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Wizball - Now before I get slated let me say that I suck at Wizball.  I have tried many times to play it and I fail to get to grips with it every time.  I've read about gaining control of the annoying, bouncing, green little fecker and that this makes the game so much more fun but I can't get past the bouncing around stage/stages in the first place!

I complete Wizball on the C64 every time I play it. It's easy.

Last time I played it was at the last Retro Replay event in Blackpool. Spent 2 very enjoyable hours revisiting the old days.

I remember playing the CPC version and I felt it was a very good version. The controls were nice and responsive, which I think is an issue with some CPC racers. By contrast, Chase HQ, while undoubtedly impressive to look at, was somewhat hard on the hand. Maybe CPC fans had more resilient wrists than the rest of us, but I personally felt Chase HQ wasn't a lot of fun to play. WEC Le Mans, on the other hand, has a nice feel to it.

The C64 version is plagued by glitchy graphics, with the raster effect being wholly unconvincing. It's a real mess.

I think so - I must admit I'm not an expert, and I could do with reading those Wikipedia pages a bit more thoroughly myself in order to fully understand them.

Still, for the time being, another isometric game that I quite enjoyed is Arnie. The C64 version was written by Chris Butler, who of course did the conversion of Commando for the beige box.

C64 Longplay - Arnie

It's nerd time.

True isometric projection is where the angles between a pair of neighbouring axes is 120 degrees. The likes of Head over Heels and Bombuzal are near-isometric but because of pixel ratios, two of the angles are slightly smaller than the other. See the wikipedia article on Isometric projection in video games for more details.

Paperboy and Isolated Warrior (an interesting one, I've never seen it before) are actually a form of oblique projection.

Now that I've got that out of the way, Equinox on the SNES is a good 'un, not least because of its atmospheric Tim Follin soundtrack:

Equinox (Solstice II) playthrough - Part 1

I'm going to say Bombuzal here, even though I much preferred playing it in 2D mode:

Bomb Uzal on a Commodore 64

The A8 version is probably a quick and dirty port from the C64, unoptimized for A8 hardware. Bearing in mind that the C64 version is almost unanimously said to be weaker than the Spectrum and CPC versions, the results are not pretty.

The sluggishness might stem from the fact that it appears to be using software sprites rather than player-missile graphics. I think it might be using a 4-colour bitmap mode, with a split screen to change the colours (slightly!) for the status bar. If it used the 5-colour character mode, I believe you could use player-missile graphics to "mask" the background to overcome the 5-colour restrictions and colourize entire areas, such as perhaps the huts or the trees. However, you would be restricted by the amount of PMGs available and it would be down to map design as to whether or not you could get everything on screen the right colour. Not an easy ask, but not impossible. Quite clearly, there wasn't much of a budget to consider implementing those kinds of options here; even so, it's hard to envisage any other 8-bit version matching the CPC's colour in a game like this. Pity most CPC owners would've been lumbered with a green-screen monitor ...!

Yes, I also thought the C64 version made a good fist of it, and better still, it game Chris Butler a good grounding in the art of writing games where loads of character blocks are getting thrown around, Powerdrift being an obvious beneficiary of the experience he gained here.

However, mention should also be made of the peerless A8 version, which was finished recently having been programmed over a number of years by a guy in his spare time ...

Utilite will be available through CompuLab's worldwide distribution channel and through direct sales.

CompuLab expects to start accepting orders for Utilite in August 2013.

The same webpage indicates that they are looking for distributors and OEMs to partner up with them, so it could conceivably end up being stocked in your local PC store. Or it could end up fizzling out without a trace. I do think that there is mileage in this marketplace which is untapped. There is simply so much you can do with a low power, small form factor (in this case incredibly small) computer these days. This little box would be the ideal HTPC, as long as you have some network or cloud storage, or perhaps a big USB hard drive. Or of course, there are the various streaming options. It could function as a MAME box, even better if someone compiles Groovy Arcade for ARM devices.

10 years ago, this would all have required some whopping great big tower to do. Nowadays, you get machines like this that will fit in your pocket and only consume 8W under load.

Mind you, I doubt whether the quad core version will be sold for $99 - there are single and dual core machines being sold as well, with $99 being the price for the most basic version.

The Utilite site is here, for those who've not already found it: http://utilite-computer.com/web/home

Here's another $99 box of joy. Utilite (rubbish name, innit?) is a teeny-weeny computer based around a quad-core ARM CPU that is touting itself as being ready for the full desktop experience, courtesy of the ARM iteration of Ubuntu Linux.



I quite like the look of it, I must say, although it may be my inner pointless junk-amassing neurosis that is triggering my interest here. I would quite like to get a cheap one, jam a little SSD in it and set it up to dual-boot Ubuntu and Android, but why? I really don't know.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/15/meet-utilite-a-99-quad-core-arm-based-pc-running-ubuntu/

System Shock 2 won the latest Community Vote, will definitely be dropping £1.75 on that in half-an-hour's time ...

Ah, nice work on getting FC3 on the cheap. It is still not absolutely rock-bottom price on Steam, being £13, but there is plenty of game for that price. My dad, who is quite the gamer himself, has already completed it. I got him a copy for his birthday last November.

Of the games I've bought so far, I've only played Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. It is a very decent, straightforward shooter. I'm still not convinced I've got the hang of the duels - my feeling is that it is probably designed more around  twin stick set up than mouse and keys, but mouse and keys is so much better AFAIC for the rest of the game, I'm willing to put up with it for the duels. Or perhaps more likely, I am just a bad gamer for blaming my equipment (oo-er, etc.)

Nothing for me to go at today - I already have TR, Borderlands 2 and The Witcher 2, and I wouldn't pay more than a fiver for Resi 6.

I posted my Steam Summer Sale buys on the recent purchases thread, but just to save you from being billied, here we go:

Bit.Trip Runner 2
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger
Dark Souls
Far Cry 3
Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon
FTL

Rumours that the Wii U was originally called the Advanced Nintendo Universe System are so far unconfirmed.

Hah! That gem deserves a bit more attention than it's had so far. Personally, I would have gone with the Nintendo Overhyped Regressive Console System, but that's just my preferences.

There were a few of these not-quite-MSX machines around at the time - there are a couple of Spectravideo machines and the Tatung Einstein. The specs of all of these machines are very close to the MSX1 standard but for one reason or another, they were not compatible. It must have been quite frustrating for owners at the time to see so much software coming out for the MSX whilst their machines, so similar in so many ways, were lucky to get a few dozen titles.

Still, someone on the Old-computers.com site mentioned some capabilities of the Sord M5 which I think are worth copying in here:

- a version of BASIC which allowed proper variable names, subroutine names and labels (gosub TargetSprite is so much easier to understand than gosub 150)
- astounding speed because of the clever semi-compilation of code which meant that a variable or a label address was looked up once and then referenced directly
- interrupt-driven programming, which removes so much code bulk and tedium

I do like the idea of subroutine names and the semi-compilation of code. It is a pity the poster doesn't say a bit more about the "interrupt-driven programming" bit. With my very rudimentary understanding of coding I would say that C64 coding is quite interrupt driven for things like multiplexing sprites, but that's quite a specific use - maybe the poster is referring to something a bit more holistic for the Sord M5.

I never said the A8 version looked more like the arcade, just that I preferred it

No, you didn't. You said that the C64 version just didn't look like Arkanoid. Which originated in the arcades. The C64 version looks more like the arcade version than the A8 version does.