It’s not easy bein’ green

Nebulus is cute. It has a cute little character, Pogo, who lives in a cute little world populated by cute little hostile nasties, and cute little sound effects accompany Pogo’s jaunts to the top of cylindrical towers that, for whatever reason, our bipedal frog-like chum has decided to rid his world of.

Don’t let this fool you, because if ever there’s a game that’ll make you want to smash a joystick to pieces (or your Wii, if you’re playing on Virtual Console), this is the one. And that’s because this game is hard.

The premise is simple: climb to the top of each tower via a maze of stairs, lifts and collapsing platforms. Once atop a tower, Pogo demolishes it (presumably, they aren’t well built; either that or Pogo hides extremely powerful explosives up his bottom), and you get to relax for a few seconds by playing a bonus game that finds the wee green guy catching fish using a high-tech submarine.

One might wonder: if Pogo has access to such technology, why not just hire a spaceship and blow the towers to pieces? But if he did that, we wouldn’t have this game. Instead, you’re lumbered with creeping slowly up the towers, ever mindful of the tight time-limit and the fact that absolute precision is required to pass many of Pogo’s adversaries.

This would all be fine if the game was utter rubbish—it could then be cast aside and you could get on with playing something a mite less frustrating. But the fact is that even 21 years after Nebulus first arrived on the C64, it’s still annoyingly captivating. You’re sucked in by the disorientating manner in which the towers are navigated (unlike most platform games, there are no edges—instead, Pogo moves ‘around’ the towers, which rotate in real-time on the screen, an effect that was astonishing at the time and still looks pretty today) and the utterly devious puzzles. And when you finally demolish one of the structures, you feel a true sense of achievement. Just don’t expect to get very far until half your joysticks are in tiny pieces.

Nebulus is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (about £3.50), and the sedatives you’ll need to calm yourself down after a few games are probably available from your GP.

If you’re a writer for magazines covering new-fangled games systems, your biggest worry regarding interviews is whether your potential interviewees will talk to you. With retro-gaming publications, things aren’t so simple. Before you can get to the all-important ‘will they or won’t they?’, detective work is often in order, to track down people who worked on classic games.

In my experience, potential interviewees fall into four camps. The most common is the ‘enthusiastic yes’, often from those still working in the industry, but sometimes from people who just have great memories of it. Guys like Jon Hare (Sensible Software), Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris) and Alan McNeil (Berzerk!) particularly stand out from my work for Retro Gamer as people willing to go above and beyond to talk about their old games.

The second group is the ‘bewilderment’ one. You track someone down, ask them to do an interview, and they act like several kinds of excitingly exotic fruit have simultaneously started growing out of your ears. “Are you serious?” is a question I’ve been asked more than once, although the people who ask that usually end up joining the first group, happy to wax lyrical about their classic creations.

The third group contains those games creators (or ex-games creators) who simply have no interest in reliving the old days, for whatever reason. It’s pretty clear some guys got totally screwed back in the day, and many simply don’t want to dredge up bad memories. Others simply haven’t got the time nor the inclination to talk to some strange British guy with an obsession for games titles a third of their way to a bus pass. Thus, sadly, the chances of making-of features on Paradroid, Hunter’s Moon and River Raid bounded majestically into the distance, never to return, along with the time it had taken to track down the relevant parties.

The fourth group, however, is perhaps even more frustrating. Often, a quick Google can provide contact details of the people I want to talk with. If not, contacts of contacts or cunning use of various social networking websites often does the job. Sometimes, though, every avenue is exhausted, and you just have to give up. Unless, of course, you have a blog, which might be read by people who might just know the whereabouts of people you’d like to talk to.

And so here’s a quick list of the top-three people I’ve been trying to track down for a number of hours that’s now grown so large that it’s just not funny any more.

1. Mervyn J. Estcourt. This is the big one for me. This guy wrote the utterly fantastic 3D Deathchase (merely ‘Deathchase’ to its friends) on the Speccy, which, to sane people, is also known as the Best Spectrum Game Ever. It finds you hurtling through a digital forest, Return of the Jedi style, hunting down bad guys. Sadly, I’ve never quite been able to catch Mervyn himself.

