If everything goes according to plan, this blog post will be the first of a series in which I remember fondly the games that I was playing during my formative years. Growing up in the UK, Sega and Nintendo systems weren't nearly as common as they were in the US, and so when my friends and I went to each other's houses to play games it was invariably on either a Spectrum or Commodore computer. These were fantastic machines in their day, and as I hope to illustrate in these blogs, there were a lot of fantastic games released for them. (Expect extreme Commodore bias since I never actually owned a Spectrum.) I should also mention that I'm using these blogs as an excuse to update our mostly-empty pages for these games with screenshots and gameplay videos wherever possible. Our Paradroid page has never looked better.

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Starting out as the 001 influence device.

As a kid, I didn't get to play nearly as many games as I do nowadays, so I like to think that I was pretty selective. Sure, I still bought games that cost a couple of pounds apiece based solely on the screenshots on the back of the cassette box from time to time, but for the most part I based my (parents') purchasing decisions on reviews in magazines. My dad took out a subscription to the excellent Zzap 64 magazine very early in its life, and I remember that he even ordered binders to keep them all in at one point. If a game was awarded the prestigious "Gold Medal Award" in Zzap 64, there's a good chance that we discussed adding it to our collection at one point, even if the screenshots didn't look great. Paradroid was one of those games, and to this day it remains one of my favorites.


Your goal is to clear the whole thing. Eight times.

Paradroid is a shooter of sorts, in which you take control of a puny droid known as an "influence device" and must clear a huge spaceship of other, more powerful droids. You view the action from a top-down perspective and spend the majority of your time either shooting at other droids or attempting to assume control of them. Which weapon you have at your disposal varies according to which model of droid you're currently in control of; most fire lightning bolt projectiles of varying sizes (in any of eight directions!), while a few are armed with cannons that hit all nearby enemies simultaneously. All models of droid have a three-digit number designated to them that's clearly visible when you encounter them, and generally speaking those with higher numbers are more powerful. Your influence device's designation is 001, the ship's command cyborg's is 999, and there's plenty of selection between the two. There's even one (security droid 883) that's modeled after a Dalek from Doctor Who.

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Taking control of the 999 command cyborg.

Often, it makes more sense to take control of droids that you encounter than it does to do battle with them; you only get to control droids other than the 001 for a limited time anyway, and using healing stations after sustaining damage drains points from your score. In order to take control of another droid you hold down the fire button (there's only one button, remember, and it's used for a lot of different things) until your current droid changes color, and then you plow straight into the droid that you want to control. This triggers an ingenious minigame in which you battle for control of your target on something vaguely resembling a circuit board. It's a lot of fun, and while it's possible to jump straight from your 001 into the game's most powerful droids, there's a simple system in place that makes the difficulty scale appropriately.


Remember when hacking minigames were this much fun?

I used to spend hours playing Paradroid, and the goal of completely clearing all of the droids from this huge spaceship was daunting to say the least. Revisiting the game recently it seems like a perfectly attainable goal, but in 1985 I remember thinking that I had achieved the impossible when I managed it. I was stunned, then, when I was greeted not by a "Well Done, Game Over, You Rock" screen but by an invitation to proceed to a second ship. I've since learned that there are eight ships to clear in total, and one of these days I hope to do just that.