Creepy Christmas Animation

A quick post of a couple of cartoons to kick things off! the first one is just a bit creepy, and the second one is....well...Casper and friends, so suitably spooksome! 

The 13 Days Of Creepmas!

Yes, it's that time of year again where we try to extend the creepiness of Halloween into the even darker December days, in retaliation to Christmas trying to edge it's way out towards Halloween!

Over the next 13 days I'll be posting more spooky stuff to fill you with winter chills, so keep a cup of mulled wine handy to bring a bit of warmth back to your fright-frozen heads!

And remember to click the badge at the top of this post, or at the right hand top of the page, to be zapped away to a list of all the other participants in this year's creepy countdown!

My Gaming History - Part 3.1 - Other People's Pixels (Atari)

Before I finally got my hands on my own computer to play games on, and when I wasn't able to get to an arcade or got bored with my handhelds, there was always somewhere else I could go for my gaming fix....friends houses! It would often seem like everybody had a computer or console except me, especially in the late '80s, but at least there was a few people I could rely on to let me play on their machines....

My cousin was one of the first people I remember always having cool game systems, and whenever I visited I'd try and persuade her to play on them at least for a little while, before we ventured outside and played Tarzan (she was always Tarzan, I was Cheetah) or The A-Team (everybody wanted to be Murdoch)...

The Atari 2600 was the first one I played, but as it was early on my actual memories of it are pretty hazy. The only game I really remember playing  was Pitfall....

Pitfall - Atari 2600

I won't spend much time writing about Pitfall, as pretty much everybody who reads this should know what the games about! If you don't, you play an Indiana Jones type character who has to swing over pits and crocodiles, avoiding other nasties, quicksand and rolling logs and trying to find as much treasure as possible!

It's pretty much credited with creating the whole side-scrolling-platform genre, so if you've never played it you'd better seek it out so as you can maintain your "proper gamer" credentials!

I'm sure there were other games I played on my cousin's Atari, but this is the one that sticks in my memory, and it was very influential in getting me to buy many of the handhelds and tabletops in the previous blog post. It would be a while before I really experienced proper home computer games though....

Many years later, when I was almost 12, I moved home from a small group of cottages in the middle of nowhere, to a village with slightly more houses, but still in the middle of nowhere! There was still a much larger population of kids there though, one of whom was a girl who I'd grew up with at the farm who had moved away a few years previously, but had also come to stay in the new houses being built in the village. Our friendship was rekindled and we started hanging out, going on adventures in the surrounding countryside with the other kids or having epic cycle races round the block! I eventually discovered that she was the owner of an Atari ST 5200FM, and yet another batch of games would add fuel to the fire of wanting my own computer....

Barbarian (Atari ST)

As you will have noted in previous posts, I'm a sucker for the Fantasy genre, so when I discovered this game that basically let me be Conan and behead enemies, I was very intrigued! This was the first one-on-one fighter I had played that had weapons, and also the first that I remember learning the moves for! Later, when battling with my friend's little brother on woodchip piles left out the front of our houses, using canes stolen from their garden, I would impress him with the Web Of Death move I had taught myself after seeing it in Barbarian! Hehe...

My favourite bit of this game though is when you lop your opponents head off, and a little green lizard dude comes walking on, kicks the head off screen, gives a little chuckle and drags your defeated opponent's corpse off somewhere..

Anyway, as fighting games go, Barbarian is one of the best of its era, and if you haven't played it yet, you really should hunt it down and give it a go. The presentation and music are excellent too, and its still pretty groovy even today!

Quadralien (Atari ST)

My memory of this game is a bit weird...mainly because it's less about having played the game, and more about trying to work out how exactly to play the thing! My friends dad worked in a computer lab y'see, and most of the games she had for this ST were 'acquired' from certain individuals with wooden legs and eyepatches. This meant that they rarely came with any form of instructions, so if you got anything a little more complicated than a shoot-em-up, you would have to try and work out what buttons did what and what the hell it was that you were actually meant to be doing...

Apparently, the plot involves aliens taking over a large reactor in space and sabotaging it so as it's dangerously close to exploding, and you have to move barrells and orbs of radioactive material down chutes, or destroy them in other ways, whilst battling aliens at the same time. You do this by using droids with different abilities, but can only take two droids into a level at once, meaning you have an added strategic element in trying to work out what droids you'll need to solve the Sokoban-style puzzles...

Given all this, it's no wonder we didn't have a clue what we were doing when we tried to play this without instructions! Nobody ever wanted to try and work it out except me, and I'd sometimes get my friend or her brother to load it up just so as I could listen to the groovy music! Nowadays, I have a bit more of a clue what's going on, but still find it damned tricky! Still it's well worth a go if such puzzley-strategy-type things are your bag.... 

