Arcadia

Will Woodvine

Hi folks, new to the forum, but as old as the rest of you when talking about the spectrum :-)

I downloaded Arcadia (using Fuse until my speccy is sorted) just to see if it was as bad as I remembered when I was younger.

I think that as an older person I can appreciate this simple little gem for what it is now, and know that I was wrong in the past.

Compared to the normal shoot-em-ups, it presented something quite different I think. It didn't matter if you shot every enemy ship, you just got another batch until the countdown timer hit 0. Then the enemy changed to a different one, with a new shape and pattern of moving and attacking. You had to be tactical to progress, but still get that high score.

I also missed the 'special' effect of the booster. When you pressed boost, the ship moved up the screen to help get out of the way. To add to this, the programmers made your spaceship flicker green/red and become jittery in it's movement. I think that effect is excellent, giving an impression of huge engines being engaged.

It's funny how looking at this game now has given me an entirely different impression. I wonder if Schizoids was really that bad as well.....

fog

vic 20 version is best perhaps...

c64 arcadia has 18 minute loading time .. no wonder imagine v1 spent so much time at the tape duplicators :lol:

Sokurah

Now, since you love Arcadia I'm going to blatantly plug my own remake of it. :-D

...Schizoids is A LOT worse than Arcadia though. :sad:

Matt_B

It might not look up to much, but I'd say Arcadia is a great game, especially by 1982 standards. Some levels are straight shoot 'em ups but others are more a case of sheer survival; many are the times I accidentally took at the last thing as the time was running out, only to be taken out by the ensuing suicide rush.

Schizoids is harder to love. I suppose the flickery vector graphics looked quite decent by the standards of mid '83, especially if you only had a 16K machine, but the gameplay is a bit thin. Bulldozing the spinning shapes into the black hole might have been fun if the collision detection wasn't so awful; however, as it stands, your best bet for a high score is to find a quiet corner and sit tight before scooting off into another one and that's not everyone's idea of fun.

Ah well, I still think both of them are comfortably better than Ah Diddums, at the very least.

Morkin

I always liked the way the aliens could creep up below you and wrap around the sides of the screen, without it feeling unfair. Thought it kept the game tense, even when you've only got one alien left that you're trying to avoid in a cowardly manner trying not to suffer the embarrassment of it falling on you when the time hits zero...

Alessandro Grussu

Arcadia gave me many hours of fun in my early forays into Spectrum gaming. Yes, it looked primitive even at the time - to name but one, Jet Pac, which came out only one year later, was far superior - but the different alien shapes with their peculiar behaviors were the feature I liked the most. I can say I have fond memories of it, and even enjoyed playing it again last year after such a long time, for the Spectrum Regulation Play at the HARP.

Retrobrothers

Yes it's a very good game from the early days.
It has a lot of gameplay and the difficulty level is nicely balanced, meaning you can get into it pretty quickly yet it throws little surprises at you too.

I got hours of fun out of it back in the day.

Graz

The game really was quite a break through in arcade style games on a home system. A lot of its peers were still slowly clunking about in character squares. This was a bit of a showcase title. Schizoids wasn't. :(

But surprisingly, Ah Diddums was spoken of with interest. It gained a lot of kudos for originality.

Quazar

As a kid I always found Arcadia impossible... now trying it again I made it to level 4!