It’s 1990, and Parker Frog sees a certain plumbing duo on TV getting famous for platform jumping. He decides he must be the next platforming superstar, so visits a game company to audition.

Parker Frog is set a task - complete a series of platforming challenges set by the company’s sadistic game director.

So starts Next Action Frog, a browser game which begins like a history of platforming, but has some devilish level designs, that require perfect timing and quick reactions. It’s a pretty basic game, but well made, and I don’t think frogs have really been given a chance to star since the classic Frogger, so give Parker Frog his 15 minutes of fame, and play here! Requires Flash.

[via Kongragate]

It’s a common misconception that today’s computers and games consoles are better than the ones from the Eighties. Anyone who owned a Commodore 64, Amiga, Spectrum or Atari ST will testify that playing video games 20 years ago was a lot more exciting. And I can think of lots of reasons why.

For starters the feeling of getting a game to actually load off a cassette after half an hour of waiting was infinitely more pleasurable than just putting a disk in and expecting it to run. Also, it was easier for games developers to get their products to market than it is on the major consoles of today, hence you got to choose from a selection of the most bizarre and creative games ever made. Would you ever see stuff like Bionic Granny, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, or Gerry the Germ goes Body Poppin’ released on PS3? I doubt it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, games didn’t have the luxury of being able to hide behind plush 3D graphics and cinematic soundtracks. Instead, they had to concentrate on providing innovative, thought-provoking gameplay that required patience and savvy in order to master.

With this in mind, I decided to revisit the golden age of videogames by installing the VICE Commodore 64 emulator on my PC. This free app allows you to play C64 games in Windows, via an interface that matches that of the classic home computer system. Here’s how you get it to work:

First, download VICE and unzip the files into a directory of your choosing. You’ll notice there are a few different emulator versions to choose from in this containing folder. Perhaps the most reliable of them is the x64 emulator, so open it by double clicking. You’ll now be faced with that oh-so memorable home screen.

You’ve probably noticed that this window is rather small, at just 320 x 240. Don’t worry, because you can make this bigger by going to the Options menu and selecting Double Size. Here, you should also ensure that the Maximum Speed is set to 100%, and that True Drive Emulation is turned off. If not, you’ll be waiting as long for games to load as you would’ve on the original C64 system.

Now it’s time to go get some games! A lot of old Commodore 64 games have become released as public domain, meaning they’re free to play legally. Others are still covered by piracy laws though, so be careful what you install. The Almighty C64 page is a good place to go to download free, legal, disk images, as is Lemon 64.

  Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to photo editing and manipulation, Photoshop is undoubtedly the best software you can find for the job. Though it started back in 1987 as a basic graphic app developed by Thomas Knoll, the first version of Photoshop was officially launched at the beginning of 1990 – exactly twenty years ago.

I’m a big fan of this great program (as you can tell by the loads of posts I’ve written about it) so I thought it would be a nice idea to write this post as a celebration of Photoshop’s 20th birthday. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to see how different the first Photoshop looks from the one you have on your computer!

Like I said before, Photoshop started off in 1987 as a very basic graphic app for Mac called Display, created by Thomas Knoll, which could only display images in black and white.

Thomas’s brother, John, was working for Industrial Light and Magic and asked Thomas to work on a enhanced version of this program that could help him process digital images. The idea seemed to work, and in 1988 the two brothers decided to create a commercial photo editing tool based on Display, but using a new name: Photoshop.

Thomas wrote all the code, while John focused on plug-ins. They also managed to reach a deal with Adobe in September 1988, and early in 1990, the first version of Photoshop was launched. Read the rest of this entry »

Once 3D took hold of gaming, one of the early Nineties most popular types of game, the
point-and-click adventure, started to disappear. In some ways, that’s hardly surprising. The games were generally dialog driven stories with puzzles in them, and just the occasional action point - all of these things can be found in newer adventure games, which usually have much more action in them.

