Stumbling through Geordie Racer

[davidn]

Frankly I'm not sure how I forgot about this for so long, but here's a video of Geordie Racer, a game that we used to have in school that was full of pigeons. It was based on a television series, also called Geordie Racer, that was also full of pigeons. To the best of my memory, it was about a family of runners who kept pigeons, and they (either the family or the pigeons) foiled a smuggling plot somehow.

What happens in the game naturally bears very little resemblance to this - BBC Micro games were invariably collections of minigames strung together into an adventure and they always took a bit of a condescending attitude towards the player, punishing them severely or chastising them for their stupidity even when the only way to progress through the game was essentially to just pick random numbers and hope you weren’t eaten by a cat or struck by lightning. So here is an opportunity to watch me being confounded by a game intended for eight year olds.

Retrospectively, of course, I can only see this game as an omen of what was to come.

http://youtu.be/BGUSrfVSRZ0

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Argh, memories I never wanted. :P We never had this game at school - we had the so-much-more-player-friendly Granny's Garden instead, along with Dread Dragon Droom (my favourite :P) - but I remember being made to watch Geordie Racer, and thinking that Spuggy was a bit of an odd name, and thinking it was a bit of a crap series all in all, even if his dad was famous from Inspector Morse.

And for those of you who thought that Wordy is kind of creepy in this 2d-sprite form, his puppet incarnation is exponentially worse.

D.F.

[davidn]

I haven't played Dread Dragon Droom, but perhaps I should! We had all the others that seemed to be in the standard BBC Micro kit that all schools received - Granny's Garden, Little Red Riding Hood, Flowers of Crystal, Dragon World, and something that I swear was called The Magic Telephone (and that accursed adventure game that I have never found again...)

I've never gone back to look at the old Look and Read series - I fear that they may be significantly worse than I remember! Although Sky Hunter had Mr Trimm in it, who was a replacement Doctor Who.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

We'll find that adventure game yet; if nothing else, we still have plenty of time to search for it. :P

And, I'd love to see Dread Dragon Droom again! It's mostly minigames of a similar nature (sliding square puzzles, Tower of Hanoi (a.k.a. Professor Layton's pancakes), etc.), but I vaguely remember it being a slightly higher quality than the others around, as in, the story made vague sense (note the use of the word 'vague' here), and it didn't kill you immediately.

It had a space-themed sequel, called DUST (capitalisation is mandatory, apparently), but some of the games in that were nigh-impossible, or just pointless. Guess the right 4-digit passcode combination, with no clues at all? Okay, I'll just start going through all 10,000 possibilities, then... ¬_¬

D.F.