In which the black ox with the blue star (the best ox) out of Super Ox Wars recommends games we’ve been enjoying lately.

One of my first ever trips to the US (to go and visit Human Engineered Software, who were distributing some of my Commodore games at the time) coincided with the launch of a new game system. I’d read about this prior to my visit, and so I was determined that when I was visiting I was going to get hold of one of these new toys and bring it back to Blighty. That proved trickier than I’d initially thought, as the new system was in demand and finding a place that had some in stock proved difficult. I walked many miles all over San Francisco trying to find a shop that had any in, and perseverence eventually paid off and I lugged my prize back to my motel room and prepared for an evening of gaming.

The system in question was called the Vectrex, and it was unusual for a couple of reasons: for one, it had its own screen, whereas all other game systems of that time required that you plug them into the telly for display. And secondly, it had a different kind of screen, one that gamers had seen before, in the arcades, displaying games like Asteroids and Tempest: a vector display. Back in those days graphics in game systems tended to look pretty chunky, due to memory constraints and the low resolution of raster displays. Games made with vector displays looked very sharp and clean by contrast. Objects in such games were made up of lines (“vectors”) that were pure lines, not made out of a bunch of blocks like on a raster display. There were no visible pixels at all – in a way vector displays were the “Retina” displays of their day, and the idea of having such a display in a home system was pretty appealing.

The Vectrex itself was a nice little portable unit, looking quite a lot like the Macintosh that would appear a couple of years later. It was handy to set up and use, just plug it in and start playing without having to faff about with hooking it up to a telly and tuning in the RF signal. Easy to take with you round a mate’s house too (I remember there being a slight flight delay on my trip home from the US and I busted out my Vectrex that was in my hand baggage, plugged it into a wall socket in the departure lounge, and amused myself and some of my fellow passengers with games of Mine Storm, Scramble, Berzerk and Star Trek while we waited).

For a while the future looked good for the little system – gamers liked it, it received good reviews, and in a few months it became available in the UK too; one of my brothers liked mine so much he bought his own, and I was able to buy more games for mine without having to import them from the US. I went to the Summer CES in 1983 and saw on the Vectrex stand all manner of intriguing extras they were planning to release for the system – a light pen, a funky headset thing that used a spinning filter thing to transform the Vectrex’s monochrome display into colour with stereoscopic 3D, and even a keyboard to transform the system into a BASIC home computer.

(Man, I wish I’d had a video camera with me at that show, or at least have taken a bunch of pictures, because i didn’t know it but I was seeing the last peak of the videogame boom before the oncoming Crash of ’83. That show was full of stuff that was never released, shovel-loads of VCS games, computer-keyboard-addons for game systems, all sorts of stuff that in later years would be only dimly remembered or outright lost).

Then the crash happened and the Vectrex was one of the casualties. For a while as shops cleared out their inventories you could pick up brand new systems for £30 each and the games for a few quid; then it vanished, lost and gone forever, and over the years the systems that remained and still worked became increasingly cherished by collectors (I still have two). A Vectrex in good nick commands quite a decent price on ebay these days.

Of course things being what they are, systems are no longer lost and gone forever thanks to emulation, and for a few years now it’s been possible to play the system in emulation on a PC. And just now there’s a new Vectrex emulation out for iOS.

Emulation on iOS can be a bit of a mixed bag. For one thing it’s rarer than it could be, due to Apple not liking stuff which can run arbitrary ROMS, and it not being practical usually for a developer to license the rights to sell an emulator complete with all its software. The platform is more than capable of decent emulation, but there are significant difficulties in simulating controls which were decidedly physical back in the day on devices that use a multitouch screen for input. Sometimes you can get great emulation but let down by less than great controls (the Atari collection is a bit like that; although the controls have been improved from the initial release they are still a bit of a dog’s breakfast), and sometimes you get lucky and the controls don’t actually suck (the Activision collection is quite playable and worth having).

So when I heard about the new Vectrex emulation in development I was interested but worried about the controls. I always worry about iOS controls. So I was relieved to discover when the app was released that the controls are pretty good. Not perfect – that’s not a criticism of the app, just an acknowledgement of the fact that you are never going to get perfect controls on an emulation of a system that used buttons and joysticks. But what they’ve done is really pretty good, and all the games are playable and fun even using just the touch screen. (The analog stick is emulated by the left touch, and centres where the touch lands; the visible image of the touch location can be turned off, as God and Nature intended. The four fire buttons can be scaled and rotated so as to be positioned as you want under the other hand. It’s always going to be a compromise compared to a proper stick and buttons (and you can have those, if you want, too) but it works well enough that you should be able to make it comfortable to play the games reasonably well on just your bare iOS device).

