Day 89 - A Gamer Forever Voyaging Presents - Andrew Braybrook

Hey gang,

I'm working on something at the moment that could be a fun piece, but there's no way I'd get it finished today, and I wanted to put something up, so I thought this might be just the job.

If you read my other blog, A Gamer Forever Voyaging. you might remember that, back in 2011, I did a retrospective on Andrew Braybrook's Commodore 64.  It went down fairly well, but I suppose you'd expect that because they're great games.  Anyway, one of my readers is a big Braybrook fan, and he took it upon himself to take what I'd written, combine it with ZZAP! 64's reviews of Braybrook games, and put them all together in a PDF, available for download as a published work for free!

Now, why didn't I mention this before, you might wonder?  Well, the truth is, it's my fault.  I'd planned to write more... stuff about Andrew Braybrook's enhanced re-releases of his C64 games, and also about his Amiga games.  They were going to be added to the PDF as exclusive material, making it something worth downloading for regular readers of the blog.  And I just never got around to it.  Sorry.

An exclusive look at the cover!  Get it downloaded!

For all that time, it's sat there, unloved by the masses, albeit not forgotten about.  But in the latest issue of Retro Gamer magazine, there's a look at Braybrook's Uridium, with a small retrospective on his other games.  And it struck me that it might be nice to "release" the A Gamer Forever Voyaging PDF at this time, to kind of capitalise on that.

So, here it is, or rather, the link to the page where you can download it: A Gamer Forever Voyaging Presents - A Guide to Andrew Braybrook

It's a little bit rough around the edges, which again is my fault.  Basically, Tony (the splendid fellow who put it together) knocked this up for me to look at, and I said, "Great!  Don't do anything else just yet, I'll give you more stuff to put in it".  And then I didn't.  So it's a bit warts-and-all... it hasn't been edited for spelling mistakes, for instance.

If you can get past the fact it's not a final draft, though, I'm quite chuffed with it.  My first printed work, so to speak!  And it just goes to show that there really are people who like what I do.  Many thanks to Tony for putting in the time and effort to produce this... hopefully, with my book in the works, it's just a taste of things to come...

Oh, alternatively, you can read each of my articles at the following links:

Andrew Braybrook - A quick C64 history
Lunattack
Gribbly's Day Out
Paradroid
Uridium
Alleykat
Morpheus
Intensity

Day 37 - the transfer game

I love my new laptop.  The keyboard is great, and it's nice to be able to hit the 'X' button and have an 'X' appear on the screen immediately.  I can also now recondition myself to using the left shift key and the left control key... the ones on my old laptop were knackered.

Of course, the problem is that all my resources are on my old laptop, and I need to transfer them over.  I think I'll be spending a lot of today doing that.  I've got a 1TB external hard drive which you would think would be great for that kind of thing, but despite the fact I haven't used it much, I find it somewhat unreliable.  The connection keeps cutting out, which isn't ideal.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Die, rubbish crew droid!

Still, if I want to port across my vast libraries of old games, it's pretty much a necessary evil (unless I buy a USB to USB cable, but why do that if it's not necessary?).  I've got three days off work, but I've got other things that must be done, so we'll see how much time I get for that.

I'm going to play another transfer game too, one that I suspect a lot of people will have expected to see when they saw the title of this post.  If there's one game that's endured the last twenty-five years for me, it's Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid.  It's just such a great concept, so well executed, that I never get tired of it.  And with its various "upgrades", it's so much fun to play.

I'm on the slippery slope in this game...

I'm going to have another go at Steve Turner's Quazatron, too.  I played that a while ago and found it pretty difficult.  The change of perspective and gameplay differences make it a different beast, but one that I think might be worth sticking with.

Steve and Andrew were the brains behind Graftgold, and I'd love to include both of them in this book.  That might be easier said than done, though.  I think that Steve Turner might be a little easier to get hold of, but they're such an important part of that era that this book would be the worse off without them.