August 1994 - Wanaka

People keeping up with this blog have seen most of my thoughts already, but for my UI blog I did a complete overview of the UI of the COMPUTE's Gazette disk menu. (Along with the old thoughts about the text reader)

Wanaka - Shawn Menninga

A sliding tile puzzle... the accompanying text says it was popular in New Zealand, but I couldn't find Google links for a real world version. A very similar game has been marketed as Rush Hour where you have to maneuver a car out of a crowded parking lot; here you want to bring the big northern NZ block down to touch the souther NZ frame. Competently done, could have used some animations maybe. (And it's a tricky puzzle; the author says he can't get it in fewer than 124 or so moves.) Rating:3/5

July 1994 - Space Pirates, 15 Solitaire

I kind of gave up tracking the PD Picks, especially whe they're not games, but Globe by John Crider is pretty amazing, that thing is is rotating and you can use the joystick to swing it to various angles:

And also, it was not a great month for games:

Space Pirates - John LeDoux

This 128 game is made by the same folks who made Starship Battles and presumably also appeals to people who like menu-drive spaceship games. Rating:2/5

15 Solitaire - Arthur Moore

I hated this less than some solitaires. You want to find a pile of cards of the same suit that add up to 15, so they'll then be removed, but you can't use 10 or face cards, which have to be removed all at once. Good use of colors (two shades of red, two of grey) to reinforce which suit is which. Rating:3/5

June 1994 - Wizard's Demons

The editorial overview goes into the path of Gazette to this point, and how an increase in printing costs kicked them out of their nestled in COMPUTE role. They do mention "All the ads on Gazette Disk generate barely enough revenue to pay for one of the programs that I purchase each month"... so my guess that it was more advertiser funded than not was incorrect. And with the subscribers that switched "it looks like Gazette Disk will be around for some time." Good to know, cough cough. (The article also mentions Commodore's tailspin.)

I am a little weirded out that "Super-Alarm III" (a PD pick to turn your computer into "a device similar to a clock radio" -- meaning a clumsy alarm clock that can play .MUS files) is written by one Kirk Mook. I thought "Kirk Israel" was a weird enough name, but I am jealous that he has only 4 letters for both first and last.

Wizard's Demons - Troy Heck

Invaders/Galaxian type shooter with a magic theme. You operate a cannon and need to blast the flying demons who are trying to kidnap the wizard below, as well as reigning demonfire on you. Getting hit incapacitates your cannon long enough that the wizard will almost definitely get whisked away. If you do manage to shoot a demon-carrying wizard, you have to press up to cast a "featherfall" spell so the wizard doesn't plummet and die anyway. (Also pressing down beams you to the middle of the playfield.) Decent graphics I guess, so-so gameplay. Rating:3/5

May 1994 - Balloon Bash, Sunday Driver

There's a review of "C64S", a C64 emulator that runs under MS-DOS. They say it works pretty well, and being able to save and restore state was pretty cool. I had forgotten emulation was starting to happen back then. Kind of odd to be using an emulator on a Mac to read an article about an emulator on PC.

Balloon Bash - Joseph Sheppard

Ugh, another one of these... not very different than MauriceYanney's Balloon Pop a while back, though the balloons are moving down and not up, plus this one is a little more annoying because you don't just touch the balloons to pop, the pin is a bit more "realistic" in where it has to be positioned. There are also rules about bonuses for 3 in a row and "target colors" but really, for just another Kaboom!-like, who gives a damn? Rating:2/5

Sunday Driver - Maurice Yanney

Speaking of Yanney....man oh man, I do find myself wishing he could have found someone to collaborate with on graphics - his programmer art is terrible - just look at that car and deer... Anyway, this is an ambitious driving game, but not a very good one. It's loaded with features like deer on the road, road narrows, road splits, icy road, a police helicopter who will tag you if you're going over the posted speed limit, having to watch your gas, etc but trust me when I say that all probably sounds better here than it is in practice. (The score is represented as a dollar figure, and the instructions mention something about being able to get new cars when you save up enough cash, and hitting obstacles comes out of that budget). Besides the terrible art, there are just weird misfeatures-- like no matter how fast you might be going, the deer is more or less keeping up with you vertically, in your direction of travel. The general physics and control feel is so bad especially in contrast to May 1990's Race Ace, that had a delightful sense of having to speed up and pass cars. I will admit this is the only driving game I've tried that has a cruise control feature, so I'll bump up its rating to merely mediocre. Rating:3/5

April 1994 - Berries, Contact--Switch On!, Spell Maze

They tweaked the menu system, getting rid of that odd slightly-graphic-y initial loader page I wrote about before, and just adding more levels to their old reliable:

They're also back to having a "Table of Contents" text file.

I was thinking about what I found irksome about that previous menu.  For one thing it was function-key driven, which makes it slightly more annoying on a modern computer... the function keys are still there for backwards compatibility, but they've been repurposed so on a mac you have to hold "fn" to make them work. Overall "function" keys are falling into the dustbin of history - things are menu-driven and mouse or touch now and when there are keyboard shortcuts, people have figured out that mnemonics make more sense. (Man anyone here remember Word Perfect, and those little bits of paper you'd put over your functions to remember what key combos did what?

power users loved 'em, along with "reveal codes" (which is kind of akin to peeking at the HTML of your web document) but I'd have to say humanity is better for having moved on.)