The simulation of the actual vector display is very good too. They’ve even left in authentic-looking amounts of vector flicker and some of the weird background noises that display used to make (which may sound like a bad thing, but actually adds to the charm and realism of the emulation). The Vectrex was a monochrome system, and each game came with a coloured plastic overlay that you’d clip in front of the screen, which defined play areas and added come colour to the scene – these overlays are faithfully reproduced too. As is the option to just go ahead and play in (brighter) monochrome with the overlay off, as many of us real system users did, having misplaced the overlays or not being arsed to put them on when changing games.

For full-on authenticity though you’ll be happy if you’ve got an iCade. If you look at the image of the Vectrex system I posted earlier you can see the iCade next to the original system, and you can see it has the same screen orientation and even pretty much the same joystick and button layout. Although the joystick on the original Veccie was analog, most games just treated it like a digital stick anyway, so most of the games are playable on the iCade in just about as authentic a way as physically possible. It really is a pleasure to play on the iCade, and with the bigger screen and arcade controls could even be considered to be better than the original in some cases.

The UI is very posh, and consists of a 3D rendering of a kid’s bedroom from the 80s. Your Vectrex sits on a desk in the corner, and you can pan around to see your game collection on a shelf. Choose a cart from your collection and you can rotate the box and examine it closely. It’s all very nicely done and makes a posh and pretty front end to the emulation.

The game is fond of showering you with lots of little micro-achievements (I farted once while playing and was mildly surprised not to get a “First Wind Broken” achievement at the end of my game) and as you get them a corkboard in your virtual bedroom fills up with little badges for them all.

There’s a blackboard in the bedroom which shows you the current online leaderboard for whatever game you’ve been playing. Yes, that really is me being best in the world at Star Ship. I’m high on a good few of the leaderboards, come on and beat me!

There are photos and videos to look at too; the emulation frontend is really very well done, and it adds an extra, modern dimension to these old games to be able to post on global leaderboards. I can’t imagine how awesome that idea would have seemed to 1980s me. We take so much for granted these days .

What of the games themselves? After all great emulation, decent controls and a posh frontend all count for bugger all if the games are a pile of wank, and many old games don’t stand the test of time too well. But fortunately by and large the Vectrex games were a pretty decent lot, and given that they are, after all, early 80s games, they remain surprisingly fun to play today, particularly with the addition of online leaderboards. 80s games are all about score, after all.

Out of the chunk of the official library released so far (more games are forthcoming soon, apparently) the only two I don’t play much are the American football one (it makes no more sense to me rendered as tiny Os and Xes than it does on telly with real people) and the soccer one (which actually wasn’t that bad when I tried it, just it’s not really my thing). Some of my favourites:

- Mine Storm (this game was built in to every Vectrex, and is the free game you can play when you download the app). This is a cool and challenging Asteroids-style game. You start with passive mines that just drift about and on later levels progress to mines that shoot back at you, homing mines, and combinations thereof.

- Fortress of Narzod. This is a really fun bottom shooter in which you shoot at baddies who advance down a twisting corridor. You can bounce your shots off the walls and have to be careful not to bounce your own shots back and shoot yourself. After three levels there’s a fireball-hurling boss to kill. Gets satisfyingly fast and challenging as you go on.

- Scramble. Not a game you’d think would translate to vector very well, but in fact this conversion is extremely good and plays very much like its coinop ancestor.

- Pole Position. Again, a game you’d think wouldn’t suit translation to vector, and indeed it does look a bit sparse compared to more colourful raster versions, but it actually plays really well and feels nicer to control than some of the raster versions I’ve played.

- Rip Off. An interesting game in that you have infinite lives and simply have to prevent enemies from stealing a stash of pods in the middle of the screen. Smashing your ship to kill a bad guy is just as important a strategy as shooting them. Games are short and frantic.

- Solar Quest. I believe I’ve mentioned this as being one of the games that inspired Minotaur Rescue, and if you’ve played that you’ll see why when you play this, in which you shoot baddies which release “enemy pilots” (little asterisks) which you can either shoot or rescue before they fall into the sun (sound familiar?).

- Star Castle. A near perfect recreation of a classic vector coinop, at which I am rubbish as I tend to get blasted as soon as the middle cannon is exposed. I suspect I need to work more with the screen wrap to develop a good technique.

- Star Ship. This was released as Star Trek in the US version I had. First-person space shooter incorporating elements of Tail Gunner (shields you can use to bounce incoming enemy shots back off the screen) and Star Raiders (a star base to refuel at, a warp tunnel to use).

