April Edition Live Magazine - April 2014 Issue. | Page 34

“What’s your
favourite retro
game or console?”

“AFTER SCHOOL, ON WEEKENDS AND DURING HOLIDAYS
I’D FIRE THIS UP AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT TO CONQUER THE
LEVEL AND TRY TO FIND EVERY SECRET WITHIN THEM.”
My childhood was full of great memories, setting
up my Nintendo 64 in the lounge room during
school holidays and squaring off against bots in
Perfect Dark 64.
Upgrading the Nintendo 64 to an Xbox and conquering four player split-screen multiplayer with
the Pistol on weekends. Many wonderful memories, but if we’re talking retro then for myself
even though I’m quite young I can’t look past the
Amiga 3000.
The Amiga 3000 is my personal favourite, because it was so old school, games were stored
on floppy disks and the keyboard itself was covered with a thick plastic skin to protect it from
dust any other substances.

the game and one that haunts you in every single level is the ghost of Aunt Matilda.

Industry Comment..

Starting 15 seconds after you’ve started the level, this ghost will mimic your every single move,
and to keep you on your toes she’s slightly faster
than you so if you don’t keep moving and collecting trash she’ll eventually catch up to you.
Not to mention that each level has an open tap
and the longer you take the more flooded the
level becomes. Quiffy can’t survive underwater
for long so making haste is key within Flood.
Flood did poorly in sales due to the fact that it
featured experimental gameplay but that didn’t
stop me from enjoying it.

It had everything from Robocop, ESWAT, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, heck even The Blues
Brothers had their own game.

After school, on weekends and during holidays
I’d fire this up at any given moment to conquer
the level and try to find every secret within them.

The Amiga 3000 was all about platformers and
the best platformer that I had ever played as a
kid that took me years to figure out what it was
called was, Flood. I even had a poster of the
games protagonist being chased down the sewer by an array of bad guys from the game.

Quiffy could climb and crawl on any surface,
he could use weapons such as a flamethrower,
grenades even shurikens, and obstacles such
as missiles, lasers and lava would hinder any
chances of successfully completing a level.

The game was based around a small green creature Quiffy, who was the last of his kind tasked
with escaping the sewers to reach the outside
world collecting as much trash as he could along
the way.

As a side note for all you trivia enthusiasts out
there, Flood was developed by a studio named
Bullfrog Productions, which was founded by Les
Edgar and the ever so famous Peter Molyneux.
It was published in 1990 by a company that goes
by the name of Electronic Arts.

Enemies such as Psycho Teddy bears with a
large mouth and a set of teeth where it’s stomach is, mechs with enemies inside of them just to
name a few. Perhaps the scariest enemy within

It’s amazing to see how far back many developers and publishers go, that even in your childhood odd and rare games you can barely remember, they were apart of that.

ARTHUR KOTSOPOULOS:

WWW.OXCGN.COM

“IT WAS A LIGHT HEARTED, STEALTH-ACTION FPS SET IN
THE 1960S WHICH HARKENED BACK TO THE STYLE OF SPY
FLICKS, LITERATURE AND COMEDIES OF THAT ERA.”
As much as I like to play games across all consoles, I like to think of myself as a PC Gamer
at heart and while I could easily read a chapter from the gospel according to Gordon Freeman or Wolfenstein. My favourite retro game is
a little more recent than those, it’s a little game
from Monolith Entertainment called “The Operative: No One Lives Forever” that was released in
2000. It was a light hearted, stealth-action FPS
set in the 1960s which harkened back to the style
of spy flicks, literature and comedies of that era.
Specifically the game followed British spy Cate
Archer and her escapades with the clandestine
organisation UNITY in its fight to defend the
word from the Bond-Villiainesque crime syndicate “H. A. R. M”. NOLF had great overall design, it had a strong story, it had a great sense
of in-level pacing, the action was never boring,
the stealth segments were challenging but never impossible and it’s quite possibly one of the
cheekiest games I’ve ever played. Whether it be
due to its innumerable spy movie references, its
quirky Classic Bond-style gadgets (lip-stick grenades will forever be embedded in my memory),

its comical bystander conversations steeped in
the 60s pop-culture zeitgeist (listening to a Moroccan merchant try to sell a monkey to an evil
Henchman still cracks me up to this day) its eccentric list of cast members or its wildly fantastic
escalation of events.
Another reason why No One Lives Forever remains dear to me is the fact that it still has a lot to
offer modern game developers. It wasn’t afraid
to have fun with the female protagonist’s involvement in a male-dominated spy-game, it could be
outright silly and also drive the story with a serious tone with great success. It’s a little tricky for
some developers to make a game where some
people are killed off by being jabbed with pellets
that cause them to burp until they explode and
expect the player to take the succeeding events
seriously.

SEAN FOX:

WWW.STICKYTRIGGERENTERTAINMENT.COM