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Firelord: A Guide To My Favourite Childhood Game

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When I was 10, there was one special computer game that I played through several times a week — sometimes almost daily. The game was Firelord . Firelord’s title screen, shown while loading from casette tape. Firelord is a 1986 game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, written by Stephen Crow, and published by Hewson Consultants Ltd. It is an arcade adventure game, in a medieval fantasy setting, where you explore a huge map. You play the hero, Sir Galaheart, who tries to save the kingdom of Torot from the evil queen’s curse. The graphics are unusually colourful given the Spectrum’s strange hardware limitations, and the game is unusually complex. Firelord and Me I used to play this game a lot around 1988, and became quite proficient at it. Indeed it is a very good game, probably one of the best ever made for the ZX Spectrum computer. Incidentally, the Commodore 64 version of Firelord was actually very different, and in my opinion quite bad — the controls were sluggish and the graphics...
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Grim Fandango

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Grim Fandango Grim Fandango is a wonderful graphical adventure game from LucasArts . The Grim homepage used to have a welcome page showing only a really cute animated skeleton toy , which you clicked on to enter the real site, but they removed the welcome page a while ago. The image itself, though, can still be found in its original location, and looks like this: There’s a story here. Grim Fandango is from 1998, back when 3D graphics for games where still only beginning to become popular. LucasArts wanted to make their first 3D adventure game. One of the creators of Grim stated in an interview that he got the basic idea for the game from the skeleton toy above. He saw one in a toy store, looked at it, and thought: “Hmm, texture mapped skulls would be really cool.” In the spring of 2001, a friend of mine gave me a toy of the exact same kind. There were some slight differences, so it’s been painted to look more like the original — the pants, shoes, and the...
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