General Election

[Fahnn]

There are games out there that used dynamic loading from tape. I believe 'The Rats' has a selection of in-game events which the loader program randomly chooses from, but this is only done at the start of the game. And I can't find it now, but someone made a BASIC adventure game where every choice you made led to a new paragraph, which was loaded from tape as data. Obviously this would only be feasible using emulators or extra hardware, as the constant rewinding and fast-forwarding would become too annoying on a real machine.

Yes, it's the instant-access benefits of emulators that got me thinking about this in the first place. I assumed that at least a few games using this technique would have been written since emulators became commonplace, but after a bit of a poke around I couldn't find any (of course, that doesn't mean that such games don't exist). Maybe it's like when CDs became available for data storage and games started including long sections of video seemingly just to fill up the available space. I think I read somewhere that if you were to write a text adventure for the Spectrum that used all the data capacity of a CD, it would be the equivalent of writing 1,500 full-length novels. Possibly that's why no-one got around to it.

[djnzx48]

I don't remember any games that make use of advanced tape loading, but if you're including demos then this is a good example of what can be achieved with emulators.

[Fahnn]

I don't remember any games that make use of advanced tape loading, but if you're including demos then this is a good example of what can be achieved with emulators.

Going off-topic a bit, but I'm so impressed with some of these Spectrum demos, I've been watching a lot of them on Youtube recently. When I was first getting into making music with trackers on the Amiga, I bought quite a few (SoundTracker, ProTracker, Digitrakker, Octamed, etc.) for a quid each out of the back of Computer Shopper and suchlike. They always came with demos, but those Amiga demos just aren't as impressive as the best Spectrum demos I've seen, either graphically or sonically. I can't put my finger on why, exactly. The Amiga demonstrably has better graphics and sound, but the people making the Spectrum demos just seem to try harder. Maybe that's it.

[zack4mac]

Perhaps a political satire game? maybe mix The Prisoner in for good measure! or just have Characters popping up like the Prince Charles Dalek in Head over Heels, I only wish that I kept using my C64 or ST and learnt to program, instead I spent the next few years trying to get my PC ruining solid, needles to say it never happened.

[Fahnn]

Perhaps a political satire game?

Oh, for sure, it would have to be, I'm not capable of writing anything serious. There always have to be jokes and utterly ridiculous situations (that lend themselves to more jokes). If I tried anything different, my fingers would probably fall off (I've not tested this theory, but I'm pretty sure of its validity).