Issue #60 of White Dwarf magazine includes reviews of three Games Workshop computer games: Battlecars, D-Day, and Tower of Despair. Because they were all released for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer, which was, so far as I know, unavailable on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, I never saw (or played) the actual games themselves. Instead, I had to content myself with the advertisements that appeared in WD. Of the three, I'd have probably been most interested in Battlecars, because I always wanted to play the tabletop version of the game, but couldn't find a copy.
Did any readers own and/or play any of these games? If so, were they any good? Even after all these decades, I remain genuinely curious about them.
Had the board game Battlecars (which used the same cover art) but not the PC game. It was nothing to write home about, certainly a weak effort compared to Car Wars. Way better than Dark Future though - you literally could not drive off the road in that game, nor could you make a 90 degree turn. 180, sure, no problem, but 90? Madness! GW car games were a thoroughly mediocre lot.
ReplyDeletePretty sure I've seen the art from both the other ones somewhere as well - maybe novels?
Sinclair licensed Timex to make their computers in the US, so they were available here, but the Timex Sinclair 2068 was different enough from the Spectrum that it had trouble running Spectrum software. I don't think the GW games got sold in the US; I know my friends with Timex Sinclairs didn't have them.
ReplyDeleteActually I see from the pictures you include that GW intended to market the games for Commodore 64. I wonder if that happened. Certainly I didn't have them, and I got lots of games for the C64.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, my eyes fail me. Thanks for pointing that out.
DeleteTower of Despair seems to be the only one that actually got released for C64, probably because it was a text adventure and easy to convert.
DeleteSo a heads up, you can play SJ Games Ogre on the computer now.
ReplyDeletehttps://store.steampowered.com/app/517780/Ogre/
And there a whole line of Warhammer games now including Dark Future.
https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/warhammer
We played a lot of Battlecars on the spectrum and loved it. I think we took turns designing our cars (loadout, weight, speed etc), then played out a match - it came with 2 little card overlays you placed over the keys to show what keys were what, then you'd share the keyboard between you. The 48k spectrum with its odd rubber keys was pretty small too, so just as well we were only kids or I'm sure it would have been unplayable! We never did play the board game, but we were big Car Wars fans and I think we regarded the Battlecars boardgame as an inferior simplification (at that age we regarded complexity as a sign of maturity or something)
ReplyDeleteI think Tower of Despair was written by Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith of Way of the Tiger gamebook fame, and the tower also makes a cameo in the second Fabled Lands gamebook.
ReplyDeleteI owned a Spectrum 48K and I have a vague recollection of playing that D-Day game. The rubber keyboard on my Spectrum broke down a long time ago, but I still have that little machine, and show it to my students every year in my "History of Computer Science" class I teach. Mostly it's about the history of academic computer science, but there's also a small show-and-tell session about hobby computer in the early 80s. ;-)
ReplyDeleteChaos was the best game they released and it's brilliant https://www.retroheadz.com/retro-games/chaos-the-battle-of-wizards-spectrum-review/
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