Top 10 bbc micro games

Complete each level without crashing, and the director is suitably impressed: You get paid, and then get to move onto a harder level.

What made DDD fun was the gameplay. Graphics wise, you were dealing with nothing more than simple 8x8 sprites. But the gameplay, and most notably the need for precise jump-button timing surprisingly made the game a lot of fun. Jumbo - Molymerx Software. You could view a map of the UK at any time, which made it a tad easier to see where you were going. However, New York had no map which made it an incredibly difficult destination.

Realistic behaviour was key in Jumbo, and the instruments were acurately portrayed, and the game itself used very realistic flight physics. And just like in real-life, your handled like a bus with wings. Stall speeds, bearings, airport beacons, and airport landings were all highly acurate to real flying. Being the most realistic flight sim also made Jumbo exceedingly difficult to play.

Taking off was easy, and turning was okay, but landing was another matter entirely. There was no automated landing system, and the inability to acurately see your approach path made it ridiculously hard to land before hitting the end of the runway. If you did crash, Jumbo would happily tell you how many yards you spread wreckage.

My record? Download Jumbo. Designed as an educational game to primarily develop mathematical and logic skill, 'L' was typically played in the classroom by kids at school. There were many puzzles in 'L', most of them based around arithmetic and logical pattern matching. Puzzles such as arranging theatre stage lights in a certain combination, and square rooting robot guards were all challenges in this delightful game. One of the unique properties of L is that it was an educational game that was actually fun to play -- a very rare product from an era when typical educational games consisted of sub-standard quality, and very poor gameplay.

The exceptions to this being the wonderful Granny's Garden , and Flowers of Crystal. L provided kids with a decent parsar, capable of understanding many words and phrases, imaginative settings, and well thought out puzzles. It created a game where learning was fun, and school was fun too. It's still enjoyable to play today and the people who developed 'L' can be proud that they produced such a high quality, educational game.

Note: "L" is a fussy game to get running. Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror - Micropower. It is said that Micropower put so much money into developing Mines of Terror that it significantly contributed to them going bankrupt. It had good gameplay, and very detailed graphics for the time. I'm not quite sure what the game was actually about - perhaps something to do with stopping The Master before he takes over the Universe.

Usual sort of thing. If nothing else, Mines of Terror helped preserve Colin Baker as The Doctor, which was fortunate considering the absolutely duff scripts he got handed in the actual series.

One of the most popular was Manic Miner. Jet Set Willy was in essence the sequel to Manic Miner. The good news was that you could now freely wonder from room to room. The bad news was that the game was just as hard to complete as the original. Jet Set Willy included one of the most cruel tricks in any game - a room which, if you entered, you would repeatly die until you ran out of lifes.

With some great gameplay, but suffering from lacklustre graphics, and embarrassing sound, Jet Set Willy wasn't really the success that it should have been. In fact, Superior showed how such a game should be done when they released Citadel in Perhaps most interesting was the fact that Jet Set Willy was a direct port from the Spectrum by a company that was reluctant to release games for the BBC.

Jet Set Willy is a welcome addition to the archive. Lode Runner was a highly original arcade game, which had been previously copied by Acornsoft with their Monsters Game. Preserving all the gameplay of the original, Lode Runner was and still is a great game. However in my mind, this was one of those occasions where a copy was better than the original. Monsters just seemed to be more fun, and more colourful.

In Great Britain Limited, you had the chance to be Prime Minister and show everyone how you'd run the country. The game was primarily based around you attempting to balance the governmental budget, while attempting to be popular with the voters, and win the election.

It was a tough game, and I thought it was the least fun to play. World Travel Game was perhaps more light hearted than the other two. The object of the game was to travel the world and collect a certain number of souveniers as quickly as possible. Sound easy? Well it is in principal, but mix in a finite budget, train delays, and time limits and you have a challenging game. Still fun to play today.

In my opinion, out of the three games Inheritance was Simon's best. Comprising of almost two seperate games in one, Inheritance was split between you first raising a certain amount of money, and then managing a business. To begin with, you start with 10, pounds. The object of the game is to convert this ten thousand to a hundred thousand by playing the stock market. You can buy chemicals stocks, metals including zinc, and copper, and you can also gamble some on horse races.

