The Games That Time Forgot: 1985 Edition
- AlWo73
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Featuring a thief, some beef and "TURNSTILES?!?!"
TAFFY TURNER
(Silversoft)
Back in '83 everyone was at it. By which I mean trying to make a quick buck by ripping off all the familiar arcade favourites for the home computer market before anyone could get their act together to sue their asses. So we got 58 versions of Frogger, 87 Space Invaders clones, 104 Centipede-a-likes and 586 cheesey maze gobblers. These figures might not be accurate, but they are nevertheless compelling.
Silversoft were one such company to try this ploy and they probably did pretty well out of it for a while, their 'interpretations' mostly passing muster for the time. But when the arcade conversions eventually dried up, did they have the cojones to do their own thing successfully? They seemed to struggle on the whole but they did have their moments of promise. Worse Things Happen At Sea was certainly their zenith, and they also published Fergus McNeil's Bored Of The Rings and Robin Of Sherlock. They even tried their luck importing some Dinamic games from Espana, but they weren't the Spaniards' best efforts - nowhere near impossible enough and a zero nipple count.
Talking of such things, Silversoft appear to have gone, ahem, 'bust' in late '85 but before that they snuck out Taffy Turner. They just never told anyone about it, so no-one thought to review it. It was programmed by one Brendan Kelly. Oh god, hope he's not that doofus who plagued us with Mrs Brown's Boys on telly. Hang on, quick check.... no he's not. Thank feck. He actually went on to do some stuff for Incentive, namely Confuzion (which had a 'happening' song on the B side, as reviewed by me and my mate Dave a little while ago) and he had a hand in making GAC too. Most adventurous.
The title of this game is a bit racist but it's a kind of passed down, or traditional, brand of racism. As the eponymous hero's name originally popped up in an old nursery rhyme, almost certainly made up by some dastardly Englishers, called "Taffy Was A Welshman". He allegedly liked to steal prime cuts of meat from unwitting folk about to eat their Sunday roast. It's a pretty appalling stereotype really, so probably would have got this game 'cancelled' in today's parlance, had not the Spectrum itself largely been cancelled already long since. Damn you, Sugar!
In this game our Mr. Turner fancies partaking in a spot of opportunistic shenanigans as he breaks into a shop which sells beef. Probably a butchers then. But once he's snuck in, he finds an object blocking his way. "A TURNSTILE?!" the inlay shouts over-excitedly in the manner of "A handbag???" from that Important play about Ernie, you know the one.
And so he discovers there are lots of creatures milling around the shop trying to chomp him, or get to the beef before he does. He must whack all four of them pretty quickly, then do it again just for fun, then magically some stairs will appear and he can get out, presumably with side of meat in hand. Then he moves onto another shop to try the same trick. Must be quite the sandwich he's got in mind to make.
He does have one advantage if he can make use of it, namely the aforementioned 'TURNSTILES!?!' It's like moving the maze walls in Pacman so is in turns handy and disorientating. There are four or five across the whole screen, so Taffy's pursuit of the baddies does get fairly fast and frantic at times. Thankfully the game moves fast enough to keep up with him, even accommodating a warbly in-game soundtrack, like was all the rage back in 1985. Different levels bring new screen layouts and sprites, with lashings and lashings of ginger beer, sorry, I mean colour.
This game is included in this feature because it didn't get reviewed by the big 3 Speccy mags. But looking further afield to other publications, they all seemed to have ignored it. The only place I could locate any feedback was Spectrum Computing's User Reviews bit. A couple of folk on there loved it, one chap claimed it hasn't aged well which seems harsh, and Brendan Kelly himself pops up on there to tell us all that he didn't get paid a penny for Taffy Turner. Now that really is harsh...
So I reckon it's not a bad one, this. Quite challenging to get far in, if a tad repetitive. But it's colourful, attractive enough graphically and sonically, and overall a pretty decent maze affair with a turnstiley twist. Bet it didn't sell well in Wales though! Maybe that's why it was kept so quiet generally...
PILFERING PERCENTAGE
69%
THE GAMES THAT TIME FORGOT: 1985 EDITION
2nd place!
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