ROCK STAR ATE MY HAMSTER (AMIGA)

Now that the Halloween season is over and the kitschy sweetness of the cardboard ghosts and jack o’lanterns has been put away until next year, we can take a look at something truly horrible: the music industry! That’s right, you can live out you rock band management fantasies with today’s game – the Amiga version of Codemaster’s 1989 talent-exploitation-em-up Rock Star Ate My Hamster!

Here’s the title screen, showing the late Michael Jackson wearing a space helmet. Jacko never went into outer space, did he? I’m fairly certain he didn’t, but honestly at this point no new revelation about Michael Jackson’s life would surprise me. Oh, it’s a reference to him sleeping in an oxygen tent, isn’t it? It says a lot about just how famous Jackson is / was that you can immediately recognise this image of him, even though his face looks like a low-res photo of the moon.
Also on the title screen is the game’s theme tune, which consists of some bleepy music and a squeaky voice intoning “a rock star ate my hamster” over and over again. You might think “Rock Star Ate My Hamster” is a title that was chosen just to be weird for weirdness’ sake, but it’s actually a reference to the time the awful British tabloid The Sun ran the headline “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster.” Freddie Starr was a British comedian, who did not eat a hamster: the story was cooked up by publicist, convicted sex offender and all-round shitbag Max Clifford. The fake story of a late-night hamster sandwich was good for Freddie Starr’s career, however, and it should give you an idea of just how highly Rock Star Ate My Hamster thinks of those in the entertainment business.

And a business it certainly is: Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a management sim that tasks you with assembling a rock band that will set the charts alight and rake in the cash. Well, sort of. Making money is necessary but it’s not the main goal, and to call it a management sim is a little generous when perhaps “random event generator” might be more accurate.
The game begins with the player being introduced to their avatars and the creators of this musical empire: Cecil Pitt (it’s like “cesspit,” you see) and his young protégé Clive. I think Cecil is supposed to be based on the businessman, MP and poor swimmer Robert Maxwell, but to me he looks more like Bernard Matthews. As for Clive, he’s just some bloke called Clive, as far as I can tell.
First things first, choose how many members your band is going to have. I went with three, for no particular reason. Then you get to choose those band members, and suddenly you realise that the only reason RSAMH was created was as an excuse to draw caricatures of pop stars.

Here, for example, is Wacky Jacko, your Michael Jackson analogue. The strange thing is that RSAMH has you hiring artists that are already famous, famous enough to earn £18,000 a week in 1989 money, so it’s not the “bring up a struggling new band” exercise you might have been expecting.

RSAMH has a couple dozen stars for you to choose from, most of them rendered in an unflattering manner but some treated with slightly more respect: David Bowie and Freddie Mercury get off more lightly than most, as well they should. Also pictured above, to give you a general idea of what you’ll be seeing, are Alice Cooper, Cliff Richard, Elton John and Madonna. When combined with their “comedy” names – Cliff Richard is called “Stiff Pilchards,” for instance – they’re all pretty recognisable, and most of them are big enough stars that even in the future year of 2016 you’ll know who they are. There are a couple, like Tracy Chapman and Midge Ure, that have rather faded from the public consciousness and the decision to combine Salt ‘n Pepa into one two-headed siamese twin called Scratch N Sniffa might throw you off, but on the whole they’re bona fide superstars. The game also rather unfortunately features Gary Glitter. You can’t blame the developers for not knowing how that would look in 2016, but it’s still a grim inclusion.

I can’t leave the rock star selection screen without showing you the ghoulish visage of Phil Collins, a face that looks like someone put a ham sandwich on an anvil and then smashed a human skull into it. Imagine if you felt that thing coming in the air tonight. Oh lord, you’d need years of therapy afterwards.

In the end, I decided to commemorate those musical legends cruelly taken from us in the past year by assembling a supergroup composed of Bowie, Prince, and Lemmy. Unfortunately now I’ve upset myself because we’ll never know what such a collaboration would have sounded like. I’d say “amazing,” at a guess. The game suggested I name my band “The Dead Presidents” but I wouldn’t want to be thought of as ripping off the Dead Kennedys, so I called them “2016 Was A Terrible Year” instead. As soon as I picked that name I realised it sounds way more like a student union indie band circa 2004 than the glam-pop/metal/funk amalgam you’d expect from these three musicians, but I’m stuck with it now.
Before you begin, you also have to decide what kind of equipment you want: new, used, or stolen What’s the difference between each option, besides the price? I haven’t got a clue, and RSAMH wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the details.

