Category: Game On

More Fire Power Needed

Friday May 11th 2007

After a couple of months of practice I’m now regularly scoring around 5000 points on Desktop Tower Defense. The key to getting this far was upgrading as many squirt guns as possible to their maximum level – it really is just a flurry of ammo and death once you get a bunch of them rattling away.

For the life of me I cant work out how folk are cracking over 8000 or 9000, though – I’m surviving all the way through the final wave of enemies and the game just ends at that point. There are two big flying bosses which are the penultimate enemies that I haven’t managed to kill yet, so maybe they’re worth a shit load of points if you do get them.

I guess I’ll just need to keep practicing. 🙂

25 years ago this week, the ZX Spectrum launched

Wednesday April 25th 2007

I was introduced to the ZX Spectrum by long-time, on-off family friend, Alan Green in late 1982. I’d go round to Alan’s house and sit in the corner of his lounge, where he had the Spectrum hooked up to a portable tv, and play the early games for it with him.

Alan always tried to get me interested in programming for it, too, saying I should work my way through the manual, which had examples and an index of every command that could be accessed from the Spectrum’s rubber multi-function keypad. Initially I gave that kind of thing a wide berth, as playing games was so much more fun than all the heavy duty stuff.

By the time I got my own Spectrum for Xmas 1983 I was right into it, though, writing loads of little programs in Sinclair Basic – most of which would draw random circles on the screen, or ask you for your name before PRINTing it out in random colours (Or pseudo-random, in the case of the Spectrum – there’d always be an emergent rainbow pattern that formed if you filled the screen up with “random” colours).

PSP in Education

Friday March 30th 2007

Some smart ex-Sony employee has introduced the PSP as a learning tool at the school she now works at. Enabling the students to download pictures and *shudder* podcasts to aid the learning process, the trial is being held at a school in Birmingham.

School sure has come on some from my day. As dragging in a ZX Spectrum wasn’t really practical, I had to make do with my calculator watch as a “learning aid”. 😉