Black Lamp (Atari ST)

Another great fantasy game that had me hooked from the first play was this tale of a poor Jester trying to win the heart of a princess which he does by returning the coloured lamps stolen by evil dragons who have invaded the kingdom! By returning the lamps, the protection spells that kept the kingdom safe from marauding monsters will be put back in place, and the day will be well and truly saved!

I loved wandering around the lovely little villages and castle in this game, battling the evil monsters that have started attacking due to the lack of the aforementioned protection spells...and I remember being really impressed the first time I came across a dragon, killed it and retrieved the fabled Black Lamp of the title!  It really struck a chord with me and I later came up with several ideas for my own games (none of which I ever made) based around very similar settings....

Eddie Edwards Super Ski (Atari ST)

Hehe...this marvelous game of skiing sticks in my memories not for the actual game itself, but for the memory of what happened one fateful afternoon when several of the local kids had gone to my friend's house to play it...

Being only a single player game, we passed the joystick from player to player as we took turns to ski down the slopes and try to beat each other's times. There must have been about 5 or 6 of us there that day, which was a bit more than the usual 2 or 3, so the joystick was getting a bit of a hammering. One girl was a bit more heavy handed than the rest of us though, and after she'd had a go, the next person on discovered that suddenly the skier would shoot of to the right of the screen and not do much else..

Funnily enough, it was upon noticing this that a very strange event happened...The girl seemed to obtain amazing auditory powers and could hear her mother calling her from the other end of the village! Nobody else could hear this, but she assured us that this was the case and she had to rush home as soon as possible, leaving the rest of us to inform the girl whose computer it was (who bizarrely wasn't even there that day) about the broken joystick. Needless to say it was a while before we got back in to play the ST again....

Starquake (Atari ST)

This is quite possibly my favourite platformer ever, and I'm not even sure it can properly be called a platformer! It was after playing this that I found myself making excuses to visit my friend a lot more often, so I could have another go at trying to beat this gem of a game. Many, many fond memories of playing it, including a run when all I seemed to find where the extra life joysticks meaning I could play for ages and almost complete it!

You play the part of B.L.O.B., and odd little creature tasked with repairing the unstable core of a rogue planet that has appeared from a random black hole. To do this, you must roam the planet looking for items you'll need to take to the core and use to repair it.

To help you, you'll find lots of little teleportation huts that you can zip between to save time. To do this though, you'll need to learn the passwords, and finding these out added another fun element to the game! Careful management of your extra platforms (which you seem to poop out by pressing down), health and ammo is also required...and to really get around you'll need to find the Access card pretty early on too!

All this adds up to a surprisingly strategic yet simple game that's loads of fun to play! I might go and give it another go actually after writing this...I never managed to beat the ST version, only the Speccy version...

Marble Madness (Atari ST)

Quite a few nice memories of playing this game too, but another one that we were all pretty bad at. Trying to navigate a marble down an isometric maze courses whilst avoiding tubes, drops and acid puddles is even trickier than it sounds! We had fun trying to beat each others progress through the levels though!

I seem to have a false memory of this being played on some late eighties gameshow, like First Class or something, but apparently it wasn't, and I might be mixing it up with 720° which definitely was played on First Class...still, if anybody else reading knows if they did play it on any random TV programs, let me know in the comments....

Nebulus (Atari ST)

This was another one that looked really cool, but none of us could get the hang of...it's amazing how many games we just couldn't get very far in but played nonetheless! A bit different from nowadays where there's so many games flying around that if you can't work something out in 5 minutes, it's consigned forever to the "Naaah!" pile....

You have to navigate your little frog-like character up a rotating tower, avoiding traps and enemies, which can either knock you further back down the tower or into the sea, causing you to lose a life...Revisiting this game recently, I was finally able to get a bit further than the first level, and I discovered a nice little side-scrolling shooter section, where frog-dude pilots a submarine to get to the next tower! I can only imagine how excited we all would have been if we'd managed to see that back in the day! But yeah, now that I can actually play it, it's not a bad wee game at all! Quite addictive....

Buggy Boy (Atari ST)

Now this is one we could play! A brilliant little driving game where you control a beach buggy, racing to the finish line trying to drive through point gates and collect flags whilst avoiding trees, walls, spikes and various other obstacles!

It's a really well presented, bright and fun game, and again we all had a blast trying to get further than the person playing before us! I have many fond memories of spending sunny afternoons playing this when we should probably have been out on our bikes or something instead! Hehe....