Here’s the main menu, where you can select which task you’re going to inflict on your band that day. You can send them to practise, organise a gig or a short tour, set up a publicity stunt, shower your stars with gifts in an attempt to reign in their primadonna tendencies or record some tracks.

I sent them into the practise room first. It felt like the most appropriate thing to do, you know? You wouldn’t think they’d need much practise, given that they’re all already famous rock stars, but it might help the disparate members of the band gel together into a tight live act. All that actually happens when you do this is that the number of days you sent them in for passes by, and at the end your band re-emerges and you’re sent back to the main menu with no indication as to what effect, if any, their practise session has had. Have they melded their disparate styles into an exciting new genre, or have they already descended into drug-fuelled punch-ups and “creative differences”? It is a mystery.

Okay, it’s time to give our adoring fans what they want. It’s gig time, and 2016 Was A Terrible Year are starting their assault on popular culture in the scabbiest, most flea-ridden pubs they can find. You get to choose your venues, from pubs and clubs to stadiums, and set the ticket price, but beyond that you don’t have any input on the gigs themselves. It should be an interesting experience, because as far as I’m aware the band don’t actually have any songs yet, but I’m sure people would pay good money just to see Bowie, Prince and Lemmy sit around on stage for two hours shooting the shit, especially in this reality where you wouldn’t have to hire a psychic medium for the experience. I know I’m excited to see what this concert looks like.

This is what I get for allowing myself to feel any excitement, huh? You don’t even get to see the gigs! Instead, you’re stuck in the tour bus, counting the ticket sales and dealing with the occasional whinging from your band members. I won’t lie, this is extremely disappointing: I was rather looking forward to seeing my band up on stage – or at least being thoroughly ignored by the regulars in the Dog and Duck – but instead you’re stuck looking at the inside of this bus. This amusingly tiny bus. Based on the proportions of the walls and the dashboard, the band are driving around in a cube.

Suddenly, disaster strikes! Prince – sorry, “Mince” - demands a £60,000 crate of caviar before the show or he’s going to quit the band. As a result, Prince quit the band. Look, I barely even have that much money and I’m sure as hell not spending it on fish eggs, so it looks like the band is down to being a duo. These events pop up fairly often when you’re out gigging (although thankfully not when you’re only got one band member) and rather annoyingly they’re never a bluff. You either pay  the money, or Cecil becomes so enraged by the artist’s temerity that he fires them on the spot. The ability to offer a compromise would have been nice, and if I could have haggled with Prince he might have stayed in the band in exchange for a box of fish fingers or something, but sadly it was not to be.

Suddenly, disaster strikes! Again! I finally got the band into the recording studio so they could lay down their first album, but I forgot that a) studio time is expensive, b) I was still paying wages and c) you can’t earn any money while recording, and so due to the drain on my finances I managed to go bankrupt and get a game over. I partly blame this on my trouble with reading the cash amounts for various things. I think it’s something about the font; I often found myself having to count the number of zeros in any given amount because I was struggling to get the number right at a glance.

Not to worry, I simply started again with three of the least expensive singers in the game: Lemmy (again,) personal VGJunk favourite Alice Cooper and flirts-with-racism, “human massacres are nothing compared to the horrors of KFC” indie tosspot Morrissey. This gives me a chance to resurrect the name Flesh Hammer, last used as a band name in the long-ago article about PS1 band management sim Popstar Maker.

An important part of managing a successful band is getting them noticed, and it’s clear that working hard, gigging a lot and writing good music is right out of the question, and so we turn to the “Publicity” option of the main menu. This randomly generates a news event featuring one of your band members, and they come in three flavours. Pictured above is the first kind, where rather than being headline news your star appears in the box-out at the bottom, accused of something terminally uncool like trainspotting or falling off a pavement. Presumably these stories actually reduce your star's popularity, but because RSAMH gives you no way of keeping track of any stats beyond your bank balance and the sales charts, there’s no way to tell.
Also note that I had to censor some pixellated boobs up there. “The Stun” is, of course, a parody of the previously-mentioned Sun newspaper, which for many years (until last year, even) had a topless model on page three. And they say us Brits are sexually repressed.

