Quick Look: Lumo

I think the BBC Micro B made by Acorn is worth a mention, between that and the other variants they supposedly sold about 1.5M units. It had an educational remit (Sinclair missed out on that contract) but there was a shit-ton of games written for it, including the original Elite, Revs (an F1 simulator), Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy etc, and had both digital and analogue sticks designed for it. It's also a weird ancestor to the ARM chips used in most mobile phones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

That song does not sound like Talking Heads at all.

A Prodigy reference is not something I expected to see in a 2016 video game..

https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gerstmann/atari-tape-music

As Jeff mentioned.

Huh, that Jump icon from the movement test is literally the Mucky Foot Productions logo, a studio founded by ex-Bullfrog devs, makers of one of my favourite games "Startopia".

@ultrasupermario:I would absolutely recommend you and anyone else similarly interested in the early history of the British videogame industry to check out the 2014 documentary "From Bedrooms to Billions"

The start of this game triggered some pretty strong nostalgia in me, even though my only direct experience of these sorts of games was having a few that I didn't understand for my first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464. All those stark near-monochromatic black-backdropped isometric games had such a distinctive look and sense of mystery (and weird slow vertical movement, if I remember correctly), but I was quite young at the time, so I found it all a bit intimidating. I never really played very much of them. I felt that I didn't know what I was doing and that this would probably take forever, so I never really got into them. I'd definitely be interested in giving it a go now, though, if only to tap into this strange half-nostalgia for an experience I recognize but never quite lived.

@dragon_puncher: Nor a Generation Game gag in the game itself. ;)

In regards to software transmission, if you skip to 4:50 of this wonderful video, you'll see the BBC broadcasting software across the television for the BBC Micro over the end credit.

Up on the d-pad is diagonal? You absolute nutter!

Gotta love the video game history talk.

Edit: I actually really like the moody music in this game.

I gleefully chuckle at Jeff's jovial appreciation for silly little British things, like semi-dated slang, The Young Ones and GLC. I love it.

@hassun: Controller schemes gone mad!

The music of this game is great. Also I think the sound of tapes and their degradation as you play it is a valid reason to put something out on one if you want (admittedly there is plenty of bandwagon-jumping now) - though I do want the download code too.

@junpei: I could never beat that game as a kid no matter how hard I tried. Also, that's an amazing link to discover about that guy.

They really missed an opportunity to make some really cool transition in between the screens like the new area draws in from a wireframe while the old one fades out or something similar. This weird fade in and fade out with a static background is almost jarring.

At least at first, I'm getting shades of an old DOS game called Mystic Towers from this- but maybe it's just the perspective.

Ok I've brought up Mystic Towers so that's all the excuse I need to link its theme song

Is there a ghostly woman's voice on the title screen of this game, or am I insane?

@pudge: Yep, to the former.

Another great little touch - Check out the achievement names. If you can understand them then you're probably not as young as you think.

Impeccable accents by Jeff as always!

My Uncle often talked about gathering games off tapes, trading off mates and gathering data off the radio years ago. There is a distinct beauty to those old tape-based games, I still hold some jealousy for my uncle's youth in northern England.

nostalgia overload !! . Takes me back to trying to load game copies from school through my ghetto blaster. The higher the volume , the greater the chance of loading the game successfully.

Here are a few of those classic iso games --

Movie

Fairlight

Head over Heels

@junpei: yeah it's massively underrated no idea he made Contradiction though!

@ultrasupermario said:

So the failure of the Atari (which was caused by things like making 10 Million carts of a game when only 10 games have ever sold 1 million) essentially killed home gaming in the US, people stopped taking risks.

That's how comes the NES made such a big dent, because the consumers still wanted games, but the retailers and manufacturers didn't want to take a risk.

In the UK and other parts of Europe we had small computers that we could code games into, so much so that magazines would just have code for games as a feature, so anyone could make games. as such so many off kilter games came out, with very regional stuff.

So you could buy games for the price of a magazine, as opposed to modern game prices, additionally the hard part of piracy was incorrectly inputting the code.

Because the hardware didn't necessarily cross the sea and the magazines weren't international, American's would probably had to really work to seek out games. and there was so much shit.

Jet Set Willy (it's the prequel to Jet Set Radio(It's not)) was a big deal. someday @dannyodwyer will probably do a feature on Gamespot or here, but bare in mind Danny was probably more Amiga than Spectrum.

Anyone remember that Mystic Tower game? You played as an old Wizard geezer in some tower of some sort of mystic. Reminds me of this for some reason

@jeverage YES!

There's a Prodigy reference on that SD card.

I lost my shit at the Crystal Maze reference.

Looks neat and well worth a look.

That Atari tape music was sick on it's own. Then @fobwashed came along (as usual) and...

Perfect.

It reminders me of Cadaver by the Bitmap Brothers.

Have to say gents, Jeff sounds proper chuffed

*2 minutes in*
Oh the street fighter training stage made its way here!

I'll almost certainly be getting this game if it falls under $15 during the upcoming Steam summer sale. I love the early parts of Equinox, but the later parts are just actively hateful with blocks and essential rooms hidden behind things, outright invisible blocks, invisible conveyor belt blocks, and all sorts of other horrible things. A modern isometric puzzle game which is challenging and clever without actively going out of its way to be as hateful as it can possibly be at every opportunity would be great.

