Nostalgic Focus - Of an Apple ][+ and Two Games

pathforger (56)in #personal • 7 years ago (edited)

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I was probably around 6 years old when I got my hands on the second-hand Apple ][+ that my dad brought home.

By my perspective it was massive. This big hunk of plastic glass and magic with big bold logo and name emblazoned upon it.

It was fascinating and it made loud beeping noises as I gradually learnt how to use 'CATALOG' as a command.

In all fairness any computer without software is bound to be a bit of a letdown. Still - I was enthusiastic about it.

The image above is a 'very' similar machine - down to the monochrome green monitor (that I recall took seconds to dim to ambient darkness when the lights were turned off) and the twin disk drives.

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Well even so, hardware does need its software so it was not long after that Dad brought home what would become my obsession for the next few years or so - a boxed game called 'Shard of Spring'.

To this day, one thing that I vividly remember was the experience of placing the disk in the disk drive and listening to it load. For those who haven't experienced it, these older kinds of floppy disk drives were far from silent in their operation, and as it loaded information to the computer's RAM - especially while booting-up - the disk-drive would deliver a series of clicks and whirs.

Now while it does this for all diskettes, the sound of loading 'Shard of Spring' itself is quite ingrained into my memory. It quite literally took on a musical quality to me - and put me in the mood for the game-play even if there was absolutely no 'music' intended or otherwise to be heard in the rest of it.

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Shard of Spring was a Role Playing Game of the top-down variety released by Strategic Simulations Inc. in 1987.

The story goes that an evil sorceress by the name of Siriadne has stolen a mystical piece of long-lost life-stone that gave the land its brilliant temperate weather for past centuries. From her castle the greedy sorceress ruled over the land, using fear that she would destroy the shard of spring to cow the people into docility and making them pay ever more ruinous tribute that grows with every year.

This causes bank executives to raise their premium bonuses, collapsing the financial sector under their weight and spurning many foreclosures.

OK so that last paragraph was made up... the game never went into that level of explanatory detail. It could have happened?

Well... this sets the backdrop for you, the player to step in with a band of adventurers.

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How lucky! I found imagery that perfectly represents what it was like on the monochrome monitor. Not that I didn't also hanker for the colored version. Never wanted for a mouse, strangely enough.

While its reception was a little lukewarm - to me this held a 'wow' factor like nothing before it. I sunk hundreds of hours over time. To explore a world within a computer, having adventures and feeling the tension of dangerous encounters...

Oh yeah.. I was all over it.

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Obsessing over the game manual that came with it let me also to discover that there were at least two English languages in the World. Traditional English and American English. Seemed odd to me back then and its still kinda odd today - but there are far weirder things in the World. 'shrugs' ^_^

When the disk died in the early 90s - it was a shock to me, while by that point I'd long had an Atari ST 520 to sink my teeth into, it just wasn't the same. There were no top-down RPGs in my game collection.

I spent some more time warming up to 'Battle for Normandy', also by Strategic Simulations Inc.

Initially - I sucked badly. I had no idea what I was doing. I had my butt handed to me on an axis shovel and those failures were painful. Its not that I didn't also initially do badly at 'Shard of Spring' but 'Battle for Normandy' was a pretty hard top-down Strategy game.

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It was also less fun to do bad in - as each turn of the game was graded by whether things were successful or not. I also didn't like losing units. ^_~

Fortunately the game could be played over the course of an afternoon. It was relatively replayable also as some details (weather conditions and its effect upon the flow of supplies and ordinance) were random.

And, truth be told, I increasingly found it to be rather satisfying.

And then an era ended with the selling off of the Apple (I had mixed feelings - but my copy of 'Shard of Spring' was no more - and that for me was a big part of why I loved the Apple (plus this was before e-bay was a thing).