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

[kibet.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, good old Look and Read. 'Draw what you think happened to Blue Flash' and despite your best imagination, they destroy it by the fact they just did not let him out of the cage.

Out of the four from my years at school, it was the least exciting. Badger Girl was all about stealing horses and whether the father was in on it. Dark towers was a firm favourite with spooky goings on and the last was Through the Dragon's eye, which was rather brutal with the villain turning the purple character into goo, and the green one into a caterpillar before squashing it. Or I might be remembering wrong, but I am sure the villain had clacky fingers and they were looking for bright yellow blocks whilst the Dragon tried to read the 'Thin Ice' sign.

[davidn]

I've never seen Dark Towers but I've heard it was one of the best ones... I had Badger Girl, Geordie Racer, Through the Dragon's Eye, Sky Hunter (which was one from the 70s that they repackaged, though I didn't know it at the time) and I can't remember any of the others.

Charn from Through the Dragon's Eyes was definitely the stuff of nightmares - usually people's young minds exaggerate them, but he was seriously an undead bird-skull thing with bare intestines spilling out of his ribcage and scissor-fingers which he used to melt people. What a way to grow up.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

I think this has to be shared.
Prime candidate for the next video, right, everybirdie?

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I want to see it now!

[davidn]

Here he is! He appeared in the television series, I can't remember if he was in the game...



(This picture found by doing a search for "charn through the dragon's eye", finding one on a forum, and discovering that the image I'd found was a hotlink to my own site.)

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

That thing is terrifying.Part of me is glad I missed out on that series; the other part wishes I'd had something as cool as that instead of slightly dodgy loosely-pigeon-related antics with people with Newcastle accents.

Spellcasting: A-V-A-U-N-T

D.F.