Nothing beats [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner"]Lode Runner[/URL], [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANCN7ejb1zg"]Highway Encounter[/URL], beside of PacMan, and few others. I think this shows my age, ha! I especially remember the first two, because they were "revolutionizers" in their ways.
Lode Runner was one of the first games coming with a "screen editor", it had like 50 or 100 (or 200?) screens (levels), on top of which you could build your own 50 or 100 more or so (I don't remember the numbers, but they were in this ballpark). I was not so skilled in playing the game effectively, fast reaction in front of the keyboard was not my strong point ever, I mean I had colleagues and friends which were faster and better than me at these kind of games, I was more like the "chess" style player. In spite of the fact that I am an extreme fast typist, I still can't type blind (I have to look to the keyboard from time to time, like few times a minute), and "speed games" are not my range. But having a way to edit your own "puzzles" and tease/torture your friends, well...that's worth the money :chappy: I made about 20 or 30 of those screens, some of them quite clever logic puzzles, none of them were based on speed, but on logic. Stealing weeks of my friends' lives, haha... Few of those screens became actually famous for a while, but after you knew the "tricks" they were very easy to play, like a sudoku grid that you believe it is impossible, but after you solve it and learn it by heart, it is no fun anymore.
Then, the Highway Encounter I remember for graphics and fluidity of movement. That was one of the few, or first games where the authors were extremely clever to use black and white martians and street, i.e. giving up colors, and use that checkered pattern, which together made possible for the code to run about 6 times faster and the movement was extremely fluid, with no jitter, remember, that was [U][B]3.5MHz[/B][/U] 8-bit processor, yes, it is not a mistake, those were MEGA hertz, not Giga. All other games, including the classical PacMan, had a jittered and jumpy movement, compared to HE. HE was [B]fluid[/B], like nowadays high-end graphic cards. In the beginning I was thinking, "what the hack? black and white? don't they know that Spectrums are called Spectrums, because they can display colors? Are we in the sixties?". (Edit: the year was '87, the game appeared in '83 but it took a while for those things to penetrate the [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain"]iron curtain[/URL], hardware and software). Then I spent days playing that game with friends, the fluidity of the animation hooked me, and then I spent weeks cracking it with [URL="https://worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/h/HiSoftDevpacV2.pdf"]gens/mons[/URL] to see how it was done.
That game was of real use to me, as later I had to implement a psychological test (required for driving license) for a local Psy Lab, and I used similar ideas. It was my first money I earned as a programmer. But this is another story...
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