Retro Gamer 52: Klax—it’s square!

Retro Gamer 52 plopped through the letterbox this weekend, and it’s something of a belter. Although there are a number of highlights, the eight-page making-of about the utterly lovely Star Wars arcade game (the vector one with the scratchy samples) is the standout for me.

Although I’m a tad jealous that Darran Jones grabbed that one for himself (well, there have to be some perks for being editor, right?), I also got to write about a classic arcade game: tile-based action-puzzler Klax. This game was devised by Mark Pierce, who now heads the excellently named Super Happy Fun Fun; Mark clearly still has boundless enthusiasm for arcade games, and was a pleasure to talk to.

His game is, in some ways, an oddity. Similarly abstract to Tetris, Klax spawned a slew of home conversions, which I had great fun working through. (Most bizarre: the top-down Game Boy version from 1990, which is actually less advanced than the impressive Atari 2600 effort.) For a while, I wondered why Klax has largely been forgotten, bar an appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures and as half of the dreadful Marble Madness/Klax GBA double-pack from 2005. The answer, I decided, is this: Klax is hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly hard.

Tetris pretty much lulls you in and takes a while to go crazy, and even relative novices can go for a good while on Zoo Keeper before it overwhelms. Klax, on the other hand, requires ninja tile-juggling skills to progress any distance into the game. One only wonders what Mark Pierce and his partner in crime Dave Akers were like at the time the game was released—presumably, happily completing Defender blindfolded and one-handed.

That all said, the difficulty level didn’t stop me spending a few happy hours, erm, ‘researching’. Perhaps I need toughening up anyway, since one of the games I’m going to be writing about in the not-too-distant is one of the toughest arcade games of the lot.

Klax

Luckily, belting along in a spaceship doesn’t affect the path of the evil tiles of doom.

June 16, 2008. Read more in: Arcade, Magazines, Retro Gamer

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Retro Gamer 51: Lifting (a) chop

A couple of weeks back, Retro Gamer 51 escaped from its confines (somewhere in Bournemouth), to be unleashed on the world. Inexcusably, I totally forgot to get the pimp-o-pointer out, hence this belated post.

This month, the magazine has one of those shiny gold covers, which collect fingerprints and blind small pets unlucky enough to glimpse the magazine in bright sunlight. The cover has a big Zelda image, but the game I wrote about didn’t make the cover this time, nor even the contents page. Instead, tucked away on page 84, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find The Making of Choplifter. Well, you would have been pleasantly surprised if you’d not read this blog post, obv.

Choplifter not getting on to the contents page didn’t irk, but it did throw up the question: what is a classic game that will grab readers? Dun Durach and Heroquest both made it on to the contents page this month, for example. What it confirmed to me is that classic games really are in the eye of the beholder (and also the editor), and that those titles you think are most loved and well remembered may not be. Still, I was happy to interview Danny Gorlin and spend a few hours testing out the surprisingly large number of Choplifter conversions. Well, apart from the Sega ones, which are horrible.

Choplifter

Sarah Beeny realised this episode of Property Ladder was going to be hairier than usual.

June 2, 2008. Read more in: Apple II, Retro Gamer, Retro gaming

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Retro Gamer’s half-century

Including a six-page interview with artist legend Roger Dean

Surviving the death of a publisher is no mean feat, but in December 2005 Retro Gamer crawled from the wreckage of Live Publishing and set up shop at Imagine. Now, against all odds, the magazine is celebrating its 50th issue.

For this milestone, I’ve penned something special and a bit different from my usual videogame making-ofs—an interview with Roger Dean. Inventor of the sea-urchin chair and cover artist for Yes, Roger’s best known in gaming circles for his imaginative and stunning artwork for Psygnosis games. However, as the interview reveals, his gaming-oriented output is more wide-ranging than covers for classic 16-bit titles.

Find out more about Retro Gamer and buy the current issue at www.retrogamer.net.

Roger Dean\'s Barbarian artwork

Roger Dean’s artwork for Barbarian.

April 25, 2008. Read more in: Retro Gamer, Retro gaming

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