DIzzy, Prince of the Yolk Folk

 
The music for this game, from Alistair Brimble, was for me always more memorable than the game itself. It was one of the better games in the legendary adventures of Dizzy, the greatest (or at least, my favourite) of which shall be the subject of a subsequent post.

Batman - The Movie

Subsequent to the previous post, I felt that I should say something about another Batman game that I played a lot back in the day; 'Batman - The Movie'.

This was very different in style to that of The Caped Crusader game as it was a clear cut platformer, albeit with the odd driving level here and there. As I recall it didn’t have any music accompaniment (at least, not the ZX Spectrum version which I owned) leaving only the basic sound effects for atmosphere.

The lack of any music did not lessen my enjoyment of the game, in fact at the time it was one of my favourite games to play. Despite the very primitive colour scheme, the gameplay was where the game excelled.

As you moved Batman through the levels, his batarang could be used to grab ledges and move higher up the screen. Although you could also use it to swing across to the other side of the screen. I remember finding this swinging action really enjoyable as it gave the game a kind of complexity that was not often seen in other titles around that time. I don’t know if this was a ridiculously difficult motion to program back in those days, but I thank the programmers for putting in that hard work.

Batman - The Caped Crusader

This was an early game that had a visual style different to anything else that I’ve seen to date. It was done in a comic book style whereby each scene was placed within a bubble, and when the character walked off screen the next part of the location would pop up in a new bubble at the forefront. The previous screen would still be visible underneath but at a lower opacity, it was a good shot at a comic book style game.

The music by Fred Gray was also memorable for me, in particular the 4-bar intro. It’s these very small things that led to greater inspiration in subsequent works.