Skool Daze - best daze of your life
The year is 1984 and I was desperate to get one particular ZX Spectrum game, the adverts for it kept appearing , school friends had it and it sounded amazing. The 'borrowed ' copy we had loaded rarely , so playing this became a rare treat. In fact sometimes I could spend up to an hour , fiddling with the volume control to get a 10 minute game as I would have to turn it off to have dinner. But on those glorious Saturday afternoons it loaded I escaped , strangely , back to school.
Now this game does have a plot, I don't think I ever played it to try and achieve the point of the game. But for those interested , the plot is to retrieve your report cards from the safe by hitting the school shields and then knocking over the teachers so that they reveal the code to get into the safe. It is a great story line, worthy of Grange Hill , which was showing on TV at the time. You may perhaps think that was the reason I was desperate to play this game?
The game came with the option to change the names within the program, so I could have merrily changed the names of the computer cast to have my very own Grange Hill. I would have loved to have catapulted Mr Bronson (Michael Sheard ) !
But if I never played it for the plot, what exactly did I spend the time doing? Very much like real life, in this game you have to get to certain classrooms at certain times and you are expected to behave in a manner befitting a school-boy. I found that all my time was taken up just by doing that in the game and of course catapulting the teachers and making sure others got the blame.
But if I never played it for the plot, what exactly did I spend the time doing? Very much like real life, in this game you have to get to certain classrooms at certain times and you are expected to behave in a manner befitting a school-boy. I found that all my time was taken up just by doing that in the game and of course catapulting the teachers and making sure others got the blame.
If you are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or in mid catapult or even sitting on the floor, lines would be handed out . Get over 10,000 lines and it was game over. Plus the fact that certain other computer generated characters would delight in telling tales made for quite a realistic experience! Occasionally a character would also sidle up to you to impart a vital piece of info, stay away from Fred as he has mumps , blunder into him and it was game over. There was just so much going on in this game, you didn't really need to play it for the idea of winning the game.
I freely admit to having been a well behaved pupil in the real world, I don't think I was ever given lines or detention. Perhaps I played this game to release the more devilish Julie, the Julie that would have dearly loved to catapult her detested maths teacher and would have loved to have skipped all needlework and cookery lessons? It was certainly fun in this game to watch all your classmates trudge off to the White Room and then go off exploring , until a teacher caught you. I think this was maybe why again I never tried to achieve the games objective, I was far too busy living out my fantasy school life!
To this day, this is a game I never grow tired of , there are just so many ways of playing this game. There's the long slow 'let's behave and see how long we last' game, or there is the 'devil child ' game, where I see how quickly I can get 10,000 lines (catapult everything that moves is a great way of playing this game!) To me this is still a classic game , it tapped into a common experience that many of us playing computer games were having at it's time of release, being at school.
So why did I enjoy this game so much?
So why did I enjoy this game so much?
Did I perhaps dream of becoming a teacher? Nope, although I was a swimming teacher for ten years , that career was not influenced by this game at all! There are two words that explain why I loved this game so much.......Malory Towers.....
Now, for those not in the know , this was a series of books about a Cornish girls boarding school written by Enid Blyton in 1946 . I know that Skool Daze is based in a boys school, but remember I said you can change the names. For me this became a completely different game as I was able to imagine I was inside my favourite school, with my good friends Darrell, Sally , Irene , Mary-Lou and of course dearest Gwendoline.
Now, for those not in the know , this was a series of books about a Cornish girls boarding school written by Enid Blyton in 1946 . I know that Skool Daze is based in a boys school, but remember I said you can change the names. For me this became a completely different game as I was able to imagine I was inside my favourite school, with my good friends Darrell, Sally , Irene , Mary-Lou and of course dearest Gwendoline.
I think when we look back at these classic games we look at graphics, game play, plot, colour clash, control ability. What we also need to remember is there was another ingredient , one which no game could really work until it had , the imagination of the player. Because of this we all experience these games differently. Some people played this game to relieve their own school day stress, others to recreate the world they saw on their TV screens.
Me? I escaped into the mind of one of the greatest children's book authors and headed for that clifftop castle in Cornwall.
Me? I escaped into the mind of one of the greatest children's book authors and headed for that clifftop castle in Cornwall.