If you thought 2023 was crap, think again!

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...

 As we draw to the close of 2024 Firelord Quality Games have squeezed in one last entry. The accompanying email fills me with hope. "In case the previous entry was not the winner, this is the one!"..."If the price for the 1st winner in more than 1000$ then I would prefer to receive it in bitcoins." The manual also makes me believe this could be a game worth playing "We all know Dragon Lair in ZX Spectrum was Crap. No-one bother to finish it because it was boring,difficult,boring, difficult and had many distractions! Firelord Quality Games took all the above characteristics and created a unique & never seen before game! Lragon's Dair : We stripped all the distracting stuff from the game -like graphics,direction controls,sound and multiload and we created a PURE Dragon's Lair Experience!" But is it worth playing? The intro screen is as promised, striped back and music free. Hmm, tough choice between 1 or 2 I start with option 1. It is quickly cle...

 As the old saying goes, you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once, I thought there would be a fancy name for this, but it appears to be called clustering or Bus Bunching compared to Wiggenstein's Third Law. Why am I talking about buses? Because I am en route to talk about snakes. Having just posted a review for a snake game, another drops into my inbox.  It is very basic, but actually quite good. In the original Snake you used to eat things like apples, each one you ate you got longer until you had trouble avoiding your own body. However, your body used to move with you. In this version (very like Snakemower) your tail stays put and you get longer with each move.  There is one other major difference to Snake, this time you are a fire-fighting snake. You need to collect water (blue squares) to pass over (extinguish) the fires (red squares).  A handy gauge tells you how much water you have. So the trick is to avoid your body and red squares unless you ar...

This is a diving-themed game. There's no way you would know that, of course. There is nothing in the gameplay or the visuals to suggest anything water related. Is there something fishy going on here? No. Playing it as a purely abstract game then, it plays like this : Your little UDG character moves around in 4 directions and can shoot. There are 3 circles moving left to right, which can be shot. ( Unless the collision detection fails ) You score points by shooting the circles. The number of points scored depends on mysterious factors. The game ends if you shoot all the circles. You don't get points for the final circle. That seems like a bug. All the while, a uppercase D moves around in 4 directions sort of randomly. Your little character dies if the D touches him. ( Unless the collision detection fails ) There is a time limit. The collision detection is terrible, and it isn't much fun. BUT! Look! Literal moments of effort on display here. The elaborate splash screen has ...

 The email accompanying this entry promises a thrilling rally game. " Take on the desert in DESERT RALLY, an 80s-style game with simple "O" and "P" controls. Dodge cacti and camels in a clunky car that’s more grit than glamour, in a 12-direction driving challenge that’s as unforgiving as it is addictive." Like the previous entry from ZX Kerl we have a range of cassette covers And a poster which adds to the promise of a bare-knuckle ride through the perils of the desert. The only real question is how does the game measure up to the promise of the marketing materials? For a start there is no loading screen which is a pity I would love to see a Grongy take on either of the cassette covers. Instead the game loads straight into the instructions for play with a tasteful choice of colours. For some reason there is a prompt to enter a Level, though nothing to tell me what this is for. Left to my own devices I enter 'One' which instantly throws 2 Variable n...

To prove I can follow instructions I turned off fast load for this one. "Do not fail to load this at normal speed, though, because I had to use some interesting trickery to get the loading screen to appear in the way I did! And, the chances are, it'll take longer to load overall than it will to see everything in the game." Even at normal speed, it is necessary not to blink. For a brief second a screen with A O P S appears Before blending into the image from the cover of A Spy in Isengard which spawned a multitude of memes around orb pondering. The email promised me "You'll play it once to lose, once again to win, that's your lot.". Since I only read the email before loading I wasn't sure what to do at this point. I poked around at various keys with no result. Maybe this was after all a genuine Niksen simulator? I left it running in the background while performing a couple of chores, suddenly there was a fuzzy crackling and the emulator reset. What th...

 The accompanying email provides a promising start "Pancakes are taking over the earth, smash them into oblivion" So does it live up to its early promise? Sadly no. The game starts in a familiar fashion by not autorunning.  After running I have Deja Vu, for a moment I think I am back in 'cmpltly awsme bgl simlater'. The screen presents me with a circle and 2 dots.   With no idea what to do I press a key. A small UDG appears presumably a pancake smasher. From then on I get inputs which I seem to be able to type anything into and the program progresses via mournful beeping to being told I have smashed 3 pancakes. Whatever I enter the game resets. Technical Ability - 8.1% The program listing is a mystery, lines 20 to 60 are superfluous, and line 146 gives me 2 chances to end the game without even starting. There is no game just a series of empty inputs leading me towards the end. Achievement - 2.9% It runs and does something. Fun - 7% I enjoyed 2 minutes of reading the l...

 Reading the accompanying email this is clearly going to be a challenge "I trust you aren't dyslexic and can read backwards, otherwise your brain might wilt and die. instructions are in the game, have "fun"" Since I do suffer from a level of dyslexia (the worst possible name for a condition for people who have issues with spelling) I am immediately in the risk category of brain wilt and death. I bravely face the challenge and load up the accompanying TZX file.  The game starts with a by-now, well-known flourish the need to RUN to start. Instantly I enter a world of spelling differences. I soon grasp that my kingdom is under attack by a mad wizard and I need to kill him. A strong start to an adventure.  I'm asked if I want instructions and I type Y and indeed my brain wilts a little trying to work out what "strunctoins: splick glacj oakaoapalalaladimadingdong" means. I am so busy trying to fathom this out I have missed the message at the bottom of t...

Often I find the emails that accompany the games to be as/more amazing as/than the games they accompany. "I was going to ask god to bless this one but even he has standards so I guess you'll have to do." The inference is that I have no standards and that I am likely to bless this program. One of those two things is wrong. From the start this heads on to my not a game pile, in this case not a utility either. The program opens by needing me to type RUN. After that, I am greeted with the screen below. Points are given for the attempt to center the text and removed for the random vowel usage. With no further instructions, I press enter and get greeted with the word SCORE:. A second press draws a circle on the screen. A final press tells me I bit the bagel 3.3874512times. Extra point for the lack of spacing. Pressing Space and Enter to restart results in a dismal beeping, anything else spares you the beeps. After this 0 OK, 81:1 Fortunately, it doesn't look like I need to ...

I'm beginning to think there should be an award for the tersest email accompanying an entry. If so this entry would be a serious contender. "Enjoy the game. Have a colorful 2024" Attached to the email was a TZX file called Level Up 48K. So far not too much to go on, so I loaded it up. One blink later and it was done, so fairly short. Even better the screen looked like this So no autorun. At this point there are only two real options LIST or RUN. Naturally, I listed the contents, 11 lines of basic. Normally I would hesitate to show the code here to avoid ruining the pleasure of listing it yourself. But the content will be easy enough to guess from the rest of this review. Bonus points will be awarded for not turning off the green paper. The game (can it be called a game?) seems to be a sad reflection of mankind's current progress. At least with the first crap game you got to press M, there was a goal of sorts to mow a lawn. There was even some level of graphics. Not so...