jaxphp.org|The best in online games.

I have often found that there is something exciting about playing games for money and I have to admit I do like a bit of a dabble at playing bingo online.  I prefer the side-games more really as a retro gamer fan. There are some great branded slots out there that have Tomb Raider themes etc which brings me back the old days. I don’t know if you have noticed but there have been lots of bingo sites appearing lately and I have found that rather than going through each site individually I can compare them all (and find them all!) at the online bingo comparison site bestoffersbingo.co.uk. It does exactly what it says on the tin! I quite often find a voucher for the site that allows me to spend as little as possible and more out the site as possible. I’ve found there are some top sites that allow me to withdraw money by playing in free no deposit bingo rooms. These sites are really good value for money. One of the sites recently had an advert on TV showing some astronauts dancing and goes by the name Moon Bingo. You can play for moneyon this site and they triple any amount you put in on your first go. I tend to go for the sites with the larger jackpots and the cheaper tickets as I figure it’s better than doing the National Lottery and you stand much more chance of winning. I have to admit the chat rooms are really good, nobody is competitive really everyone congratulates eachother on a win. You quite often see them writing abbreviations such as WD (Well done) or GL GL (Good luck). One of the new bingo sites to launch this year is more like a celeb magazine and gives away equally as much as Moon. They also triple the first amount you put in and have lots of free rooms to play in. I figure its worth playing in the free rooms at the same time as being in the larger jackpot rooms, you’ve got nothing to lose by playing in these rooms, I tend to have quite a few windows open playing side-games at the same time, although some of the software that the bingo sites use allows you to open the side-games during play. Anyway if you like a bit of celeb gossip but don’t like to admit it, I find Bingo Hollywood is a good one to play on.

In the most recent issue of Retro Gamer they looked at Rainbow Islands and you may have seen mentioned a little company called Graftgold. They were the original company working on one of the arcade conversion for the game but the project was passed on to Ocean Software. It sparked back memories of when I was at school, not just because I used to play Rainbow Islands on my Amiga but because my mum actually knew someone who knew the manager of Graftgold and whilst everyone else was doing their work experience working at some dead-end crappy job I was doing mine there. I had to go for an interview which I remember being one of the scariest experiences of my life, in fact I distinctly remember wanting to pass out from fear. The interview was a bit of blur, but I think a tiny bit of my passion for my Amiga shon through and I was allowed to work there. I explained that I really liked making music and was using a program called Octamed. They put me with their in-house musician and unless I dreamt this I ended up making a remix of Whigfield’s Saturday Night or he heard me playing with their keyboard messing about, I remember it being very embarrasing anyway. After playing around with their music equipment for a few days I went on to test games. Yes, thats right, I spent my whole work experience testing games and writing down suggestions or any faults with the game. This was quite possibly every school boys dream job! I was in the offices with programming legends like Andrew Braybrook. Lunch times would be a Bomberman tournament with fish and chips. This really made me want to be a programmer, my only regret is that I never made more of an effort to get to know everyone. I was very young and didn’t really know what to say!

Anyway if you want to play the online version of Rainbow Islands I have found it here!

I’ve been having a look around the app store on the iPhone and had a search for some old Amiga games, I never find anything! Games I used to play like New Zealand Story, Rainbow Islands, James Pond and the Double Dragon series just arent available. It’s so disappointing. I managed to find a few including Golden Axe which had terrible controls. The problem with a lot of games on the iPhone is that because the controls have to be shown on-screen, if you have big thumbs like me you end up covering the whole screen, then all it takes is a baddie to walk underneath your thumbs and you end up getting beaten to death! I think this is possibly where an iPad would come in handy the larger screen would make such a difference. Sega have started releasing some of their old releases. Sonic the hedgehog and Sonic the hedgehog II are now available, but again i’m put off even trying them with the controls issue. I didn’t think the control would be such a deal-breaker for me but it just ruins the whole experience, give me a good old joystick anyday!

It is possible to have good controls on the iPhone though. Gangstar is an amazing game that is a Grand Theft Auto-style game and uses the built in accelerometer in the iPhone so you basically tilt your iPhone when driving to turn corners in any vehicle you happen to steal! If only all retro conversions had this amount of time spent on the controls then they might actually be worth paying for.

