Old vs. New A to Z: The Letter S

CURRENT SCORE:

OLD GAMES 7

NEW GAMES 11

A nice pic for sure, but maybe face your enemy for better results?

SATAN

(Dinamic, 1989)

Dinamic were notorious for two things. Hardness and nipples. That is to say their games were mostly incredibly difficult, even for Speccy games of the time, and... well, the whole Game Over debacle (to be said in an Alan Partridge voice for full effect).

Here's our fella, straddling a lady finger to get upwardly mobile

I think I'm right in saying they only released this one game on their ownsome in the UK, farming the rest out to the Imagine crew. Unfortunately I can't be bothered checking this fact, but it's stuck with me from decades ago. Wonder if it's right. I'm impressed with myself if it is. I should really be appalled though probably.

This li'l guy will still mess you up if you get in his way

So it takes some cojones to call your game after Old Nick himself. Hope they went down to Hell to buy the requisite licence, otherwise a grim fate would surely await our Spanish gamesters at the hands of Beelzebub's lawyers, of which there would be a plentiful supply down there. I've only got a few words of English on the inlay - "Warriors, wizards, weapons, warfare, (w)magic. Someone must destroy Stan, oh sorry, Satan". Wow, not asking much are they?

Geronimo! No, actually I've just been sent flying backwards again

Knowing Dinamic's reputation for hard-as-nails quests, I was a bit sceptical at first. But you know what? This is a pleasure to play. You go round hacking up creatures, do a lot of jumping up and down large lady fingers, exploring your rather ornate surroundings, and generally lasting a lot longer than you thought you would. Graphics are nice, the monochrome at least changing colour fairly regularly, and there are some quite nice AY sound effects, if no actual tune. All very civilised, with no hardness or nipples in evidence.

Looks like Steven Seagull on the right is bricking it

SQIJ'D

(Monument Microgames, 2018)

By 1987 the budget games market was really taking over. Suddenly your games collection greatly increased in size, if not necessarily in quality. Some companies didn't ever seem to be purveyors of much quality though, and one such was The Power House.

Sqijy boy is one mean-looking yellow-spit gobbing mother in this game

Apparently one of their programmers parted company with them, but still had one more game to fulfil contractually. So he offered them a number called Sqij, which... wasn't really finished properly. In that you couldn't play it at all unless you POKEd it big time first. And then you wished you hadn't bothered. He wasn't expecting it to actually be released, see, but it came out anyway due to The Power House's stunning QA measures. And so became known as probably the worst game ever released on the Speccy.

This bit of the tree is rather red and bloody. Yick

It gained a certain level of fame then despite itself. People made tributes to it, or to the game "as it should have been" to quote Gandalf. One called Sqij 2018 I was considering for this feature, but then I spotted this one, which seems a bit jollier. Let's see if it surpasses the original then...

There' a dovelet, quick, turn it into a Kentucky Fried Dovelet

It works, so yes. You have to feed dovelets to a strange evil tree, which you apparently created yourself bizarrely, in order to gain its trust and then sap its lifeforce. Or sap. You fly around, find and roast the odd dovelet if you're lucky, then try to find the centre of the tree, by which time your little birdie is fairly knackered and dies. Or maybe it's just me. Not a bad jaunt though, colourful and tuneful, even without being POKEd to bits.

VERDICT

BEST GRAPHICS - SATAN

BEST COLOUR - SQIJ'D

BEST SOUND - SQIJ'D

MOST PLAYABLE - SATAN

MOST ORIGINAL - SATAN

MOST ADDICTIVE - SATAN

FINAL SCORE

SATAN 4 SQIJ'D 2

Satan wins!