What was the first game you completed?

[Dewt]

I've been thinking about this question for a solid week and cannot come up with a definite answer. I can think of early games I completed, but there's a good chance I actually finished something years earlier.

The trouble with having the Speccy as your first computer is that game completion becomes fuzzy. Some games aren't completable, others are so badly balanced that you could put 20 hours in and not complete them, sometimes the completion is underwhelming and forgettable, so you really need to have solid memories to get this right.

[Dewt]

Ghostbusters. I know I got to the end bit but did I complete it? I know it was the first game I had on tape, so every game I owned before it would have been on the Amstrad Compilation Disk Spectrum Plus 3 disk that came with the computer... did I complete any of those?

No. I Gift From The Gods was hard as fuck, Mailstrom crashed because the bacon slicer shots would escape the screen and start overwriting memory, couldn't beat the last boss of N.O.M.A.D., my parents completed Cosmic Wartoad one night, not me, and I don't think Daley Thompson's Supertest had a failure condition. And it was mostly my sister playing those because I was too young.

So now I'm thinking of early Speccy games I had on tape and trying not to get mixed up with demos I had. Ghost 'n Goblins? No. Renegade? Couldn't get past Bertha. The Great Escape? Fucked if I knew what I was doing, would usually get stuck in a wall behind a stove. Didn't finish any Dizzy game due to thick brain. Fuck. Did I complete anything on the Spectrum?

It might have been Super Mario Bros on the NES then.

[kalowski]

I remember doing very well on this

[NoSleep]

Is that the one where you drove through Albuquerque and places like that?

When do the tears start running down your cheeks?

[Ferris]

I remember doing very well on this

We'd all rather pissed and loaded but let's pay attention to the thread topic please.

[kittens]

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis

The first game I remember really playing was Worms, but you can't really "complete" that.

i certainly hope you constructed the entirety of zoombiniton, and that you don't think competing just one logical journey is enough to claim to have completed this game.

[Phil_A]

It was either Barbarian II (Palace Software one, not Psygnosis one - crucial difference) or Magicland Dizzy on the Atari ST, can't remember in which order.

The former was actually a piece of piss once you knew what to do, the only thing was there was nothing to tell you the exit of the second level was hidden behind an apparently solid wall that you could actually just jump right through, which lead to a fair amount of annoyance. You restarted at the beginning of the last stage(there were only four of them) you reached every time you got a Game Over, so once you'd figured that out the rest of the game was a cakewalk. It actually had a fairly good ending as well - I mean okay, it was only little 30 second bit of Drax stumbling around looking for his head and then telling you he was going to definitely get you next time mate before fucking off, but at the time this was practically a cinematic cutscene.

Magicland Dizzy was the first of those games I managed to finish entirely on my own, although I think I only managed it once as it had some ridiculously unfair jumping sections that would usually rob you of all your lives. That was the thing about the Dizzy games, the puzzles were usually pretty basic so they made the navigating the environments the difficult part.

There were loads of other games I got to the end of by cheating my way through, it didn't really occur to me until later that this was a profoundly unsatisfying way of playing, and most of them didn't have an actual ending to speak of anyway. You were lucky if you got a message saying "WELL DONE" most of the time.

[Dewt]

Magicland Dizzy was my favourite one. Kudos on figuring on that you're supposed to pick up a railing that was indistinguishable from the environment.

[Ferris]

i certainly hope you constructed the entirety of zoombiniton, and that you don't think competing just one logical journey is enough to claim to have completed this game.

What kind of complete fucking moron do you take me for? I saved every single one of those blue cunts from whatever peril they were in via myriad Logical Journeys.

Edit: fucking hell its on iPad now, might get that and spend the afternoon rebuilding ZoombiniTown

[oy vey]

Thing is, as I remember, when you did complete Manic Miner there was a weird picture if a syringe and a mackerel and then it went back to the start.


Wonder if anyone ever completed Jet Set Willy and what happened then?

