jaxphp.org|The best in online games.

In the most recent issue of Retro Gamer they looked at Rainbow Islands and you may have seen mentioned a little company called Graftgold. They were the original company working on one of the arcade conversion for the game but the project was passed on to Ocean Software. It sparked back memories of when I was at school, not just because I used to play Rainbow Islands on my Amiga but because my mum actually knew someone who knew the manager of Graftgold and whilst everyone else was doing their work experience working at some dead-end crappy job I was doing mine there. I had to go for an interview which I remember being one of the scariest experiences of my life, in fact I distinctly remember wanting to pass out from fear. The interview was a bit of blur, but I think a tiny bit of my passion for my Amiga shon through and I was allowed to work there. I explained that I really liked making music and was using a program called Octamed. They put me with their in-house musician and unless I dreamt this I ended up making a remix of Whigfield’s Saturday Night or he heard me playing with their keyboard messing about, I remember it being very embarrasing anyway. After playing around with their music equipment for a few days I went on to test games. Yes, thats right, I spent my whole work experience testing games and writing down suggestions or any faults with the game. This was quite possibly every school boys dream job! I was in the offices with programming legends like Andrew Braybrook. Lunch times would be a Bomberman tournament with fish and chips. This really made me want to be a programmer, my only regret is that I never made more of an effort to get to know everyone. I was very young and didn’t really know what to say!

Anyway if you want to play the online version of Rainbow Islands I have found it here!

I never actually had a Commodore 64 but a family member did and I loved this machine! I was one of those people confused at people choosing to play the Spectrum over the C64. The choice to me was obvious, the C64 had better graphics, better sound and the games selection was good. I think possibly the Spectrum had more games, but what good is it having more games if you have to play them on a Speccy?

Anyway I remember playing Ghostbusters for hours on the C64 and I was huge fan of the films, at the time, everyone at school wanted to be a Ghostbuster. The game had some great music and I remember some speech whenever you lost a battle that said “He slimed me!”. That might not seem exciting to you new gamers but speech? on a C64? It’s a technical marvel! I’m pretty sure the C64 could technically actually play speech all day ’til the cows come home but it was very rare to find it on a game in those days.

I’ve just found this online C64 version of Ghostbusters written in Java, def. worth another play!