Why, and to what extent, did France like different games (and computers)to elsewhere?

[CCCP alert]

I still remember pricing up a C128 + 1571 disk drive and it cost more than the 520STM + SF354 disk drive bundle I got mid 1986. I figured better to have 2 different computers like C64 with tapes and ST with disk drive than C64 and C128 with a tape and disk drive between them. The C128 really got no killer apps (probably because nobody bothered to make the VIC-II 2mhz compatible).

I only knew one person with an 8bit + disk drive in the UK, it was my middle class friend with a 48k Atari 800 and 810 and 1050 disk drives. My other friends all had tape based 8bits too. I don't know about France but in the UK tape based systems were the norm for 8bit. I honestly can't remember how annoying Summer Games II on tape was in the mid 80s, played it a lot though so I guess I put up with it.

I don't mind the blue/cyan shift of the French art either, it's just a different style I guess. We were all still learning back then how to make the most of Neochrome/Degus/Dpaint in those early days. After the ST I spent most of my time with Digi-paint though using Digi-view to source my clip art from magazine adverts and fantasy art books, I even remember forking out a huge sum of money for a 1mb expansion, 1.5mb is useful for Digi-view/Digi-paint as you could use the shared clipboard for 21bit quality source data between the two and use interlaced HAM6.

[Megalomaniac]

People in Germany and France are often surprised that Britain largely stayed with tapes on the 8-bit systems. The Spectrum being such a cheap system for the time (£175 for the 48K model on launch in 1982, £149 for the +2 on launch in 1986) and being effectively locked to cassettes is probably a big reason why - though perhaps a more expensive disk-based system would not have been as affordable in Britain as in France or Germany? The British economy was less equal than those countries in the 1980s, even if those at the top (who weren't necessarily those at the top in 1979) were doing well. Perhaps Spain and Portugal (where the economy was also less strong, and the Spectrum was huge) stayed cassette-based too, so perhaps Spanish Amstrad players never got some of the top French disk-based games either?

I suspect cassette-based multiload is one of those things we could put up with then that we wouldn't cope with now, rather like swapping 11 disks for Amiga Monkey Island 2 with only one disk drive. The bigger issue might have been those C64 games that were heavily cut down for cassette, such as Little Computer People.

[CCCP alert]

Well I guess the late 70s in the UK were a bad time financially already for the masses with the huge rises in cost of living for most people, then a lot of industries were closed down/streamlined in the early-mid 80s so there was a hell of a lot of unemployment for workers, and of course 1 secretary with a word processor replaced 3 secretaries with a typewriter during the 80s too. America got the V8 Ford Mustang at launch, we got the shrunk in the wash 1.3L or 1.6L rough as hell sounding 4 banger engined Ford Capri!

Defender of the Crown did see a tape release, at least on the C64, in the UK but I dread to think how unplayable that would be, the disk version is very playable and nothing to moan about all things considered. The Amstrad disk release is also not too shabby either from what I remember, has an almost French art style to it.

Stuff that just loads in the next levels in sequence is fine, like Law of the West or Gauntlet etc but stuff like Summer Games II was probably a real nightmare hence all the 8bit tape games on ebay with tape counter numbers scribbled on the instructions (which are absolutely useless because there were 2 or 3 tape counter mechanisms on the Commodore datasette, definitely the 1981 and 1984 models have different sized reels and give different counter numbers). Hell, finding the start point of the game you want to play on something like Softaid is bad enough never mind during the game. Absolute nightmare playing the CPC multiload tape games using an MP3 cassette adaptor and something to play WAVs into it but on the real hardware the cassette motor stops on CPC/C64....for 48k or Speccy+ 48k owners this wasn't the case, you had to sit and wait for each section to load then hit the pause button like I had to do on my laptop playing the CDT files. NOT FUN!

I figured better to have a C64+tape deck than something cheaper that might have had a disk drive for the same price in 1983 (say a VIC-20 and VIC-1540) . Besides I moved away from C64 gaming by 1988 so most of the 8bit games I played were single load. Multiload on C64 usually meant Top Gear Jeremy Clarkson style "ambitious but rubbish" developments lol from most publishers. Times of Lore sits in 64k and only the intro which is loaded from tape first made it impossible to release as a single load game but that's not really any different to the intro in things like Scarabeaus etc which loads the intro then continues to load the game once it's finished. Skyfox was another nightmare to play but at least it was awesome when you did bother.

[Megalomaniac]

It feels like America got readymade home computers in general a few years before Europe did - the Apple II and 8-bit Atari pre-date any European developed systems of note, the ZX80 probably the first to make any impression. Did 8-bit Ataris sell much here before then? Was America being ahead of us purely down to the relative economical situations in those countries?

Most Spectrum games which didn't fit into 48k (ignoring some ambitious 128k-only stuff like Carrier Command and Where Time Stood Still) were simply load level 1 - load level 2 - load level 3 - die - reload level 1 type progressions, which meant they were workable on tape, but definitely limited what could have been done with strategy games or flight sims (not to mention the Infocom games), genres that otherwise naturally played to the machine's strengths and potentially lessened its weaknesses. UK Amstrad owners probably suffered from it too - had there been a decent market for disk-only Spectrum games I'm sure things like Iron Lord would have been released for both Spectrum and Amstrad in the UK (perhaps not the point and click adventures like Le Manoir de Mortville as Spectrum colour attribute problems would have been an issue for that style)

Presumably different tape decks on other system generated different tape counter readouts too? I had a Spectrum +2 with no tape counter on the built-in (and presumably standardised throughout its five-year life?) cassette deck, it was probably more of a nuisance than my memories are telling me. The tendency for a lot of C64 games to load an intro, then load a menu, then load the actual gameplay took some getting used to when I first got one as a retro system, but luckily by the time 64K wasn't enough for the entire game turbo-loaders had taken off so you had quite fast loading anyway.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

I still remember pricing up a C128 + 1571 disk drive and it cost more than the 520STM + SF354 disk drive bundle I got mid 1986. I figured better to have 2 different computers like C64 with tapes and ST with disk drive than C64 and C128 with a tape and disk drive between them. The C128 really got no killer apps (probably because nobody bothered to make the VIC-II 2mhz compatible).

OMG! You bought a 1571! You put it in a chest at night right? I remember it was absolutely overpriced.

There was a misconception with the VIC-II. There was no interruption to signal it availability to the cpu so it was slow to pilot it and so unusable for games. It explain the slowness of CP/M too. On the C64 the misconception was with the disk drive interface...