Anne Summers

There's not going to be any DLC is there? I mean, Sekiro didn't get any, when everyone expected it to, so there's obviously precedent. And it just feels like we would have heard about it by now if it was coming. Hope I'm wrong, of course!

My little girl (just turned 5) loved the eyeball corridor! First game we have played through together from beginning to end and she absolutely loved it. She had me explaining all sorts of things, like AI, uploading human brains into machines, and the idea of sci-fi in general, to her as we played.

Very cool. I never played The Hobbit back in the day but I always liked Level 9 adventures because they had a lot more going on under the hood than a simple Choose Your Own Adventure type setup. There were monsters to fight, roaming characters, a magic system, and stuff like that. Red Moon was my favourite. It was actually one of the first games that got me wondering about programming and how games worked, as I realised it couldn't all be done with simple "If Player Input = X, Then Print Y" type logic and it needed databases and other variables.

That one never worked for me - although I remember it was given in several variations across different mags so I may have never tried the right one. motherfucking, motherfuckin, motherfucken etc. Also maybe it was one of those cheats that only worked on a particular version of the game - like the retail release or the Flights of Fantasy OEM version. "fluffykiwis" always worked for me, though.

Lemmings 2 was great at the time. It seems a bit fiddly and complicated now though, compared to the straightforward loveliness of the original. I guess the Amiga version is the version to go for, never played the PC version but it's probably not got such good music.

I don't think he's just an utter charlatan to the point that he would fake a video game collection just to look like he has some knowledge of the subject. I mean, anyone who was trying to build an extensive collection of games would inevitably have World Cup Italia 90 and Home Alone in there somewhere. To be honest I didn't mind him until I saw this video , I always found his stuff mildly entertaining. But I didn't realise how widely renowned he was for ripping off other people's footage and not crediting them. George Cropper is clearly a guy whose been dealt a pretty harsh hand by life and it's left him very bitter and twisted. His videos (this one, and the one he made about Octavius Kitten - the only output of his I've really watched) are shot through with misogyny, ableism and sociopathy. That makes him a cunt but it doesn't necessarily make him wrong, in this case, I guess.

Hang on. So at the start she goes on about how they are always "very very careful" about the rights for everything they use, even images. Then she says she got the picture of "Ray Harry Housing" by Googling him and taking the first picture that came up (which happened to be from the New York Times).

Lots of mags printed the sweary version for the Amiga, but it never worked for me. There were actually quite a few fake cheats that ended up doing the rounds, I seem to remember - obviously just getting copied from one mag to another without anyone bothering to check. One famous one was for Chaos Strikes Back on the Amiga. Standing in from of the dragon and typing in a long phrase definitely didn't give you infinite health but it definitely got you killed very quickly. There was also the cheat for Shadow of the Beast 1 which unfortunately only worked on cracked copies of the game, the actual release version didn't have any cheat modes.

Abso-bloody-lutely I used cheats. Games back then were hard, unlike today where you basically expect to be able to finish any game you buy if you plug away at it enough. I must have owned 100 games for my Speccy but probably only ever saw the credits roll (or more likely the minimalist "congratulations" screen), legitimately, on 10 of them. Cheat codes were like a second lease of life for games. A few months after I'd got as far as I could on them and got bored, the cheat codes would appear in YS and I'd be back on it for a bit. I was always puzzled thinking about who worked out the codes first. Like how did someone discover that typing fluffykiwis into New Zealand Story on the Amiga gave infinite lives, or "ten pints" in Shadow Of The Beast 2. I used to think that it was probably down to the fact there were so many people playing these games that inevitably every combination of button presses would get tried and someone would find them by accident. Now it seems pretty obvious that they would generally be leaked by the developers to their mates, who would tell other people, and eventually they would end up in magazines.

I bet X68000 Vs FM Towns was the Japanese equivalent of ST Vs Amiga.

It did have some amazing arcade conversions, of Capcom stuff like Ghouls n Ghosts, as well as other stuff like Afterburner, if memory serves.

An interesting addition to my collection arrived today - Dragonstrike. The world's first dragon combat simulator. It's basically a flight sim on dragons! I remember this coming out, and thinking it looked amazing at the time. It was well before I had a PC which would have been capable of playing it, but I remember seeing it listed in the catalogues that came packed into the boxes of other games. I am not sure if it was even released over here - the version I have comes in the US style packaging and I don't think I've even seen it in one of the bigger style boxes that the UK/ Euro releases came in. This one has lovely art cards showing some of the different dragons, with their AD&D stats listed on the back, which is nice. Really nice condition too, and I'm happy with this after knocking the seller down from the ridiculous price they were asking for it originally. This one isn't on GoG or Steam though, I don't think, so I'll have to resort to emulation to play it. Here's a link if anyone else fancies giving it a go without shelling out the still fairly hefty £50 I paid to add it to my collection: https://archive.org/details/msdos_DragonStrike_1990 Collection starting to look a little less half-arsed.

Oh yeah, I think Final Fight is a bit of an exception to the rule that Capcom games tended to be fairer and better designed. It's not a great game from a game design point of view all round, in my opinion. Limited movesets when compared to other scrolling fighters of the time, and the later levels just chuck hundreds of identical enemies at you in order to chip away at your health.

I think the answer to the OP question is "Some of them". I always felt it was kind of cheap if it wasn't possible to complete a game without taking a hit - in other words a "perfect" run should always be possible, in theory, even if it's really, really hard. Capcom games like Ghouls and Ghosts or Strider are probably the best example of this - some of the best arcade games ever made, and perfectly possible (if very, very hard) to get a "perfect" game. Of course in order to get to that standard of playing where you were capable of doing so would require pumping in a huge number of credits in order to learn the stages and memorise attack patterns. That was what good game design was about, in the golden age of the arcade (the eighties, basically) I think.

Yes, pretty sure that's the one, thanks!