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Artic Software
Artic Computing was a software development company based in Brandesburton, England from 1980 to 1986. The company's first games were for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer, but they expanded and were also responsible for various ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC computer games. The company was set up by Richard Turner and Chris Thornton. Charles Cecil, who later founded Revolution Software, joined the company shortly after it was founded, writing Adventures B through D. Developer Jon Ritman produced a number of ZX81 and Spectrum games for Artic before moving to Ocean Software. Usually packaging and distributing games themselves, some titles were picked up by Sinclair who repackaged them under the Sinclair brand, and Amstrad who repackaged them under their Amsoft brand. Adventures A through D were written for the ZX81 but were quickly ported to the ZX Spectrum platform on its release (as well as other systems). By comparison with later Spectrum adve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brandesburton
Brandesburton is a village and civil parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It is situated approximately west of Hornsea and north-east of the market town of Beverley. The civil parish is formed by the village of Brandesburton and the hamlets of Burshill and Hempholme. According to the 2011 UK census, Brandesburton parish had a population of 1,522, an increase on the 2001 UK census figure of 1,348. St Mary's Church, which is surrounded by its churchyard in the north-east corner of the village, is a large, medieval building, with tower, nave, aisles and chancel. It was largely built out of cobbles, but has an early brick clerestory and later south porch. Exhibiting some fragments of Norman work (including a priest's door), it principally dates from the 13th to the 15th centuries, and was restored in 1892. Inside are two noteworthy brasses: on the south side of the chancel the fragments of a (rare) bracket-brass, and on the north side more substantial, full-size b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Hobbit (1982 Video Game)
''The Hobbit'' is an illustrated interactive fiction video game released in December 1982 for the ZX Spectrum home computer. Based on the 1937 book ''The Hobbit'', by J. R. R. Tolkien, it was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler and published by Melbourne House. It was converted to the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Oric, and other home computers. By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold. The parser was very advanced for the time and used a subset of English called ''Inglish''. When it was released, most adventure games used simple verb-noun parsers (allowing for simple phrases like "get lamp"), but Inglish allowed the player to type advanced sentences such as "ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it". The parser was complex and intuitive, introducing pronouns, adverbs ("viciously attack the goblin"), punctuation and prepositions and allowing the player to interact wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gilsoft
Gilsoft was a British developer of video games and related utilities. The company was best known for developing the text adventure authoring tool '' The Quill'' and its successor, '' Professional Adventure Writer''. History Gilsoft was set up by Tim Gilberts, at the time aged 17, in the early 1980s, using money from his father, who ran an electronics store. Gilberts had been writing software for the ZX81 prior to founding Gilsoft, but with the release of the ZX Spectrum, he was convinced that he could make money by satisfying the demand for games for the new platform. Many early titles developed by Gilberts for the Spectrum were clones of arcade games, among a few original titles. Gilsoft was initially run as a family business, with Gilberts acting as technical director, his father as managing director, his mother as company secretary, and his cousin as accountant. Other employees were mostly made up of friends and neighbours of the Gilberts family. In 1982, Gilsoft was joined b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Quill Adventure System
''The Quill'' is a game creation system for text adventures. Written by Graeme Yeandle, it was published on the ZX Spectrum by Gilsoft in December 1983. Although available to the general public, it was used by several games companies to create best-selling titles; over 450 commercially published titles for the ZX Spectrum were written using ''The Quill''. Development Yeandle has stated that the inspiration for ''The Quill'' was an article in the August 1980 issue of '' Practical Computing'' by Ken Reed in which Reed described the use of a database to produce an adventure game. After Yeandle wrote one database-driven adventure game, ''Timeline'', for Gilsoft, he realised that a database editor was needed, and it was this software which became ''The Quill''. After the original ZX Spectrum version was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, and Oric computers. Versions were also published by CodeWriter, Inc. in North America (under the nam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parser