Check out Geoff Neil on YT. He does a perfect (no lives lost) Jet Set Willy with commentary, and the attic bug poke obviously. He also does several other speccy classics.

Well done on Manic Miner. Could never do it.

First one for me was Cookie on Speccy, which admittedly is a 5-level/minute job but it is a bastard. After that, I got Starquake many times, which is very easy TBH especially when you have all the transporter names.

[greenman]

Probably Phoenix(Galaxian like shoot em up with birds catching from eggs and a big UFO at the end who's underside shield you slowly ate into) sometime in the early/mid 80's at the local leisure centre although that wasn't exactly long with only half a dozen levels.

[AsparagusTrevor]

Probably Phoenix(Galaxian like shoot em up with birds catching from eggs and a big UFO at the end who's underside shield you slowly ate into) sometime in the early/mid 80's at the local leisure centre although that wasn't exactly long with only half a dozen levels.

I had a clone of that on the C64 called Eagle Empire which took about 20 minutes to load so I'd make sure I got plenty of play out of it (unless it crashed that is). The UFO-type boss at the end, there was a place where all the bullets missed you, so you could safely camp there and shoot until it was over.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I had a clone of that on the C64 called Eagle Empire which took about 20 minutes to load so I'd make sure I got plenty of play out of it (unless it crashed that is). The UFO-type boss at the end, there was a place where all the bullets missed you, so you could safely camp there and shoot until it was over.

I had that and really loved it, there was something immensely satisfying about shooting those giant birds and causing them to explode.

[bushwick]

First one I clocked was Donkey Kong Jr Game & Watch, when the score goes from 999 back to 000 and it gets faster. Could do it dead fast, proper mindless twitch gaming.

Completed Splatterhouse and Midnight Resistance in arcade around the same time (fair few credits on both mind). The only thing I remember completing fair and square on the Spectrum was Combat School, I just used infinite lives for a lot of games like a loser. Don't think I've completed anything in modern era (apart from a couple of dumb little twin stick shooters on steam) as don't have the patience/too many interests etc

[Viero_Berlotti]

Probably 'Bruce Lee' on the Spectrum:

https://youtu.be/iiYy7VUZuXs

[dallasman]

Had a Commodore 64 for a few weeks in the 80s, with the cassette player and a black and white TV. Proper old school gaming, that was. Remember enjoying Dig Dug and Hero, but probably never got close to completing either.

Then, in about 2013, we got my daughter a Nintendo WiiU. Eventually tried some Mario Cart 8, and then something called "Affordable Space Adventures", which would've been the first one I completed. Really enjoyed that, and it was a good beginner's game. Great look:



The first of the few big-name games we have that I completed, was probably "Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze". That and "Donkey Kong Country Returns" were the first games where I dared attempt the "expert" levels, and was moderately astonished that I eventually developed skills that had seemed impossible just a week or three earlier. Spent crazy long hours on various Super Mario games too: Galaxy 1 & 2, 3D World. It was my main leisure activity for a good while, usually with podcasts or audio books instead of the game audio. That was a great combination, as I was learning, laughing or being made to think, so I could more easily justify staying up until 3AM, trying to jump to the top of a wall. Some of these proper "grown up" games look so amazing, I'm basically scared to try them. Thinking of getting a Switch, though, now they're probably quite affordable second hand.

[Kryton]

It was either Barbarian II (Palace Software one, not Psygnosis one - crucial difference)

Curious what was the difference?

[Sebastian Cobb]

Not sure. Had a few ZX81 games but I don't remember any of them being completable. Trying to remember the early Spectrum games I played... Ant Attack, Maybe? Tranz Am?

Fired up Tranz Am again the other night actually. I do love it - the way it conveys, probably as much as any 16K game ever can, the feeling of racing across a post-apocalyptic American wasteland.

That engine noise reminds me of the noise I heard waking up to my mate reg's cat skittering all over my sleeping bag during a sleepover.