Then there’s the good kind of headline, the kind that has your star doing something not necessarily pleasant but rock-star-ish enough to endear them to the general public, like revealing their life as a BDSM slave, trashing hotel rooms or, in this case, eating a house. A lot of the “good” headlines revolve around your star eating various things – bishops, wives, hands – but the one about eating houses seemed to come up far more often than any other during my playthroughs. By the time Flesh Hammer reached the end of the line, Morrissey had chewed his way through the equivalent of Milton Keynes, with so many three-bedroomed semi-detacheds rammed into his cavernous maw that you’d expect the papers to stop reporting on it. “Oh, that’s just Morrissey,” they’d say, “He’s so dedicated to not eating living things that he sates his terrible hunger with the odd Victorian terrace.”

Here’s the third type of news story. You know, the one where your rock star straight-up dies. Usually it’s because of a plane crash, but there are other eventualities, as seen here. I like that the headline is “Rock Star Dies In Nuclear War” and not “Holy Shit, There’s A Nuclear War Going On.” It has a pleasing absurdity to it.
So, that’s how the publicity stunts work. You either (one assumes) lose or gain some popularity, with a roughly one in ten chance that one of your band members will be suddenly killed. No word on whether their death affects your popularity, but if anything you’d think it’d give it a big push upwards. Nothing increases music sales like a fatality, after all.

Speaking of sales, it’s time to get Flesh Hammer into the recording studio and actually make a god-damn album this time. Like everything else in RSAMH, you don’t have much control over what’s going on. Some tracks are generated. You hear a five-second burst of random music when this happens, which I guess is meant to represent the song? There’s nothing so obvious as “genres” or “styles” in this one, it’s all bleep-bloop Amiga ditties. Then you pick a name for the song. Do this eight times until you’ve got an album’s worth of material and, erm, that’s it. I wouldn’t mind so much if the game was sticking more to the “management” side of being a management sim, but Cecil and Clive are right there at the mixing desk so they clearly have more input on the Flesh Hammer sound than they’re letting on and therefore so should I.

Once you’ve got your tracks, the next step is to release them onto an unsuspecting world. This is a simple process: pick which track you want to release (or put out the entire album) and, if you’re feeling fancy, make a video for it. As is probably obvious by now, RSAMH doesn’t let you do anything as fun as directing your own video. Instead, you chose a director, location and general theme – the themes including such potential attention grabbers as “leggy models with whips,” “Greasy Toy Boys Working Out” and “Boring Guitar Poses.” As has now become traditional in this game, you’d assume that hiring the most expensive director and the fanciest shooting location would result in a more popular video and thus more popular song, but there is precisely zero evidence that this is the case.

The weekly sales charts are in, and Flesh Hammer’s début single “Smiley the Rainbow Kitten” is straight in at number nine! Sadly that’s about where it stayed, and no amount of publicity stunts, gigging or band members dying in sexual experiments gone tragically wrong could seem to shift it. Okay, I thought, maybe it’s the song. I’ll release Flesh Hammer’s second single, get the album out, and surely reap the rewards of a sustained media blitz. However, I managed to bankrupt the band yet again, this time when making the video for the second single: I accidentally clicked on the most expensive director, a Steven Spielberg knock-off called Steven Cheeseburger. He wanted three million pounds for his participation, money that Flesh Hammer simply did not have because I imagine it’s resting in strippers’ underwear up and down the country. The problem is that you can’t back out of a decision once you’ve made it and there’s no option to confirm your choices, no “are you sure you want to bankrupt yourself, you big idiot?” button, so I was condemned to suffer the consequences of my mis-click. Annoyingly you can back out of your decision when you’re setting up a tour, but not in any other menus, which I think I’ll just have to put down as terrible UI design.

