Suddenly the music cuts out, a fanfare then it’s back, faster and slightly discordant. Shit! The exit is still a good 10 seconds away as the clock carrying devil sweeps in to attack.
What am I talking about? Why New Zealand story of course! When you’ve been playing it for half an hour and your knuckles are aching from gripping the control and you have only one more level ’till you finish it and you’re nearly there, the onset of the hurry up music, herald of the hurry up devil, is the closest I ever come to blind panic, it really is heart stopping*. No modern games seem to be able to elicit this kind of gut reaction from me, perhaps it’s pavlovian, a remembered response from the Amiga’s hey day, before I was so hardend to the way games work, maybe…
Is there a point to this post?
Yes! Taito Legends has lots of dross in it but for New Zealand Story, Bubble Bobble and a savagely butchered Rainbow Islands** it’s great, obviously I can play more faithful versions of all these games on MAME, but I’ve not been able to find a working NZ Story ROM so I had to get it.
*Though not litterally obviously.
**Really, who thought changing the music on this was a good idea? I suspect it was the lawyers thinking that someone was going to sue them for using Somewhere Over The Rainbow, the tune they’ve replaced it with sounds almost right but that just makes it grate more.
And then Neil said:
That looks excellent! I’ll have to pop round for a game of Bubble Bobble some time…
And then Charlie said:There was a letter in this month’s Edge about the need for archiving of computer games, given how unobtainable most old games are now. Man I’d like to be a curator of a museum like that.
And then tom said:Absolutely!
There are a few groups who do that kind of work ( eg. http://www.softpres.org/ ) and obviously the whole emulation scene and the efforts of private collectors play a role, but there really needs to be a proper public archive. The recording and archiving of video game history is bad enough that people can’t even determine which company developed certain games as recently as the mid 90’s … http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/gh.htm
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