Shadow Covenant

Hi guys, and welcome to what I expect to be a regular feature on my blog: “Games of my life”.

In this feature, I’ll be talking about some games that really made a difference in my life… I’m not talking of the best games I’ve ever played (although some of them are), nor the ones that had more impact in the video game world. I’m talking about games that made an impact on _me_ personally…

Why should you care? Well, to be honest, I don’t expect you to care that much, but it’s fun strolling down memory lane and see old games again… I know I had a blast doing some research for this while I was preparing the series.

So, without further ado, here is part one of the series, hope you enjoy!

The Hobbit

Released in 1982, developed by Beam Software, “The Hobbit” was the first text adventure I’ve ever played, and it really blew my mind at the time… I’ve never read the books before this, so the story was completely new and it was very exciting to have a game telling me a story. I played it on the ZX Spectrum (a Timex 2048 machine).

You can play it online here. They even left in the time it took to render the screen like on the Spectrum…

Elite

“Elite” was a space trading game (probably the first one) created by David Braben and Ian Bell in 1984. It featured wireframe 3d graphics in the ZX Spectrum (where I played it), but it had ports in almost all machines known to man (some better, some worse… I played the Commodore Amiga version years later, and it was beautiful for the time!). It was also one of the first sandbox games, in which there weren’t any obvious objectives besides the ones you set for yourself, and it featured a procedurally generated universe to play in.

You’d go around trading stuff and defending your cargo, trying to rise higher and higher in the game hierarchy (to the coveted “Elite” title).

The game spawned a sequel in 1993, called “Frontier: Elite II” (or just “Frontier”), but for me it never captured me as much as the original… You had better graphics, and more worlds to explore (and you could even go to the surface of the planets), all generated procedurally. Most of the elements of “Elite” were also present in “Frontier”, but the game had a better, more physically corrected flight model, which was much harder to master and not as much fun (for me, at least)…

Jet Set Willy

Another game from the golden age of ZX Spectrum games, “Jet Set Willy” was a sequel to “Manic Miner“. Created in 1984 by Matthew Smith (working for Software Projects), it was a step up in platformer games.

What made this game amazing for the time was the fact that it was huge, having dozens of different rooms (that could be played in non-linear fashion), with different challenges to overcome, to help Miner Willy to clean up his house after a party. It was wicked difficult (for me at least, I was 11 when I played it for the first time), and had some bugs that prevented players from finishing it if you did stuff in a certain order.

Took me ages to finish this one…

Matchpoint

Had a though time finding information on this game on the internet… Matchpoint was a tennis game created in 1984, by Sinclair Research (I think, couldn’t verify this)…

While I didn’t enjoy this one very much (not much of a sports fan), it was very important to me because it was the first game I saw on the Spectrum, the game that made me say “I want to be a game developer!”. From then onwards, most of my life choices were done around that…

The game had impressive graphics for the time (the ball even cast a shadow!!!), and it was relatively fun in two player mode (two people crouching over the small keyboard)…

Ok, that’s it for this first installement of “Games of my life”, hope you enjoyed it… Next time, I’ll be looking into the Space Quest saga and Legend of Zelda games, so stay tunned…