With time on your hands what have you been playing?

[ianace]

With many people with time on their hands, what have you been playing old classes or new downloads?

My list includes Space Crusade and both Street Fighter games, on a real spectrum +2. And introducing gauntlet, a great two player game to my two sons.

New games I have been enjoying Bonnie and Clyde on the ZX Vega.

What other games people been rediscovering or which new games are you really enjoying?

[Morkin]

Been fairly sporadic with Speccy stuff recently. I've been trying out a few of the new games announced here but have only had a cursory go at most so far, just 10 minutes here and there.

Until recently I hadn't used my (actual) Speccy for ages, but I decided to get it out for round 2 of the high-score comp we're having at the moment, as I knew I had a copy of Pssst to play.

Although I had a pretty free Sunday, I was dreading having to dig around in my storage boxes for the leads, power supply etc. But I'd forgotten that after the last use I'd carefully taken all the key components (leads, power supplies, and of course the Speccy) from storage and put them somewhere else for quick access (that's middle-age forgetfulness for you). So it only took a few minutes to get set up and running.

I keep forgetting how much I enjoy loading games from tape. I usually find when I go to the effort of loading a tape I play the game for a lot longer than I do when I load it up in an emulator. I'm going to try to make it a weekly thing now, as I've got a fair few games on tape just sitting around.

[Cosmium]

I usually find when I go to the effort of loading a tape I play the game for a lot longer than I do when I load it up in an emulator. I'm going to try to make it a weekly thing now, as I've got a fair few games on tape just sitting around.

Very true. It's funny isn't it?! Attention spans seem to shrink dramatically when there are hundred/thousands of instantly loadable choices - games in this case - in front of us. I wonder if there's a name for that? It's almost like there's a nagging feeling at the back of our minds saying "you can keep playing this, but maybe there's something better just around the corner, and it's SO easily accessible, so go on, finish this and try that instead!" A bit like continually scrolling up the screen on your phone looking for newer/more interesting posts or news than the one that just went by.

Whatever it is, I think it's the same effect with Netflix streaming. Loads of stuff to choose from and instantly play, yet selecting a show and committing to watch it all the way through.. now that takes effort!

I think the extra effort put in to getting something to happen, that used to be more common in the 'old days' e.g. going to a shop and renting a video or feeding a cine film into a projector, seems to be proportional to the attention span we'll give the resulting experience.

I suspect the tactile feel of preparing the physical experience increases the resulting investment/enjoyment too (over digital experiences)..

[TMD2003]

What have I been playing?

Doom. More specifcally, Doom II megawads with Wrath of Cronos bolted on top. And some Heretic whole-episode wads, also with Wrath of Cronos.

Interspersed with a bit of Spectrum programming, just to stay on topic...

[TMD2003]

UPDATE: with time on my hands on Sunday, I was playing my way right through the excellent Atari ST shareware game, Plop. And there are so few references to this utter gem out there - and with less than five minutes of in-game footage on the entirety of Facetube, that I thought I'd make my own. I have a screen recorder (OBS Studio) and an editor (Shotcut) that I'm slowly learning how to use, I've updated Steem to SSE v4.02, and here are the results!

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

If you're too lazy to scroll down the wall of text under the title...

There are very few videos about this Atari ST shareware gem from 1992. The chances are it was based on an existing original, probably from somewhere in Japan, and was coded in STOS by Digi Tallis Developments (Jon "Orm" Lewis and Simon "Maguay" Hall) "in about two weeks".

In short, place blobs of "stuff" in the squares, each of which can hold one to four blobs; fill them any further and the square will "plop", vacating it and squirting one blob of "stuff" into the adjacent squares, in the four basic compass directions. Any square held by your opponent's colour will be taken over, and the object of the game is to wipe your opponent's colour off the board. Most of the previous videos show only a few seconds of the "Normal" mode, with regularly laid-out rectangular boards, so I thought I'd show off the entire "Tournament" mode in three installments, where the shape of the board and distribution of squares can be highly irregular.

These are levels 1-10, with the full introduction included, and some take longer to conquer than others. What happens at 14:40 where the computer takes over one of my squares is still a mystery to this day, but I had my revenge soon enough. And if this was a ZX Spectrum RZX file I'd have used "Rollback", whereby I can correct my mistakes; I made a new save state after each board, and only reloaded if I've lost (which I only did once), if there was a problem that needed to be removed (which there was on the original attempt at level 3), or if it took longer than ten minutes.

I'd always wondered if there was anything like this game on the Spectrum - or, maybe, if this version could be converted (and, other than that incompletely-filled squares might need Nirvana or Bifröst trickery to be properly represented, how hard can it be?). About as close as I've found is Russ Gouldthorpe's Atoms, which is hidden away on a dark corner of Github. There's also a much cruder representation of the same theme (using the digits 1-4) which I think may have been a CSSCGC entry at some stage...

Anyway, levels 11-20 will be released tomorrow and 21-30 on Wednesday.

[TMD2003]

As promised...

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

I also found Exploding Atoms, made in what was Czechoslovakia in 1990, predating Plop - so clearly there's an original that both are based on, probably from Japan - I found a forum post somewhere by someone lamenting the loss of a similar game on the MSX, which might be some evidence as to its origins.

As for Ross Gouldthorpe's Atoms, as opposed to all the other programs of the same name up there, I've made a very quick RZX of that. 3 minutes and 20 seconds was all it took to beat three computer opponents on the same board... Plop certainly has better AI!

[TMD2003]

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwcBOMc0NZo[/media]

And that's a wrap! The RZX of Atoms is also on both Daren's original site and FaceTube, if you want to compare the two games.