A sequel would be very cool indeed :)

Thanks! It’s quite a niche scene though sadly so not that much happening in terms of new games being made. We are definitely nearly there with Ropoko. And I have my own game too which I’m working on.

Minesnake was so good though and clearly you put a lot of effort into it, it’s pretty feature-rich. Love the level names and the fact if you do well enough you can unlock the ability to start the game from higher levels. It’s an awesome take on the Snake genre. I still play it :)

Just thinking back to the amazing time when Retro Gamer magazine reviewed @jfroholt.bsky.social 's awesome game Minesnake and gave it 82% ! In my opinion, best Snake-type game available for the Sharp MZ series :D They also gave us a two page spread with an interview with Joachim too.

A little bit of Qixi for the MZ-700

Oo Pikmin! One of my favourite game series. Hopefully my son and I will be seeing it soon.

Not sure about ending music but when I was a 6 year old the theme tune to Juliet Bravo would make me cry. No idea why.

Also, it's not strictly a printer but a plotter. The pens move back and forth on the paper as it prints.

That's the maxed out version of the 700, (the 731). Normal compact cassettes like you use in your Walkman though :)

The Sharp MZ-700 sold well in Japan and Europe, but never boasted of its own version of Football Manager.

#KevinToms #FootballManager #Sharp #SharpComputers #RetroComputers #HomeComputers #Microcomputers #80sComputers #PersonalComputer #RetroPC #UKComputers #UKRetro

Indeed it didn't. Now is the perfect time for you to correct this huge oversight 🙂

Never seen one in the real world! They're a lot more capable than the preceding MZ machines, it feels weird knowing that there is an MZ machine out there which can do graphics :)

Whereas this will, most likely, be a small Sharpscii face chasing a small Sharpscii stickman figure :D

Another interesting arrival today! I wonder just how much it has to do with the arcade game of the same name. Probably very little!

I hate to say it, but I think that was his surname.

Im not sure I was in the right mood though due to already being annoyed by a guy who literally wouldn’t stay off his phone in the row in front of ours, 5 or 6 times his phone screen lit up during the film while he perused facebook and other stuff. Really distracting and annoying.

I thought it was a little too long, felt myself getting restless towards the end and I’m not sure it’s as good as all these rave reviews I’ve been seeing. I do think I need to see it again though.

In the words of Treguard, "Oo, nasty!" I mean, I can kind of understand it in the real early days, like Colossal Cave Adventure with memory at a premium and demands on people's imagination being far more but no excuse in the latter days.

We used to unroll those, get a stone and then run it along the length haha. Not sure kids can even get these anymore can they?

Text adventurers! A little help please?

You know those mazes where all the rooms are identical, and going north from one room and immediately south again isn't neccessarily going to take you to the room you came from?

For instance, the first picture here is the first bank on the Western character set and the second picture represents the Japanese machines' first bank of chars.

I actually don't know the answer to that, sorry. I'm really unfamiliar with the X68000. And that has actually reminded me, there is a big difference between the Japanese and Western machines' character sets. That's probably why this seems a lot like PETSCII in this instance.

I have never enjoyed those mazes either, I think it’s also a bit of a cop-out when it comes to the storytelling part of the adventure.

It's not PETSCII as it's not the same character set (there are two banks of characters as well). We often refer to it as Sharpscii. And there are lots of examples of Sharpscii art work by some very cool people :)

A surprising number of games for the MZ were written and published in BASIC without being compiled even. Because there was no language in memory when switching the machine on, publishers usually stated whether the game was machine language or not because the user had to load BASIC otherwise first.

"The gameplay introduces a unique twist on the "power pellet" mechanic such as PacMan."

An interesting sentence.

Should have been running Thunderbird.

Interesting as it's not that crazy, you need to look up the MZ-700 "Space Harrier" version. Now that's crazy.

The reason being that the MZ does not have pixel access, the character set is held in a ROM chip and not accessible to programmers.