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So that was some of the games that further fed my craving for games, but before I finally managed to get my grubby little paws on my Speccy +2a, there was another 8-bit that almost swung me to the dark side....the Commodore 64! And we'll take a look at what games took my fancy on that machine in another post some other time...... :-) 

A Most Successful Countdown...(+ A Look at Some Other Countdowners)

Well, after worrying about not getting things done for Halloween this year, this has turned out to be my most successful Countdown yet! Not giving myself any deadlines or numbered posts has helped a great deal, as has my discovery of Blogger's scheduled posts! I"m not even here right now, having gotten a last minute Halloween call-to-severed-arms!!

As It's not quite the end of Halloween yet, I'll point you in the direction of some of the other great bloggers who have been posting all throughout October as part of the Countdown, who you should have been looking at anyway if you paid attention to my post at the start of the Countdown....

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First up, to see posts about all things Halloween and some awesome decorations go to Maple Grove Cemetery! Where you'll also find funnies such as the one below...

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For toons, tunes and a great A-Z of of alien invasion movies, check out The Goods!

"D"

is for 

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS

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For a look at some cool spooky toys, like this Dybbuk, check out Action Figure Barbecue...

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And to check out what sorts of amazing Halloween related stuff you can find if you rummage around Garage Sales, check out Garage Sale Finds! Always amazing stuff to be found here....

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For a whole host of Halloween short movies, head over to Halloween Short Films!

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And that's just a few of the 140+ blogs that have been taking part. so you can't use the excuse that there's nothing to do this Halloween! 

As for me, I'm going to take a break for a few days at least, and go catch up on some of the other blogs myself! If you head over to Deadpan Flook's Gruesome Games you'll find daily reposts of previously covered games though! And I'll see you back here soon for some non-Halloween-type comic bits and looks at games, etc.

Oh, and if you can't wait till next year for more spooksomeness, remember there's always Creepmas in a month or so! ;-)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Another Earful Of Eerieness - Spooky Old Radio Shows

It's been a while since I put up some old radio shows! If you'd rather settle back and let your imagination paint the pictures instead of  watching the TV shows in the previous post, then this is the post for you! Just click on the videos below, turn away from your screens and let your imagination run away with you....

The Devil Doctor (The Witch's Tale 1934)

After purchasing an historic manor house in England, an American discovers that one of the promised 106 de Caseract family portraits is missing. He summons a local expert, the Reverend Mr Roberts, for an explanation and discovers the portrait isn't missing... it is hidden. For a very good reason.

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Valse Triste (Lights Out 1942)

Two city women vacationing in the country lose their canoe and seek help within the dark woods. Coming upon a cabin, the women are then terrorized by a mad fiddler obsessed with chance who is intent on making one of them his bride and murdering the other.

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Three Skeleton Key (Escape 1953)

Three men are besieged in a lighthouse when a ship wrecks on the shoal and releases a horde of starving rats. Narrated by our old friend Vincent Price......

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Behind The Locked Door (The Mysterious Traveler 1951)

An archaeological expedition to the Vermillion Cliffs of Arizona seeks to uncover ancient Aztec artifacts... but, instead, finds a cave with a bizarre and deadly legacy.

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Possessed By The Devil (CBS Mystery Theatre 1974)

A young boy who happens to be a minister's son is admitted to a hospital with fatal wounds. Though his health improves, he has lost his soul forever.

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(With thanks to Plot Spot - Plot Archives, The Nitrate Diva and The CBS Radio Mystery Theatre for plot details and inspiration....)

Cinema Of Stuff Presents....More '70s TV Horrors

Here's a host of spooky stories from more '70s TV shows.....this should keep you entertained if there's nothing on TV tonight!


Ghost Story is a great series from Screen Gems and Columbia Pictures in 1972, that later became Circle Of Fear...Circle Of Fear lost the host, an eccentric gentleman called Winston Essex, which is a bit of a shame as he gives the series a nice old fashioned feel!

Anyway, it's stories from when it was still Ghost Story that I'll be posting tonight....First up is a rather familiar tale of a lady feeling somewhat uncomfortable in a new home........

Next we have a TV that predicts the future, some zombies and a huge dose of guilt......

And then we have this tale of a woman who finds her husband has checked out of their hotel without telling her...but that turns out to be the least of her worries....



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Beasts is an ATV series I discovered thanks to a comment on the Shadows post by Two Headed Boy, and I can see what he means about the series not quite clicking....still, here's a couple of episodes so you can see if you like it yourselves! This one where a shop's mascot seems to have suddenly sprung into life....

