merman

I quite enjoyed Mean Streak when I played it on that cover tape. Matt Gray told me years later his music doesn’t play properly in the game, the developers hacked out part of the player routine to save space.

PHM Pegasus (controlling one ship) is ok, but the follow-up Strike Fleet (controlling the whole fleet plus helicopters) is bigger and better

My brother said Ipswich could concentrate on the League after losing to Colchester in whichever Cup competition it was in last week. Turns out that means going top after beating MK Dons 3-0. Looks like a long season for the Dons and another inconsistent one for Ipswich.

Pretty niche one, but just finished Floppy Disk Fever from Dutch publishers Onamatopee. It interviews people around the world still using floppy disks, from a British artist to a member of the Internet Archive team. They also interviewed friends of mine who still run the Scene World diskmag:

Three Fields (set up by former Criterion people) did the Dangerous Driving games, and their awesome spin-off Dangerous Golf (imagine the Crash Junctions, but you hit a golf ball around locations full of destructible objects). Three Fields is about to reveal Wreckreation at Gamescom, so we could be getting a new Burnout...

Both good games and playable on Amstrad, but feel like there are better versions out there.

And now, my Amstrad CPC best games list: https://www.timeextension.com/guides/best-amstrad-cpc-games

Yeah, the Aussies grabbed more on the last day, even with an all-England squash final. Closing ceremony was brilliant.

Bronze for the men’s hockey team, and more diving medals for England (plus a gold for Scotland). While England can’t quite catch Australia in terms of golds, we have won more medals overall.

Gutted for the netball team, but ecstatic for the hockey players. Superb defence kept Australia out. And bronze for the English twins in beach volleyball.

MicroMUD was on several formats but reviewed poorly. http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=4792&d=18&h=0

Psycho-Nics Oscar If you have not heard of this one, it’s the game that served as a big inspiration for Manfred Trenz when he created Turrican. (And if you look at Mega/Super Turrican there are even more similarities).

New Zealand only made 71-9 in the Commonwealth T20 match, England won that fairly comfortably despite a couple of hiccups.

England needed to win by 14 to avoid Australia in the semi-finals... Brilliant win from England’s netball team over New Zealand last night, so they play Australia in the semi-finals.

Here’s an article on best C64 games I wrote for Time Extension: https://www.timeextension.com/guides/best-commodore-c64-games

Here’s my first article for the site - best C64 games: https://www.timeextension.com/guides/best-commodore-c64-games Note this was was limited to the commercial era (1982-1994) and concentrated in the big names and most influential titles.

No worries, it’s easily done if you just came across the article somewhere else.

The finals were incredible. Brilliant to see Katarina Johnson-Thompson defend her heptathlon title.

Jukka was trying to recreate the design of another Finn - Stavros Fasoulas, with his debut game Rainbow Warrior (better know as the first ever Thalamus release, Sanxion)

I did mention that article here

I love the sprites in the platform section of Octapolis, a great example of overlaid sprites. Here they are a mixture of hi-res and multicolour giving lots of detail and definition.

You can see why the developers did it, since the Amstrad shared the same Z80 processor as the Speccy. But when they took time and care over making an Amstrad-specific version the game was often better than the Speccy equivalent. And to go back to the original question, there is definitely an element of programmers understanding a machine better given time. The early Amsoft games can’t compete technically with the late releases. But then, it doesn’t always follow that a flashier game filled with technical tricks is automatically more playable than something simpler...

The whole tournament has been amazing, and great to see the England players being so sporting in victory, consoling the German players. Thoroughly deserved win. The whole England squad put so much into it, and Serina Wiegman is an incredible coach.

Brother went to cycling on Friday (24 hours before the serious crash) and the rugby sevens finals yesterday. Triathlon was absolutely dominated by England, and doing exceptionally well in the gymnastics too.

There’s a couple of examples of that in ZZAP! too, the most memorable being Warren Lapworth trashing Quedex from Thalamus (which got a Sizzler on full price release and 60-odd% on budget)