Another excellent video game port on the Atari ST and one I enjoyed playing with my brother on twin joysticks. Loads of levels, power ups, co-operative play, needing some strategy based on level design and occasionally just a bit of luck. It's a childish, pleasing game with some cute characters and solid platform gaming, with enough nuances in the game rules to learn that mean that you can really start ratcheting up the points. As for the music, this was a lovely bit of Atari ST music, featuring some truly heavy square bass lines and arpeggios that played throughout the game. Even hearing just a bit of it sends me straight back to my childhood!
I've just picked up a
new bit of kit for my bedroom after spotting a bit of a bargain on
Gumtree for just £100 and a trip down to leafy Kenley in South
London (barely Zone 5) in the snow. It's an Akai Miniak and in pretty
decent shape as well – if only for the missing knob cap on one of
the endless controller knobs and a couple of video game stickers on
the unit itself that came off with zero fuss. Thanks to some
isopropyl alcohol that made the whole unit stink like it had just
been dumped in a vat of vodka, the stickers left no marks either and
in general the unit is solid, working and with no scratches or dents
at all. This post is more of a kind of "first impressions" review after I've had a better chance to sit down and play with it for a few hours.
A recent article on the
Beeb (that's the BBC for overseas readers) caught my eye the other
day, which claimed that chart topping artists had at some point
fabricated their successes in order to get noticed by DJs, record
labels and other artists. In singles out a company that would
arrange for videos on YouTube or tracks on Soundcloud to receive set
numbers of hits and accompanying comments to back up the legitimacy
of the "traffic". In doing so, this increases the
visibility of the work on the site, at which point it starts to pick
up organic hits and thus into the headspace of industry
professionals.
