carleton

Me either, but back then I worked with people who’d learnt programming with punch cards.

I need to catch up a bit but I'm intrigued what you'll say about Speed King. I really rated it back then and played it a lot. I've just checked out a YouTube video to see why and it doesn't look to have held up very well. From memory I think the coder of Rocket Roger wrote it all out on paper as hex statements and his wife typed it in. Amazed he got a game out of that at all.

My mate fell over backwards trying to catch the ball when the computer hit a 6 in Graham Gooch's Cricket. I have no other memories of it.

@squirtleabsolutely not, most of the interest is in the differing opinions.

I've worked from home all week so not had a chance to listen to the latest edition. Got to say I didn't like almost everything about FGTH at the time, the one exception being the music on the flower level. In other news I've just heard my game Millie and Molly scores a sizzler in the latest Zzap annual. I think it's going to be a while for the podcast to catch up to that.

Air Traffic Chaos on the DS was excellent but that too was quite a stressful game.

I never played Kennedy Approach but I think we had a demo which was just all the speech from it. I guess like a phone sound board. Speech always impressed me on the C64, so much so I bought the awful Fyler Fox because it promised speech on the box. The publisher even called the range "Tymac Talkies".

Those sales figures for Skyfox are amazing, I didn't think C64 games touched those kinds of numbers. My game APB was number one in the official UK charts and whilst we weren't a party to sales figures I always assumed it was less than 10,000 sales in total.

And here it is nested between my copies of the games:

Mine has arrived, it looks excellent. Good work guys. I didn't realise it contained some of my work and wins me over for referring to my C64 version of APB as "top of the pile".

Somehow I don't think the artist who did the in game Captive graphics did the loading screen.

Yeah, I think you got it spot on. It was great though. You'd eventually collect two halves of a helicopter which let you fly around the map.

Thing on a Spring was another game which benefitted from cheats (this time built in so I think they knew). There's absolutely no point to the oil draining corridor sections and the challenge was just to not get stuck in scenery with cheats on. We played it loads. And another Mastertronic game I played a load of. This time the obscure Captive. It was like nothing I'd played, an actual puzzling adventure. Rough as toast graphically but I think I persevered to completion. Same with its sequel Spooks.

I suppose there is. Although I don't think any areas were locked if you didn't have certain items, it just made it easier.

It definitely had an open world feel to it despite the tiny map. It just felt relaxing to drive about and mess around on the roller coaster etc. Then there were the little tense moments when you had to make a tricky jump which spiced things up. It always felt like it was your own fault if you made an error, something which was unusual back then. There was an actual reward in getting new items as well, like the gears or a better fuel tank. Again that was quite unusual for the time. I still don't think I understand how it does the isometric look if I'm honest, it's a cleverly programmed game.