Clogging Up The DS

Posted by oddbob on March 30, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles 
Print this Article | Help us keep RR online

We're raising money for SpecialEffect. Please donate if you can.


So, thanks to the generosity of Mr Smayds who kindly purchased me an R4 Cartridge for my DS, I’ve spent the past 24 hours rediscovering some games I really haven’t set enough time aside for of late. The ability to sit in bed and play through some of my favourite 8 bit games is a temptation too good to resist, so what else was I to do other than fire up SpeccyDS and see if some of the games that stole my formative years still stand up today?

3d Starstrike

3d Starstrike

It took far too much time for an official conversion of the Star Wars arcade machine to actually appear on the humble Speccy, not that many people actually cared too much - not considering we had 3d Starstrike to play with. Y’see, 3d Starstrike is without a doubt one of the fastest, most perfect arcade thrills you can get on an 8 bit machine. All the stages from Star Wars are relatively intact (although no Death Star visible for obvious reasons, we’d hate for Realtime to have gotten in trouble) with a little bit of tweaking. The Equatorial Duct (Trench Run) now ends with a pair of Reactor Cubes that have to be shot instead of the old Star Wars port on the floor lark which serves to add more tension to an already intense run.

Its easy to forget with time just how fast and frantic this game is, and its been 2 years since I last dug it out for a play (the last time was to come second place in the RR Score League with a piffly 1866800). Even on the DS screen I find myself ducking and weaving in my chair as I navigate the Duct section.

Here’s hoping that Uncles remake of Starstrike II maintains the pace and brutality that makes Realtimes efforts so darn playable.

3d Deathchase

3d Deathchase

Nenads excellent recent entry into the Calculator-me-do competition over at RR, Deathchase:UFO has only one criminal flaw in it. I can’t play it on my DS! So, with that in mind - its back to Mervyn Estcourts fantastic original. It may not be the prettiest of games, but none of that really matters when you’re belting through tree’s at high speed attempting to take out the other bikers.

There’s nothing cerebral about Deathchase, its gaming brilliance distilled down to its rawest essence and whilst I’d highly recommend knocking the volume down to a tolerable level as the squelch of the bike can grate after a while, its lost none of its magic in all these years.

Robotron 2084

Robotron 2084

…or the single biggest reason to be thankful that Stuart Campbell exists. Take a good look at that menu system for a moment, as there’s a reason I’ve chosen this screenshot rather than an ingame shot. See the final option before keyboard? Sinclair with 2 Joysticks. 2 Sticks on a Speccy. Fantastic. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it you lot with the arena shooters.

In all the years I had a Spectrum, I never had a single stick, never mind two. Not that it would have mattered as Robotron 2084 didn’t see the light of day until many years later, thanks in no small part to Stuart Campbell we can play it today. Whilst for bang ber second kicks, I still prefer Wild West Hero it hasn’t stopped Robotron getting a kicking on the DS for a good while.

So, yeah, I’m having a shitload of fun right now when I can prise the DS away from Mrs Bob long enough. Mega props and thanks to Smayds, and equal props to Craig for SpeccyDS which is getting an absolute hammering right now.

Tags:

Speak your brains

4 Responses to “Clogging Up The DS”

  1. gnome on April 1st, 2007 2:33 pm

    Fantastic post. Never heard of Speccy DS before…

  2. oddbob on April 2nd, 2007 4:27 pm

    Its lovely Gnome, one of the nicest emulators I’ve played with across many formats - the 1:1 screen resolution probably helps that though.

    I did want to write a few follow up posts for other formats, but looks like most of the other DS emulators aren’t quite up to scratch yet - which is a shame.

    Absolutely gutted that the Vectrex emu runs at around 1 frame per month and looks to be quite abandoned.

  3. gnome on April 2nd, 2007 5:32 pm

    Guess I really have to get one of them R4 thingies then… :)

  4. Richard Phipps on April 5th, 2007 11:20 am

    I’m jealous.. :(

Hello Reader! Perhaps you'd like to comment on this piece?.
As well as allowing you to type out your innermost and deepest thoughts about this piece, we've magiced up (well, installed a plugin) a fantastical ajax malarkey that lets you edit your post up to 15 minutes after you've posted it. Superb eh?