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Punching Robots 2084

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  • Byte Driver

    A screenshot from Byte Driver. It's a black and white racing game done in the style of a Vectrex game. The mountains in the background are lines, the road is a bendy line, the car is also made up of lines.

    Byte Driver is a neo-vectrex vroom vroom videogame. The vroom vroom is important because Byte Driver is speedy in a very specific early eighties arcade/home computer kind of way.

    It’s a game where every turn is a really wide turn, every straight a chance to try and go fast without crashing into a mine, some bullets, or something videogamey.

    You go forward, you go fast. You take a turn, you go fast. Vroom Vroom.

    Sometimes, you slow down to hack a car and then you have to make a choice really fast. Hacking a car throws up a menu with some goodies to choose from, which is so far so videogame, except you’re still in a car going fast. That’s still going fast whilst you try and choose whether you want to upgrade something or cadge some energy in order to survive, in case you weren’t managing to keep up.

    Without energy, you won’t be going fast any longer. You won’t be going anywhere because it’ll be game over.

    Here’s a quick video to show how it works:

    Yeah, yeah, I died pretty quick there, you can stop laughing now.

    Byte Driver is available on Steam and Itch in exchange for some money. Needless to say, I enjoyed it.

  • Inferno 2

    It's neon maze. The walls are blue with rounded corners, the rest is a sea of shapes and colours exploding.

    Please sir, I cannot tell a lie – I absolutely love Radian Games stuff. One of the select few developers that I’m fairly likely to grab pretty much anything and everything they put out, if at all possible.

    Whilst their very first XBLIG release (the wonderfully titled “Joy Joy”) slightly missed the mark for me, I’ve enjoyed just about everything I’ve played of their twin stick and shootybang games since, XBLIG, phone and on. I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite (seriously, I like them that much) but if you really made me choose, Inferno in all its incarnations would be pretty much near the top of my list.

    Again, a blue neon maze but now with even more explosions and brighter colours.

    It was the easiest sell for me. It’s essentially Berzerk meets Gauntlet with the faintest hint of ARPG to it. Pretty much the kind of game I’ve spent the best part of 40 years losing hours to and I don’t really see any reason to change in that regard. Especially not whilst I’m still enjoying myself so much with that kind of thing.

    You no doubt know the drill already. You find yourself in a maze, you have to get to the exit. Between you and the exit lies an enormous amount of enemies and a number of locked doors. Collect keys to pass through the doors, use lasers to get rid of the enemies. Get to the exit, find yourself in a new maze with more enemies, more doors more keys and do it all again.

    It’s a videogame in the absolute purest sense. A direct descendant of I don’t know how many arcade and home computer games, a game that does exactly what it needs to do with absolutely no bloat or complication. A game where you get from one end of a maze to another, with colourful lasers.

    I love it.

    More colours, shapes and explosions. The maze is a deep blood red now.

    I love that there’s very little in it that couldn’t have existed in the eighties but also, it absolutely could not have existed as the game it is then. The upgrade shop, the absurd amount of particles, the much more relaxed difficulty curve make it more a game of the now. Did I mention the absurd amount of particles? It has an absurd amount of particles. It’s great. I love particles, me.

    Anyway, it’s been around a few years on the PC but with it recently (finally!) seeing a console release I’ve been playing through it all over again and yep, still works for me. Still works for me very well indeed.

  • The 5 Most Useful New Blocks In Minecraft Bedrock 1.17.007 for Windows/PS4/Xbox One/GX4000

    A fancily dressed skeleton with a fine pipe and hat introduces the top 5, an occasional series of lists of 5 things not to be taken entirely seriously.
    1. Crenellated Goose
    2. Eggy Trevor
    3. Glass Eye
    4. Three Quarter Witch Armament (Green)
    5. Multi-layer Thermal Insulation – 1.2m x 10m (12m2)

You are reading Rob’s Punching Robots Club

The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.

Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.

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