Pleased as Punch
When you come from a family that work in the meeja, you get the occasional odd opportunity. We knew someone that was making a documentary about Punch and Judy, and they wanted to talk about how it had found its way into popular culture. At this time, you didn't get more 'popular culture' than the new phenomenon of home computer games, and as it happened, there was a Mr Punch game.

So one day we get a delivery of a console and a game. Fuck alone knows what platform it was on - I remember some kind of cartridge. All I do remember was that it was the worst game I'd ever played - and a good few years out of date to this veteran of the best the ZX Spectrum had to offer. It was a bunch of screens where you had to get from one side to the other, occasionally jumping over some shit, and at the end it would shout 'Rock the Baby'. It was truly awful, but it was a game and I played it.

A couple of days later I went to someone's house and was filmed pretending to play the game for half an hour or so. Then they took the piece of crap game away and I went back to Alien 8.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Thu 11 Jun 2009, 20:55, 3 replies)

punchy!
that game was so shit! i only played it to beat my brother. it took me all of half an hour to complete the damn thing.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Fri 12 Jun 2009, 2:12, closed)

Fuck, I can't believe anyone remembers it
But I should have guessed - this is, after all, B3ta :)
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Fri 12 Jun 2009, 13:58, closed)

Depends on the platform it was on
I'm a bit biased here, as I know people from the software house that developed it, and only ever played the MSX version which wasn't too bad.

The speccy screenshots do look a bit shit and the MSX game wasn't about to win any big art awards, but it played ok (I found it difficult, at the time) and the sound synthesis did work, including on the speccy.

That was a bit of a rarity. It was early days and the only popular games that used speech were Ghostbusters and Mission Impossible - and only on the C64. Most software houses wimped out of trying to do speech.

Must dig it out and see how bad it really was..

Never did play Alien8, but did have a go at Knight Lore; that was tricky and annoying in its own way too..
(syllopsium, Wed 17 Jun 2009, 17:15, closed)