- Web Wars. A peculiar game in which you have to fly down a web collecting space insects by licking them with your tongue while avoiding and shooting enemy shots. Sounds odd, and is, but look at the lovely perspective changing web and think of the great version of Tempest they could have done if they’d had the license.

Most of the other released games are well worth a look too, and between them all there’s certainly enough gameplay to justify the investment (you get Mine Storm for free and unlock the rest with a single IAP). Also free are four homebrew games, the best of which is probably a pretty decent implementation of old 8-bit classic “Thrust”.

The price to buy all the games is a fiver, and whereas some might think “a fiver, that’s expensive” when it comes to iOS games, I think it’s a good thing, and I would like to see more developers moving away from the ultra-low price point. 69p does more harm than good in my opinion. For a game priced at 69p to succeed it has to sell absolute bucketloads (which most games don’t, so developers either give up after realising they’d be better off playing the lottery, or start messing about with niggly bits of IAP to try and gouge back their development costs that way). I’d much rather developers be more upfront about it, and charge at least the price of a pint for their work; it’d mean sustainable game development would actually be possible without hanging out for the miracle of “going viral” (and would beneficially impact game design too, since developers wouldn’t necessarily have to feel that they absolutely must design for maximal popularity above all else). Also if you charge a fiver for a game it’s a much more reasonable thing to expect a few updates during its life. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to make updates for 69p games that you’ll never get paid for again.

But I digress. Is Vectrex worth a fiver? Given the nice front end, great presentation, leaderboard integration and a nice collection of games, yes of course it is. If you’ve any enthusiasm for or interest in older game systems then having this beautifully presented collection on your iOS devices (it’s Universal, as all apps should be) is well worth the slightly less than the cost of a vindaloo (without even the rice and pappadoms, never mind the lager) they are asking. Good on them for setting a decent price point I reckon.

It’s not perfect though. There are a few bugs and gotchas in this initial release – it doesn’t run on original iPad 1s and it’s a bit slow and dim on my iPhone 4. It looks and works great on my iPad 3 and mini though, so you should be good on anything rated similar to the iPad 2 or above. There’s a slight emulation glitch which means that sometimes, when playing Mine Storm, the vector display will go a bit funny for a few seconds. One of the developers told me this is a 6809 emulation bug which has since been fixed and there’ll be an update along shortly to fix it. It’s not game breaking usually anyway – if it happens in game to you just sit tight and after a few seconds it’ll go back to normal.

They also say they are working on improving performance, so there’s a chance it’ll become viable on the older iOS versions in due course.

There’s some more games from the original library soon to be released (and you’ll get them for free if you’ve already bought the current game collection), and who knows, maybe they’ll release emulations of some of those funky peripherals I mentioned. I’d quite like to see that if they did because I’ve never actually seen the colour imager thingy, which was released but is pretty rare.

If I were to have a wishlist, I guess I’d ask for a couple of things: it might be nice to be able to set autofire on some of the buttons. To make a game playable on the touchscreen I strongly believe it’s necessary to de-complicate controls as much as possible (which is why many of my games don’t even need a fire button). Every time you have to lift your finger and tap to make a now shot, there’s the chance your finger will wander away from the landing zone for that button. I just think autofire on some games’ fire button might make them feel and play more nicely on the touchscreen.

I don’t know how the vector generation code is broken out inside the emulation, but it might be nice if it were possible to choose some alternate vector styles not possible on the original hardware (good though the emulation actually is). It’d be fun to play the old games in some new funky modern style .

So yeah, highly recommended, modulo the few glitches I’ve mentioned (which will be fixed soon anyway). And now i think I feel a game of Fortress of Narzod coming on.

(In fact I wouldn’t mind doing a modern remake of Fortress of Narzod one day. I reckon it’d quite suit my style)…

The app is a free download from here:

Vectrex Regeneration on the App Store

That gets you Mine Storm and the homebrew games and you pay a fiver to get all the rest, including a few more from the original lineup yet to be released.

In which the black ox with the blue star out of Super Ox Wars takes an occasional look at games we like which aren’t actually ours.

This game was recommended to me by one of its creators, who thought I might enjoy it; and indeed I do, it’s rather nice. It’s called “Monotaur”.

Of course that’s a headstart right away; getting me to take notice of a game is going to be significantly easier if there is a hint of minotaurishness about it. The game itself is almost entirely abstract, its boanthropic reference pared down to nothing more than a tiny circular blob with teeny little horns which somehow nevertheless manages to be quite cute.

