#oneaday Day 104: New Acquisitions

My parents stopped by to visit today. We haven't seen them for a while, so it was nice to catch up, particularly now they're doing a lot better than when we saw them around Christmas. (They are also reading this, so be nice!)

My Dad was good enough to brave the loft at my childhood home and attempt to retrieve a few additional bits of software that I thought was still lurking somewhere or other. Specifically, I knew that there were a few MicroProse titles for Atari ST that it would be nice to have hold of, plus a few games that I knew we once had that seemed to be missing from the collection they brought down last time they came to visit.

Well, he found three full boxes of stuff:

The contents included both PC (DOS and Windows 3.1/95-era) games and software, plus most of the ST stuff I'd correctly assumed was still lurking somewhere or other. Here are a few highlights:

Here's a DOS-era PC game from Accolade that I remember being very interested in because it was sort of "illicit" thanks to its stomach-churning horror imagery. I liked the game itself, too; I just never really got anywhere with it, though judging by the graph paper in the box, I'd at least attempted to at some point.

This was one of my favourite games back in the day: Space Rogue by Origin. This was an interesting combination of space sim and role-playing game, the likes of which I haven't really seen since. The space sim was full-on 3D polygons, including navigation, combat and flying through warp gates to get from sector to sector, while the role-playing game section was presented like its contemporaries from the Ultima series, using a combination of top-down tile-based graphics and text.

One thing I absolutely adored about Origin's games was that they always came with a bunch of "in-character" stuff that could help you immerse yourself in the game world. Here, for example, is a promotional flyer for the galaxy's hottest new arcade game, Hive! And yes, you can actually play Hive! as part of Space Rogue.

The manual for Space Rogue was presented as an actual manual for the spaceship you spent the duration of the game in, annotated with comments from the ship's previous owner, plus added coffee stains here and there.

Here's another beast of a package: Spectrum Holobyte's Flight of the Intruder, the sequel to their popular F-16 simulation Falcon. Flight of the Intruder was based on a novel which, conveniently, was included as part of the game package.

Also, when I say "remember manuals?" I'm not referring to the little pamphlets you used to get with PS2 games. I'm talking about beasts like this one. Spiral bound! Over a hundred pages!

The heaviest package among today's acquisitions is undoubtedly A320 Airbus, a game about flying an A320 Airbus. Well, "game" kind of undersells it a bit; this is a realistic flight simulator in the Flight Simulator mould, only with a particular emphasis on commercial flight, and including some game-like structure where it evaluates your performance in handling various situations.

Much of the bulk comes from the collection of high altitude enroute charts and a book of ILS approach charts, both of which are genuinely useful during gameplay for navigation and setting up landing approaches.

The bulk of that manual shouldn't be underestimated though. Look at the state of that. Beautiful, high-quality coated paper and a glossy front cover. Delicious. This wasn't a MicroProse game, but you could generally expect this sort of quality from their titles too — very much a feeling of these games being "premium" titles for grown-ups.

Despite the thickness, the A320 Airbus manual is actually kept rather readable with large print and broad line spacing. This helps make what could be an extremely daunting game seem a little more approachable.

And the final highlight for today has to be ERE International's Teenage Queen, a strip poker game for Atari ST that was my second ever encounter with lewd games, following Artworx's imaginatively titled Strip Poker for Atari 8-bit.

Teenage Queen, like most strip poker games at the time, followed a slight twist on five-card draw poker and saw you facing off against an anonymous opponent designed by artist Jocelyn Valais. Valais worked on a few titles in the 16-bit computer era, but seemed to disappear off the face of the planet following Infogrames' simple digital adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Teenage Queen became somewhat legendary for a couple of reasons: firstly, all the "spectaculor" images for the heroine's various states of undress were stored in unprotected .pi1 image files on the disk, allowing you to make use of the popular graphics program Degas Elite (for which .pi1 was its native format for 320x200x16 colour low-resolution images) to simply ogle to your heart's content without having to play all that pesky poker.

The second was that once you got the young lady in the nip, she carried on playing, until this happened:

Oh no! She was a robot all along! Oh well. Given the advances in technology in that regard in recent years, I don't think that would stop a lot of people I know.

Aaaanyway… having now found a home for these new acquisitions plus the other goodies in those boxes, my upstairs "study" now looks like this from various angles:

On the left we've got big-box PC stuff, both 3.5" floppy disk and CD-ROM. Across the top shelf from the middle onwards we have some Atari 8-bit stuff and then some Microsoft Windows stuff I couldn't find any other home for over on the far right. The other stuff you may well have seen before if you've been following me for a while; on that middle shelf we have a NES and a few games, a Saturn (sans cables or controllers), a Game Gear with a knackered speaker and partially buggered screen and an old digital camera. Then over on the far right we have my collection of Philips Videopac games for the G7000.

Here's a better view of the Videopac stuff, plus my cool Pong poster signed by Nolan Bushnell. That turned up in the post one day while I was working on GamePro; I can't remember why, because this was long after Atari had tried to "reboot" Pong on PS1. Perhaps it was just some sort of goodwill gesture from a PR company. Either way, I like it.

Here's what's on the desk: an Atari 520ST with two floppy drives (one single-, one double-sided), a Philips G7000, a Sony Trinitron TV-monitor, and an Atari 130XE with two disk drives and a tape deck. The tape deck currently lacks a power cable, but the two disk drives work. Also apparently some cat ears from somewhere.

And here's the shelf at the side of the room. This is all Atari ST stuff, mostly games, but there are a few cool bits of software in there, like the various releases of the Replay sound sampling software and some music sequencing packages such as Steinberg Pro-24. I also chose to keep all the beautiful Psygnosis boxes together up the top there.

And panning left a bit, here's the majority of the big-box ST games collection. Plenty of old favourites I still enjoy booting up there — and some new acquisitions today that I'm really looking forward to revisiting for the first time in a good few years.