All right, let’s have one last attempt at reach the pinnacle of pop stardom with The Shitty Beatles. Originally a four-piece ensemble with a mix of established talent and cheapo garbage, a series of tragedies and Mariah Carey-esque diva strops whittled the band band down to just Rick Astley. Ahh, remember rickrolling? Truly that was a gentler time in the landscape of internet pranks. Anyway, The Shitty Beatles being just Rick Astley miraculously hasn’t scared away the sponsors, and he’s been picked up by Joka Cola. Go on, try to figure out what “Drink A Joke” is supposed to mean, I dare you. Like everything in RSAMH, being sponsored has the potential to backfire – in this case, it was later discovered that Joka Cola causes cancer which probably did not do Rick’s popularity any favours. You should have eaten a house, Rick. The common man loves that.

There are a couple of other random events that pop up from time to time, the most frequent being the invitation to perform a charity gig. However, you don’t find out until after you’ve said yes whether you’ll be performing in aid of a genuine charity or something horrible like the Campaign for Public Executions or whatever the next Band Aid is going to be. You can also have your music stolen by pirates – the game is unclear on whether they’re the tape-copying kind or genuine eye-patch-and-peg-leg types – and you can decide how to deal with them. Every outcome costs you money, but buying them out always seemed to be less expensive than sending the boys round, because the boys always get kidnapped and then you have to pay a ransom.

Here we are, then. The Shitty Beatles, chart toppers. I have no idea how or why this happened, because I didn’t do much different from last time I released a single. This is no cause to celebrate, though. You might think that getting to number one is the goal of the game, but it’s far harsher than that: you need to release four platinum records in the course of one in-game year and frankly that was never going to happen for me.

The game ends on December 31, as Cecil and Clive decide to pack in their music management careers. I have only one question about this: why? You were making literally millions of pounds a year with very little effort! Did I read their intentions wrong, and where I thought they were in it for the money they were actually in it for the thrill of artistic expression and the adoration of the record-buying public? Why only one year? Was this all some kind of Around the World in 80 Days style bet between gentlemen? Like so much of RSAMH, it’s utterly opaque and makes no sense.
Even if you do somehow finish the game – it is possible, apparently – all that happens is that Cecil fires Clive. That’s it. You don’t even get invited to an awards ceremony where you can interrupt Wacky Jacko’s performance by waving your arse at him, making the whole exercise pointless.

Rock Star Ate My Hamster is a brisk and pretty enjoyable experience with an interesting concept and the odd funny moment, but as a game it’s pretty terrible. It’s a management sim where you don’t really manage anything, picking options that generally lead to a random result – a result with an impact that you have very little way of gauging. Well, unless a band member dies in a nuclear war, that’s fairly clear cut. Too much of the game remains unexplained: what difference do the different recording studios or starting equipment make? Is there any point to practising? What determines how happy your band members are? Why the hell did you draw Phil Collins’ face like that? That said, a lot of this only matters if you want to “beat” the game, and that’s not really what it’s about. It’s quick to play through, it’s dumb fun and it’s certainly not meant to be taken seriously, so if it sounds interesting to you I’d recommend you’d give one of the many computer version of Rock Star Ate My Hamster a try – just don’t expect it to fulfil any desires you might have for a “proper” band management sim. It’s definitely better than Popstar Maker, I’ll give it that much.

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PUB TRIVIA / BLOCKBUSTERS (COMMODORE 64)

It's two for the price of one here today at VGJunk, which sounds like a bargain until you realise the price is your very soul! No, I'm kidding. One of the games does feature clowns, but they're rather tame examples of the usually sinister slapstick scoundrels and seem incapable of removing your soul, as much as they'd like to. It's a pair of Commodore 64 quiz games that I'm looking at today - a topic that I'm aware is of very limited interest to anyone but myself - starting with Codemasters' 1989 pointless-knowledge-em-up Pub Trivia!

The full gamut of human history is on display, from Oliver Hardy to Pythagoras and what I think is the Ferrari badge hiding in the back there. It's a decent title screen, even if the Thinker has taken on a slightly simian appearance and Lady Liberty looks as though she needs a good night's sleep.

