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Not lol. I am serious. You understand that it's supposed to be on the UNESCO list of world heritage? It's on the shortlist of longest things, right alongside that pornbloke's dong what was done in rubber.
-------------------- Le plaisir d'un homme authentique Posts: 108
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Jonesey, can I pretend that dry burp of a lol was a kind of delayed response to my HDM post. Otherwise I feel a right c*nt for pasting in old material that nobody even laughed at first time round.
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No one's lolling because they're scared you'll get all dyspeptic and stalk off mumbling about being patronised. Believe me when I tell you we're all lolling... on the inside.
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Back on topic... I'm currently addicted to Urban Dead . I'm a bit nervous at the moment as the site appears to have crashed and I've got a character out in the open.
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I've laughed at it both times it's been posted, Kovacs.
The 'dry burp' was for Pettibone, though, for switching off his enigma machine for a moment and cutting through the crypto-crap with something blunt. It made me laugh.
quote:Originally posted by Samuelnorton: And yes, I used to play D&D - first at school, and then more recently while I was living down in Hampshire where around eight of us would gather together once a week and act like cast-offs from LOTR.
Let me guess: you were an auk, right? aaaaak!Posts: 8657
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Roy is right though: apart from my Judge based on Denise Huxtable from Cosby, my other long-running Judge Dredd RPG character was just a copy of Bruce Willis from Moonlighting. It really couldn't have been more eighties. I am pretty sure we even drank Quattro. We certainly ate Wispa bars and listened to tapes of Commodore 64 music on cassette.
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: tapes of Commodore 64 music on cassette.
What do you mean? You listened to the music from the games themselves? As in, you recorded it onto tape from the computer using a microphone? Or you listened to the sweet beats and screeching melodies of a game load? Or was there an album released in the 80s of the best C64 game music? I am confused. ----> . See.
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Yes, held the cassette recorder up to the TV as the game was playing ("using a microphone" only in that the tape player had a built-in tiny mike) to get those sweet beats. At least once, I had to play the game while recording the music, in order to get the different tunes down (eg. the hall of fame music and death music on Rambo were both worth being transferred to "Kovacs' Best C64 Zarjaz Walkman Music").
However, this wasn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. There was quite a fan culture around composers for the C64 -- Rob Hubbard was a "name" just for his game compositions, and I see others also remember him now. I think there was also a professionally-recorded tape of his music, with added beats, though this was probably given away with Zzap 64 mag rather than sold in Our Price.
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Through the wonders of internet nostalgia-geekdom I am now listening to an mp3 remix of The Last V8 for the first time since I lost "Kovacs 2nd Scrotnig C46 Sounds -- DO NOT ERASE!"
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Did you know you can download a SID emulator which allows you to play .sid files on your PC? Basically a software emulator for the original synthesiser chip in the C64 which plays the actual files which were included with C64 games.
I can send you a copy if you like, and a bundle of a few thousand .sid files. They're all named and virtually every game you can remember is covered.
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: Yes, held the cassette recorder up to the TV as the game was playing ("using a microphone" only in that the tape player had a built-in tiny mike) to get those sweet beats. At least once, I had to play the game while recording the music, in order to get the different tunes down (eg. the hall of fame music and death music on Rambo were both worth being transferred to "Kovacs' Best C64 Zarjaz Walkman Music").
However, this wasn't quite as bizarre as it sounds. There was quite a fan culture around composers for the C64 -- Rob Hubbard was a "name" just for his game compositions, and I see others also remember him now. I think there was also a professionally-recorded tape of his music, with added beats, though this was probably given away with Zzap 64 mag rather than sold in Our Price.
Excellent. I wrote about Our Price just the other day. I think it was the first time the place had popped into my head for at least a decade.
I'm impressed with the taping of music from the game itself. Your technical adventures obviously had more success than mine.
I remember my father bringing home a second-hand Sony C5 betamax. It wasn't as impressive as the more modern C7 (black case and a damper on the top-loading eject), it was silver and ugly and the top loader could launch an Action Jack almost to the ceiling of our lounge (admitedly the video recorder sat on top of a combined TV/VCR stand, but still...impressive, right?)
Despite its shortcomings, it did have one feature I never saw on any other video recorder - audio dub. Audio Dub meant you could actually record just an audio track over an existing betamax recording. With only a microphone, I would be able to dub my voice over the top of adverts, Sapphire and Steel, Monkey even! The problem was, I didn't have a microphone. The only alternative was to record my voice track to a tape, using the built-in mic of a tape recorder, and then play the tape into the VCR using a lead my dad had soldered together in order that I might copy BBC games tape-to-tape (i.e. between my dad's hi-fi and my hand held tape deck). It worked and we had hours of fun dubbing Timotei adverts with, "Wow, my name is Tim Baker and my permed hair is so soft and gay because I use Timotei. Timotei for Timmy...hahahaha!"
What I really wanted to do, though, was dub over computer games with my own voice. To add a commentary to what was going on. All I had to do, I reasoned, was record a game playing session to betamax, then I could dub over it explaining my every move and how great I was at Elite. It should have been so easy! Plug the aerial lead for the BBC micro into the back of the video, instead of the back of the TV, then the video into the TV. Tune it in and press record.
