Chuckie Egg - Best Game Ever

Instant playability. Great jumping compared to other platform games. No stiffy jobs or micro second timing required.

Addictive game play that makes you want to play again and again. Good for 30 seconds and realistically playable for hours.

Simple objective, collect all the eggs and avoid the birds. No bothersome cut scenes or mandatory craptacular puzzles to solve.

Great graphics in terms of simplicity and layout so you know what to do without thinking. Great sound, so basic and simple that it fits the game perfectly.

8 Bit Wars - Spectrum vs Amstrad vs Commodore.

The 8 Bit-era was just simply the best time for home computing. No virus, no booting and no online updates. It was also the era where you knew that if you have the skills you could program a game in the comfort of your bedroom. Nowadays, you have to spend so much money on a computer and the cost of development is absolutely astronomical!

The computers back then were the Spectrum, Amstrad and the Commodore 64. The Spectrum had the cheapest games and were the most playable since the graphics couldn't compete with the other two.

The Amstrad had better graphics than the Spectrum and the sound capabilities could not compete with the Commodore 64. However, when it came to the graphics it had a better palette than the Commodore and most of the software were available on a disk.

The Commodore 64 trounced the other two when it came to sound capabilities and the games had very smooth scrolling which both the Spectrum and the Amstrad seemed to struggle with.

What was interesting about the the three computers was the fact they each had very unique set of buyers. The Spectrum for the those on a budget, the Amstrad for those who needed business applications and the Commodore for those who could afford one.

Operation Wolf - Amstrad Action

This was simply an awesome game. It was the best version amongst the 8 bit trio.
It had the most colors and the action was non stop. The music was fantastic and created enough atmosphere to feel like you wanted to shoot some 8 bit pixellated enemy soldiers.

So what can you do? You can shoot dangerous animals so they can drop useful items. You can shoot helicopters, tanks, soldiers and throw grenades. What you can't do is shoot civilians and hostages as they will deplete your energy.

An absolutely stonking conversion of the original arcade machine!

Roland in Time - Dr. Who?

This was a game that confirmed something that I have always known. I am just hopeless at platform games. Where people would rave about Jet Set Willy and Super Mario games, I was struggling with this game called Roland in Time. It was one of the those games that came with the 6128 on a 3 inch disk. I kept loading it because it was one of the first games on a 3 inch disk.

It had this Dr. Who title screen that warped when you started the game. The graphics were awful and the controls were too stiff. The enemies didn't seem to interest me and overall it was not pretty or enjoyable enough to even perservere with. I mean, there are some games, where you just keep going just to see what the next level is going to be like, not this game however.

Seabase delta - Wooosh! Beep!

Seabase delta

This was just a brilliant game. It was very atmospheric and I liked the underwater feeling and I loved the fact that it actually had sound effects. It was also one of the first interactive fiction typing games that actually had graphics that made it so immersively captivating, rather than just obligatory pretty pictures.

I really wanted to complete this game and even to this day, I still do and it's one of the few interactive fiction games where the parser is not too difficult, and the puzzles do seem logical compared to other games, which were absolutely nonsensical.

Amstrad CPC 6128 - 16 Colors and a Built in Disk Drive? Get Out of Here!

I was first exposed to this awesome computer when my father bought it from a garage sale. It came with a few games and I remembered my father telling me how he used to own a previous version and actually rented games on tape through a mail order company.

I remember going through some games looking only for movie titles and game compilations, some only came in tape form which wasn't what I was looking for.

Anyway, this was a sleek machine with a cool built in 3" disk drive which you have to switch sides to use up the full capacity. The disk was awesome and solid, none of the flimsy 5.25 inches or 3.5 inch type. This was hardcore.

The graphics were great even though it had 16 colors. However, I must admit some games were just bad ports from other 8bit computers and so sometimes used only 4 colors. It was also one of the few computers that had 80 column character displays. That was impressive back then.

What sets this computer apart from the rest is the fact that it had a built in disk drive and a matching monitor that was sold as a bundle.