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A long and arduous drive down to the very nether-regions of the United Kingdom was a pretty spontaneous, for me anyhow, decision that much to my girlfriends displeasure, she wasn’t going to be able to join me on as she couldn’t book the time off.

5 hours down and 300 miles later I hadn’t seen a single pirate, plenty of coastline but not a galleon to be seen or a sea shanty to be heard. I already had feared the chances of me finding the SCUMM bar were slim and when I got to Penzance this was confirmed.

In place of what I would have expected to be some pretty awesome pirate shops selling Cutlasses and Grog I stumbled across some very sub-standard town stores and a gaggle of emo kids who were probably running about 3 years behind the times. I guess fashion takes a while to get down to the west country.

In fact I think the ONLY pirate related thing I saw in Penzance was a small boat anchored in the harbour that was selling nick-knacks with a pirate flag, unfortunately I didn’t get chance to check it out due to the absolutely atrocious weather the UK has had over the last week or so.

My secondary objective, as my pirate search was looking to be coming up empty, was to try and find some arcades. Normally the British seaside is awash with arcades, especially old ones. I must have walked well over a mile in the pissing rain and stumbled across a single arcade.

I normally have a handful of games I generally expect to see when I go to an arcade, they are :

• Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles
• Simpson’s
• X-men
• Bubble Bobble or Snow Bros (if I’m lucky)

What did they have in there ? Sod all, I was most distraught. The seaside had let me down, the closes thing to an arcade experience they had was the T2 arcade and that’s pushing it, the game came out for the SNES Super scope FFS!

Through my entire week of hunting for arcades there was one shining light of a game that I didn’t even know existed and something I will write a bit more about in pt2.

After Burner : Climax

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Take a journey to a mystical land where Arch Mages battle for supremacy of magical new worlds – battle to become the LORDS OF CHAOS

You would have thought in 1990 this would have been a pretty big statement for a video game to make.  The UK still hadn’t seen much of the 16 bit consoles and the Amiga was still king. If a household had any kind of games device it would probably be an Amiga, Atari-ST, Commodore 64, Spectrum or Amstrad.

The whole market was very similar, you would still get the movie licenced games, which arguably were of higher quality than the more recent attempts, and the games based on popular TV shows. So in-between the copies of Postman Pat and Dangermouse there would more often than not be games that break the trend and walk a different path.

One such title was Lords of Chaos, with a look very similar to the X-com games and a massive potential it put you in the boots of a custom created wizard who was bidding to become the next ruler of the realm. The single player experience took your wizard through a series of scenarios in which you generally had to last for X number of turns and leave via a randomly placed portal once the time comes.

The blurb on the back of the box reads :

Produced by the designers of Laser Squad, Mythos Games have packed excitement and strategy into a game bursting with features : 1- 4 players can battle against each other or highly intelligent computer opponents, make potions, cast up to 45 different spells, collect treasure and fight mythical creatures in this multi-level adventure

Now in 1990 I was the tender age of 8 when my brother bought a copy of LoC for £9.99 probably from WH-Smiths, and it was quite possibly the first entry in what would become a strong love for turn-based Strategy RPGs that would still be with me at this day. The ideas behind the game are ones that I don’t even think have been recreated in any modern game and if it HAS I would LOVE to know about it.

Once loaded the game treats you with the wizard creation screen, you couldn’t simply select a pre-made wizard, you had to create from scratch a wizard who could not only survive a fight with a dragon, but also create enough minions and damage to take out another enemy.

The game was genius, instantly a hit in my household we would often spend a Sunday creating our characters, or loading our single player characters up for a bit of extra strength. The beauty of the game was in the ability to save your single player wizard and load it into the game with all XP acquired so that you can bring those few extra spells and have the ability to risk a dragon spell on the off chance you will run into a Dragon Herb on your travels.

The manual includes a token in the back for you to send off to get the first expansion pack that unfortunately I don’t think ever came out, at least not on the C64. It touted two new scenarios “Island of Iris” and “Tombs of the Undead”.

LoC is a very solid title, pretty good AI and lots of interesting monsters to conjure and spells to cast, and is only probably let down by the lack of scenarios on the single player as with hundreds of different ways to build your character there is always a different way to play and the random layout of the map each time gave the game that level of unpredictablity.

While Laser Squad has been rehashed and rebuilt in many different forms under the X-com name, LoC hasn’t received the same treatment. Possibly due to the geek stigma of the fantasy genre during the period but it is certainly a title I would love to see come back on something like Xbox Live or the DS with some kind of play by e-mail structure that would work exceedingly well in a game like this.

If anyone has any information on a remake or similar games then please leave a comment and let me know!

P.S – I found a copy of StarPaws in the box as well! what a game.

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I can safely say that I am pretty happy with the way the site is looking currently, it’s still slightly unwieldly but it will come when I have a clearer head and a bit more vision.

The reason for the title is as follows, I plan to begin to go through my ludicrous back catalogue of games and document review and possibly even play again some of the old games I have. Everything from Armalyte on the C64 up to Fallout 3 on the 360 I hope to take photos and write a section about each game and fill it with lots of lovely juicey information.

Hopefully I will start this off tomorrow so I can sleep on what game I want to start with, I have a good idea of what I am going to start with and I assure you it’s going to be a cracker! I might dust off the old machine as well but due to time and, probably , hardware constraints I will emulate the game.

Until tomorrow!