Thomas Harte wrote: > Hi, > > while tidying up a bit today, I discovered that I still have a load of > semi-complete SAM stuff I had entirely forgotten I owned. I found the > 'boxes' but not the disks for the following :
I have seen / played several of these games, but don't actually own them myself. > Splat! > Pipemania Pipemania is an immensly cool game, in my opinion, especially with 2 players. The screen is divided into squares, and you have to arrange the supplied pipe segments in the squares, to join the supply pipe with the drain pipe before the water (oil?) is turned on. The best part is when the water has started, and the pipe isn't finished yet. You're racing to put each piece of pipe in place before the water gets there, so you've got no time to worry about whether it's going in the right direction. :-) Can't remember exactly how the 2 player part works though. > the LERM Spectrum Emulator (SAMTape?) > > and the disks, though they don't entirely work for : > > Vegetable Vacation I found this one too hard. I think you could only control the direction of the leading vegetable when it was against a wall. It was really frustrating when I decided to leave the wall at the wrong time. I could see the vegetable floating towards its doom, and wasn't able to do anything about it. It didn't stop me trying though. It was great when I managed to get onto a new screen. The graphics were really fun, it reminded me a lot of Jet Set Willy. > Prince of Persia It looked and sounded better than the version I had played on the IBM PCs at school. However, there were 2 things that conspired to make it less playable. For one, the 'careful' steps were not as careful. (On the IBM version, if you were holding down the Shift button, you could walk right up to the edge, and then take one more step. The prince would put his foot out into the air, and look like he was going to topple off, then recover his balance. But on the Sam version, even if you were holding down the Shift button, the prince would still walk right off the edge of a platform, just a bit more slowly.) And the other was that it did not have a save feature. > Defenders of the Earth I never got anywhere in this game. I could only get to a few screens, and where ever I went, a little robot would come onto the screen and kill me. Obviously I was missing something. > The Sound Machine > > I also found my mouse interface box, but the mouse is entirely broken. > > Though this is all irrelevant since my SAM power supply has really > given up now, and I doubt any of them would work with SIM, since they > are probably protected, I am wondering how good the games actually were? > I haven't played them since I was about 12 (when I was actually using > the fully functioning SAM), and I seem to remember them all being quite > good except for Defenders of the Earth and Vegetable Vacation. Of those > two, DOE wasn't really that bad I suppose. I know what you mean. I can remember playing 'Fort Apolycopse'(sp?) on a friend's Commodore when I was about 12. What stuck in my mind was how absolutely huge the sprites were. A few years ago, I downloaded a Commodore emulator and a copy of the game, and was really surprised that the sprites weren't nearly as big as I had thought. (Not that this belongs on the Sam mailing list, but) [snip] -- James Gasson
