Gazette Galore: blogging the games of COMPUTE!'s Gazette

[+kisrael]

Hi there!

A shameless plug for a blog I'm starting:

http://gazettegalore.blogspot.com/

I was fortunate enough to get a big pile of COMPUTE!'s Gazette with disk as a kid, and I decided to go through the whole decade plus' worth of type-in games and review them.

It was an interesting time for games! I like how so many of the articles are describing the programming behind the game.. really empowering stuff for the hobbyist culture.

[neglectoru]

I think this is a very interesting project! I got my start with programming by typing in entries from Compute's Gazette. I was so happy when I convinced my parents to get a subscription to the disk (probably added years back to my life!), but I learned a lot from these programs.

[+kisrael]

I just added September, October, and November 1984.

[Chris++]

Awesome! I'm really looking forward to reading this.

[+SpiceWare]

I wrote a maze game for my my BBS that, like Castle Dungeon, was inspired by Atari's Adventure on the 2600. The maze game used my BBS/MusicTerm features of sprite and joystick support. The maze was drawn in the same color as the background, the priority on the sprite was changed to show up behind the characters. You could hit the fire button to show the full maze, done very quickly by changing the background color, though it would penalize you for doing so. The maze generation itself took a little bit of time to send over, especially as most callers were still at 300 baud, but once it was sent the process of reading the remote joystick and moving the sprite was quite snappy.

[BydoEmpire]

That is cool - my brother and I typed in a lot of those games, and we bought the discs whenever we could. Some of the games were darn good.

 

I still have a pile of our Compute!'s Gazette magazines, which are fun to read though. Most of them are from 1984, so it's great to see these reviews.

 

I thought Bagdad, Sno-Cat, Castle Dungeon and The Tomb were a lot of fun in particular.

Edited August 27, 2015 by BydoEmpire

[motrucker]

 

Hi there!

A shameless plug for a blog I'm starting:

http://gazettegalore.blogspot.com/

I was fortunate enough to get a big pile of COMPUTE!'s Gazette with disk as a kid, and I decided to go through the whole decade plus' worth of type-in games and review them.

It was an interesting time for games! I like how so many of the articles are describing the programming behind the game.. really empowering stuff for the hobbyist culture.

 

I think we all typed in programs from these magazine way back when. I used to have all of these mags, until a move and they were all lost. After that I used DLH Bombjack's site :

http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/

But I may start using yours. Thanks for all the work.

[+kisrael]

Yeah, I'm considering extracting individual game files into .T64 or .PRG files --

http://csdb.dk/release/?id=132307might be my best bet for that? Though I'd have to be using a windows emulator...

[+kisrael]

http://gazettegalore.blogspot.com/- I'm up through the end of 1985 now.

[+thegoldenband]

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the site so far, and enjoying it quite a bit. I love these kinds of efforts, and the combination of completism and obscurity particularly appeals to me.

 

I played your browser version of Heatseeker / Heat Seeker, and it's an absolute blast! After a couple dozen attempts I was able to clear Difficult without losing a plane. That'd be a great candidate for a minigame on a console compilation.

[Chris++]

I'm enjoying it as well. It's been a lot of fun to read so far. (And you have the distinction of writing a web log whose subject is unique!)

[christo930]

 

 

 

Hi there!

 

A shameless plug for a blog I'm starting:

http://gazettegalore.blogspot.com/

 

I was fortunate enough to get a big pile of COMPUTE!'s Gazette with disk as a kid, and I decided to go through the whole decade plus' worth of type-in games and review them.

 

It was an interesting time for games! I like how so many of the articles are describing the programming behind the game.. really empowering stuff for the hobbyist culture.

 

 

I really like Dodge'em and the arcade games it's based on. I'll have to try that type in version.

[+kisrael]

   

 

I really like Dodge'em and the arcade games it's based on. I'll have to try that type in version.

Cool , it would be good to hear what a connoisseur of the game thinks of it... the genre has never really worked well for me.

[+thegoldenband]

Wow, I had no idea Bouncers was based on a C64 type-in game!

[+kisrael]

Just wanted to bump this a bit!

 

http://gazettegalore.blogspot.com/has gotten to 1990 - the point where the standalone magazine got folded back into COMPUTE, and COMPUTE itself got a new publisher (the Omni/Hustler folks)

 

I also updated http://gazettegalore.alienbill.com/with direct D64 images of almost all of the games I ranked 4 and 5 stars

Anyway, I've found some cool games, and in general try to talk about the computer culture of the time, so Commodore fans might enjoy it.

[Laner]

Great idea - I devoured Compute!'s Gazette each month for several years.