Alas, I never got it to work. Days were wasted - maybe even weeks. I always felt I was one more lead away from achieving the impossible - owning a betamax copy of me completing a computer game, complete with my own voice-over saying how I did it. I would have been a legend, but I was always one lead, one plug away from success. Begging my father to "just solder this one to this one…pleaaaase!" I was so close but never made it. Because of that experience, I believe I understand what it must have been like to be an ancient alchemist.
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Sid is the music chip, is it? I did have a C64 (and Spectrum) emulator on my last PC. If it's just for hearing the original sounds, I will gratefully decline, Ringo: I'm actually preferring the mp3 remixes now
ETA: Jonesy I almost feel like you watched me masturbate over Helen "Supergirl" Slater. I did that too. "I'm Timmy Mallett and I want you to drink Cup-A-Soup, because it'll make you like meeee" [voice breaks... pals giggle in background... rush to finish the "joke" as the advert changes]
However, it seems I performed the 80s equivalent of pnwing you, because I did have a microphone -- which I asked my dad to buy me so I could practice "human beatbox" -- and worked out a system for recording Spectrum games onto VHS while dubbing a soundtrack.
My masterpiece, and one of my few attempts in fact because it was a lot of hassle dragging all the gear down to the living room colour TV and spreading it out over the floor, was a version of Rogue Trooper the game, with Blondie's panoramic, aching orchestral Autoamerican laid over the visuals, and me reading captions from the comic book ("Nu Earth... a blasted wilderness where only the Genetic Infantryman can survive") plus the synthesised voices of the weapons chips, performed by holding my fist around the top of the mike for a kind of "filtered" effect ("Norts! Let's waste them, Rogue!")
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Fair enough. There are a few different emulators out there and it's taken me a while to find one that actually manages to properly recreate the original sound of the SID chip without any sound chopping or skipping. I got a CD with something like 20,000 C64 games on it and the SID emulator and music bundle came with it, and I've probably had more use out of this than the concole emulator itself. Because, let's face it, as nostalgic as they may be, retro games are never really as good as you remember. Except maybe Impossible Mission and Racing Destruction Set.
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Yeah I'd love to have one of those Mart, ir even build one out of my C64 which I still have in a box in the loft. Pricey though...
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Because, let's face it, as nostalgic as they may be, retro games are never really as good as you remember.
Jetpac actually is as good. I think that qualifies for one of the best games of all time, given that rediscovered it and played it for hours twenty years after it was first released in 8 colours on 16k.
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You know, I sometimes feel really sorry for anyone who didn't grow up in the 80s. The memories are such pure comedy. I find it hard to believe the 90s could furnish such high-class corny nostalgia, though I'm happy to be proved wrong. Perhaps in a thread someone will start.
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I never had jetpac, I just had it's close cousin 'HERO' which was pretty good, although I now find that game utterly perplexing.
Golden Axe is still worth a play though, as is Way Of The Exploding Fist, if simply for the screachy synthesised karate yells.
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If you were into later games than Spectrum and Commodore, this site is quite fun.
It takes themes from megadrive games such as golden axe and streetfighter 2, and lovingly creates them in heavy metal. It's not especially good heavy metal, but it's fun anyway.
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I'm not sure to be honest. My parents used to be pretty hardcore with the games copying so we had a stack of thousands of games. I can't have been more than about 5 but I remember being pretty good at these games back then. I've wondered this myself to be honest.
I think I played a lot more of the games which were released towards the tail end of the eighties, like Ghostbusters, Pit-Stop II, Barbarian, R-Type (although this was much better on the Sega Master System) and suchlike. Actually Ghostbusters may well be a lot older than that, thinking about it.
I also remember watching my sisters and my Dad playing all these games for hours. I was fascinated by it to be honest. I would happily sit and watch my sister play Bruce Lee from begginning to end, for instance, which was no mean feat, even in them days.
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I never had a C64. In the eighties I'd begun my now-longstanding tradition of backing the losing format in any given generation of hardware, by having an Amstrad CPC 464. See also: N64, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo Gamecube.
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I was so bored that I completed Golden Axe last week. When the music kicked in at the end we danced around the living room. We rejoyced at the fact that the creature that looks like a chicken leg is called Chicken-Leg and that Ax-Battler doesn't wield an axe. Then.....jesus, we considered sampling the intro music because the "'The Battle' already sounds like a hip-hop track"
quote:Originally posted by Ringo: I would happily sit and watch my sister play Bruce Lee from begginning to end, for instance, which was no mean feat, even in them days.
That's one of the few games I could win every time. Even my little brother could win that.
I found R-Type better on a Spectrum emulator than on an emulator for the original videogame, for some reason. I never played it at the time: it must have been very late 80s, after my loyalty to the Spectrum waned.
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Yeah it wasn't a hard game (my sister isn't exactly the best gamer out there) but it's not a short game which is what I meant by it being no mean feat. It seems strange now to contemplate sitting and playing a game from start to finish without turning off and doing something else halfway through, but this was before the days of saving your progress. I think the last game I completed in one sitting was Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3, which took 14 hours. Perhaps that's why people don't do that nowadays..
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The great thing about Bruce Lee was that player 2 could play as the fat enemy, which was pretty unheard of at the time as I remember. Player 2 actually trying to halt the main player's progress. Me and my friend from first school Alun spent a lot of time playing that.
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
. See.
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so I could practice "human beatbox" -- and worked out a system for recording Spectrum games onto VHS while dubbing a soundtrack.
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