Tag: Ultimate
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Where’s my Water? Vs PSSST
Having kids has opened up my eyes to many things There I was cooking tea for the kids and my young daughter asked to borrow my Surface to play ‘Where’s my Water?‘. This game is pretty much regarded by almost everyone as a good game. I found it dull. My daughter was completing the game…
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Skinning the games
It was important to apply a ‘skin’ to each of the games… firstly to make the games more appealing to those who’d never played the games and secondly to separate the games from the other Spectrum emulators that are available. As I’d used the ‘game harness’ skinning the games was fairly simple. The most important…
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Tooling up
The Collected Works From eBay, I bought the Collected Works. This was a 1988 compilation of all the Ultimate Play the Game games, except for Underwurlde, for some reason. The four games released under the US Gold banner were also not included, but rightly or wrongly, they were not regarded as Tim and Chris Stamper…
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Apptastic idea….
So it appears we’ve now gone full circle, the app coding phenomenon for the smart phones and tablets now perfectly mimics what happened 30 years ago I guess in 2013, we are at the 90’s point in the gaming world. The crossover point between hobbyist/small studios to the mega game studios. I couldn’t help but…
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Removing the Sinclair ROM from the emulator
The Spectrum has a 16K ROM. The ROM being the primitive operating system (monitor) for the computer, one of the first tasks was to reverse engineer it so a complete understanding of the machine could be gleaned. The exercise was largely trivial as it was well documented, as shown here in The Complete Spectrum ROM…
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Early RARE
Sometime before the Ultimate demise, the Stampers had already decided to switch gaming platforms to Nintendo’s Entertainment System and had formed a separate company called RARE – Research And Reverse Engineering. From here Rare and I departed company, as I also switched platforms too, but to the Commodore Amiga instead. In 1992, my girlfriend (now…
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Ultimate Play the Game
The “computer game” has been with us now since Space Invaders was released in 1978, 35 years ago, cor blimey. In that timeframe I suspect the number of games that got cancelled for whatever reason outnumber those that got published. This blog is about a ‘failed game’, or more accurately a ‘failed app’, and whilst…