Nevertheless, the relaxed, quirky point and clicks were never forgotten, and the rise of downloadable and indie games on all platforms has seen a resurgence. And that’s fantastic: point-and-click is the ideal choice for the casual gamer who wants a deeper experience. They don’t require dexterity or learning complicated controls - if you can use a computer at all you can play these adventures. Currently, there’s a great mix of updated classics and new games available to play, and here are a few ways to get started.

Machinarium: One of last year’s prettiest games, the puzzle element is pushed to the fore in Machinarium, but even when it gets hard it’s cute enough to keep you motivated. There are demos available for Windows and Mac.

LucasArts Adventure Pack: This collection of four classic games from the early Nineties may look outdated, but they are fantastic. There are two Indiana Jones titles, plus LOOM and The Dig - The Indiana Jones adventures have held up especially well, with excellent writing, puzzles and humor. Windows only.

Zombie Cow Studios: This is a two man team, who’ve created two excellent adventures - Ben There, Dan That and sequel Time Gentlemen, please! They are full of jokes, definitely not for children or the easily startled, and the stories are excellently off the wall. The first game is free, too so check it out!

Broken Sword/Beneath a Steel Sky: Touchscreens are ideal for point-and-click games, which is good news for iPhone users. Two of the greatest ever adventures, from Revolution Software, have been remastered and updated with a brilliant control scheme. Both are gripping stories, and Broken Sword looks especially fantastic. You can still play the original Beneath a Steel Sky on your Windows PC.

Telltale Games: This team have brought back both the Sam & Max and Monkey Island franchises in 3D to great success in episodic content, and continued with new series featuring Strong Bad and Wallace and Grommit. These are all excellent adventures, and they bring high production values back to point-and-click games - great if you can’t stand lo-fi retro graphics!

Distractionware, AKA Terry Cavanagh is releasing his now highly anticipated platformer VVVVVV on January 10th. There should be a demo, which will be reviewed here as soon as possible.

Why should you be excited? Cavanagh is already the author of several distinctive, highly playable yet thought provoking titles, and VVVVVV looks like being the best of the lot.

To help you get in the mood, why not check out these free titles from last year? There’s the contemplative Pathways, intense Bullet Time, eerie Judith and the excellently atmospheric platformer Don’t Look Back.

The games are quirky, but always well designed. Expect some difficulty, too, although I’d say Cavanagh’s games are only difficult in comparison to many of today’s too easy console games. Make sure to visit thelettervsixtim.es, and play the game when it comes out - it should be an excellent start to what I hope will be a vintage year for indie games.

Going back to the past is sometimes the only way to understand the present - and even the future. Now that we’re about to enter 2010, blogs and newspapers are starting to publish their own analysis of this first decade of the 21st century. But what about software? Can we trace it back to its origins and see what it looked like five, ten or twenty years ago? In the case of Windows, the answer is yes. We’ve been able to find images from all the versions of Windows released up to now, from 1.01 to Seven.

Windows 1.01 (1985)

You might not have been born yet when Windows 1.0 was released. Don’t complain about it though. With such a tacky combination of colors, this first version of Windows wasn’t really something worth viewing.

Windows 2.03 (1987)

It took Microsoft two long years to release the second version of Windows. Windows 2 was supposed to improve the first version, but the color combination didn’t get any better. The most outstanding feature, however, was the Control Panel, with an overbloated menu of three options.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vector Conflict: The Siege is a defense game where you have to keep waves of attacking vector enemies from hitting you. Vector graphics gave us the first true 3D games way back, and ever though they’re unnecessary today, there’s something undeniably attractive about their minimalism.

The game is pretty tricky. You have  a number of weapons at your disposal, and a tiny radar to warn you of approaching attacks. You can be attacked from any direction, so you have to spin round taking out enemies with one eye always on the radar. It plays straight from your browser, after just a little loading time.

