DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

Review: Super Iron Fist Challenge!!!! (ZX Spectrum) - By Super Bad Advice

3/5/2016

12 Comments

 
Picture
BY SUPER BAD ADVICE
Being a gamer these days is hard work.

As well as actually playing games in the first place, you then feel obliged to go online and offer/defend your opinion about those games in skank-packed forums that frequently get all heavy and toxic, like a blancmange made of polonium.

​So shall we remind ourselves of the good old days, where no one cared what your opinion was and – sans internet – you couldn’t tell anyone you weren’t stood next to anyway, by reviewing an 8-bit game?

​And better still, an 8-bit game that literally no one else but me has ever played, so no one else CAN have an opinion on it? Sounds like a plan to me.

Picture
​RARE GAME
Why is this game so rare, I don’t hear but am going to assume you asked for purposes of exposition?

​Well, because I wrote it when I was 10, and I found it in a box in the loft last week.

​The cassette has degraded and I don’t have a Speccy these days anyway (hence no screenshots, but I have done you a nice drawing of roughly what it looked like, on a novelty Post-it note), but here’s what I remember – give or take 30 years of near-constant forgetting.
 
As you might have guessed from the quite frankly wildly overenthusiastically punctuated title, this is a beat-em-up.

In fact it’s as pure a beat-em-up as you can get, as due to the not-unrelated facts of (A) I programmed it in BASIC, and (B) Because I was terrible at programming in BASIC, there was no AI to fight back. Essentially, the player just bludgeoned their opponent repeatedly until the end of the round.

Picture
HORRIFYINGLY VIOLENT
​​While obviously this is horrifyingly violent and should have earned it an age rating that meant I, the programmer, was banned from testing my own game, I justified it narratively by saying on the cassette cover that you were trying to save ‘the town’ from a ‘bomb’.

Essentially, I pre-empted the hit TV show 24’s casual approach to appalling torture being an acceptable means to and end by about 20 years.

At the time I didn’t say which town or who was trying to bomb it or why, but from what I remember of the graphics it was pretty bland, square and horrible so let’s assume it was Milton Keynes, and the protagonists don’t like roundabouts.
 
Your person moved from stage to stage – station, docks (do they have docks in Milton Keynes? Well they might have had in the 1980s, so let’s assume so), shopping mall and so on – until they got to the final boss.

​Who was as unresponsive as the other enemies combat-wise, but just bigger. In fact, he was more or less a sphere, as that was the best I could manage to his imply daunting size. So possibly an evil version of Pac Man? Let’s say no, he wasn’t – if only to avoid lawsuits from Namco.

BODGE JOB
Hang on, you say, if the enemies didn’t fight back, what was the ‘game’? Ah, well that’s the true work of genius (by which I mean shoddy bodge job).

On each level you could either kick, punch or headbutt your opponent. Kicks made your lower limb extend in a frankly disturbing manner to impact with your opponent’s torso, not entirely unresembling the sort of appendage they extend to do in-flight refuelling between jets.

​A punch did much the same, only higher up your body. A headbutt, to avoid the illusion-shattering appearance of decapitation and/or ‘giraffe neck’, moved your square head graphic one block forwards so it was effectively on the character’s shoulder.

It didn’t connect with your enemy, because - again - I was a lousy programmer and couldn’t render this in pixels. It counted as a hit nonetheless. Each blow took down your opponent’s health, but the ‘game’ was thus that on each stage you could only use each move a certain number of times. This varied from level to level.

​Overdo it, and the ‘GAME OVER’ screen would come up, telling you you’d sprained your wrist/ankle/neck, and your enemy had won. Why no modern beat-em-up has taken this purist approach is mystifying.
Picture
​AHEAD OF ITS TIME
In another remarkably ahead-of-it’s-time move, your protagonist could be either male or female.

Not because I was a surprisingly right-on 10-year-old, but because I was so poor at creating graphics in BASIC that the gender of the player character was essentially undeterminable.

​It could equally have been a rendering of your violent Uncle Pat, a deranged Grandmother off her face on sherry, or Nude-O 4000 – a genital-free android from space who really likes duffing stuff up.
 
In summary: while I was about as convincing a programmer as a length of hose tied to your belt with a shoe on the end is an artificial limb, it wasn’t too bad for a second game.

​My first effort had been a boring text adventure about a giant evil lorry (no, really – I think I probably nicked the idea off of an episode of Knight Rider), so it was certainly a step up from that. Albeit a fairly uneven step strewn with vomit, man wee and fag ends, like you’d find outside a city-centre Wetherspoons at 3am.

SMELLY THIRD
Alas, my planned third game – a real leap forward that would have seen you play a character trapped in a 3D maze – never got off the ground, because I realised I didn’t have the slightest idea how to make any of it happen onscreen.

I learned everything I knew from a vast and stupefyingly dull partwork magazine called Input, which I only had 1 volume of, and if they did 3D graphics it certainly wasn’t in Volume 1.

So being sensible I immediately gave up my blossoming career as a coder and went back to trying to do wheelies on my Raleigh Grifter. Which was equally impossible because, as any fellow former Grifter owners will know, the frame of the bike was made out of unrefined pig iron and it weighted around 50,000 tonnes.
Picture
IT'S TOO LATE
​I think it’s probably a bit late for a programming comeback now, especially as I can’t even remember the feeble amount of BASIC I used to know.