I guess that was the Ferrari badge, given that the graphics were provided by one John Ferrarri.  Not much in the way of options here - you can have up to four players, set controls to joystick or keyboard and also load another set of questions, which bodes well for the game's long-term appeal.

Before you can get into the action, you must select an avatar from an array of disappointingly normal-looking people. They do have a few quirks, mind you, most notably that their eyes have fused together into a single Sonic the Hedgehog-style ocular lump. Also, number one seems to be emitting stink lines. I'll be playing as number five, because his green background makes it look as though he's laying in a grassy field, perhaps dreaming about striking it rich on the country's pub trivia machines.

Pub Trivia's portraits remind me of the characters from Codemasters' own Micro Machines, seen here in all it's NES glory. It doesn't appear that John Ferrari worked on Micro Machines, so I'll put it down to that being Codemasters' in-house style, or John Ferrari being a pseudonym that the artist used to deflect the shame of working on a pub quiz simulator.

Here's the Pyramid of Trivia, a towering monolith that we must ascend by answering questions, starting at the bottom row. Answer the question correctly and you move to the next row, although you can only pick from questions that are touching the one you just answered - for example, if I got the sports question right, I'd be able to pick either the music of the clown on my next turn. So, music, then. I wouldn't poke a clown with someone else's severed hand, which is exactly what's happening here.
Questions fall into the categories of music, showbiz, trivia, and sports, with a special question waiting at the top of the pyramid. Why isn't music in the showbiz category? Who knows, but it works out fine for me because that means there's two categories representing the kind of useless pop culture ephemera that I've filled my brain with over the years. Of course, I was five years old when Pub Trivia was released, so let's see how well I remember my infant years, shall we?

A nice, easy question to start, then? Good, I'll take it. Rather than having to type your answers in with the keyboard, you move your cursor and hit fire to press the appropriate button, which makes sense because that's how pub trivia machines work.

And then the second question stumped me, because it's the kind of thing that only a zoo vet or Las Vegas magician is going to know off the top of their head. However, you've always got a 33% chance of getting the right answer in Pub Trivia, which explains how I got so far into the game the first time I played it. That's fairly typical of any multiple-choice quiz game, although they usually have four options so this game is even more lenient on those of us that have to rely on randomly pressing buttons. The answer here is, according to Pub Trivia, 25 years. I Googled "lion average lifespan" afterwards and was told they live about 10-14 years. Now I don't know who to believe.

It doesn't take long to reach the top of the question pyramid, and nothing much changes while you're doing so apart from the timer moving faster and faster with each rung you clamber up, although I never managed to run out of time on a question. I'm only moving a cursor, after all, and I either knew the answer or was just going to guess anyway. A combination of luck and bored hours spent skimming Wikipedia meant that I eventually conquered the pyramid - but what next?

The Money Maze, huh? I wonder what that's going to be like. Finding a path through a labyrinth of trivia questions, choosing which direction I take after each question, something like that?

Or, you know, it could be the exact same thing as the previous round. What's happened here, yeah, is that Codemasters have completely misunderstood the meaning of the word "maze." There's only one direction to go - up - and you can always see what's ahead of you. That might, in fact, be the very opposite of a maze. You can also see here that I'm playing for some dizzyingly high stakes, with a whole ten English pence up for grabs on certain questions! My character's dream of funding his retirement by clearing out these machines is cruelly dashed.

Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to touch this clown. If I fail to return, tell my family I loved them and that the plans for the giant golden monolith that will mark my grave are in the back of the kitchen cupboard, behind the blender.

The Joker card lets you skip a question. For his attempts to aid a human, this clown is now an outcast from the Dark Brotherhood of Jestership and will be hunted down and punished for his treachery. Imagine a balloon animal wrought from tortured flesh. It will not be a quick death.

And so on goes Pub Trivia, with pyramid after pyramid of questions to answer and, as far as I could tell, no end to the quizzing. Once you've collected some money, every incorrect answer removes ten pence from your total until you go bankrupt, and in the end I had to deliberately lose in order to finish the game. I don't think that's entirely down to the questions being easy, although many of them are, but also because it's easy to reach a state of equilibrium as you keep earning and losing cash. I would say the questions are easier than in most quiz games, but I think part of that is down to Pub Trivia being a British game with lots of questions on British topics. I've played a lot of American quiz games and done far worse, because there's nothing American quiz setters love more than questions about goddamn baseball. Here, though, there are questions about football, a subject which falls neatly into my wheelhouse, even if Uruguay is repeatedly spelled wrong.