It’s a tilt game, and I’m not usually much of a one for tilt games, but this one manages to be quite fun and compelling for such a simple thing. The basic gameplay mode is simply this: you can move your little horny blob round the screen by tilting, and touching the screen causes it to flip between black and white states. As alluded to in the screenshot above, think Ikaruga. (Never played Tilt to Live also mentioned there but I imagine it’s some kind of tilty avoid-em-up).

Various other blobs rez in, sometimes randomly and sometimes in formations, sometimes black and sometimes white. You have to avoid the ones not your current colour, and poke the others with your tiny horns. Like in Ikaruga you earn “chains” for successive undefeated hornings. You attempt to survive as long as possible (in the endurance-style play modes) or to get to the end losing as few lives as possible (in the timed versions) whilst racking up the biggest chain-score you can as you go. It sounds dead simple and it really is not a complex game, but for all its simplicity it is quite addictive and fun.

Other gameplay modes can be unlocked through play (or by paying 69p to unlock everything, which I did, more because I liked the game and wanted to get rid of the ad that otherwise appears at the end of every level than to skip the unlocking process).

Rage Mode has you scuttling around avoiding the baddies as long as possible whilst picking up “Rage” powerups. By stacking these you can unleash circular blasts of destruction in ever larger radii, your objective being to collect up as much Rage as possible before detonating it, thereby killing as many enemy blobs as possible in a single blast.

There’s a Pacifist Mode where you eschew horn use altogether and just avoid everything for as long as you can (memories of Geom Wars there). And there’s a Master Mode where chains don’t carry over between polarity changes, encouraging you to risk staying one colour as long as possible to get the biggest chain even if it’d be safer perhaps to switch.

Subtle variants on the basic theme which are sufficient to make each of the four variants distinctly enjoyable in their own ways.

Presentation is very tidy, the graphics sparse and abstract and monochrome but nonetheless stylish and even a little bit cute (the little horns!). There’s an appropriately thumping tune that builds in intensity the longer your scoring run goes on.

If you liked Ikaruga and are a fan of the progressively sphincter-tightening sort of feeling you get from these type of chain/avoid games then definitely give this a go, it’s fun and there’s no piss taking with the IAP, just 69p to unlock everything and fuck the ads off, if anything it’s too cheap; any game that’s halfway decent and which entertains you deserves at least a couple of quid I’d say. Bugger 69p, I think it does more harm than good to game development in the end.

But I digress, so I’ll finish off pimping this stylish and very slightly bovine game – give it a try, even if you’re not particularly into tilt games and don’t know what an Ikaruga even is. You may well enjoy it just as I did.

The only thing which could have made it better would have been the occasional minotaurish grunt .

MONOTAUR: Free download from the App Store

It’s happened again.

It’s a scene which has played out so many times, in the offices and homes of game developers across the world. It’s happened many times before and doubtless it’ll happen many times again.

One dev turns to another and says “well, we’ve got this fantastic idea for a game… what about a theme for it? can you think of anything?”

“Hmm… uhh… no, not really, I’ve got nothing right now. How about you?”

“Ahh… umm… lovely curry last night… erm… bloody hell, Britain not losing as badly as usual in the olympics then… er… actually no, I’m empty too…”

“Sooo… well then…”

“I guess… it’s the usual thing then…”

(both simultaneously) “WE’LL MAKE IT LOOK LIKE GEOMETRY WARS THEN!”

And so they do .

This time the game in question is basically Geometry Wars and Gauntlet mashed up (and made to look like Geometry Wars). And that’s basically all you need to know about the design of Inferno+. Says it all really.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way slagging off the actual game, it’s great fun and I’ve just spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon blasting through its 40 levels. I’m just taking the piss a bit because it does seem to be a well worn cliche these days, making stuff that looks like Geometry Wars. And it’s all well and groovy, because Geometry Wars does look nice, but you could probably fill your ipad twice over with games that look like Geometry Wars.

So what distinguishes Inferno+ then?

Well, I’ve thought for a while that a mashup of Roby and Gauntlet wouldn’t be a bad idea, lots of shooty shooty combined with maze exploration and looting would make for a fun game (in fact if I ever do a Llamatron II it’d probably be something along those lines). This game implements that idea very competently. The controls are very good (once you go to Options and turn off the fixed control points like a sensible person) and the blasting action is fluid and fun.

