::scr learning to play games

[Paul Mison]

Potentially off-topic interlude. Feel free to slap me.

On 07/03/2002 at 11:17 +0000, Chris Heathcote wrote:

>I must admit these kind of games pretty much passed me by. As do most
>modern
>games. In some ways the interfaces have got simpler - I started off
>playing
>games on a qwerty keyboard, with the 5,6,7,8 and 0 key I think.
>Someone even
>made a clip on joystick to turn these into something more meaningful. Then
>we migrated to Q, A, O and P.

Spectrum, yes? 5678 0 were the cursor keys (with Shift) when you were
programming. It's slightly odd it took so long for QAOP to become a
'standard', especially as the layout of the keys was definitely odd.
(Play on a Spectrum emulator with unmapped cursor keys for a while and
you'll see what I mean.)

One of the big problems with Spectrum games was the fact you had to
stop for a choice of joysticks; there were at least three different
standards (two actually just used keystrokes fed into the expansion
bus, and conflicted), plus keyboard, which was often remappable. On the
other hand, after you'd waited five minutes for a game to load from
tape, another ten seconds pressing 5 then 0 wouldn't hurt.

Somehow I don't think you could get away with stuff like that nowadays.
Although I suppose PC games often have to have a bunch of options to
configure things (or they did, when I last played games; is it any
better now, or do you still have to choose what graphic card you have?).

--
:: paul
:: macintosh!