As i’ve mentioned before, one of my fave game series of all time is Monkey Island, this works perfectly on the iPhone, point and click lend themselves very well to the iPhone’s interface, so how about some more? How about Indiana Jones and the fate of atlantis? Sam and max? Leisure Suit Larry? (OK maybe not Leisure suit Larry) but there are some great point-n-click adventures out there, I just hope they make it to the iPhone.

I have just been reading about Microsoft’s new Game Room. For those of you who don’t know this looks like it could be a lot of fun. Basically it is a downloadable piece of software that allows you to move around a virtual arcade playing lots of retro arcade favourites. Currently it looks like the line-up of games is mediocre to say the least but it will hopefully keep expanding, depending on the success of course. One feature i’ve read is that you can challenge your friends to beat your high-score and send them taunts. This seems like a great idea to me, i’m sure this will be one of the key elements of Game Room as I can’t think of anything more tempting than trying to beat a friends high-score. I’ve lost count the amount of times i’ve tried to beat someone at a game on Facebook only to fail and frustrate me until my fingers start to bleed! The emulation with the games is apparantely very good according to industry experts (and people who just love old games). As i’ve said the list of games looks OK but it could do with some more titles on there, I guess it takes time to do deals with developers and companies that, well, simply don’t exist anymore. I can imagine it being a legal minefield. There seem to be a lot of Atari and Intellivision titles at the moment which obviously means games like Adventure, Combat and Millipede can be found.  I hope they start to introduce much later arcade classics as they are more my era, but maybe thats just me being selfish!

I’ve only just downloaded Game Room but I was slightly annoyed at Microsoft insistance that the entire human race is from the USA. I had to make up my usual US address with the only zipcode I know – 90210 (I bet they get a lot of incorrectly addressed mail in Beverly Hills, but i’m sure the beautiful huge houses and millions of dollars in their bank accounts make up for the torrent of junk mail in their very american trash cans!) I plan to post my thoughts on Game Room after I have had a good play with it.

I never actually had a Commodore 64 but a family member did and I loved this machine! I was one of those people confused at people choosing to play the Spectrum over the C64. The choice to me was obvious, the C64 had better graphics, better sound and the games selection was good. I think possibly the Spectrum had more games, but what good is it having more games if you have to play them on a Speccy?

Anyway I remember playing Ghostbusters for hours on the C64 and I was huge fan of the films, at the time, everyone at school wanted to be a Ghostbuster. The game had some great music and I remember some speech whenever you lost a battle that said “He slimed me!”. That might not seem exciting to you new gamers but speech? on a C64? It’s a technical marvel! I’m pretty sure the C64 could technically actually play speech all day ’til the cows come home but it was very rare to find it on a game in those days.

I’ve just found this online C64 version of Ghostbusters written in Java, def. worth another play!

It’s my first post but I thought i’d start with one of the best point-and-click adventures of all time – Monkey Island. It was 1990 when LucasArts launched “The Secret Of Monkey Island” (Yes thats right, 20 years ago bet you feel old now !) . I remember spending hours on some of the puzzles, bare in mind I was only 10 years old at the time, I remember dedicating a good few years of my childhood playing the Monkey Island series, even looking back now, some of the puzzles were ridiculous. I vaguely remember having to “use a monkey on a water pump” at one stage after weeks of head scratching. It was the sense of humour and character of the game that made it unique and still does to this day. If you have never played the series before I cannot recommend it enough, just think Pirate of the Caribean but funnier and more involving. In fact read recently in a magazine called Retro Gamer that the script for a Monkey Island animated movie (which was pulled)  was written by Ted Elliot who went on to write the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie. A fourth Pirates Of the Caribbean movie is due for launch in 2011 and will be based on Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides, the same book that inspired the Monkey Island games.

It was a very sad moment when LucasArts pulled the plug and no longer carried on with the series. Fans started setting up their own blog dedicated to the series always spreading rumours of a new Monkey Island game but for years nothing happened.

Finally after years of waiting a new publisher Telltale Games has taken on the series and to be honest - they couldn’t of done a better job.  The new games encapture the spirit of the classic games very well.

To play the new series visit: http://www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland you can download the DEMO for FREE!

You can download the special editions of monkey island 1 here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/ for £6.99

A site called cdosabandoneware http://www.cdosabandonware.com/std_games_details.php?gameid=1188 does allow you to download some of the Monkey Island games for free but you have to enter some of their prize draws (also free)

You can download the special edition of Monkey Island on the iPhone in the iTunes store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-secret-monkey-island-special/id324741347?mt=8  – priced at £4.99