3D Maze -

A simple maze game.  As a child we used to draw complex mazes on squared paper.  To the present day, with both hedge mazes in stately homes, to the corn maize mazes that spring up every summer around the country.  This game is a simple maze game.  The computer generates a random maze, based on the dimensions that you provide.

The maze is generated as above.  You, as the player start in the North Western corner of the map and have to make it to the exit in the South East.  You use the arrow keys to guide yourself around the maze, moving one step forward or back, and turning left and right through 90 degrees.

The aim, as with every maze, is to escape in the fastest time possible.  Each time you check the map, the game adds 30 seconds to your total time.  There are no aliens, traps or other things blocking you in this game.  The only challenge is to find the fastest route to the exit.

And with that a quick fun, fast (well fast for the Acorn Electron) game.  One that needs very little set up to get into.

Dallas By CC Games

Ahh, the 80s.  Shoulder Pads, beautiful women and a tv phenomenon called Dallas.  Set in the exotic city of Dalllas Texas it told the story of hte Euings and the Barnes and their never ending strife set against the backdrop of the Texas Oil Industry.  For those of us living in the UK at the time it was one of the most stunning tv series of its age.  And, when one of the main characters, though dead for whole season, suddenly re-appeared in the shower as if nothing had ever happened, a whole series of television was wiped from the canon of Dallas.  It was also one of the first tv series that led to the rise of the water cooler moments.  "Who Shot JR?" made the front page of most newspapers in the UK, as one series was left hanging at the edge of the cliff edge.

And so comes along the inevitable tie-in game.  Dallas.  A simple premise, you need to build up your oil company before Euing Oil takes you over.  So how do we do this?  The game takes place on a map of the surrounding area of Dallas City.

The main controls run along the bottom of the screen.  The game follows a set cycle

• Concession Sales
• Move your Rig
• Drill
• Hopefully Strike Oil
• Build Production Facilities
• Lay a Pipeline
• repeat

Concession sales allow you to purchase lane upon which to drill.  From here the game takes on a random chance, you drill down through the levels, either drilling through rock, striking oil, or sometimes the dreaded dry hole.

Once oil has been struck, to make it profitable, you need to create production facilities and lay pipelines from the facility back into Dallas.  The quicker you drill, and produce the facilities, the quicker your total assets build up.  While it is possible to get into debt, this makes it harder to ultimately beat the game.  As you are paying interest on the loans that you are taking out, which leaves you less money for the purchase of new assets and the drilling for oil.  As the game progresses, you lay more and more pipework.  The shot below shows a late stage of the game.

You do not always need to purchase assets, but if you run out of land to drill on, you will struggle.  The game has 3 difficulty levels, which affect the speed at which Euing Associates grow their assets.  I will be honest I have managed to beat the game on the first two levels, but the hardest level is beyond me.  Perhaps I am not as ruthless I would need to be to win the game there.

If you are successful, and I would say, it is less often than more often, you will receive a nice telex (for the young ones out there, this was after the invention of the telephone and before emails) informing you that you have taken over Euing Associates.

In the beginning

I can't be 100% sure when I first played with a computer.  It would have been the early 1980s and the computer was the glorious Acorn Electron.  32kb of memory, a single channel sound system and a tape player to load games.  This was the beginning of the commercial home computer market, the mass-market computers.  Developed by Acorn Computers as a less expensive version of the BBC Micro Computer, the computer that was in every classroom in the United Kingdom.

It's main competitor in the home computer market was the ZX Spectrum, with 48kb of memory, a slightly more powerful machine, with the unique rubber keyboard.  But for me, my parents bought an Acorn Electron.  The key reason for purchasing this over the other home computers, was the commonality with the BBC Micro.  My parents wanted me to be comfortable with computers from a young age.

I remember attempting to write my first computer program.  I chose a simple game to start with, chess.  I remember my Dad telling me that you have to instruct the computer how the game had to be played.  I think my first program went something like

10 Draw Grid
20 Colour 32 squares black
30 Colour 32 squares white

I was surprised that the computer didn't draw a chessboard at this point, But I was hooked.  Many nights of reading Electron User magazine, typing in the listings, debugging the listings and then playing the games and I was well on my way to being a fully fledged geek.

The Acorn Electron, ZX Spectrum and other games of the computers at the same time, led to the growth of the bedroom industry of game development.  Kids designing and developing games in their bedroom.  Some games never making it off of the paper, others making it to full production.  It was a time of people pushing the 32K of memory to the absolute max, with some amazing results.  And so, after firing up the machine, that still works after all of the time, it is time to re-visit those games of my childhood.