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...

 When I won the dubious pleasure of being this year's C.S.S.C.G.C judge I was aware that no matter how big my feet are I was stepping into some big boots. I wished that someone had compiled an instruction manual containing the vast wisdom of judges past. Failing a manual, then a training simulator would have been a vast help.  The old adage "nature abhors a vacuum" holds true and has driven Firelord to fill the required void with another quality product. For all who have entered this year or intend to enter beware, because one of you will be sat in my seat next year. Not my physical seat, but the metaphorical red leather Chesterfield with the comfortable hollow in the seat cushion formed by years of weighty posteriors. All of you need to download this product and get training. Unlike many entries, this one arrived with a comprehensive manual which is reproduced at the end of this review. But let's get into this thing. Like any truly professional piece of software, the...

 One of the requirements for a crap game surely has to be a great name, one that instils a frisson of excitement and a sense of wonder as to what it will herald. This game has such a name, move over Ant Attack here comes Sloth Attack. The accompanying email adds to that level of promise "Anyway to this Spectrum game. It's all quite simple. You control a character who's sole need for survival is to avoid a sloth. A rampaging, murderous sloth that kills on contact. And it is hell bent on doing so. Fortunately it's a sloth, and it's slow. But it's constantly out to get you. It's probably on cocaine or something because it never goes to sleep. " Now if this is paired with excellent graphics, kickass music and unmissable gameplay play this game will be a winner. It begins with a simple intro explaining the content of the game. All framed with a pretty leafy border. So far, so good. Unfortunately, there isn't any intro music, but still a chance for excel...

 This is a game that I have waited a life time to play. Billed as Tetris for the spatially challenged, UNIS gets rid of the awkwardness of different shapes and replaces it with a simple cube. Loading the TZX file presents the player with a simple but effective loading screen. Once loaded the player is offered the choice between using the keyboard or Kempston joystick. The latter wasn't tried in this review due to a lack of the required hardware. Since there is no need to rotate the playing piece the keyboard is limited to 3 key O and P to move left and right and A to drop the piece faster.  The object is to make lines of cubes the same colour vertically, once you have 5 in a row, the row will disappear. Initially the pieces drop slower than a snail with a terrible hangover, but as lines are formed this speeds up to the maximum speed the BASIC program is capable of running at. Pressing left or right causes the pieces to keep moving in that direction until a wall is hit or you p...

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...