Timezone
Some games I played within weeks of them being released, others didn't find me for years. This game was published by Atlantis in 1985, it took me until 1991 to find it. You may be surprised that I was still playing on my ZX Spectrum in 1991, but I had been using it to write programs to help me revise for my 'A' levels and it then came with me to University in Plymouth (although at the time it was changing from a Polytechnic to a University), this was a little stress relief game for me between my studying - at least that's how it started out.
Now let me make this quite clear, this game is in no way , shape or form about Doctor Who. Your time machine has been vandalised and as a veteran time traveller you have repaired it with chewing gum so that you can find the missing parts. To save yourself from damage you have a 'robot retriever ' dog....no it's clearly not K9, how could you think such a thing! Your aim is to recover the 8 parts from 8 timezones and fix your TARDIS...whoops ... time machine shaped like a cassette. Your robot dog has a laser to defend itself but only when facing left or right.
It's a simple game, as you progress the rooms on the levels increase and the aliens get more weird and wonderful in their design. It's certainly no Atic Atac or Maziacs . I don't think any of my friends had this game , it was never featured on a covertape and in fact it's average review score from the magazines was 47%. So why did I love it ? Well to me it WAS a Doctor Who game and in my mind that green metal dog was K9. Clearly the reason the time machine looked like a cassette was the chameleon circuit had malfunctioned in the TARDIS again.
It was a quick little game to load and now with hindsight it has the feel of an Atari 2600 game. It was just the right length to play a few levels of before bed, no chance of getting addicted and needing to play it every day then.
So I'm still at a loss how I became so addicted to this game, or why. By 1991 it was the only game I was playing , despite having all my games cassettes with me. Atic Atac and Sabrewulf sat gathering dust while I was guiding my little 'K9' through rooms containing just one alien that didn't regenerate once shot. The student union offered arcade machines and pinball tables, but I still stayed in my room with a black and white TV playing this game (sad but true.)
So I'm still at a loss how I became so addicted to this game, or why. By 1991 it was the only game I was playing , despite having all my games cassettes with me. Atic Atac and Sabrewulf sat gathering dust while I was guiding my little 'K9' through rooms containing just one alien that didn't regenerate once shot. The student union offered arcade machines and pinball tables, but I still stayed in my room with a black and white TV playing this game (sad but true.)
This game formed the backdrop to my deteriorating mental health battle and in a way I'm glad it was this game, not Atic Atac or Sabrewulf , or any of my favourite games. The reason for this is that during my recovery I completely forgot about this game, I knew I had played a game, but despite me playing it every day for over a year I couldn't recall it's name , or for that matter even remember what the screens really looked like. The little green K9 and the cassette time machine disappeared in to another timezone along with the hazy , disjointed memories of that year from hell.
There they stayed until 2020 when I began to unearth all my ZXSpectrum memories , but how do you find a game when you don't know it'ss publisher, name, description or in fact anything really about it? Well, luckily, Nick Jenkin reviewed a game called Heartbroken from the same publisher. While scrolling through the other games listed on Spectrum Computing , I recognised a very familiar cassette shaped time machine and green K9. At first I was too scared to play the game, would it cause memories to resurface?
There they stayed until 2020 when I began to unearth all my ZXSpectrum memories , but how do you find a game when you don't know it'ss publisher, name, description or in fact anything really about it? Well, luckily, Nick Jenkin reviewed a game called Heartbroken from the same publisher. While scrolling through the other games listed on Spectrum Computing , I recognised a very familiar cassette shaped time machine and green K9. At first I was too scared to play the game, would it cause memories to resurface?
Well, no. Was I still addicted to it? Well, no.
The spell had been broken, in fact I wasn't really able to see the attraction to it all, other than the unofficial Doctor Who game element . But I still can't help having nostalgia for this wee little game. I don't think it's writer G Weight went on to write any other games.
But I would just like to say thank you to them.
For writing something that came in to my life when I needed it most.
For creating a time travelling game that ended up helping me take the hardest journey of my life and then disappearing so beautifully so that I wasn't reminded of it, only to reappear when I was healed so I could say thank you.
The spell had been broken, in fact I wasn't really able to see the attraction to it all, other than the unofficial Doctor Who game element . But I still can't help having nostalgia for this wee little game. I don't think it's writer G Weight went on to write any other games.
But I would just like to say thank you to them.
For writing something that came in to my life when I needed it most.
For creating a time travelling game that ended up helping me take the hardest journey of my life and then disappearing so beautifully so that I wasn't reminded of it, only to reappear when I was healed so I could say thank you.