Spectrum Computing

MonkZy's recent game Go Race! made me wonder how many titles in the archive are "game & watch" inspired.

How to define? Graphics hidden under attributes? Simple minimal movement? Ported from original? It might be hard to define but I think you know when you see one.

So far I know of Go Race, Fireman, and remember FrankT did a Fireman as a beeper music demo.

Any more? Are there enough to warrant a ZXDB group? Is it worth it?!

My hunch is that you will find more in the magazine type in sections. It seems a good fit for what they needed.

With MonkZy being a sport and releasing the source to his GoRace game i figure others might adapt what he has done for the other titles. So it probably warrants is own category.

Like visually its such a distinct style of game. I figure everyone has a fav game & watch. One thing I never knew was just how hard these things were to preserve. Very little is really known about how many of the titles actually worked. It was thought for a long time they didn't use a cpu but when the mame guys took a few of these bad boys apart and ended up having to de-cap the ICs they found out they were in fact microprocessor based systems. This was only done in the last few years.

I can imagine that its a time/cost issue with the preservation/documentation of the rest of the titles. Plus you effectively destroy the game and watch you are preserving during the decamping so I can't imagine many collectors being too keen on submitting stuff to this process.

I had always assumed they worked like early arcade boxes and were all desecrate logic. Well you learn something new every day

http://forums.bannister.org//ubbthreads ... #Post97003

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1FStxAVz4[/media]

There's Kool Eggz based on the Russian Elektronika game 'Nu Pogodi' (a clone of Nintendo's Game & Watch 'Egg'). It's not a true 'LCD cell' implementation though as different graphics can occupy the same space.

I would define them as 'compulsive arcade' or non-stop, frenetic, simple action, not necessarily a port of the original games.

For example, this game:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=16139.



Help people go through the bridges to avoid them to sink. From level 4, 5 on, bloody frenetic.

Would you include games inspired not directly by "Game & Watch" but rather by Soviet/Russian "Elektronika" handheld games which were itself inspired/copied from Game & Watch ?

Found another one Mole Hunter. I don't think it's based on any existing handheld LCD game (I could be wrong) but it certainly fits the genre.

Ralf wrote: ↑Sun Mar 11, 2018 6:08 pm Would you include games inspired not directly by "Game & Watch" but rather by Soviet/Russian "Elektronika" handheld games which were itself inspired/copied from Game & Watch ?

For ZXDB, not sure, maybe it's too vague to be a group (note - not a genre, and it wouldn't be my call ).

Either way, I would be interested to see a list of G&W and Elektronika in this thread, it would help to decide.

R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:18 pm

Ralf wrote: ↑Sun Mar 11, 2018 6:08 pmWould you include games inspired not directly by "Game & Watch" but rather by Soviet/Russian "Elektronika" handheld games which were itself inspired/copied from Game & Watch ?

For ZXDB, not sure, maybe it's too vague to be a group (note - not a genre, and it wouldn't be my call ).

Too late, I had already created this group! It will be in the next ZXDB update.

R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:18 pm For ZXDB, not sure, maybe it's too vague to be a group (note - not a genre, and it wouldn't be my call ).

Either way, I would be interested to see a list of G&W and Elektronika in this thread, it would help to decide.

Figured you might want to look at another player in the lcd game market.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u5dtBtG9yU[/media]

Tiger games.

With the lcd custom screens, its expensive to produce in low numbers because the factory that makes them needs to have custom tooling - it uses a kind of stencil to create the cells. But the process of manufacture after you are set up is very efficient. So if you can do a big production run the material cost of the screen becomes very low.

Once you get over production volumes of say 10,000 it is dirt cheap to buy these screens from a factory.

I was going to make some list of Game & Watch style games but it's soooo hard nowadays.

On WOS searching for games is broken and you can't browse your search results as screenshots.
On Spectrum Computing the search engine is still quite basic. You can't search for let's say games from Russia or in Russian language.

I'll give up for the moment but will be back

Another Elektronika-inspired title is Diver Mystery Of The Deep.

There is a version of 'fire' here

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=15756

PeterJ wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 9:40 pm There is a version of 'fire' here

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=15756

Already mentioned in the first post of this thread

Whoops. Sorry. It's been a long week!

A couple more made in Sinclair Basic : https://awesome-table.com/-KTJLy2xX7_E1 ... ilterN=lcd
One inspired by Ball from Nintendo. The other one won a recent Sinclair Basic russian jam (all 48K games I think..though all are made to run in Pentagon).

Edit:

Mickey by Segio (Sergej Neznanyj), Winner of the Basic Best Game 2017 : https://zxart.ee/mobile/eng/parties/2017/bbg17/

BASIC - interesting.

How about a Game & Watch engine that works like my CharAde engine, as an extension to BASIC - you'd have to load in a SCREEN$ with all your graphics, then program up the attribute squares in memory that you want to show and hide for each game 'cell', then you could just do an LPRINT with a code in it to turn a whole cell on or off. The logic for your game could then be programmed in BASIC.

Anyone want to try it out if I write the engine to do this?

And while we talk about Game & Watch it looks like another game inspired by simple handheld console is coming to Spectrum

Brick Racer, soon on our machine:
http://www.indieretronews.com/2018/03/h ... 4hqXf.gbpl



Not exactly Game&Watch but close enough to be mentioned in this thread, I guess

I had this brick game handheld, not many time ago (2004, 2005 maybe) and it was simple but diabolically addictive. With those crap graphics, it has dozens of Tetris games and variants, car chase games, etc. Over 100 games in total. The one in the link is green, but mine was grey.

The weird thing is that I got it free when I bought a cheese (yes, a cheese!) in my local supermarket. All very WTF.

The next days I couldn't stop playing it. Really addictive

Someone mention that archive. org released a bunch of emulations of these games.
http://blog.archive.org/2018/03/18/some ... e-archive/

And here is an article about it:
https://www.cnet.com/news/internet-arch ... led-games/

I did not knew that Mortal Kombat version

A scan collection of the devices: http://pica-pic.com/

hikoki wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 1:23 pm A couple more made in Sinclair Basic : https://awesome-table.com/-KTJLy2xX7_E1 ... ilterN=lcd
One inspired by Ball from Nintendo. The other one won a recent Sinclair Basic russian jam (all 48K games I think..though all are made to run in Pentagon).

Ah yeah, I owned the Ball Game & Watch.

Was OK, though when I saw the Donkey Kong one I thought it looked and played amazing.

There's now a group of "Game & Watch" games in ZXDB, you can see it here:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... up_id=1039

Did I miss anything?

hikoki wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 1:23 pm A couple more made in Sinclair Basic : https://awesome-table.com/-KTJLy2xX7_E1 ... ilterN=lcd
One inspired by Ball from Nintendo. The other one won a recent Sinclair Basic russian jam (all 48K games I think..though all are made to run in Pentagon).

Edit:

Mickey by Segio (Sergej Neznanyj), Winner of the Basic Best Game 2017 : https://zxart.ee/mobile/eng/parties/2017/bbg17/

[mention]R-Tape[/mention] please add Mickey to the archive, and both games to the "Game & Watch" group!

Did I miss anything?

This one for example:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 96&id=3470


I recall there were more but as I said before it's hard to search for them. I'll report if I find anything more.

By the way, something wrong is with palette of this screenshot. Non bright red seems too dark. Actually I checked it and it's (190,0,0) in RGB which is too far I would say.

I seem to remember the criticism of Mad Nurse was that it played like a G&W game.