As you may have read elsewhere, today marks the 5th anniversary of the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. The browser, intended as a direct attack on the market dominance (and abysmal build quality) of Internet Explorer, has gone from strength to strength in those five years, proving that the software we use to view the web can be as important as the content we’re viewing.

But this story didn’t really begin on November 9th, 2004. Firefox had already been around for a couple of years, under the name of Phoenix (and, briefly, Firebird). That was when many internet users, including myself, first had a chance to get to grips with what was to become a revolutionary piece of software. I was still using a 56k dialup connection when I first used Phoenix, so load times really mattered!

You can still download Phoenix 0.5 (from 2002) and, apart from gaping security holes it’s riddled with, the program itself is eminently usable and very reminiscent of Firefox 3.5.5. Some page elements display incorrectly on newer websites, but the most notable difference is how much faster ‘bloated’ Firefox 3.5.5 is. Also, Firefox uses a heck of a lot more memory than Phoenix ever did, but that seems OK because computers have so much more memory available.

Many of the keyboard shortcuts and features in Firefox were already available in Phoenix. Tabbed browsing, for example, works well in the older browser, though you couldn’t carry out advanced tab operations like dragging tabs to reorder them. Phoenix 0.5 also fails the Acid3 browser test, with a score of 39/100 - still strikingly better than ’standards be damned’ Internet Explorer 7 (12/100).

Taking another look at Phoenix 0.5 today has brought back a lot of memories… like how the default theme was ugly but the favorites manager was streets ahead of IE’s offering (which it still is). Phoenix was an important piece of software that restored hope to web users like me who’d grown up with Netscape, only to see it die from lack of development. So yes, today is Firefox’s birthday. But I’m remembering Phoenix.

Welcome to the Gap

Fifteen years ago, I was 15 years old, ambitious and filled with dreams. Most of these entailed the creation of those fictitious worlds that sucked me in. Adventure games presented me with both worlds of magic (far, far away), as well as dystopian, grim representations of OUR world. Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) belongs to the latter category.

With references to Nietzsche, Huxley and Orwell, BASS came packed with intelligence, leaving us disconcerted by… hiatuses of thought. Of course back then, in The Netherlands, all we got from our English reading list was Watership Down. Don’t get me wrong: I felt sorry for those rabbits. However, I felt even sorrier for those who did not get their hands on a copy of Beneath a Steel Sky.

Your quest

The game takes place in a post-nuclear world, divided in an outside - the Gap - and an inside - a hierarchical city. Or is it the other way around? Robert Foster is a child of both worlds: he finds himself growing up in the Gap, yet feels something from the inside pulling him in.

What or who this is and what happens next, are catalysts in Foster’s quest. Find out who you are, where you come from, who put you there and how exactly that fits into the bigger picture. Kind of like ordinary life, wrapped up in a shiny iPhone port of a classic adventure. Read the rest of this entry »

MoneySeize is a great example of retro jumping and collecting. Your hero, of sorts, Sir Reginald MoneySeize II, Esq. needs to collect all the gold coins he can find, to fund construction of the tallest tower in the world! No princesses to rescue here. There are 50 stages, with 1010 coins to find. Stages range from super easy to almost impossibly difficult. It even comes with the disclaimer “this game is very difficult” - platformer professionals will love it. It really is great, though, and our rotund aristocratic hero can do everything an Italian plumber can - while wearing a top hat.

This one’s for people with super human reactions! Bullet Time is a super fast shooter from Terry Cavanagh, developer of many wierd and wonderful indie game experiences.  Here, your challenge is to survive as long as you can. You save up “bullet time”, so when you hold the space bar, the game slows, giving you temporary breathing space. You fire automatically, leaving you free to concentrate on movement. So far, I’ve only managed to survive 20.33 seconds. Can you do any better?

The stream of indie games seams to increase by the minute, from big and lengthy developments, to games created in hours. Much of this output is also free, and without commercial marketing constraints there are some truly bizarre experiences out there.