[magval]

I was born in 1987 and there was a Master System in the house not long after, so the first game I ever played was almost certainly Alex Kidd in Miracle World. I remember my auld pair were worried because I played it (and played it well) with the controller upside down, and nearly compromised my basic understanding of what left and right meant. That game still gives me that feeling, that mad, almost painful sensation of recognition, of total understanding, unchanged in decades and impossible to describe (witness me scrambling, presently).

Didn't finish it 'til I was about 20-odd, though, on the Wii Virtual Console. I don't believe I have ever finished it without two things - a list of which Rock/Paper/Scissor options to select in what order, and that floaty cane yoke that you can use to glide through the spiked room in the last castle. Something's telling me I was 27, in fact, when I did finish it. Game ends on a real downer, too, which should in theory invite you to play some of its awful sequels, but they all look and feel too different.

I didn't play that many games when I was wee and I'm struggling to remember what the first one I actually completed was.

It would either have been Sonic 2 (Mega Drive, and only with level select, which doesn't count), Donkey Kong 1994 (no cheats, and still a towering sense of achievement) or Super Mario Land 2 (at my kitchen table at what I remember being about 2 in the morning, which can't really have been the case as I was no height, and what the fuck was I doing playing a Game Boy sat upright on a wooden chair in the middle of the night?)

While I'm thinking of finishing games, I've never gotten over abandoning Devil May Cry during the final boss. Can never claim to have beaten that one. Worth revisiting? I was never good at it though, I completely mashed my way through that game and think I reached the last boss in spite of myself.

[samadriel]

Didn't finish it 'til I was about 20-odd, though, on the Wii Virtual Console. I don't believe I have ever finished it without two things - a list of which Rock/Paper/Scissor options to select in what order, and that floaty cane yoke that you can use to glide through the spiked room in the last castle. Something's telling me I was 27, in fact, when I did finish it. Game ends on a real downer, too, which should in theory invite you to play some of its awful sequels, but they all look and feel too different.

Alex Kidd in Shinobi World is the only good sequel, but it's pretty damn good.

[Phil_A]

Curious what was the difference?

They were two entirely different games. For some reason two separate publishers both had their own Barbarian series with hardly anything to distinguish them name-wise. It was a confusing time.

The Palace one had this mildly controversial cover art that got it banned from the shelves of Boots, which may have helped distinguish it in the minds of the target audience:

http://computeremuzone.com/fichas/b/BarbarianII-a.jpg

[thenoise]

I think it was Cosmos Cosmic Adventure


A not-very-hard kid friendly side-scroller from the early 90s.

I put more hours into Space Quest, which I puzzled over for hours and hours (and delighted in the witty responses when I typed in slightly rude things into the text parser) but I barely got anywhere at all until I downloaded a walk through years later.

[Jim Bob]

I think it was Cosmos Cosmic Adventure

As soon as I saw that screenshot with it's distinctive EGA art style, I immediately thought to myself 'I bet that's an Apogee Software game'.  Looked it up and I was not wrong.

[Kryton]

They were two entirely different games. For some reason two separate publishers both had their own Barbarian series with hardly anything to distinguish them name-wise. It was a confusing time.

The Palace one had this mildly controversial cover art that got it banned from the shelves of Boots, which may have helped distinguish it in the minds of the target audience:

http://computeremuzone.com/fichas/b/BarbarianII-a.jpg

Aaah it was the Palace one I played then.

[popcorn]

I can complete any computer game on max difficulty.

[idunnosomename]

PONG HAHAHA

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Palace of Magic on the BBC Master

[Thursday]

Probably some graphic adventure on the BBC Micro for school, but the first I actually remember would have been the first Commander Keen game.

[Thursday]

I think it was Cosmos Cosmic Adventure


A not-very-hard kid friendly side-scroller from the early 90s.

I put more hours into Space Quest, which I puzzled over for hours and hours (and delighted in the witty responses when I typed in slightly rude things into the text parser) but I barely got anywhere at all until I downloaded a walk through years later.

Always fascinated by the lore implications of when Cosmo met Duke Nukem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoSNLnHSabU