Quick Look: Lumo

Dan's voice sounds different.

Surprise?!

This seems pretty neat. Starts a bit slow, but i guess that helps when you try to teach the players a bunch of mechanics. Like standing on the box to absorb it, or pushing boxes in midair are moves that aren't very intuitive.

He's just working on his Jeff impression.

wut

Video Games History Times with Jeff is a good times.

Any excuse to share Solstice"s amazing intro music makes me happy:

Composed by Tim Follin (yes, the guy who made Contradiction: Spot the Liar!) this is one of my favorite pieces of music from the NES era.

This is a weirdly specific reference to a time I can't imagine alot of people have the context for. Perhaps that's just an American perspective though.

I was amazed to find Spectrum games were distributed via audio tapes, and they could broadcast the software via the airwaves. I guess it's just a different way of transmitting data, but still totally cool.

Never played games like this, but Jeff talking about tapes brings back memories of playing World Games on the C64. It was a case of getting to the right timecode (4 digits on the tape deck IIRC) on the tape, loading the game, then just waiting for about 20 minutes with the screen going nuts:

Nice ambience and sfx. Real nice timber with a great throaty bass going at all times.

Solstice has SUCH good music. So does Silver Surfer, also on NES.

Nice Red dwarf reference with the Holly Hop OS.

I like this game's charm.

That's not a wrench, it's a spanner

I remember there being a ton of Jet Set Willy fangames floating around the internet in .wav form. Just connect a cassette recorder to your audio-out from your PC, put them on a cassette, and you could play them on the real system.

I do remember that you often needed high quality cassette tapes and recorders for data though, as typical cheap tapes/recorders could potentially muffle a sound or two inaudible to the human ear, but would be enough for the system to not recognise the code properly and fail to load the game.

CORRRRRR

Need more Brad + Jeff QLs

Yes, in Poland We had video games broadcasted over the radio, due to lack of copyright laws, also games were sold in packages 5 games or so per tape on Atari and even more on C64. You Yankees were missing out big time with your childish Nintendo nonsense. ;P

The "Hold My Hand Very Tightly" song (at 12:34ish) was originally given away with a copy of the Spectrum magazine Your Sinclair. It was on the B side of the cover-mounted tape.

EDIT: The A side was Skateboard Construction System which wasn't as good as it sounds, sadly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDW9jHrobnE

Great isometric: Landstalker

Good isometric: Viewpoint

Assy isometric: Ultima 8

@tamriilin: @junpei: When I got an NES few years back, only game I had was Solstice. That music blew me away, I was like "This is NES music? No way, this is some Amiga-ass shit"

You had me at the street fighter-esque training stage

As someone who likes types of music where cassette tapes never really died, I must say that they work very well for certain kinds of sounds. At some point I'm sure it's an aesthetic thing, but what isn't?

@sil3n7: it is an American perspective but nothing wrong with that, the UK computer gaming scene hasn't had the same impact on the global gaming culture as the Japanese and US 80s scenes did.

An interesting thing though is that US culture is so all-pervasive that in countries where most of 80s gaming was on stuff like the Spectrum, instead of the NES (which we did get, but quite a bit later), mass culture has developed a kind of imported nostalgia for stuff they didn't play instead of the games this is calling back to. I was playing spectrum games about 4 years before I ever played a Mario game for example, I knew a lot more people with either a spectrum or a c64 as a kid than I did an NES (even into the 90s). I used to go to the library, get some c64 tapes out and go to my pal's house to play them. This would have been 1991ish? Somehow though, 80s nostalgia for that stuff is less widespread here than for Mario etc.

Anyway it's always nice to see retro-inspired stuff which reflects the games I played REALLY early in life because so few of the ideas of these games survived into the mod era. Jeff must be the only American I have ever heard of who owned a c64, which is awesome.

Big Noystie

This game and the States & Capitals jam are both ill af

Wow, that game tape thing was fascinating to this non-Yuropian.

It was probably the only way to get a higher fidelity, more multitracked music in games before that was possible.

I had a Master System, sir.

Game looks cool. Super enjoyed the conversation.

This reminds me of when I subscribed to The Rainbow, a magazine for the Tandy Color Computer, and they had a special Rainbow on Tape subscription that included all of the program listings on a cassette tape every month. There were three copies of each program as tapes weren't very reliable.

I really liked this for some reason. The whole game seems to really encourage fun laid back conversations like the one you guys had, I would so play this whole game if I just had random conversations like this to listen to while I did

QL starts with British stereotype. starting good already lol

@boniti: So you're saying this might be... A Podcast Game™?

Lumo is tickling some nostalgia centre a little bit even if I never liked the isometric games people generally talk about. I did love games like The Last Ninja however but it was more of a pseudo-isometric thing I believe.

My introduction to gaming was via tapes for the Memotech 500 and C64 but I also admit, now that I'm an adult, that I always hated/envied the Nintendo kids for their instant-loading cartridges. It wasn't something we could afford however with NES games being around 100usd here even back then and C64 games we could just copy via tapes or diskettes. On the flipside, the slow loading on the C64 let me enjoy some really, really good music that I still listen to now and then.

@scarycrayons: but then you had to take a screw driver and adjust the magnetic head that reads the tape. Changing the position mostly worked to make the sound clearer! Simpler but of course more complicated times...

I like seeing the nostalgia of a culture I never experienced tapped like this. Keen!

Jolly good time.

this reminds me of playing Batman on the msx and looking for all the parts of the batmobile

Who are these two dapper British chaps doing this quicklook? New hires?

Looks great. Soundtrack sounds nice too.

So i am sure there are plenty of you in this community who are older then i, (i am 19) and was wondering what Jeff meant by i rate this game "British out of 10." was Europe computer technology not as advanced as it was in north america? i assumed everyone had similar technology, but since i was not alive at this time, and i dont know the full history of computers, what where major differences from computer technology in Europe and North America between the years 1980-2000? Thanks to those of you who answer my conundrum.

You can use the ducks as a jumping platform, its just a pretty precise timing and if you don't make it you fall through to the poison :D

Was that a reference to the Generation Game in the conveyor belt room?

And a Prodigy/Kool Keith reference on the SD card?

Excellent.

@ultrasupermario: America were on the same page as Europe in terms of tech, just that elswewhere was where it sold. Commadore being one of the big three in Britain, along with Sinclair and Amstrad.

Although, by the time I was playing these games, Amstrad and were also making the Spectrum. Didn't realise that happened in '86. Commadore went bust in '94. Reading up on this, Amstrad is now owned by BSkyB.

Reminds me a lot of Little Big Adventure. Which is nothing but a g(ood) thing

The reason Giant Bomb is THE BEST gaming site is that Jeff Gerstman is the helm. Thank ya'll for getting me through a lot of hard times in my life. NOICE!!!!

Speaking of the Sinclair, here is Radiohead's "Nude" being performed by 80s technology.

@chillicothe said:

Hehehe, still, gaming system without keyboard, joysticks and loading games from tapes, where is fun in that? ;)

That atari tape music would probably make some fly-ass vaporwave jams.

As a Spectrum kid, this just fills me with joy in the way that Rock Boshers didn't.

I'm glad GB covered this and I'm super glad Jeff was on board.