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The founders of Ocean Software (who you may well remember from the 8 and 16-bit era, before they were bought out by Infogrames) David Ward and Jon Woods, have been initiated into ELSPA's Hall of Fame, which celebrates those who helped put the UK game industry on the global map.

They also produced a lot of tat if my memory serves me correctly, and... AND... they had the nerve to turn me down for the position of FAQ/Games Tester when I was younger, with the rejection letter saying words to the effect of "You don't know enough about games" - and this was when the Saturn and Playstation were going strong, shortly before they released Jersey Devil on the PS - such details can only reveal how deep the scarring doth run.

The original story was from Voodoo Extreme

I had Daley Thompson's Supertest. It was a classic. The only event I can recall with any clarity is the pistol shooting. This was an original I paid for also and it was very expensive as a Spectrum title then too, around a tenner if I remember rightly.

My mate had Hyper Sports (original also). The archery was good.

Still remember the logo, emblazoned on my mind.

Heh, they were like the EA of their day (apart from their labour practices I guess!). Loads of good titles came out of Ocean, and a far bit of rubbish too like GoIP says.

A lot of their big titles were Spectrum arcade conversions - Chase HQ, Rainbow Islands, Operation Wolf etc and film licences - RoboCop, Total Recall etc. They also published the absolute classic Head Over Heels. You can get a PC remake of HOH here:

Head Over Heels PC

Time to dust off my spectrum...

(IMG:http://www.if-legends.org/~adventure/images/logos/ocean.jpg)

They were also involved with the orginal Worms release (along with Team 17, whatever happened to them?) - You can see a complete list of Oceans releases at Moby Games - just looking through the list brings back far far far too many gaming memories - including Boot Camp (Or Combat School as it was called over here) - a frustrating game that caused me many an aching arm and damaged joystick....

Cor, what a fine site that Moby Games is, never been there before. I forgot Ocean were responsible for so many great games, I loved F29, TFX and EF2000, some of the most enjoyable flight games I've played.

Team 17 are still going strong - www.team17.com. The latest in the Worms series (Worms Forts - Under Siege!) has just been launched to mixed reviews.

Ah! Course!

I was too busy thinking of how prominent they were on the Amiga with Project X, Worms and the lovely Alien Breed series (before the 3D attempts) - they just seemed to get about more then (in my humble opinion)

Moby Games is good for nostalgic trips back in time, and for helping you rememer details about publishers/games that have slipped your mind - take a look at Electronic Arts for instance, they started so well - before upsetting people with poor quality expansion packs and yearly updates.... oh... and the entire employee issue too...

As far as flying games go, I used to love F19 Stealth Fighter, the follow up F117A, as well as the rather spiffy Gunship 2000 (all by MicroProse) - PC flight sims just aren't the same.

Team 17 was obviously too easy - what ever happened to U.S. Gold?

Ah - nevermind, Moby Games knows more than I gave it credit

Hehe, I played F19 to death on my Atari ST (never had an Amiga :unsure: ), great game, hugging the terrain to avoid radar detection but less than 300 keys to remember. Microprose were right up there as publishers too. Gunship 2000 was the first game I bought for my first PC - an Amstrad 12 Mhz 5286 with 1 meg ram and a 40 meg hd back in 1992!

I've come over all nostalgic now. Off to Ebay to see how much I can pick an old ST for...

Mr.Fodder Sir, you have an outstanding taste in games...

I myself was having a nostalgic turn, and decided to explain to Mrs.Pig the joys of F-19 and Gunship 2000 - and made the fatal error of showing her some screenshots of my most beloved of games, whilst they stirred up many memories of late afternoons of gaming, she said, and I quote:

She also made a comment that the graphics looked like they were drawn by a nine year old, and said that I should stop living in the 70's - Which was odd, as Gunship 2000 was only released in 1991...

Anyway, I fear any attempt to bring nostalgic appliances into this household will fail...

Haha, these johnny-come-latelys have no appreciation of their gaming heritage. Without the likes of us old hands there would be no Half Life 2. Err, probably.

Besides, I have no idea what Mrs Pig means, this is quality, look at the detail on that railway line:

(IMG:http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/images/gs2000.gif)

Exactly! Sheer beauty...

They don't make 'em like they used to.

Thanks for encouraging a more than happy trip down memory lane...

If you want basic graphics nothing could compare to the Star-Wars games of wire frame DeathStars and the trench, yet gameplay wise it was unbeatable.

However I was remembering, as you two old men spoke of yesterday flight sims, how much trouble I had with just keeping anything except WW1 biplanes up in the air, when I came across a reason that scifi games have simplified control set ups. If you wanted to have a true space sim you wouldn't have enough keys on the board, even with macros.

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