I'm just back from a fantastic 10-day vacation with my family on the beautiful Italian island of Sardinia. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now the first priority has been to get an episode of Floppy Friday out on schedule. Once again this episode had zero preparation, but I was very happy with the selection of games we stumbled across. The first three games came from a "team sports" floppy (an unofficial collection, it just happened to contain these games): MicroProse Soccer, International Basketball and International Hockey (which I was sure I'd played before in this series,…

We made it to 50 episodes! I'll only record another 14 – to take it up to a round 64 – so we're getting close now. I wanted to make it a special one, but as I was a little busy getting ready to leave on holiday I didn't quite get the time to research each game ahead of time. I do think this episode has a nice selection, nonetheless. We started by playing Nemesis, which was released in some places as Gradius, apparently, and then played Flimbo's Quest and Destroyer. All gdecent games. I also tried (and failed) to…

In today's episode we go more retro than ever, dusting off an old 1970s Pong console from Inno-Hit. We played all 10 of the games on the console, which certainly made the editing simpler than usual: no speeding up needed, at all! My 12-year-old daughter kindly joined me off-screen (out of respect for her privacy) for the 2-player games. It was fun to have someone join me.     As mentioned in the video, my kids have already played this console for hours: the games really are timeless!

[I've just heard the sad news that the computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair died last night. He changed the lives of many, many people who grew up in the UK in the 1980s. We owe him a very great debt. RIP, Sir Clive.] Well, that was something. I spent a full hour recording this week's episode, although I managed to whittle it down to just over half of that, as there was a huge amount of waiting around. I hope it's still watchable enough. It started well, playing what is apparently a conversion of a classic Atari 2600 game, Rally…

We're edging closer to the end of this series (which will come at episode 64, appropriately enough). There's still plenty of fun to be had before it's over, though! In this week's episode we once again play games found on a series of random floppies. We start with a game I actually enjoyed a lot called The Arc of Yesod. The main character comes with a remote drone – how cool is that? We then loaded a German strategy game called The World, but not for very long. Afterwards came Kane, Forester and Hi Ska Do. These seem to have…

This week's episode contains another eclectic mix of ancient Commodore 64 video games. We started with Snoopy, which turned out to be rather basic and tedious. We then tried Trucking USA, which turned out to be in German. From there things became more interesting, with a fun platformer called Burger Time, a classic arcade conversion of a game called Sea Wolf, and finally a quirky little number called Pegasis.     I rather enjoyed Burger Time and Sea Wolf – as you can probably tell from the video – but the whole episode was fun to record. Here's the cover…

Another mix of games in this week's episode! It's hard to know what the first game, Road Runner, was meant to be, as it really must have been corrupted – there's no other reason for the graphics to be so messed up. The second, The Hobbit, was an illustrated text adventure I remember playing for hours on my ZX Spectrum as a boy. The third was B.C.'s Quest for Tires, which seems like it was probably a classic when it came out in 1983. We finished up with an obscure but playable title named Fortress Underground, which I actually rather…

This week's episode is an interesting one, in that it includes a couple of Italian games that I've found no reference to on the interwebs. And both were really fun to play! The first was Miami Race (that's right – not Vice, but Race), which was a very playable (i.e. fun and easy) racing game, while the second was called Pogo, which was a puzzle platformer with some really interesting 3D rotational effects. We then went on to play Mandroid and the first text adventure we've tried in this series, S*M*A*S*H*E*D. We then tried – but ultimately failed – to…

In this week's episode we take a look at four games, with a brief interlude of Nothin' Special. The first game was a Pac-Man clone that's apparently called Munch Man 64. We then went on to play two "patrol" games (which basically have nothing in common beyond the name): Falcon Patrol II and Park Patrol. We wrap up by playing Ace of Aces, albeit - once again - very poorly.     Here's the cover art I could find for three of this week's games: Only one had a review in Zzap!64 magazine: Ace of Aces was rated very highly…