carleton

Probably fair. I’ve worked with loads of really talented programmers and loads of really nice programmers. Rarely do the two share a Venn diagram. Ste was bang in the centre.

I don’t think I ever played it. I’ll have to give it a go when I’m next on the 64. If it’s half as good as Big Mac I’ll be happy. Black Lamp was a rare misstep by Ste Ruddy.

Agreed, there's some lovely stuff there. C64 demo coding seems to be some totally different kind of skill set.

Well games were tested and tweaked as you coded them but obviously the developer themselves had lots of blind spots. The publishers would often come up with suggestions as well. That said I'd never worked with (or even heard of) a games-tester (latterly QA) during all my time working on the C64. When I started at Tiertex in '93 we had two full time QAs and it's as you'd imagine they were pretty helpful in finding lots of stuff. They also played in a totally different way to how a coder would in that they try and break the game with unusual behaviour. Whereas I'd check the bit of code I wrote worked as intended, often in limited circumstances and move to the next bit. To this day it's hard to watch somebody new play your game. Everything you take for granted is right out of the window in the first five minutes. I watched a VOD of something playing one of my games on Twitch and it took all my effort to not shout at the screen. Back to the episode and there's a few I've heard of for once. Battle Valley had an amazing tune and Zybex was an excellent budget game. I think the coder of that did quite a few "tributes" to arcade games of the time, often with better results than the official conversion.

Yeah, it was utter dog shit. I didn’t code such a fancy ending for M&M though.

Spoilers if you haven’t completed it yet

I Tweeted similar when Gorby went. The only other person in the game is Sylvester Stallone. Edit: Misread previous post.

Same guy did both, kind of. To be honest most of our graphics were drawn on an Amstrad and then converted down by the junior artist.

Touché. In our defence that is a desert level set in the Middle East. I always thought the criticism of blocky graphics was much more valid.

I never got this joke. Here’s a little picture I made for Twitter with the C64 games I’ve coded over 30-odd years. Not especially brown. One explanation I have heard is that the VICE emulator palette is quite wrong and makes everybody think colours were muted.

This looks great, never heard of it so thanks for pointing me in its direction. Bought it without even trying the demo, I only seem to be replaying my older games these day so it's nice to get something new.

Wind Waker was excellent on the WiiU because of the second screen on the pad. I think the Switch version might be a step backwards from that. I'll probably still buy it.

Nice!

Yeah, doesn't appear to be the same person. However when we worked together Software Creations were doing the N64 version of Carmageddon which is either a coincidence or bad data on Mobygames. Which is entirely possible, my entry on there is patchy. More so for missing games than incorrect credits though.

I've worked with a Jim Bagley and still have him as a friend on Facebook. It's not the same spelling and it's not the sort of thing I'd imagine him doing so I'm loathe to ask. He was also more of a Spectrum programmer.