I,Robot

[Deckard]

As a long-time LL fan I wonder how different this will feel - I played the arcade game back in the day and it certainly felt......different.....theres a lot of 3d movement in it which Jeff doesn't have in his games so I wonder how that will translate.....

[Frogacuda]

I always liked I Robot. It's fun seeing Jeff and Giles plumb the depths of Atari's most obscure early 80s games. I wonder if Major Havoc is next.

[Bisley]

April 17 looks like the day

[MattyP]

April 17 looks like the day

Oh great news... Just in time for my birthday at the end of April

[Deckard]

https://www.nintendolife.com/features/i ... nd-i-robot

Whoop -

the game runs at 60fps.

[jawafour]

I just read that Nintendo Life article and it got me thinking... I bought my first gaming mags in 1984 and Jeff quite often featured in them; for interviews and, of course, new games.

Forty-one years later and it's a genuine delight to see that Jeff is still being interviewed and still making games. I'm looking forward to seeing the new I, Robot :-).

[Deckard]

The archive for old mags rocks ! -

https://archive.org/details/commodore-c ... 2up?q=jeff


Commodore Computing 1987 - The Jeff Minter page !

R ats. Rodents. Big, fat, hairy ones. ‘None of the flags in the status register are affected by the MOVEA instruction’.
Two hours of headaches and scram¬ bling about in some perfectly sound code just because I forgot that none of the flags in the status register are affected by the MOVEA instruction . . .
Nevermind. Have a cup of tea. Have a ciggie. Thank God for Kane, Hawkins and Leventhal, and get on with the column . . .
I’m now living in the house I bought in Wales, after a fair bit of upheaval. It’s raining, just like it ought to in Wales. I don’t mind, I’ve got my arcade machines nicely set up in the living-room, and my trusty ST upon which I’m currently writing softsprite routines by way of a break from Colourspace, and with a view to writing some good ol’ blasters for the beast.
Surprisingly enough, instead of me being the only computer nut around these parts as I expected, I find that there’s an enthusiastic band of STowners around here, many of them musicians using the Pro-24 software that’s rapidly becoming the standard in the music industry; the tiny local news¬ agent stocks three different ST maga¬ zines amongst the Farmers’ Weeklies. It’s a groovy place, especially when it’s not raining (it doesn’t really rain that much in this particular bit of Wales); I’ve found a shop in Cardigan that sells Mothers’ Fragrance joss sticks (the best!) and Peruvian artifacts, and if you go into Newcastle Emlyn on a market day the whole town smells of sheep. Lovely.
During the move, I had to get out all my old Commodore disks and re-stash them, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to look back at some of the games, long since forgotten by today’s hip users. It’s been very interesting . . .
In the old days, d’you know that Yanks could actually write arcade games? I mean, before the Yanks decided to spurn arcade games forever, they used to produce some pretty good stuff. Repton, for example ... not the BBC hack of the same name (why name a game after some public school, any¬ way?) but a Defender-ish game pro¬ duced by the now-defunct Sirius Software. It’s really a great game — it’s slower than real Defender, but a touch more strategic in the way you play it. And excellently programmed, too — it comes straight off the Apple and, surprisingly for a Commodore game, uses software throughout for both scrol¬ ling and sprites. Consequently, there are some good FX in the game of the sort you normally can’t do due to lack of sprites. Worth getting if you can still find it, and will probably be dirt cheap by now.
Strange, the way the Yanks turned off arcade games completely within the space of about a year. I went out to CES in 1983, and there was like total arcade mania — a million VCS games by a thousand different companies, Sirius and Broderbund pumpin’ out the good stuff on the Commodore and Atari. . . and then, a year later, it all starts to dry up, and what do we get out of the USA now? Submarine simulations. War games. A zillion text adventures. Base¬ ball simulations. American Football simulations. I could carry on but I’d fall asleep.
My theory is that it’s all part of what I call the IBM PC ethic. Maybe the Yanks succumbed to that line of argument that goes ‘I gotta do something USEFUL with my computer!’ and so they all went and traded in their trusty Commodores for boring IBM PC’s, which are, as you surely know, utterly useless for fastmoving arcade games. Maybe they figures that just having a bit of good, straightforward arcade fun was beneath their throbbing intellects — hence the great emphasis on simulation and strategy. I think it’s a great shame . . . after all, the USA is the country that produced Eugene Jarvis (creator of Defender, Stargate, Robotron and Sinistar, and arguably the greatest arcade game designer of all time) and Star Raiders . . . and what about Lucasfilm? What of the tremen¬ dous promise shown by stuff like Fractalus and Ballblazer?
Come on America! Dare to have fun again! Get blastin’! Take a rest from the simulation and intellectual stimulation and give us thrust, hyperspace, warpspeed scrolling, lasers and smart bombs!! Give US Gold something inter¬ esting to import for once! Forget the IBM PC — it’s Amiga time now . ..
Things I’d Most Like To See from th’ Yanks:
1) Eugene (god) Jarvis to write a game on the Amiga
2) Broderbund, Synapse and Sirius re¬ established and selling hot arcade titles
3) Possession of IBM PC’s to become illegal
4) Electronic Arts to stop talking about electronic arts and actually produce some (and port DPaint 2 over to the ST while you’re about it, guys)
5) A one-year ban on sports simulations and war games
6) Zippy the Pinhead for President
I’m sure you could think of a few more.
Well, that’s enough of this none-tooserious look at the American scene . .. I’m off to get on with those sprite routines on the ST, but first I’ll have to nip down the postbox, in the rain, to get this off to CCI.
At least there’ll be lots of wet sheep.

