Weird Computer Games - Jenny Tyler and Chris Oxlade

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Retro stuff from way back when. Very basic BASIC.

Did you own any of these computers?







Found here:

archive.org/details/weird-computer-games_osbourne/mode/2up

[scarabium]

I owned A VIC20 but would often adapt code from other machines to run on it.

I remember ordering these from a book club at school.

[ripper]

Over the years I bought an Atari 400, Atari XL600, Commodore 128, Acorn Electron, ZX81 and Amiga 500.

The ZX81 was the first I owned, with the wobbly 16kB RAM pack, and the last being the Amiga 500. Games were, of course, far more basic back in the 80s, but I had a great deal of fun playing them. The Amiga had a built in floppy drive, but the others I owned took cassette tape based games. There were lots of games for £1.99 or £2.99, either re-releases of older full price games or written specially for the budget price. In the 80s I seemed to spend a large proportion of my disposable income on games.

One of the oddest and most disappointing games I had was Friday the 13th, based on the film series. Can't recall if I had it for the Atari or Commodore, but it was awful. The best thing about it was that it came with a blood capsule.

The Ataris accepted cartridge based games, but those were expensive. I think I bought a couple, Defender was one, but at £30 they were generally not something I collected.

[toff]

Jan 28, 2024 15:56:58 GMT ripper said:

One of the oddest and most disappointing games I had was Friday the 13th, based on the film series. Can't recall if I had it for the Atari or Commodore, but it was awful. The best thing about it was that it came with a blood capsule.

Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum evidently:

"The Friday the 13th game you never knew existed." Eurogamer. June 8, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVNmI9JFyeM

C64 is the only platform of those three I've even heard of; at least one friend had a C64. I had an IBM PCjr, which weirdly took slightly different programming than the PC, had both a floppy drive and cartridge slots, and a "chiclet" keyboard that could be used remotely except that it gobbled up batteries too quickly to be practical to use that way so we always kept it corded.

I don't recall making any computer games from books, but I think may have done at least simple mazes from BASIC programs in K-Power, later Family Computing.