The game categorises itself as “Action RPG” but I’m sorry, if this is RPG then so is Pac-Man . You play the role of a little circular space ship thingy blasting at other blobby vaguely geometric Geometry Wars type thingies. There is looting (in the form of “G” pickups which add to your score) I suppose. Basically though it plays exactly like it says on the tin: Gauntlet-style mazes you make your way round blasting away in a Geometry Wars style. Like in Gauntlet there are “doors” that need unlocked with keys you find in the maze, and there are generators that spew enemies. You have shields that get depleted as you get hit and which can be replenished by collecting + signs you find scattered around the place (bits of meat and jugs of scrumpy not looking so great drawn in a Geometry Wars style I suppose). Shoot everything, have a whistle round looking for hidden areas and to make sure you’ve completely rinsed the level, off out the exit and on to the next one.

There are smart bombs that can be found and active shields that I’ve not much used so far. Every now and again you find a shop and as you progress you are given upgrade points to spend in it. At first only a few upgrades are available but as you progress you can spend some of your score to unlock the others. And every 10 levels there’s a boss who can usually be defeated by the age old method of keeping moving and dodging stuff whilst shooting the crap out of him.

You’ll probably want to play most of the time on the hardest difficulty as the lower two are quite easy to defeat, especially with all the powerups going on. Playing medium difficulty this afternoon it was no bother to whistle through all the levels and by the time i was getting towards the end I was so hideously beweaponed that all I had to do was basically move through the maze not bumping into anything nasty and everything died for me. But there’s plenty of fun to be had playing on hard, and 4 different ship types to play though with, and you can always go for a higher score (and make the game harder for yourself) by not spending any of your score to unlock the more exotic powerups. Oh, and if you play through the game once it unlocks the + mode which does seem to be a lot harder, so there’s plenty of scope for replaying and score chasing.

So there’s actually plenty of game for you to get stuck into, and best of all you get it all for the purchase price. No “Congratulations, you’ve beaten easy mode, do you want to buy Medium difficulty?” or “Well done, you got to level 20, do you want to buy the rest of the levels?” or “Jolly good, you’ve earned the chance to upgrade, would you like to buy this nice smart bomb?” or (most heinous of all) “Game Over. Would you like to buy an extra life?” ARGH DEAR GOD DISGUSTING IAP GET IT OFF ME

None of that bollocks. It’s all there when you buy the game. SEE, PEOPLE, THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE. A nice, well made, COMPLETE game for a fair price. So definitely a gold star from this ox for Radiangames here and on the strength of this I’m definitely inclined to look out for more of their games.

(They do get one bite taken out of their pappadom of excellence though for nagging me to rate the game at the end mind. I understand the need to get good publicity but being prompted to rate stuff gives me the same vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get in the curry house when the waiter comes round one too many times asking if everything’s all right. I always feel ratings and such are worth that much more when they are unsolicited, when someone’s actually thought highly enough of your work that they’ve jolly well originated the effort of going to rate the thing off their own bat rather than just gone “eh, ok then” and pressed the “Press this button to rate now” button. This is but a minor niggle though, and I’m probably the only person to get annoyed by it, so it’s only a small bite. And they have been jolly good sports with the no IAP so an extra pint of Cobra for that. And there’s still the lime pickle).

So if you fancy scratching your Gauntlet and blasting itch I definitely recommend this fun blaster with great controls and all the parts in the box when you open it, and which just happens to look like Geometry Wars. Oh and it’s Universal too, so an extra gold star and a grunt of approval for that too.

Get it on the App Store at the following link.

Radian Games: Inferno+

(When it comes to roleplaying and Robotron just about the only game I can think of which could actually make that kind of a claim would be the very excellent indeed “Time Bandit” on the Atari ST. Utterly fantastic game that, lots of Gauntletty shooting’n'looting action mixed up with a complicated plot and puzzles almost like a text adventure, great fun that was. If that’s not being remade for iOS then it damn well should be. Come on somebody, pull your finger out! Get it sorted! And don’t fuck up the controls! Thanks! )

FANTASTIC. GIVE IT ME.

This week I thought it’d be nice to mention one of my favourite ox-related iOS games (not that that is a huge category by any means, although with each game we release we are doing our best to rectify that).

Some games set out to do rather more than merely keep us entertained with thumb-twiddling and hi-scoring. Some games set their sights a little higher than that and attempt to educate us as well. One such game will be familiar to many a North American schoolkid who grew up in the 80s and 90s: a game called The Oregon Trail.

The game was very popular on the Apple II and was ported to a bunch of 8-bit systems popular in the US. It’s basically a resource management game intended to teach kids about the fun of managing resources (doubtless preparing them to enjoy stat-oriented RPGs and filling in tax returns later in life) whilst also teaching a historical lesson about the migration of people across the US under arduous conditions at some point in their history (as I am not a North American ox I never actually played this and so I’m not educated about where or why the actual migration took place. I just know it had oxen in).