Plus never seen this before -

https://archive.org/details/Llamasoft_2 ... e/mode/2up

Plus I didn't realise you can play old Jeff games there too......Headbangers Heaven on the Spectrum anyone ?

[Valgalder]

Late to the party as in just finding out about this (Guessing my Youtube algorithms are wacked and or Atari needs to push it out there more.. ) but this looks incredible. Pre-ordered on Switch.. (although I wish I had VR).

[Valgalder]

This also makes me want to get back up to Galloping Ghost Arcade outside Chicago so I can play the original arcade again ASAP.. I remember it being a pretty freaking cool game.. especially for the time.

[Frogacuda]

https://www.nintendolife.com/features/its-a-perversion-of-the-whole-thing-jeff-minter-on-scam-games-switch-2-and-i-robot

Whoop -

the game runs at 60fps.

Fun interview. Interesting to see they want to keep combing the Atari catalog. I wonder if Atari would ever have any interest in backing original Llamasoft games too.

If I'm going to guess the two games Jeff and Atari agreed on, I'm gonna throw my money on the long shots (which are never long shots when talking about Llamasoft):

Major Havoc (Jeff loves vector and switching between gameplay modes), and STUN Runner (It's not TOO wildly far off from Polybius even with less pronounced shooty elements).

I know Gravitar is the obvious one and probably right but I said what I said.

[Deckard]

I never ever got on with either of those games I think mainly as they were rare whereI lived in Bath - I think I saw MH once in Weston-super-Mare.

For some reason I loved Marble Madness.. be interesting to see what Jeff and Giles could do with that...or Battlezone.

[Misfit]

I never ever got on with either of those games I think mainly as they were rare whereI lived in Bath - I think I saw MH once in Weston-super-Mare.

For some reason I loved Marble Madness.. be interesting to see what Jeff and Giles could do with that...or Battlezone.

Black Widow looks like it could be a Llamasoft game. But someone will say it's another Tempets as it almost looks like a tube...

[Whiteball]

I never ever got on with either of those games I think mainly as they were rare whereI lived in Bath - I think I saw MH once in Weston-super-Mare.

For some reason I loved Marble Madness.. be interesting to see what Jeff and Giles could do with that...or Battlezone.

I loved Marble Madness back in the day and I can clearly remember it was the first time I never had to pester my dad on holidays to go in an arcade, he started saying "Let's pop in here they may have a Marble Madness"
He wasn't very good but he liked playing it all the same.

I'm sure the guys could do a good take on it and certainly wouldn't mind seeing them do so, but I think Major havoc would be my first choice.

[Deckard]

Nintendo just took my payment for the download of I, Robot ! Not long now !

[Deckard]

She's there !