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Who is Paul Rose?
Paul is probably better known as Mr Biffo – the creator of legendary teletext games magazine Digitiser. These days, he mostly writes his videogame ramblings over at Digitiser2000.com. If you want more Biffo in your eyes, you can catch him as the host of DigitizerTheShowat www.bit.ly/biffo2000.
I’ve been playing a lot of old games recently – more than usual – due to capturing game footage for my YouTube channel (new series Digi Level 2 is out now… excuse the plug). My explorat ion isn’t limit ed to the usual paddocks, but vent ures dow n the lesser-t ravelled pat hs of gaming history.
It’s proving to be a challenge because so many classic games, especially the home-computer games of the Eighties, are borderline unplayable. Yes, this might be considered heresy in this magazine, but it’s the truth. We need to admit it to ourselves. Many games were punching so high above their weight that they broke their arms.
If you’re using emulation, the experience is somewhat improved – you can use controllers or keyboard layouts that aren’t completely illogical. However, if you’re sticking with the original control scheme, then nine times out of ten, you’re screwed.
Why did so many classic Spectrum games, to cite one example, place all the controls on the same line of the keyboard; up, down, left, right, fire, collect? It’s beyond counterintuitive; it’s profoundly fiddly, and it seems no one ever stopped to consider whether a better layout might’ve been slightly less insane.
Furthermore, many Spectrum games almost collapsed under their own complexity. Anything beyond the simplest arcade-style action games required a PhD in Advanced Baffling Strategy, or some sort of training course to memorise esoteric menu systems.
It’s no wonder games like Manic Miner and Jetpac were so beloved – because they kept things relatively simple, pure, and didn’t over-stress the hardware to the point of implosion.
Let’s be honest, Knight Lore was a classic, but its acclaim had very little to do with the gameplay, which would regularly grind to a halt whenever too much was happening on the screen, a