​But as the Wu Tang Clan demonstrated recently by releasing an album as a single copy and getting some buffoon to pay a load of money for it, there might still be a chance to cash in on my previous work thanks to people being really stupid.

So if there are any particularly rich idiots who’ve bought a ZX Vega thingy who want a unique and almost certainly unplayable urban combat experience, let me know – we’ll start the bidding at £1 million?

​In the meantime, did you ever quite wrongly see yourself as the next Shigeru Miyamoto and write anything equally terrible in your youth? Let us know in the comments, love.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
​MR BIFFO'S GAMES OF MY YEARS
12 Comments
Superbeast 37
3/5/2016 10:23:45 am

I created a Hang Man game where one person typed in the word and the other had to guess characters and it even had an animated man being hung.

Well Ok I copied about 5 pages worth of code from the back of the Speccy manual! I didn't actually learn basic until I was at Uni where they used it to introduce us to the basics of programming! Good old Qbasic!

Anyway I am amazed that there wasn't any media outrage over young children being taught how to create "graphic depictions of suicide".

Instead it was considered "educational".

To be honest, learning just the basics of programming stole the magic of games from me. When the pirates attacked me in treasure Island I always used to feel that there was some entity inside that little grey box, some intelligence out to get me.

When I realised how dull and simple it was, the mystery was lost.

I'd rather just be a consumer and not know how it works! The enemies in Dark Souls are truly menacing and give me that feeling I used to get as a kid. Don't tell me how it works!

Reply
Topscore
3/5/2016 12:23:21 pm

Games are like kebabs. To enjoy the end result it's best not to know what goes into them.

Reply
Bruce Flagpole
3/5/2016 11:14:42 am

I've always wanted to make games, but i'm too lazy to learn how to program properly or spend the time and effort needed to make a game properly just for my own benefit. I much prefer dreaming of ideas than actually trying to make things, so i'm holding out for an a-team-esque team of crack developers to just roll up and offer to make the game of my dreams and give me the profits.
As youths me and a mate often would design games on paper but never bothered trying to actually make them.
As I've gotten older, every now and then I'll get the urge to try to learn and make something, get so far down the basic steps, get bored/frustrated and stop.
On the speccy, i only got as far as drawing shapes and making noises...on the amiga i made a 'bumble bee simulator' in some basic package thing (amipro?)...more recently i've made a couple of games that actually got to a vaguely playable state, so i promptly stuck them on steam greenlight expecting my minecraft style fortune to roll in but alas, it seems people want more than just shoddy graphics and a hastily put together idea... :)

Reply
favus link
3/5/2016 12:15:00 pm

I made Digi invaders once, but I never finished it, I should finish it, can someone else finish it for me?

Reply
Chris link
3/5/2016 01:54:21 pm

Yes, although on the Speccy I don't think I ever got as far as making a fully working game. I did write Garden Designer though - http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk/about/reviews/YourSinclair5800075-gc.jpg

Your game sounds ideal for the CSSCGC!


Reply
Chris link
3/5/2016 02:01:15 pm

It's probably worth me sticking in the review of an Amiga game (a boardgame conversion with the theme changed) that I also wrote. I don't recall if it was ever released at the time, but I uploaded it to Aminet some years later.

The review is here: http://obligement.free.fr/articles/twarden.php
It's in French, but I think it basically says that it's the worst game ever.

Reply
Wicked Eric
3/5/2016 02:02:56 pm

This has ethical breach written all over it.

Reply
Starbuck
3/5/2016 06:23:03 pm

I wrote a ZX Spectrum quiz game in BASIC way back... Lots of classy screen BRIGHT and FLASH effects... I give it 93%.

Reply
Penyrolewen
3/5/2016 10:55:28 pm

I didn't even get as far as you, Super Bad. I spent a long time coding (in basic) a text adventure 'engine' so that I could just change the text and bingo, a new game! You lot too you to young to remember, know this: text adventures were ACE in 1983. What could be better than typing, on a rubber keyboard, various versions of the same command to see which, if any worked?
Use sword
I don't understand 'use sword'
Swing sword
I don't understand 'swing sword'
Attack with sword
I don't understand 'attack with sword'
Hit with sword
I don't understand 'hit with sword'
The Orc kills you. You stood still too long.
Game Over
Anyway, after all that effort, my brother taped over the start of it with a save for 'Escape from Colditz' if I remember rightly. My fame and fortune were lost forever. I would have been the first Mark Clattenburg, or whatever that Facebook guy is called.
Oh well.

Reply
Super Bad Advice
4/5/2016 10:02:27 am

That's pretty much on par with my adventure game effort, only I had a screwdriver instead of a sword as it was about a lorry.

I assume that there's some aspect of a lorry you could fix with a screwdriver, but then again I once managed to wire in my car battery backwards so who knows?

Reply
DrBlue
4/5/2016 12:44:46 pm

Still better than World Cup Carnival...

Reply
The School Boy
5/5/2016 08:46:51 am

I wrote a penalty shootout simulator on my graphical calculator instead of doing well at A-Level maths.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