This screenshot appears to come from a slightly posher version than the Apple II version shown before. Maybe it’s from the Apple II GS or something. Note that the ox has been upgraded and now has coloured, more shapely horns, spots, and even an eye.

You had to buy a bunch of supplies, outfit your wagon with nice oxen, and set out on your journey. Along the way you would meet various hazards and have to make key decisions. You could cross rivers which was more risky or take the longer way round which would take longer and use up supplies – you get the idea, we’ve all played these kind of games, and to be honest they can be a bit tedious. But I suppose if you’re at school being allowed or positively encouraged to play games on the computer is always a good thing even if the games are a bit po-faced. And at least it had oxen in (we’ll try not to think about how mismanagement of your resources can negatively impact ox well-being in the game). Lots of British schoolkids have rosy memories of a game called Granny’s Garden for much the same reason (but that has less oxen in. I think. I’ve never actually played it but I’ve never heard oxen mentioned. There might be a cow, I’m not sure. But anyway.)

There’s been an iOS remake of The Oregon Trail quite recently, in fact:

Just look at those posh, modern, go-faster oxen, all slanty and urgent and with sweeping horns.

However that is not the game I am recommending here, sleek modern oxen or no.

Now there’s this chap called Justin Smith and he is plainly daft as a brush. Not daft as in stupid, because he’s plainly not that; I mean daft as in Monty Python, as in very silly indeed, and he makes some delightfully silly games. After all you have to be pretty silly to take a po-faced game like the Oregon Trail and mash it up with the likes of Excite Bike (or Kikstart, if you’d prefer a more British comparison with your cup of tea). But that’s what he did, and the results are wonderfully, gloriously daft.

The game is called So Long, Oregon and in some ways it is really quite similar to the Oregon Trail, in that it does involve a degree of resource management. The objective is to take your wagon and your family and your precious oxen (who can’t actually be harmed in this game, although they can be made to grunt a lot) and set out to find El Dorado. You have a certain amount of food and various misfortunes can befall your family members along the way and you must make key decisions that can affect their fate.

Unlike in the Oregon Trail, which was just a turn-based predominantly text-based thing, in So Long, Oregon you get to drive your wagon in realtime across a scrolling terrain. You can shoot stuff too and gather the meat for your supplies. Oh, and there’s physics; completely ridiculous physics with lunar gravity.

Here rather than fording the North Saskatchewan River we’ve taken a runup at a particularly pointy mountain in order to jump over it. You’ll have to be careful landing that wagon so as not to get caught in that tricky crevice there. One family member is dead and another’s pretty poorly. The chap on a horse is a robber and if you don’t shoot him he’s likely to steal some of your stuff.

The controls are simple (and onscreen buttons are permissible here because they really don’t get in the way of anything as you play) – just “Go Faster, Oxen” and “Slow Down, Oxen” really. Whilst airborne (and you will be airborne, lots) you can use them to adjust your angle in-flight to set up for a good landing. You can also tap anywhere onscreen to fire a shot from your wagon.

Here we’ve arrived at Fort Laramie. Hooray! Unfortunately we’ve arrived upside down.

You’ll pass forts and encampments along the way where you can trade for supplies, heal sick family members and such. You may get the odd nasty surprise at these too, so you can elect to just move on by (or fly clean over whilst doing a 360 if you prefer) if your status is good. Your objective is to go as far to the left as you can and discover El Dorado. Should you achieve that then you load up your wagon with loot and set off to make your way back home. Backwards.

Now the graphics may not be ultra modern and the game may be a bit silly and the controls may take a bit of getting used to but that doesn’t really matter because it’s just funny to play. I found myself sniggering out loud quite a few times while I was playing and I tend to prefer games that don’t take themselves too seriously anyway. This game is just a proper laugh.

There’s a mode where you race as fast as you can go against 19 other wagons. It’s completely bonkers.

And for all its daftness So Long Oregon does contain an actual game that’s challenging to play, and you’ll find yourself coming back to it until you’ve successfully got yourself back home again, and then coming back again to try to do it without actually killing most of your dudes and to try to get a decent score.

You can get this daft masterpiece at the following link:

So Long, Oregon

And I note from that website that it’s also out on Android too by the looks of it. Jolly good.

If like me you enjoy Justin’s style then you should probably take a look at his other games – Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is a perfect antidote to all the Olympics bollocks and wankery that is in such full speight right now, and actually made beer come out of my nose when I first played it down the pub. And I’m not even going to attempt to describe Enviro-Bear 2010.