A combination of money and resources mean the 2D scene is alive and well, from the beautiful Braid to short and tough mini developments like Sword Calibre. Some of these bring something new to 2D gaming, and many are resolutely retro in style and gameplay. Either way, what’s on offer is very different to most commercial releases.

There are 3D games too.  Classic 1990s 3D engines, like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake (the standard bearers for their respective generations) are still producing fun today: Bizarre story telling from cult developers with Judith, joyful uber street violence like Urban Brawl, and probably my favourite experience of the last year: Gravity Bone.  If you want something that looks a bit more modern, college creation Glasshouse is an interesting 3D puzzle game, with presentation and graphics that are incredible for a free game.

Another genre that’s produced a plethora of indie releases is the “physics based game” (which generally mean your success involves using gravity in some way). Crayon Physics is the most obvious example, but there are others like FlickerStrings, Numpty Physics and the excellent And Yet it Moves.

What a fantastic title for a game! Terry Cavanagh’s new indie game Don’t Look Back! is a hard and atmospheric platform shooter. the basic 8-bit graphics work really well, the colors and sound effect work together to create a great sense of foreboding about… something. You have unlimited lives, and you’ll need nearly enough patience alongside some lightening quick reactions, but it’s worth it. Sign in to the site and you can register your high scores too.

A few months back, a National Videogame Archive was launched in Britain, aiming to preserve videogames that might otherwise be lost. I’ve been playing games of one sort or another since I was a little kid, and I have no idea what’s happened to most of them. Games are an important part of our social fabric, and it would be a great loss if elements of gaming history disappeared.

With that in mind, I thought I’d ask our team what games they would like to see preserved for future generations to enjoy:

Nick and James both proposed early 90s football games, Kick Off 2 and Sensible Soccer respectively (both on the Commodore Amiga). At the time people argued over which was best, though the years have been kinder to Sensible Soccer, which is currently available on XBox Live Arcade.

Nick also asked for Amiga games Speedball 2, the ultraviolent sport of the future, and Stunt Car Racer, a futuristic racing game that can be seen as a gentle precursor to PlayStation´s Wipeout series.

Elena took us even further back into gaming history, requesting Atic Atac, a ZX Spectrum game from 1983, which she says she remembers playing most as a child. Apparently it was voted 79th best ever Spectrum game in 1990! High praise indeed. She also suggested the daddy of first person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. This can now be found as an online flash game, and having looked at it again, I’m glad I’m around to play modern first person shooters! Read the rest of this entry »

The rise of game download portals such as XBLA, Virtual Console and PlayStation has presented a flurry of retro games and weirdly innovative titles. PC users needn’t feel left though because there’s a thriving indie scene producing tons of games, many which are free. While these are not the 3D, high production value epics we pay for, they do provide some unique experiences. They represent great time wasters with some fiendishly hard and addictive gaming - perfect for these difficult economic times. Here are a few of my recent stand-out indie experiences:

For relaxed ambient games, give chilled out real time strategy game Dyson a spin, or the demo of the hypnotic Osmos. Both of these manage to be addictive and relatively peaceful experiences. These are great if you have a spare ten minutes, but don’t mind losing an hour or two.

Equally stylish, but more traditional, is the wonderful Multiwinia. Download the demo here to check out one of the coolest looking action/strategy games from last year.

If you need more action, there’s fast paced 8-bit zombie gore-fest 10800 Zombies, or the slightly more cerebral The Manipulator, both of which are totally free and great examples of not-quite-retro indie productions.

I also recently looked at the cute platformer The Kiwi’s Tale, which is a great throwback to early-90s gaming. For a desktop high score challenge, check out Skull Pogo. I loved the simple controls and macabre comic-style graphics, and spent far too much time trying to beat my last score. It has an online scoreboard too, so keep clear if you’re super competitive!