First up – (genuine) new content is coming very soon. In the meantime…

Back in the mid-eighties, the big argument among computer-owning kids was whether the Sinclair Spectrum or the Commodore 64 was ‘the best’ machine to own. Frankly, I always found this a little bit baffling – Speccy games only ever seemed to feature about two colours, and while the Commodore 64 was supposed to be technically superior, I didn’t think much of its washed-out palette either.

Our family had an Amstrad CPC – possibly the least celebrated of the three major 8-bit home computers – and while it may be wrong to focus on graphics, with virtually every major computer release appearing across all three formats (CPC, Speccy, C64), on the old ‘comparing the screenshots on the back of the box’ test, the CPC came out on top every time.

Okay, I may be a little biased, and admittedly the more colourful CPC graphics occasionally seemed a little more chunky than the others, but on the other hand, I never came back from an afternoon squinting at my mate’s Spectrum games thinking, ‘cor, I wish I had one of those…’

By the time the Amigas and Atari STs of this world started emerging, we’d built up a collection of some 350 games, a total boosted somewhat by the presence of quite a number of £2 budget titles. At that price, it didn’t really matter if they were rubbish, but quite a lot of them weren’t. Codemasters may now be a respectable publisher of endless full-price Colin McRae titles, but back in the 80s their business was cranking out fun-size little arcade games that were cheap as chips.

It has to be said that these were the games that I played and enjoyed most. Other titles had a surprising amount of depth, but they were usually hard as nails, too, and I recall my Dad being forced into constructing several labyrinthine home-made maps in a vain attempt to complete Gargoyle Games’ Marsport.

Meanwhile, I was busy enjoying the likes of Codemasters’ Twin Turbo V8, a cheap knock-off of Outrun which actually looked pretty good when compared to the CPC conversion of the arcade classic (pictured below – and no, that isn’t a reverse view, I just crashed the bloody thing, okay?). Recently I got the urge to pick up a CPC emulator specifically to have a go at this game – an experiment which took up roughly ten minutes of my time. While I don’t for a second imagine I’ll be forsaking my PC oldies for a CPC emulator, I’d still like to give some of my old collection a go – perhaps it could even be a semi-regular feature on the journal (whoop-di-frickin’-do – a reader).

In the meantime, if you’re at all interested in anything CPC related, you could do a lot worse than check out the following:

Caprice – A top CPC emulator that’ll do pretty much everything you could want, er, CPC-wise.

The Amstrad CPC Games Resource – There’s a ton of CPC games available for download here, with links to reviews, too.