As to the movement options, I would probably choose the weird isometric controls over the more standard ones, but not for the sake of nostalgia. Most of the difficult jumps and other hazards will likely be made with the isometric perspective in mind and I'd rather be making those jumps while holding a specific direction over fiddling with pushing the d-pad or analogue stick diagonally.

P.S. I'm still waiting for a "Ranking Of Amiga Cracktros / Demos" by @dannyodwyer.

I'm sure "Hardwired" would be up there somewhere. Music by one Jesper Kyd, now known for his phenomenal Hitman & Assassin's Creed work.

This game reminds me of 3DRealms "Mystic Towers".

@thepullquotes: cool thanks, good to know, jumping ahead into the future a bit, do you happen to also know when things like windows and mac started to become universal, as in when Northa America and Europe had similar tech so they could release titles everywhere instead of having these regional games that never saw the light of day in some locations of the world. sorry for the follow up question, i like to learn.

Right my pc just crashed and I lost 7 paragraphs, so I'm going to be blunt and you can ask me to dive further in, on specifics.

Heads up I'm 27 and we didn't get the internet until 2000, so I missed out on a whole section of the internet, and this is purely a personal point about this stuff.

We first got a DOS Computer about 1993, I only knew relatives who had them.

We had computers at school which were like BBC Micro's.

The first PC games I knew other people played was Doom/Lemmings/Civ/"Command and Conquer"/Worms and Elite.

Some more people (like 3) I knew had pc's around 98, but it wouldn't be until 2004-5(last year of secondary school) that I could say, that a bigger majority of people I knew had computers, even so that was mainly them downloading music, getting hacked and not playing games.

RE Regional stuff, there was regional games, which didn't really cross the pond, but Graphics cards and PC specs were more of a concern, plus we could download roms of games that never came out in Europe (Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, EarthBound,Chrono Trigger)

H.E.D.Z. was our first game that wouldn't run becausea graphics card, a few years later we could run Max Payne fine when it came out.

@thepullquotes: oh sorry for your computer crashing, and thanks for the extra info

For anyone looking for the "Talking Heads" esque song Brad mentions (plays in the elevator), this is it.

I'd get this game in VR. Anyone know if it's compatible?

There was also a The Prodigy reference on there. "Take your brain to another dimension. Pay close attention" is likely a reference to their song Out of Space.

@ultrasupermario:

While the US market was tanking due to the aforementioned failure of Atari, the UK was hit with a perfect storm of affordable components, a growing hobbyist community and a group of entrepreneurs who wanted to bring them all together, and the 'home computer' was born.

Home computers were distinct from what we know as a PC these days, a lot of them were based on the same technology (such as the Zilog Z80 processor) but each had their own particular quirks and custom hardware that rendered them incompatible with one another. This led to games being ported to each system by different programmers, often with wildly differing results.

The big names in the early 80s were Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, with the Amstrad CPC and BBC Micro bringing up the rear, although they are by no means the only machines that were released. It was a boom time for the industry and for every Spectrum there was a Tatung Einstein.

Home computers were instrumental in the creation of the UK software industry, if you could write a game you could probably get it published. The games themselves would commonly sell for £2-3, as opposed to the £30-40 of a Master System or NES cartridge. A lot of the studios from the home computer days are still around, for example DMA Design (Lemmings) went on to become Rockstar North (GTA), while Reflections (Shadow of the Beast) is now a part of Ubisoft.

Sega introduced the Master System relatively early in the UK and while it got a bit of a foothold (I had one myself), a lot of people had already moved on to the 16-bit home computers such as the Atari ST or Commodore's Amiga. Nintendo didn't get around to launching the NES in the UK until the late 80s.

It wasn't really until the launch of the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo that there really seemed like there was a crack in the home computer dominance, but the Amiga in particular lasted for a very long time due to its expandability (and somewhat rabid fanbase). The final issue of CU Amiga magazine was printed in 1998, not a bad run considering the A500 launched in 1986.

The home computer really came to its end around 1993-1994 with the rise of "affordable" PCs that began to show up the older machines in terms of performance, with the likes of Doom running rings around anything the Amiga was doing (although it had its fair share of Doom clones by the end of its commercial life). A friend of mine was running a 386 in 1994 and by the time 1995 rolled around I had easy access to a PC at home and in 1996 I got one of my own. It seemed like from that point on everything was more or less standardised.

If you're interested in the kinds of games that were available on home computers in the 80s, ChinnyVision is a great Youtube channel that compares releases on the major platforms, all running on the real hardware, but bear in mind that most of those games were made by one or two people in their bedroom and sold for less than the price of a Subway sandwich.

Hopefully this wasn't too rambling, hope I didn't step on anyone's toes.

@antivanti: I'm surprised Jeff didn't pick up on that, considering it's an Ultramagnetic MCs sample!

@meanstreet: thank you for taking the time and sharing with me your experiance and the history of the computer, I appreciate it!

Loving that crazy Gabe Logan run.

A Cuddly Toy! Nice generation game nod.

The reason some modern artists like cassette tapes is that they give music a particular sound due to cutting out the highs and lows, so it's not just a gimmick/nostalgia.