davetansley

Buggy Boy (Speed Buggy in the US) feels like a game that deserves to be remembered more fondly. Sadly, it always seems to fall through the cracks between the likes of Outrun, Power Drift and Chase HQ.

This is a shame, because it is a fun little racer that received some mostly decent 8-bit ports on the #Amstrad, #C64 and #Spectrum.

But which one was the Buggy-est Boy of all? Step this way...

In the arcade, Buggy Boy is probably best remembered for its cockpit version with a panoramic three-screen display. There's also an upright, single-screen version, called Buggy Boy Jr, which is basically the same game.

In Buggy Boy, you race five tracks, collecting flags for points and time, and avoiding boulders and water traps. There are jumps and objects that flip you up onto two wheels. You'll see other buggies, but the game is mostly a race against the clock. It's a lot of colourful fun!

First port we'll look at is the Spectrum port. It's very different from the other two, and makes a plucky attempt at recreating the arcade faithfully. It has a valiant attempt at a huge buggy sprite, with colour no less, which moves about okay-ish. And the road has hills, just like the arcade.

Unfortunately, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. The huge sprite makes the road feel very cramped, and the gameplay feels slow and indistinct.

Good effort though!

Next up is the Amstrad. Like the C64 port, this feels more like it was inspired by Buggy Boy, rather than faithfully ported. Unlike the Spectrum, the buggy sprite is tiny. This actually works in the game's favour, keeping it snappy and responsive. The road moves nicely, albeit with no hills, and overall it's an enjoyable, if slightly slow, experience.

Best of all is the C64 version. This does everything the Amstrad does, only better. The same presentation (making me wonder if the Amstrad was ported from this), same small sprite, same nimble gameplay. But this version moves better and is a lot more fun to play. Getting to the next checkpoint is hugely compelling and it plays like a great, simple racer.

If you had to nitpick (Spectrum guys always have to nitpick the C64, right?) you might say that it is a little drab... but never enough to detract from the game.

A very clear C64 win!

The first RPG I ever played! This book has so much nostalgia for me... first watching the cool kids over the road playing it and picking up a White Dwarf to see what it was about, then finally getting in on a game and getting my own copy of the rules.

Green Beret is a difficult game to love, because Green Beret is a difficult game to play. Honestly, it's brutal. Utterly unforgiving, unfair in places, and generally infuriating. Especially since every life lost is greeted by a shrill siren sound that will have even the most understanding spouse reaching for her earbuds (trust me).

It's also a simple game, if a little rooted in the concerns of the 80s... move to the right, murder fools with your knife and your deep fear of communist expansion, pick up the occasional flame thrower or rocket launch to murder more efficiently... win!!!

But how did the home computer conversions handle the absurd difficulty of the coin-op? They'd have toned it down, right? Right??

Amstrad: This port is the worst of the three main ones. There's just something off about it. Maybe it's the loose controls or the insane difficulty, or maybe it's the fact that your green beret looks more like Robin Hood and the communist aggressors look more like merry men. Still, everything from the arcade is represented here. Just not brilliantly. And it is so so difficult...

Spectrum: Next up is the Spectrum. It's a port by the late great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith and it is a really neat conversion. The graphics are bright and crisp, it controls and moves around well, and it feels like the original arcade. But goddamn it's hard. I had to figure out how to use a Multiface, just so that I could poke in a cheat and get to my screenshot spot for this one!

C64: The C64 port is probably the best of the bunch, but not by a long way. It looks and sounds great, definitely the closest to the arcade. It's main problem - believe it or not - is difficulty. Again, it is insanely hard. And it suffers from some unfair hit box issues - if you jump and collide with an enemy on a level above, you lose a life, which feels wrong.

Atari: Finally, a dishonourable discharge for the Atari 8-bit version which is, frankly, a bit of a war crime.

It's beyond hard and enters an entirely different realm of frustration, with your hero wielding the smallest knife imaginable and enemies requiring the intimate closeness of a secret lover before they'll shuffle off this mortal coil

Combine this with invisible bullets (pesky Russian tech) and that awful siren that plays at the start of EVERY life and it's a recipe for an 800XL out the window.

My first love was the ZX Spectrum, but my first salacious affair was with the Sega Master System, many years later.

It was a time in the UK when consoles were hardly even a thing. We'd somehow missed the NES wave that was gripping the US, and we were still clinging to our 8-bit micros or the new 16-bit STs and Amigas. No-one seemed particularly keen to swap £1.99 budget cassettes for £29.99 cartridges.

So, getting the Sega Master System was both extremely exciting and also a tacit acceptance that new games would arrive a couple of times a year, rather than every few weeks.

And it was totally worth it. To my naive 14 year old mind, the games were basically arcade perfect... Of course, this was a measure of my own lack of exposure to actual arcades, rather than the port quality itself. But the games were definitely more polished than the Speccy games I was used to. As such, I have extremely rosy memories of virtually every game I found a way to play. Sometimes unjustly.

Like, for example, Psycho Fox by Vic Tokai.

Psycho Fox is a side scrolling platformer where you play the eponymous fox, but also a range of other animals with different abilities. You run to the left, jump on enemies to kill them, fight a boss every three levels... so it's just like Super Mario Bros, right?

Well, that's how I remember it. It was Sega's Mario, and in my mind it was just as good. Of course, I hadn't played Super Mario Bros at the time, and it would be years before I played Sonic. As such, I had no real frame of reference to judge Psycho Fox's strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses...

Because Psycho Fox has a fatal flaw which means we live in a world dominated by Sonic and Mario, rather than a crow-throwing fox...

Movement.

There's just something off about the movement in this game. The acceleration curve is too shallow, it takes forever to get moving. As such, jumps always require a run up, and escaping from enemies can feel like wading through treacle. 90% of the deaths you'll suffer are because you can't get up enough speed fast enough. And it is extremely frustrating.

It's a shame, because it's otherwise a great game. It has a Sonic-esque blue-sky feel to it, the character work is awesome, and the extra animals add an interesting dimension to how you play the game (Tiger can move fast, Monkey can jump high etc). The range of levels is interesting and includes the usual tropes (desert world, ice world with slippery momentum) and the boss fights have some novel quirks.

Overall, it's definitely worth a look. But to truly enjoy it, you will need to unlearn all of the instincts you've build up from more fluid Sonic and Mario games. You need to think about every jump, and really take your time.

What about you? Did you play Psycho Fox back then? Have you played it since? Did it hold up for you?