The thirty-year-old nature of the questions does cause some problems, though, like not knowing enough about the origin of 80's pop singer Yazz, best known for her 1988 hit version of "The Only Way Is Up." If the Yazz-related question had been "who had a 1988 hit with 'The Only Way Is Up?'" then I've have gotten the answer right, but sadly the game wanted to know her home town and I did not possess that information. Still, there can only be so many questions about Yazz, right?

The very next question was also about Yazz. Someone at Codemasters must have been a fan.

My musical knowledge was redeemed by a question about Iron Maiden, and Pub Trivia is providing a deep insight into what's on Codemasters' office stereo. It's an eclectic mix, to be sure. It's a shame Ozzy Osborne's name was spelt wrong, but in Codemasters' defence Ozzy himself probably has trouble spelling his own name.
And finally, here's my favourite question of the lot.

Not exactly a headscratcher, that one.

Pub Trivia is a quiz game that works well as a quiz game, and who could ask more of it than that? Okay, so some of the questions are a bit too easy, and the questions repeat pretty quickly, and it's less a pub quiz and more a digital textbook for someone in an alternate universe where a GCSE in Yazz Studies is a thing that exists, but for a ten-minute spell it's an enjoyable little quiz game with clowns that occupy the very bottom of the threatening-o-meter. That said, being a home computer game it's missing the little details that really make the pub quiz machine experience: there are no old men in the background complaining about the price of beer these days, no smears of cheese and onion crisp residue on the screen and, most tellingly, no friend hovering over your shoulder and insisting that they know the right answer, only for them to say "oh yeah, it's that one" when you take their advice and it turns out to be wrong. Not a game for the long haul, then, but diverting enough for a short while.

On to game number two now, with TV Games' 1988 offering Blockbusters, and if you thought Pub Trivia was a little lacking in the graphics department then prepare for a whole new world of visual disappointment.

Overall blandness aside, the sight of this hexagonal playfield will bring back memories for readers of a certain age. The ones that spent time time watching daytime TV in the late Eighties, anyway, because Blockbusters is an adaptation of the British game show of the same name. I think there was also a US Blockbusters - and presumably many other countries had their own version - but I know this is the British Blockbusters because it's hosted by the genial Bob Holness. There's Bob now, the gruesome grey visage haunting the bottom-right corner of the screen like the ghost of an accountant who died because he was too boring. Poor old Bob has not come out of the conversion to C64 graphics well, his eyes replaced by emotionless slits and the way his mouth has been rendered making it look like his lips have been sewn shut. Fun fact for you, Bob Holness was one of the earliest people to play James Bond (on the radio, but still.)

Blockbusters is a head-to-head game where each player tries to be the first to create a line of hexagons from one side of the playfield to the other by answering questions correctly. You might notice this puts the red player, going horizontally, at a disadvantage because they have to give five correct answers where as the vertical, blue player can make the connection with four right answers. In the TV version this was mitigated by the horizontal team being made up of two people, as opposed to the one person on the vertical side. No such leniency here, though - it's just me versus the computer. Thankfully the computer is kinda thick, seemingly content to watch the hexagons change colour in any old order rather than trying to make a successful chain and being rather slow off the mark when it comes to giving their answers.

As well as the concept of making a chain across the board, Blockbusters' other quirk is that you chose the next question based on the letter shown, and the correct answer always begins with that letter. This format results in what was Blockbusters' most enduring legacy, and naturally I have captured it for this article.

Asking "can I have a P please, Bob" (the usual jokey response being "no, you should have gone before we started") has long outlived the show itself in the consciousness of the British public, although I'm sad to say that my generation is probably the last that will remember the game show that sometimes made the contestants sound as if they're asking to use the bathroom. I've got a lot of nostalgia for Blockbusters, honestly. I saw it a bunch as a kid, I owned the board game and there's something very visually appealing about the ordered honeycomb of the board combined with the VFD-style letters. My biggest disappointment with the C64 version is that it uses red instead of white as the third colour on the board. For a while I didn't get why this bothered me - and get comfortable, because I'm going on one hell of a tangent here - but eventually I figured it out.