And this one, which is another tale of a pregnant woman who doesn't like a new house! Estate agents must have really had to work hard in the seventies trying to please all these newly married, pregnant young couples.....



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From the BBC's 1977 series Supernatural we've got giant puppets that might have inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.....



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And it just wouldn't be Halloween without a visit from blog regular, Vincent Price, who has a few tales to tell in this 1979 treat, Once Upon A Midnight Scary from CBS!

Return Of The Gruesome Games - Zombo (ZX Spectrum)

Artwork by Henry Flint

Zombo (ZX Spectrum) : 

Last year, my brother made another ZX Spectrum game...but this time it wasn't a Freescape game like Dead By Dawn, but an arcade adventure created using AGD! And this one is based on the character Zombo from the comic 2000AD!

Seeing as I'm short of time, and as it would probably be a bit wrong for me to tell you how awesome the game is (yes, even the "feature" when you get trapped in the scenery) I'll just copy and paste the info about the game straight from his blog!

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"You've read the comic, you've bought the action figure, now play the brand new game for the ZX Spectrum!

Not a dream! Not an imaginary thing like what someone does for a joke or something! This is the real thing - an actual thing that you can download right now, right here.

FEATURES

Predefined keys!

The ability to fire in two different directions - left and right!

Roughly ten whole minutes of semi-challenging gameplay!

Random teleportations into different areas, becoming trapped in the scenery for all eternity!

More stuff from the comic. © 2015 Rebellion.

THE PLOT

When Flight 303 crash-lands on the proto-sentient and highly lethal deathworld known as Chronos, it does not bode well for the surviving passengers. Only one well-mannered zombie/man hybrid can save the day. He is Zombo, the result of a top secret Government™ experiment to create the ultimate soldier or weapon or something. Trust your Government™.

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GAMEPLAY

You must rescue 6 survivors and defeat the secret end of game baddy to win. Colour coded keys are scattered around the planet, as are several other items, some of which may help, others of which may not, but there's a gun somewhere which'll probably come in handy. However, please bear in mind that the Shootybang 2000™ can only fire horizontally. To fire vertically, you'd require an upgrade to the Shootybang 3000™ and that's not available to you within this game.

CONTROLS

Kempston Joystick

Sinclair Joystick

Keyboard 

Q - Up

A - Down

O - Left

P - Right

SPACE - Fire

H - Pause

3 - Instantaneous Death Button (Quit Game)

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BADDIES

      Killer Space Fruit - Bounces, requires 1 shot to kill.

        Killer Space Scorpion - Moves erratically, requires 1 shot to kill.

      Killer Mutant Space Hillbilly - Moves vertically, unkillable.

        Killer Space Zombie - Moves horizontally, unkillable.

        Killer Rogue Death Shadow - Follows player, requires multiple shots to kill.

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WHY HAVE YOU MADE A ZX SPECTRUM GAME ABOUT ZOMBO?

Because the plot of the 2000 AD comic strip is exactly the sort of bizarre premise that a lot of those old 8-bit games used to have, and I knew there was software available that meant that I could if I wanted to, (in this case, Arcade Game Designer by Jonathan Cauldwell). Add to that the strangely British sensibilities and twistedly nostalgic pop culture references, and a slightly buggy game for the Spectrum just seemed a perfect tie-in.

This is a completely unofficial, not-for-profit fan-game by Malcolm Kirk.

Programmed in Jonathan Cauldwell's Arcade Game Designer.

Zombo™ Rebellion A/S, © Rebellion A/S.

Splundig Vur Thrigg, as they say on Quaxxan."

DOWNLOAD THE GAME HERE!

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So there you go! A nice wee homebrew gem for you to play this Halloween!

Here's what some other retro-inclined folk made of it.....

You can find a walkthrough, a map and more info at my brother's blog, where hopefully later today you'll also be able to find the latest issue of Hallowscream, the comic put together every year by my brother and other Scream fans! You can also find links to the old issues, like last year's which you can see the cover of below!

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That's probably not it for Gruesome Games quite yet this year...there's still Creepmas to look forward to...and if you head over to the new blog you can find a re-post of the Freddy vs Jason special I did, with the added bonus of some extra stuff about the new Friday The 13th game due out next year! 

I'll see you for a few more posts later today...yes, more posts! It is Halloween y'know!! ;-)

The Parting!

Time for another trip to the Digital Comic Museum, where Cimmerian32's scan of  Fiction Comic's Ghost Comics No.1 (1951) gives us another reason to be wary of ventriloquists dummies!