Despite finding this I didn’t come across Parintins.

(Ox- and grunt-related factoid: in the Minotaur Project games all the minotaur grunts are in fact the ox grunts from So Long Oregon. I asked Justin and he kindly let me use his ox grunts).

It’s difficult enough finding the good games out there given that there are so many things being released. It’s hard to know what to even look at. But I figure if you’re reading a Llamasoft blog page then you might enjoy some of the games that I enjoy (apart from the ones I make, obviously. You should buy those without hesitation and without the merest shadow of a doubt. Go on, go and get them all if you haven’t got them yet).

So I thought I’d start a new blog category in which the black ox with the blue star out of Super Ox Wars recommends some of the games we actually play when we’re not busy developing. If you’re stuck for something to buy (and haven’t bought every last one of our games first, of course) check the Caprichoso Arcade category for some ox-tastic reviews and recommendations.

To kick things off here’s something that’s been spending way too much time on my iDevices…

Pinball Arcade (Farsight Studios, for iOS/OSX/PC/X360/PS3/Android)

Back when I was but a young ox at university I used to spend a fair bit of my time in the student union arcade, as you might expect given what I ended up doing later in my life. I survived on a healthy diet of cheap imitation Jaffa Cakes and cans of Coke and directed a steady stream of loose change into Galaxian, Space Invaders, Tail Gunner and Asteroids. If I’d've paid as much attention to my studies as I did to the diving Galaxian Flagships and sphincter-puckering “little bastard” Asteroids saucers then perhaps I wouldn’t've been kicked out after only a year.

Video games weren’t the only things lurking in the student union arcade and halls of residency bars though. Many of us were held equally in thrall by the booming voice and mighty nipples of the fine gentlebeing you see above, who told all and sundry in no uncertain terms that his name was GORGAR.

Gorgar, Black Knight, Future Spa, Star Trek, Nitro Ground Shaker (which one frustrated and drunken student actually decapitated in a fit of rage one memorable night) – these were all pinball tables. Back then pinball had pretty much an equal footing with videogames in arcades (and in fact doubtless looked on the upstart videogames as mere whippersnappers, since the history of modern pinball goes back at very least to the invention of the flipper in 1947). Most of the students at university would have grown up being familiar with pinballs from seaside arcades and suchlike – rattling and clanging great electromechanical beasts which, although fun, did seem a bit quaint and primitive when compared to the new delights of Space Invaders and Galaxian.

The pinball industry didn’t take this lying down, however, and the same microprocessor chippery that powered the videogames started to appear in newer, more complex pinball tables too, and these found their way into the university arcade alongside the videogames and were played just as keenly by us students. I didn’t know it at the time but Gorgar’s booming voice and racing heartbeat were created by a pinball designer at Williams Electronics by the name of Eugene Jarvis – who would go on to create some of the best and most memorable arcade video games of the early 80s.

Pinball is an excellent game, and satisfying in quite a different way to the videogames, although the objective is the same – get the highest score. Pinball seems more present in the real world than videogames, controlled as it is not simply by flipper button presses but also by the wholesale shaking of the machine. To have a good game takes a degree of luck as well as skill, and it’s very accessible to players of all experience levels – a good player can have a bad ball, and a novice can have a great ball, so (except in the case of real pinball wizards) usually everybody has a chance of doing well and winning a game.

It’s not easy to have a real pinball table at home, though – a table is an expensive and substantial piece of furniture, and the complex electromechanical innards need care and regular servicing to keep working properly. So through the years there have been various attempts to create videogame versions of pinball.

The earliest attempts on early game consoles and early home computers were primitive affairs, often so crude as to bear almost no resemblance to the game they were trying to recreate. But as the years went by processors and graphics chips got powerful enough to sustain games that provided a recognisably pinball-y kind of experience to videogame players.

Some of the best videogame tables took advantage of their virtual nature to provide tables full of active targets and animated playfields which could never have been achieved in the real world. One which me and my mates got very addicted to was “Alien Crush” on the excellent PC-Engine game console of the early 90s.

This was a two-level table with fast and fluid gameplay marred only by the somewhat jarring flick-scroll between the top and bottom halves of the table. Make the correct shots and that brain would split open and monsters would come out to be hit by the ball. Bumpers rearranged themselves on the table as you played and some shots led to mini-tables upon which bonus games took place.

Even better was the sequel to Alien Crush, also on the PC Engine, called “Devil Crash”.

