The Games That Time Forgot: 1987 Edition

Nowhere near as creepy as that one in Wriggler (shudder)

TARANTULA

(Sparklers)

Doctor and the Medics. Gotye. Berlin. St Winifred’s School Choir. Mike Westlake. While you’re getting your head around that one – hopefully you’re all avid followers of refreshingly intellectual/ annoyingly pretentious TV guilty pleasure Only Connect and so should be on the right page with any luck – I bid thee greetings once more after taking something of a hiatus on this site lately.

I spotted that I had one year missing from my “The Games That Time Forgot” series, which I’ve laboured over the past few years. 1982 to 1986 were all present, as were 1988 to the 1990s. But I can hardly leave lovely 1987 out of it, can I? It’s definitely one of my top ten favourite years of the ‘80s after all. And the Speccy was still going pretty darn strong even at that point – we were still digging it, I’m pretty sure by then?

So I’m minded to at least finish off this particular series of mine since it’s so very close to completion. And it may give me some impetus to do more on the site on a regular basis. Truth be told, I don’t seem to have quite as much time of late to devote to it, and as time goes on, inevitably one runs out of things to talk about. Quite how Paul Jenkinson has managed to do 159 of his shows and still keep going I’ve no idea. Has he reviewed Jetpac yet?

This guy reminds me of Jonah in Netflix's MST3K run. No? Okay.

Well I wonder if you’ve sussed out my ickle conundrum of a few paragraphs back… If not, shame on ye, but here’s a further clue, like they give you in the occasional helpful point-and-click game, of which there are not many. “Spirit In The Sky”, “Somebody That I Used To Know”, “Take My Breath Away”, “There’s No-one Quite Like Grandma” and… alright, I can’t resist it, I’m not giving it away just yet.

Suffice it to say that Mr. Mike Westlake was responsible for the 44th equal highest scoring game of all time in Crash (yes, I checked). Any better? In all fairness I wouldn’t have got this myself, had I not indulged in such extensive research to knock up this here review. And the irony is I actually went and bought his game myself back in t’day, and I still have it under my roof (just about, it’s actually in the attic). Another clue is that it was a platform game but not a mere JSW clone, one that brought a sprinkle of originality and fun to the by now tired genre. It had relatively small but colourful graphics, which moved at quite some speed. Okay, reveal time! If I’ve got my screenshots lined up right, you should see a picture of it directly below. Hopefully you didn’t see this first, or the jig would well and truly have been up a while back.

The epitome of a game that's so fun to play you forget to try to complete it ever

Yes, it’s (checks notes) Roller Coaster! One of those games that NEVER gets mentioned these days, but why on earth not, it was a cracker? A real unsung hero amongst classic Speccy games. And in case it’s still not clear what’s going on, all of the names listed in my first sentence could reasonably be labelled as “one hit wonders”. I’m not maligning Mr. Westlake in this, as to make even one such impressive game is wondrous and admirable in itself, but it struck me how few of the top Spectrum programmers only struck gold the once. Most got at least a couple or a fair few games under their belts while the going was good, the likes of the Stampers, Cecco, Turner, Singleton, Joffa, Price. Matthew Smith comes the closest perhaps, unless one regards Styx as a “hit”, reasonable though it was. He had just the two shining moments of course otherwise, can’t remember what the games were called now though.

"Bats... I hate bats" (c) Batman

So it’s time to examine Mike Westlake’s CV a little more. After Roller Coaster in ’86 and Tarantula in ’87 (of which more soon, this being the point really), Mike went bananas for huge graphics, the likes of which would make even Don Priestley take pause and think “maybe these graphics are…. too big?!?”. He gave the world Merlin in 1988 but it wasn’t really a hit, even for a budget title. After this Mike seems to have supplied a couple of magazine cover games only, Pieces Of Eight in ’92 and SAS Combat Assault in ’93, both of which again feature main sprites over half the total height of the screen. How strange when Roller Coaster’s were so small and perfectly formed. Size isn’t everything y’know, fella.

In between his lone hit and his huge graphics period then came Tarantula. A telling comment on Spectrum Computing’s site informs us that he wrote the game to see just how fast he could make a proper game. This doesn’t bode well, but we’re told he used some code from Roller Coaster in this one, so there’s hope yet. Maybe it’s a Haunted House type ride scenario, that could work.

This sprite is fairly terrifying despite being anatomically suspect

Let’s check the inlay then. You’re in charge of a chemical plant (how’d you get that little number?) but sadly, you’ve suffered a seepage, which is always embarrassing, and just like Homer Simpson, you have proved entirely incompetent to deal with such an event. So to cover up your failings and possibly keep hold of a job, you venture forth into a nearby large labyrinth of caves, where the local fauna have mutated and gone massive in size because… chemicals! You must kill them mercilessly before they breed and take over the world in a fab skillo B-movie starring Doug McClure. I guess it was all in your contract if you’d bothered to read the fine print…

Our hero takes flight to avoid the scorpion, only to find the scorpion can fly too

It's not all bad news though, the company has dusted off its ancient jetpack from the lost property cupboard and gifted it to you, to help in your kamikaze quest. It seems to work quite well, so now all you have to do is fly around and destroy all the eggs you can find in the complex, like some genocidal maniac. Your weapon is… ah, you don’t have a weapon. Sorry about that, cost cutting and all. Your weapon is YOUR MIND!

We get ourselves some loading art, which is nice, then the menu screen which does resemble that of Roller Coaster in part, including a pleasant beepy tune which raises a smile when it suddenly goes much faster after a short period of waiting. Then we’re off and looking at a fairly cute spaceman in some magenta caves, pursued by many an insect. He certainly moves quickly enough, in spite of the odd feature of having another key you can press to go faster still, and flies through the air with the greatest of ease. The creatures are pretty annoying, most of them homing in on you mercilessly. You get 10 lives quite generously, the same as in RC actually. You fly around destroying eggs and trying not to get eaten by bugs. That’s it really.

Admit it - you wouldn't expect SAS Combat Assault to look like Berk meets Wally Week

It plays alright for such a quickly composed game. The sprites are reasonable and very colourful, although the eponymous arachnids themselves look a bit odd. There’s quite a nice scorpion in there somewhere though. Sound is sparse but not entirely absent. So there are some good aspects, but you can see why games generally take longer than a few days to make. The lack of a weapon is a bit of a shame and proceedings generally feel rather aimless after a few minutes of play.

Given more time, one imagines that the author would add more features and give it a bit of polish, as was so evident in Mike’s finest hour, but it sounds like that wasn’t his thinking at the time for Tarantula, which is fair enough. It might have been more philanthropic for Creative Sparks to bring it up with him though before people started spending their pennies on it, but then software companies were never known for their outstanding scruples. They preferred to shout at us for copying games, which I never did of course. Gawd bless ‘em!

"Jellyfish... I hate jellyfish" (c) Batman

SPIDER SCORES, SPIDER SCORES

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