You don't have to be old to recognize Horace, but you do have to be old to remember being impressed by him
. I used to play the Frogger arcade cabinet at the local swimming pool, then my dad brought home Horace Goes Skiing one day, and it just blew Frogger out of the water. Suddenly there is a point to one of those Frogger games beside getting your 3 initials on a high score screen, it's not about moving 5 frogs up a screen any more - it's about a strange beings right to go skiing, no matter what. You had to cross the road to play the ski game, it stopped being about how much score you could get, and it became more about how many trips you could make and how far you could get. I used to love how if you got hit, you had to pay ambulance fees, and when you run out of money your dead - so far removed from the way other games were being made.
Quirky games like Horace were what made the Speccy. Thinking back, a lot of my favorite speccy games were quite strange, maybe too much 80's living
. You just have to look at games like Pyjamarama, Finders Keepers, Jet Set Willy, Rockstar Ate My Hamster, Skool Daze... I'd give anything to get that excitement back, the first time you load up a mystery game, watch the title screen colour itself in after drawing itself line by line. Games did not suck back then - you had great games, and you had games that were too hard, even if a game was badly programmed, full of bugs, and ugly, we still gave it a chance.
Better stop before I choke on my own nostalgia.