It's because this Buck Rogers spaceship toy by Corgi, one of my childhood favourites, has the exact same colour scheme and some similarly geometric panel markings, and the spaceship and Blockbusters have thus become inexorably linked in my mind. Here I was, expecting some generic Commodore 64 quizzing, but I've ended up saddled with deep thoughts about the mysterious way memories are formed and can be triggered decades later by the ashen visage of a now-deceased game show host.
That's the graphics, but I should also mention the music, and Blockbusters does play a brief recreation of the TV show's theme tune when you win a match. It cannot match up to the intensity of the original, but that's not the fault of the game's composer nor the C64's sound hardware - it's just the the Blockbuster's theme is full on.

It's more "80s" than a giant coke-snorting marionette shaped like Ronald Reagan that's been crudely fashioned from discarded legwarmers and A-Ha singles, and the C64 is clearly not capable of capturing such magnificence. It also gives you a glimpse of what Blade Runner might have looked like if it was made on a budget of £300.

As for the gameplay, it's another perfectly serviceable trivia challenge, but naturally it has some foibles all of its own. For example, here I answered "host" instead of "hosts" and the game refused to accept my answer, which felt a bit harsh. I'm sure Bob Holness would have accepted "host" as the correct answer, he seemed like a nice man. Then a moment later, having not learned from my mistake, I answered "Gurkha" instead of "Gurkhas" and the game said "close enough" - I mean that literally, the message "close enough" appears on screen - and gave me the point. All I want is some consistency, is that so much to ask?
The questions are also perhaps too easy. Is that because I'm old and British? Possibly, but I was playing on the highest difficulty and this was one of the questions.

The easier questions do make sense when you consider the style of Blockbusters (the TV show): it was very fast-paced for a quiz, and because either team could buzz in to answer the question, the answers were generally a bit simpler to keep things moving along at a good pace. Unfortunately, the even on the top difficulty setting the CPU isn't much of a challenge, so rather than feeling like every second counts you end up with a lot of time to answer questions like "can you count to seventeen?" On the plus side, it's a surprisingly responsive game, with very little waiting around. Questions can be interrupted if you start typing so you don't have to wait for them to be laboriously printed on the screen, and selecting the next question is nice and speedy too.

On top of that, Bob Holness' ghoulish monochrome face jerks and twitches as you type in your answers, as though he's so excited to hear your response that he's attached the most sensitive parts of his body to a car battery in a misguided attempt to calm himself down. Blockbusters really does have it all.

If you win three games, you're whisked off to the Gold Run, a special against-the-clock round where you must still make a connection across the board but with a much stricter time limit and answers that start with multiple letters. It's certainly much more challenging than the rest of the game, and I enjoyed it a lot more, or at least I did once I realised that, unlike in the regular rounds, the timer in the Gold Run doesn't stop while you're typing. Once I'd figured that out, it became both a quiz and a speed-typing exercise. Turns out I'm not good at speed typing, and Blockbusters was not generous enough to accept "british nedcial asociaton" as the name of the UK doctor's union. I got there in the end, though. All the Blocks have been Busted, and my only disappointment is that I don't get to take home one of the game show's fabulous prizes, which I'm informed included a dictionary and a filofax.

Of the two games featured today, I just about prefer Blockbusters. Nostalgia plays a part in that decision, sure, but having to type your answers makes it feel a bit more involved and it seems to include a wider variety of questions - I didn't see any repeats while I was playing Blockbusters, and I played both for about the same amount of time. Both Pub Trivia and Blockbusters are solid examples of the genre, though, and if you're looking for a quick trivia challenge you should check them out, especially if you just fell out of a time portal from 1989. If you've got no other quiz games to play, that is. If you're trapped on a desert island with a Commodore 64, these tapes and a hand-crafted, coconut-powered generator, definitely play them. That'll eat up an hour or two as you wait for the rescue helicopter.

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