A Psygnosis Retrospective....

[Fred the Fop]

On this site is a great little article on the much misunderstood Psygnosis.

http://cache.cow.net/psygnosis/history/borrowedtime.html

[Dastardly]

Yeah, a quite interesting site. I always wondered what the connection between Psygnosis and Psyclapse was.

[Excelle]

I don't think I ever bought a Psygnosis game that wasn't any good - they were masters of the little known but supremely playable game. X-It was one of the best I think (apart from Lemmings obviously) and I still play that loads now. Any other offerings of lesser-known Psygnosis games?

[Fred the Fop]

Thats the best curry I've had, since my days as a boy in Wolverhampton. Anyway, I remember reading reviews in some magazine(s) lambasting "Fatal Rewind" for the Sega genesis. That's "Killing Game Show" to 16 bit computer users.

[alkis21]

Originally posted by Excelle
I don't think I ever bought a Psygnosis game that wasn't any

*Cough* Bill's Tomato Game..

[Twistin'Ghost]

Surely you josh! Bill's Tomato Game ROCKED! I thought it was brilliant in a Bubble Ghost kind of way.

You want bad Psygnosis, play any of their lame-ass movie licenses from the mid-90's. Or better still, play Arena!

[Fred the Fop]

Nah, try Brattacas. I hate Bubble Ghost by the way. I can't get it to work. I am not familiar with Bill's Tomato Game, Twist. Screenie?

[Twistin'Ghost]

Well, Bubble Ghost is on every platform in existance. Surely you can get it working on one of them! I loved the game way back when.

And you are right, Bratacas is Crapacus! Surely one of the worst games ever. And an ST port!

Anyhow, here's your screenie for BTG...now go download and enjoy this cool-ass game!

[Fred the Fop]

On my way to get it! Thanks, buddy:)
I guess I'll have to give Bubble Ghost another chance. Yep, and I think Brattacus was one of the first 16 bit games, no?

[Drake1009]

Bubble ghost was entertaining enough I thought, but could've been better. I still enjoyed Gogo the ghost on the C64 though. That was just a plain game with no extra stuff to make it confusing.

Oh and BTG was either inspired by, or inspired the creation of the Incredible machines. Another good entertaining game, though they've taken it too far with their remakes and releases now. I just bought Contraptions some time ago. It was the same game with 3D pre-rendered graphics. Half the levels were the same as TIM3, which in turn were exactly the same levels as TIM2.

[FromWithin]

Couple of points....

Bill's Tomato Game was in no way inspired by The Incredible Machine. Bill (Pullen) went into the office one day with this "thing" he had done. It had some fans and platforms in it with a tomato. You could shoot off the tomato and position fans and bounce it off a trampoline. You could still move the platforms around as it was moving. It was all programmer graphics, but it was quite cool, even if there was no proper game in mind for it. It got taken on as a game just from that demo. This was in about 1991. I was doing external game testing for Psygnosis at the time, and saw the demo when going in to give in my bug reports, but also ending doing the music for BTG while I was at college. I got a full-time job there after leaving college. BTG was released in 1992, Incredible Machine was released in 1993.

"Ooh. What's that?"
"It's Bill's...er...tomato...game...thing".

See?

The Tomato stuck, as did the "Bill's" part. Although the marketing people messed up the names and made them cheesy by giving the names the same initial as the object (Terry Tomato etc.) We were all most annoyed that the Squirrel never had his original name of Vladimir. I ended up playing it through from start to finish about 20 times because no-one else could test it that far. I had to get all the screengrabs for the manual as well. Ah, good times. :)

[Galahad/FLT]

I met Bill Pullen and his co-programmer (cant remember his name, but he wrote the copy protection for BTG,).

Was a guy called Terry Spencers birthday, so we went to Leeds for the night and I got talking to Bill and his friend for quite a while on the pro's and con's of cracking and piracy. I think they also claimed that N.O.M.A.D. hadn't fully cracked the game properly as there was one sneaky check left in there right at the end.

He too mentioned that the name of the game originated from it being refered to as his game and the name stuck.

Ended up getting absolutely slaughtered in Back to Basics and losing track! :)

[FromWithin]

Bill is one of the best programmers I've ever worked with. He had checksums right across the game (it was the first time I'd known anyone to do that) so that if the first part got cracked it would look okay until 10 levels down the line the screen would go mad. Haven't seen him for years.

Another bit of info: There were SNES and Megadrive versions that got canned. I was converting my music to the SNES, Matt Furniss was doing the megadrive one.

BTW, Psyclapse was a just a brand to put the crap games out on, while the main Psygnosis label had the Shadow Of The Beast's etc. so that the name didn't get diluted. Nothing to do with strategy/arcade.