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Games teh Barbelith

08:40 / 04.10.04

Games distinguished by their Barbeliciousness, possessed of that peculiar quality that makes them OURS! Flash, arcade, P.C., console, oldschool, whatever.
I'll kick off with-
Anything by Jeff Minter
(Mutant Camels, Llamatron, Psychedelia, etc)
Malapa's Challenge
(Psychic leatherboy beating the fuck out of the Gods in an insane asylum. How Barb can you get? I fell in love with it when his first spell was "Leather Rhapsody"! HAH! Professor X meets Tom of Finland!)
Endorfun
Infamous psychedelic puzzle game laced with life-affirming, positive subliminal messages hidden in the throbbing, hypnotic soundtrack. Designed as a sort of "Computer drug".
Totallyscrewed
Site for great games featuring alternibabes beating up zombies and ninjas in various mixes of arcade and R.P.G..

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:44 / 04.10.04

Which company did Quazatron and Ranarama? Hewson? Those represent the Barbeluth experience rather well, along with the Spectrum classic where you play a frog trying to climb up a series of towers... possibly by the same authors.

Failing that... how about Quantic Dream's Omikron: The Nomad Soul? It did something pretty much unique at the time of its creation, and even now it looks very impressive, but every so often you realise that you have been going round in circles for the last half hour.

11:57 / 04.10.04

There were a couple of good 'uns from pioneer Personal Computer feminist artists in Australia- Linda Dement's "Typhoid Mary" and VSN Matrix's "All-New Gen"
Both were limited by the the technology of the time- Typhoid was apparently an exercise in pixel-hunting point-and click, while All-New Gen boiled down to a Hypertext choose-your-own-adventure for grownups.
Damn, what I'd really like to see is more conceptual art subverting an established game engine. Imagine what All-New Gen would be like using a story-based engine like Half-Life or Deus Ex...
American McGee's Alice really wanted to be an intense, disturbing pychological-horror-ride through a disturbed mind, but it ended up a another jumping-platforms hitting-things game. And for fuck's sake, Alice is supposed to use a FLAMINGO, not a real croquet mallet!
There was an abortive attempt to make an Aeon Flux game- after Peter Chung pulled the rights, it ended up as the difficult-to-find Pax Corpus, which I have not tested for Barbeliciousness.

13:15 / 04.10.04

along with the Spectrum classic where you play a frog trying to climb up a series of towers... possibly by the same authors.

That sounds like nebulous. In between every tower there's a little submarine shooty section. Same one?

I had (and possibly still have) the ST version. It was by J.M. Phillips methinks and you're right, it was published by Hewson.

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:22 / 04.10.04

Nebulus (sic) sounds right - I think the Spectrum version didn't have the submarine shooty but - you just appeared in your tiny submarine at the start of the next level.

God, I loved Spectrum conversions of 16-bit games - such masterpieces of compression.

13:38 / 04.10.04

yeah, that sounds like the one

13:53 / 04.10.04

Yeah. I remeber the speccy version of Shadow of the Beast from Psygnosis particularly impressing me.

I'll add Mutant Night.

I played this on a caravan holiday when I was about ten. And it's been bouncing around doing strange things in my head ever since

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:48 / 05.10.04

I'm pretty sure Quazatron is on the new Retro Gamer coverdisc... and Paradroid. I hope Ranarama's there- I loved that.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

01:43 / 05.10.04

Rez!