Back to Gazette... I suspect the old pretty menu was a bit slower to load, as was that weirdo faux-GUI they had for a long time.

Berries - Gus Vakalis

At first blush this feels a lot like the snake games I was complaining about last time - except you're a bird, not a snake, so you can reverse on a dime without running into your tail. Unless of course you've passed too near one of the patrolling cat heads; then the cat will follow you and the effect is much the same. Anyway, berries are growing and are worth more points if you let them grow, but wait too long and they become brown and poisonous. And watch out for beehives, though I don't think there are any bees around. More cats (with wider vision ranges) get added on subsequent levels. Rating:3/5

Contact--Switch On! - Bob Markland

Odd strategy/luck game for two players, one of whom can be the computer (endearingly called "Chip") Each player gets a row of switches, 1-9. For each turn a player picks 1 or 2 dice to roll, and then can flip switches that add up to that number -- so if you rolled a 8, you could flip 8, or 1, 3, 4, or 2 and 6, etc. And the goal is flip all your switches. It does get you thinking about probability a bit, and the computer plays a very good game, so it kind of comes down to luck. Rating:3/5

Spell Maze - Michael Bolin

In theory this game is to teach kids spelling, but if anything it's about navigating a maze you can only see a little part of, or maybe just how not to make a good game. A word is on screen, then you're put in a dungeon with the letters for it scattered around. You might also stumble over a sword to fight a monster who will show up, and keys to unlock the doors (that are oddly rendered as stars) But you only see the 8 squares around you. Maybe an option to make the maze visible (with our without the contents) would have made this more playable. (Or even given it a point... I mean, I don't think any letters that aren't in the word are in the maze, so it's more a matter of getting letters in the right order.) Rating:2/5

March 1994 - Setz!, Trail Blazer

Here in the waning days of Gazette, I thought I'd make one comment on their loading program. Every time you go to run their text file reader, you get this screen:

I know it's weird to critique 20+ year old UI for a 30+ year old computer, but

A. It's goofy that they despite all these commands they don't have a simple convention for "next page", like maybe space bar- just scrolling one line at a time via the arrow keys. I think the "more" program had been available on Unix since like 1978?

It reminds me of this Dilbert cartoon, also from 1984:

B. It would have been more sophisticated to just have a simple, permanent bar on top of the screen with like "SPACE -NEXT PAGE : CRSR - MOVE UP/DOWN : M - MENU OPTIONS". Having to always go through the same page for every article is just clunky.

So I don't mind bad UI when it reflects limitations of tech of the time, but I don't think that this is one of those cases- it's just a lack of thoughtful imagination. (But it's nice that they tend to keep the main menu in memory, so there's not disk access to return to it.)

Setz! - Larry Cotton

This is a straightforward subset of the card Set, where you have to pick out three cards (in this case 'groups') where shape, color, and pattern all match or all different. Here a round is played against the clock, one set at a time. Rating:3/5

Trail Blazer - Gus Vakalis

There's been a few variants of "Snake"/Surround in the run of this magazine - this isn't the worst, nor is the best. Colorful, with player navigating through to grab a randomly placed treasure while avoid the tail and the (clichéd) happy-face enemies... Snake Pit was probably smarter in combining the "moving enemies" and "treasure to seek" into one play element. Rating:3/5, and that's being generous... maybe because the colorful blocks remind me of Crossroads (same issue as "Snake Pit", come to think of it.)
 

February 1994 - Ice Mountain, Starship Battles

The editorial overview says

By the time you read this, I wonder if Commodore itself will even be around. As I write this in the autumn of 1993, Commodore has just reported a $359 million loss for the financial year that ended June 30, 1993.

One, poor Commodore, and 2... what kind of lead times did this thing have? February done in Autumn? I guess it's a combination of how much a magazine's release date always predates the cover date, and then what it takes to pull something together, but still...

(They also mention this month's 128 game "Starship Battles" took up one whole disk side almost, but took an apologetic tone for having fewer programs with a "I know many of you say that you don't like games". Which always surprised me, because except for programming and some light word processing, I didn't know the C64 did much except games.)

I might be doing something wrong, but it seems like the 128 situation viz a viz the disks is kind of messed up: the C128 side no longer seems to know how to boot properly.

Ice Mountain - Maurice Yanney

Just when I thought Yanney might be getting kind of good, along comes this hot mess. So much is deadly to your little helicopter! Touch the "mountain", die. Bird heads right at you attracted by your bullets (especially in your the gap above the mountain) and hits you, die. Icicles from ceiling fall on you, die. If you manage to use your bullets to dig a hole down to where the goal mineral deposits are waiting, there's a missile waiting for you, and it will launch and you will probably die. Rating:1/5

Starship Battles - John LeDoux

This 128 game has a pretty badass title screen, between the music and the Klingon "Bird of Prey" descending, it was actually a little menacing! The game is a heavily geeky, type in a lot of parameters (juggle ship's power distribution and what not) then watch things unfold spaceship combat game, not unlike the Star Trek board game Star Fleet Battles. I couldn't get into it. Rating:3/5, I was feeling generous about this game's tremendous ambition.