If you make the hundred grand that you need in time, you then get to take a trip to a secret caribbean island to obtain the secret coca-cola ingredient that you need. Once you have it, it's into business selling cola to as many customers as possible. Sound complicated? Well, it is, but it's also a lot of fun.

It's also a huge game, and it won't load on a standard BBC Model B with Disc interface unless you relocate it in memory. This downloadable version does not have the relocator, so to play Inheritance, you'll need to use a Master emulator. Download Inheritance The first stock market screen in Inheritance. Drain Mania - Icon Software. What was interesting as we look back on the early eighties, was the amount of blatent game concept copying that was performed for home computer games that would just not be tolerated today.

Zalaga - Fast and frantic -- Alex Card - I know nothing.. RTFManuel E-mail : al Yes, you need to bring the stool out with you, drop it under the ladder, climb on the stool and then jump up! Works for me anyway! Dunjunz 3. Exile 4. Elite 5. Arcadians 6. Match Day 8. Bar Billiards 9. Revs PGP key available. I didn't like the stupid fence that stopped you going where you liked. My brother turned the monitor upside down on the reverse gravity levels. Never played it. Does anyone remember a game which was played in several time zones?

It was a flight game with the same sort of control as Sinistar another classic. I for the life of me can't remember what it was called.

I am surprised to not have seen Stryker's Run so far. That is an amazing game. Thank you all for reading. Yeah, I remember that. It was a cool game!

Can't remember the name though. And what about Elite? Surely that's got to be on the top ten. And Nevreyon is this spelt right? Personally, I think Citadel was one of the BBCs great games it's my favourite, to be honest with you :.

It was clever and it did squeeze an awful lot into such a small machine. Let's face it, it was hardly going to use bit colour so you could see intricate detail on the individual items was it? I think it was simply called something like "Space Pilot". And it didn't just have the same controls as Sinistar, it was practically the same game identical engine, with only slightly differnt object structures Especially the Master-enhanced version, with graphics that really looked as though they were using more than eight colours I'd probably have to agree with other people in slipping at least one of the Repton series in, as well So, of course, what the Ancient Mariner really needed was a reverse-osmosis desalination plant.

Ives, RIGB discourse. Later games managed to have far more realistic graphics with the same limitations or even worse.

Ricochet and Ravenskull for instance had much more recognisable objects and they only used 4 colours whereas Citadel used 8 plus the other 8 for animation.

I think I'd say the same about the Electron version of FireTrak. The way it managed vertical scrolling two pixels at a time was one of the cleverest hacks in history [1] but the game itself was monotonous. Peter Scott always used it to good effect to do a palette switch about a third of the way down the screen to free up extra memory without having visible mess splodged all over the upper third. The BBC's extra hardware was sophisticated enough to centralise the display. Ah, those were the days.

Did anyone else used to make sure their assembly code tended more to reliability than efficiency because they couldn't always be bothered to save the source to tape before testing?

IIRC it was two player - each player choosing a word, then taking turns to match two cards like the game we probably all played as young children "Pairs" upon revealing bits of the word Great fun. Thanks for that, it works very nicely. You see, I was trying to do it the same way I always used to do when playing it on the beeb which for some reason wont work on a RPC. Perhaps now I can complete it ;-. Elite Well what else! Imogen Brilliant Game - although a bit easy. Chuckee Egg One of the greatest games ever made on any platform 6.

Zalaga What can I say, simple but addictive. Mr Ee An arcade perfect conversion of Mr Do! Dare Devil Dennis See Zalaga 9. Repton The Original I have never played Exile, so I have no idea what it is like. Ravenskull I played, but can't remember; Ricochet was something of a different kettle of fish from Citadel. For one, it was a fair bit later in the machines life as I remember, so techniques for squeezing the most out of the machine were better known Ricochet was also more of a speed thing and it was a block-based game IIRC and the graphics were a lot more chunky.

If Citadel's graphics had been drawn on the same scale, they'd be about 4 or 5 times bigger than the original Which rather explains the "realistic" graphics don't you think? I doubt Citadel could have crammed in that many more screens than it did which is probably why the graphics were relatively small. Both games crammed a lot into what was a very small machine, really. Arcadians was cool, Meteors was very cool esp.

Oh yes. Repton all of them was good, and Micro Power's Stock Car Racer was good fun with a friend to play it with. Twin Kingdom Valley was really, really good, and Sphinx Adventure was amazingly absorbing.