This table was three screens in height, and the whole table scrolled smoothly to follow the ball as you played. There were even more bonus games to find and play as you worked your way through the targets on each level. Getting the ball into that lady’s head caused her to gradually transform into a giant lizard (David Icke would have loved it). We spent many a fine weekend huddled around the PC Engine playing endless games of Devil Crash.

The videogame tables were all well and good but they were definitely more videogame than they were real pinball. It wasn’t until the mid 90s that it became possible to attempt the kind of real-world physics modelling that would make possible convincing simulation of tables that existed in real space. The first such simulation I encountered was the excellent Eight Ball Deluxe for PC.

I’d just moved to the US at the time this came out, and another mate of mine had moved there 6 months earlier and we used to meet up and hang out in the evenings. Many of those evenings were spent in front of the PC obsessively playing Eight Ball. It seemed inpossibly difficult at first, way more demanding than the more videogamey efforts we’d played before; but just like with real pinball, practice yielded results and we had some great evenings challenging one another’s highscores in front of the old 486.

Sadly these days the physical pinball table is in danger of becoming extinct. There’s only one manufacturer still making new tables; pubs and arcades rarely have any pinballs, and increasingly the only tables to be found are those in the hands of enthusiasts and collectors. There’s a whole generation of gamers growing up who might never have seen or played a real pinball game at all. Luckily for us though there are still some very good videogame pinballs to be found, and one company is undertaking a project which sets out simultaneously to preserve in simulated form some of the very best classic pinball tables of all time, and to provide a lot of pinball fun to us gamers as they do so. And so we have Farsight Studio’s excellent Pinball Arcade.

This is available on just about everything, as detailed above. I have had the iOS version for the last few months and I’ll be picking it up on the PS3 and Vita when it comes out on those machines later this month. $10 gets you the game with 4 tables included – Tales of the Arabian Nights, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Black Hole and Theatre of Magic. Buying the PS3 version gets you the Vita version for free.

This is my favourite table of the initial four, Black Hole, as seen on the iPad. It’s an older table than the rest, and has considerably less table clutter in the form of ramps and toys than you see in more modern tables, but that’s part of the reason I like it so much; the table is very open and gameplay satisfyingly fast and challenging (it takes quite a degree of effort just to get the table to multiball compared to some of the modern tables that hand out multiballs like candy). You can shoot balls down into a lower mini-table – the Black Hole of the title – and even start multiball on both table layers at once.

Here’s a view of Black Hole on the ps3 – the additional power of the game console affords the tables more complex dynamic lighting, something I’m looking forward to seeing when the ps3 version comes out.

This is the table select screen on the iPad. As I mentioned this is an ongoing project to preserve a multitude of classic pinball tables and Farsight are offering them to players at the rate of two a month as DLC, and plan on continuing to do so for the next two or three years! The pricing of the DLC is very reasonable, at less than the price of a pint for both tables; I look forward to collecting a huge library of classic tables to play whenever I fancy a quick flip of my balls.

I’ve already been reunited with one of my old friends from University – the mighty Gorgar, with whom I have been very much enjoying getting reacquainted. Black Knight is due out later this month too (although it won’t be quite the same as the one we had at uni, which for some reason spoke French and kept ranting in a robot voice about “CHEVALIER NOIR”).

Pinball Arcade isn’t perfect – there are occasional problems with the camera views, a couple of the older tables are simulated rather than emulated which can lead to some small inaccuracies compared to the real thing (but most of them are pretty accurate since they actually emulate the CPUs of the original games and run their native code). Issues are generally being addressed pretty quickly and updates are frequent, and anyway such little glitches as there are rarely spoil a table entirely. The release of tables on the game consoles tends to lag behind those on iOS and Android, primarily because of the significant lead time on the certification process for the console platforms (that stuff is way easier on iOS/Android). And for some inexplicable reason Steam don’t want to take it for the PC. Nudging is a bit hit and miss on iOS but is apparently much better on the consoles.

It may not be perfect yet but it’s getting better with each iteration, there’s a long list of classic tables on the way, and I’ve already had way more than my money’s worth of fun so far with the iOS version. Really looking forward to having it on the ps3 and Vita too.

Best of all by buying Pinball Arcade you’re supporting an ongoing project that’s preserving great games that are becoming increasingly rare in the real world, and offering them up for gamers everywhere to continue to enjoy. And it’s very good value; you’re getting an awful lot of pinballing fun for not very much money.

Very highly recommended by this ox.

More details available on Farsight’s website (watch the video about how they model the tables!) at the following link.

Farsight Studios: Pinball Arcade

And finally, a word from my old mate Gorgar.