Combat School, retro games, imagination and broken bones. (ARTICLES)

I suppose I could call this the “Realification of Games”, but I won’t!

“When I were a lad, games were better”.
That is often an opening gambit of any retro game lover. Of course it is not precisely true for all retro games. It would be more accurate to say; “when I were a lad, I loved the games we had available to us”.

That is not to say some were not better, but try convincing a modern gamer that any C64 game was better and they will laugh at you – before trying it. You see the sad fact is, they all look crap compared to the current photo realistic games we have.

However, the old games relied on something that modern games often ignore. Imagination. I mention Combat School in the title. In 1987 Konami released Combat School in the arcades. It was a military take on the very popular athletics games of the time. You used a roller ball and two buttons to complete seven objectives, which ranged from obstacle courses, shootin ranges and finally combat training with your instructor.

Most of my friends had it on their home computers, but we very rarely played the game, even though the likes of Zzap 64 gave it rave reviews and scores (91%), you see, whilst the main game tried to break our joysticks, it was the final level that really captured our imagination.

Read the rest at Andrzej’s blog! (shameless self promotion I know!!)