jaxphp.org|The best in online games.

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.