Those were the days Testing Zap 1. Brave or what? Give me SPyCat anyday. Now that was a game, arcade style with puzzles and some interesting locations.

I want to believe. Pacman came before Snapper, and Snapper came in two versions - the identical-graphics-to-Pacman version 1, and the later version 2 with redrawn graphics but identical gameplay. Originally published by AcornSoft. Superior Software's Space Pilot. Both of these games run under Warm Silence Software's! Granted, Elite was a classic as was Sentinel but personally once you'd reached Elite status and completed all the missions what was the point?

No, in honesty I could've done without the trading aspect and been happy just to blatt things. Yes you can if you don't mind paying 15ukp and perhaps getting into dodgy ground over copyright: buy em and download a copy of the game from "The BBC Lives" web site. I remember that, it only worked a few times though. And you needed it, the monsters were too hard to dodge.

I think I had Baron and maybe another one. Was Baron the one where any key opened any door, but you could only use each one once? I preferred having a specific key for a specific door.

I really liked that. And the arcade bits weren't so hard you couldn't do it without cheating like the other games. It was just about the only arcade adventure I got to the end of excluding individual levels in Ricochet , but I needed a bit of help because of a bug - IIRC Margo Thatch would accept the money from you making it impossible to use it where it was meant and complete the game.

Snapper was the original. Snapper 2's graphics were based on Ms Pacman I think. That version was released on the Electron as Snapper - the Electron didn't have the original. The one thing I found wrong with it is, like most games, you play it a lot, and then you get bored with it. You get far ie: into Space and then you forget to change it back to the oxygen tank. I tried this too, but it inverted the colours on my monitor, and I thought it might be bad for it.

Does anyone know 1 Why this might happen and 2 Would it have been bad for the monitor? Said monitor is now dead anyway Unsolicited email will be forwarded to the appropriate postmasters. It inverted the colours on that monitor, which still continued to work for another ten years before finally being thrown out.

So: 1 No idea. Maybe the beam controller things forget the real name got settled into being the right way up and went slightly out of place when you moved it 2 Probably not, really.

What was Spycat all about? My mate bought it on tape, I don't know why because everyone I knew had Disc Drives. Anyway I never head the chance to play it and I wanted to know is it any good. I doubt it. Pacman had the original ghosts, and Ms.

Pacman looks very little like Snapper v. The idea of changing the graphics was to avoid copyright problems, anyway, so they would hardly be likely to copy an alternative Namco game! Pacman there are interludes and the maze changes, but I realise you weren't saying the game was the same. I spent many happy hours playing Snapper on the BBC, anyway. Sentinel Returns, or something like that.

It has 'improved' graphics but almost identical gameplay, apparently, but with a gentler learning curve. Post by Samwise » Mon Mar 27, pm. Post by Samuel Pickard » Mon Mar 27, pm. Post by jon28 » Tue Mar 28, am.

Post by Samwise » Tue Mar 28, am. Post by melchett » Tue Mar 28, am. Post by Kecske Bak » Wed Mar 29, pm. Post by jon28 » Wed Mar 29, pm. Post by Samwise » Thu Mar 30, am. Post by Samwise » Thu Mar 30, pm. Post by jon28 » Thu Mar 30, pm. Post by charlie » Sat Apr 01, am. Post by mjforbes » Sat Apr 01, pm. Post by Samwise » Tue Apr 04, pm. Post by GarethW » Sun Apr 09, am. Post by SarahWalker » Sun Apr 09, am. Post by Kecske Bak » Sun Apr 09, am. Post by Jeremy Grayson » Mon Apr 10, pm. Privacy Terms.

Quick links. Best original BBC micro games? Post by Samwise » Mon Mar 27, pm Pop quiz. To start: Definitely: Elite obviously Thrust Maybes: Chuckie Egg released across 3 platforms simultaneously, but original idea came from the Spectrum author Exile not groundbreaking but a very good example of an arcade adventure which was ported to other platforms Repton a little too close to Boulderdash, perhaps?

What other classic games can our community claim as our own? Post by Samwise » Tue Mar 28, am jon28 wrote: Is this definetly true? The big problem answering this question is that once you say Elite it kind of ends the discussion.

For me at least. Post by melchett » Tue Mar 28, am jon28 wrote: Is this definetly true?