2. Pete Harrap. My calling Pete a sadist in issue 28 of Retro Gamer actually irked a couple of people, but it was meant in the nicest possible way. And let’s face it, there can’t be too many people who’d create a game (Monty on the Run) that forced you to select an ‘escape kit’ from a fairly large list of somewhat random items, and then have an indestructible and stationary deadly monster right at the very end of the game if you happened to pick the wrong item. Gah! However, Pete’s a genius, and I always preferred Monty to Miner Willy.

3. John Van Ryzin. Ex-Activision guru John Van Ryzin created the utterly amazing H.E.R.O., my favourite game. This classic title tasks you with exploring caverns to rescue trapped miners, all the while blasting paths through lava walls and avoiding the various beasties that pepper the levels.

So, if you know any of these people, please point them towards this blog, and maybe—just maybe—they’ll be interested in talking to me. (Please note: under no circumstances should any private contact details be sent to me, although I guess work ones would be OK.)

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.

After posting Noise annoys, I started reading through the rest of my Practical Web Design columns, most of which rant about some area of web design that was irritating me at the time. I today unearthed a piece from way back in 2004, which—perhaps rather depressingly—remains totally relevant today: the way many web designers throw together sites in the likes of Dreamweaver, think it looks good enough, and then leave it at that.

As someone who’s hand-coded websites since 1996, it always amazes me how few web designers bother to learn the basics of their trade. But as my books on web design show, I feel that a strong foundation is essential in web design, and those designers who ignore this fact do so at their peril. (Note that Mark Boulton also regularly offers an interesting take on this subject, and his articles on grids and typography are essential reading for any serious web designer.)

Enjoy the article.

Craig Grannell explains that in the world of web design, ‘it looks good enough’ is simply ‘not good enough’.

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We’re functioning automatic. And are fully psychotic

Paradroid. If ever there’s a word to make a C64 fan feel all funny in their happy place, that’s the one. Andrew Braybrook’s game typically heads many best-of lists, and it’s just reared its head on Virtual Console. But can a pseudo-3D blaster from the mid-1980s still hold gamers in thrall in an age of 3D shooters with more polygons per character than hairs on Braybrook’s head? (And this bearing in mind Braybrook’s fairly bushy moustache at the time Paradroid was released.)

In a word: yes. I don’t use the word ‘classic’ lightly, but Paradroid is, undisputedly, a classic game, and one of the very few titles from the C64 years that truly holds up today.

Part shoot ’em up, part exploration game, and with a sprinkling of reaction-based puzzling, Paradroid tasks you with boarding a fleet of ships and blowing its cargo of amok droids to pieces. The snag: your ‘influence device’ is rubbish—sluggish, and with about as much firepower as a hedgehog. The plus side: for a limited time, said device can attach itself to any other droid, limpet-style, taking over its capabilities, enabling you to dish out robot justice with vigour.

In the hands of a lesser programmer, Paradroid would have been long-forgotten. But Braybrook’s innovative thinking and attention to detail ensured his creation a place in gaming history. The graphics were limited by the C64’s power, and so Braybrook avoided trying for anything vaguely ‘realistic’, instead creating a highly abstract aesthetic that’s reminiscent of a blueprint. Droids are distinguished by number alone, making instant identification effortless. And yet the game’s stylish simplicity still resonates.

Rather than provide a full-on top-down view, Braybrook also hit upon the idea of a pseduo-3D viewpoint. Your droid ‘knows’ the deck layouts, but can’t see around corners or through doors. Therefore, despite this overhead game having been written in 1985, its de-facto viewpoint mirrors the kind of 3D shoot ’em ups that didn’t really exist until Wolfenstein 3D yomped on in.

Also, battling to take over another droid is a game in itself—a fast-paced battle of wits, with you firing connections to take over the circuit board of your adversary’s brain. It’s a diversion from the main battle, and almost as much fun as the main game itself.

In an era where so many games are smashed into pigeon-holes, the Braybrook vision that’s so obvious in Paradroid is a breath of fresh air. The game’s combination of arcade reflexes, strategic overtones and quickfire puzzles all add up to one hell of a production. And while some will doubtless cite Paradroid’s fans as delusional nostalgics, they’re the ones missing out by not giving this great game a chance.

Paradroid is available now on Virtual Console for 500 Wii points (about £3.50), although its sprite-collision detection is a little ropey compared to the original game. Despite this niggle, you are officially lacking in the marbles department if you don’t buy a copy. Well, unless you don’t own a Wii, obv.