If you thought 2023 was crap, think again!

  Good game alert. Red Zebra has made a little text adventure using basic. The game is called Luna Tick. While there is no loading screen, the opening screen has some flourish, with nice use of attributes to form a logo:  This text adventure has a 'help' feature, showing all possible commands. The command list is simple, and that suits me just fine. I like text adventures generally, but I am usually clueless about how to play them. Really clear instructions mean I can focus on the puzzles, and not worry about what mystery command is needed to progress. This is a hard game to review because you should play it so I'm being careful not to spoil anything. And anything I can think to say is a spoiler! You start the game as an inmate trapped in an insane asylum. Although you would never know it. This information is only given when you complete the game!  However, don't let that put you off trying Luna Tick. It's a pleasantly small yet perfectly formed text adventure based...

  A lovely loading screen Seventeen years ago I wrote a  review  of  Wizard Of Wor , a  ZX Spectrum conversion  of the  C64 version  of the arcade hit.  I commented on the fact that it was a well loved C64 game, and this version finally plugged a gap in the Speccy line-up that the Commodorks had been teasing us about since 1983. I expected  Space Taxi  to be the same.  There's an ugly but loved C64 game of  this name , and it doesn't seem out of the realms of possibility that the Spectrum could handle a version.  There was a different game for the ZX81 called  Space Taxi  - which is very CCSCGC material, being a type in from the book  Not Only 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX81 1K .[1] Space Taxi, by Dave Hughes isn't related to any of the previous Space Taxi games. I'll let Dave explain the plot. The game fills the screen with stars to avoid, then populates it with planets and your destination.  Th...

 While I have been writing reviews for other entries I have gotten behind on the entries of jj52. There have been so many of these that he is well on the way to creating his own cassette 50. However, buyers of the collection are unlikely to receive a Timex digital calculator watch. To catch up this post will review all the missing entries so far. Music Match - 16K Spectrum This arrived as a TAP file of 123 KB which was quite exciting. Loading it caused me to scratch my head. Opening the TAP file revealed 34 entries with Music Match buried at 28-29.  Extracting this produced a working program. There are four levels of play when the computer makes a beep of different durations and pitch. After which you need to input a response. There appears to be no link to the response and the beep. 1. Nothing 2. 9,3 3. 7,2 4. 1,3 If you are wrong which you will be you will be told "incorrect","incorekt","What are you? 12?", Some1 neds to go back to msc cls ASAP" At ...

A new Valve game is always cause for excitement. So just last week, the official announcement of the invite-only Beta for Deadlock had the PC gaming folks all excited.  But then on Labor Day, significantly, a more important Valve game arrived to CSSCGC Manor. You can hum the Valve music yourself. Good first impressions from the loading screen - some effort has been expended. It's even got a thrilling tag line that promises 'All the fun of a Valve'. Which, honestly, seems like an achievable goal.  Impressions remain positive through the instructions screen. And you can even set the colour of the Valve! Some games would charge you money or make you open loot boxes for this kind of player skin customisation, but here we have it for free. Take that, Gabe.  But it's here that the truly important nature of the game is first indicated.  We, the players, are to inhabit the person of Barry, who manages the titular valve at the behest of the State. My Barry got a high score, p...