By MykeP
Genre: Arcade: Reckless driving
This Race ‘n’ shunt game marks MykeP’s 3rd entry into the competition, and what a late spurter he’s proving to be. For those in the know BDTOZX is based on a modern game of a similar name, in which (after a bit of research) you need to drive in a frightfully unsafe manner, crashing into other cars in order to cross the finish line first.
I actually thought that with the release of Rally Driver in 1984, there was nothing new that could be added to the genre, but how wrong I was. If RD offered sweaty, palpitating, touch sensitive action, BDTOZX can be described as being at the opposite end of the Spectrum. And it is from the get go, because as soon as it loads you are treated to an incredibly long pause while it loads, populates, randomizes* and initialises…..stuff. Though as it turns out this pause seems unfortunately brief because after it comes the ‘music’ which I gather is by ‘My Chemical Romance’ and ‘Lady Gaga’ (as Myke calls them). While it may be accomplished, it hurts.
A huge amount of work has gone into this game (which I’m not sure I’m doing justice to here), which has numerous nods to modern gaming events like ‘unlockable games’ which of course, fail to work.
It’s amazing how slow
Spectrum BASIC can be sometimes (thankfully
I had a mountain of ket** delivered last week), and I’d say Myke has pushed
in all the stops to make it so. For this
game to be exciting in any real sense you have to crank the emulator right up. But at a pedestrian 3.5MHz you take on a zen
like understanding of the world, where you can see everything, and/or nothing,
happening all at once. And while a
nicely drawn (and it is nicely drawn)
explosion can pump up the adrenaline at faster speeds, it takes on a more
poetic, contemplative angle at the snail’s pace BDTOZX was intended to run at.
Good fun this, crank up the emulator, have a look through the code at all the references, and be generally impressed with an accomplished piece of absolute carp.
Great work and thankyou Myke!
Download here.
* why did the speccy ROM use ‘z’ in randomise, for shame?
**chup
Genre: Arcade: Reckless driving
This Race ‘n’ shunt game marks MykeP’s 3rd entry into the competition, and what a late spurter he’s proving to be. For those in the know BDTOZX is based on a modern game of a similar name, in which (after a bit of research) you need to drive in a frightfully unsafe manner, crashing into other cars in order to cross the finish line first.
I actually thought that with the release of Rally Driver in 1984, there was nothing new that could be added to the genre, but how wrong I was. If RD offered sweaty, palpitating, touch sensitive action, BDTOZX can be described as being at the opposite end of the Spectrum. And it is from the get go, because as soon as it loads you are treated to an incredibly long pause while it loads, populates, randomizes* and initialises…..stuff. Though as it turns out this pause seems unfortunately brief because after it comes the ‘music’ which I gather is by ‘My Chemical Romance’ and ‘Lady Gaga’ (as Myke calls them). While it may be accomplished, it hurts.
A huge amount of work has gone into this game (which I’m not sure I’m doing justice to here), which has numerous nods to modern gaming events like ‘unlockable games’ which of course, fail to work.
Good fun this, crank up the emulator, have a look through the code at all the references, and be generally impressed with an accomplished piece of absolute carp.
Great work and thankyou Myke!
Download here.
* why did the speccy ROM use ‘z’ in randomise, for shame?
**chup