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar by breaking it into parts. The term ''parsing'' comes from Latin ''pars'' (''orationis''), meaning part (of speech). The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science. Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as subject and predicate. Within computational linguistics the term is used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer of a sentence or other string of words into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing their syntactic relation to each other, which may also contain semantic information. Some parsing a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hunchback (video Game)
''Hunchback'' (shown as ''Hunch Back'' on the title screen) is video game developed by Century Electronics and published in arcades in 1983. The game is loosely based on the 1831 Victor Hugo novel ''The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'' and the player controls Quasimodo. Set on top of a castle wall, the player must guide the Hunchback from left to right while avoiding obstacles on a series of non-scrolling screens. The goal of each screen is to ring the church bell at the far right. Gameplay left, Arcade screenshot Obstacles include pits which must be swung over on a long rope, ramparts which must be jumped (some of which contain knights with spears) and flying fireballs and arrows (to be ducked or jumped). To impose a time limit on each screen a knight climbs the wall, costing the player a life should he reach the top. Eventually, after completing a number of screens, the player must rescue Esmeralda. If this final screen is completed, the game begins again at a faster speed. Develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tempest (video Game)
''Tempest'' is a 1981 arcade video game by Atari, Inc., designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. It takes place on a three-dimensional surface divided into lanes, sometimes as a closed tube, and viewed from one end. The player controls a claw-shaped "blaster" that sits on the edge of the surface, snapping from segment to segment as a rotary knob is turned, and can fire blaster shots to destroy enemies and obstacles by pressing a button. ''Tempest'' was one of the first games to use Atari's Color- QuadraScan vector display technology. It was also the first to let players choose their starting level (a system Atari called "SkillStep"). This feature increases the preferred starting level, which could also be used to let the player continue the previous game if they wished. ''Tempest'' was one of the first video games that had a progressive level design where the levels themselves varied rather than giving the player the same layout with increasing difficulty. Gameplay The goa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Obsidian (1986 Video Game)
''Obsidian'' is an action-adventure computer game for the Amstrad CPC personal computer published by Artic Computing in 1986. The game is set on the titular space station located within the centre of an asteroid, which is out of control and drifting towards a black hole. The player must guide an astronaut with a jet pack around the station and re-activate its engine shields to prevent the Obsidian's destruction. This involves collecting items and using them to solve puzzles, while avoiding the Obsidian's reactivated security systems. ''Obsidian'' is the first game that was developed by Revolution Software co-founder Tony Warriner, who was a school pupil at the time. Due to concentrating on ''Obsidian'''s development rather than revising he failed all of his exams. The game received a positive response from journalists: it was praised for the quality of its graphics, though reviewers held mixed views on the game's ability to maintain player interest. The jet pack was criticized fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Curse Of The Seven Faces
''Curse of the Seven Faces'' is an interactive fiction video game published by Classic Computing for the ZX Spectrum in 1984. It was re-released later in 1985 by Imperial Software. The game was included in a compilation titled ''Assemblage'' in 1986 with three other games. It was published by Artic Computing. Gameplay The objective of the game is to retrieve four objects from an evil wizard: his spell book, staff, hat, and cloak. The game had a unique save system at the time: the user has the option to save the game to memory instead to the tape. This was faster than the normal save system. Reception ''Computer and Video Games'' wrote: "A variety of original locations, and some surprise ways of finding new exits, combined with well-written and fairly lengthy descriptions to make an interesting game". '' Crash'' said the plot was "weak and thin" but the location descriptions "are really quite impressive". ''Sinclair User'' called the game "disappointing but attractively produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EMAP
Ascential (formerly EMAP) was a British-headquartered global company, specialising in events, intelligence and advisory services for the marketing and financial technology industries. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by Informa in October 2024. History Richard Winfrey purchased the ''Spalding Guardian'' in 1887 and later purchased the '' Lynn News'' and the '' Peterborough Advertiser''; he also started the ''North Cambs Echo''. He became a Liberal politician and campaigner for agricultural rights and the papers were used to promote his political views in and around Spalding, Boston, Sleaford and Peterborough. During World War II Winfrey's newspaper interests began to be passed over to his son, Richard Pattinson Winfrey (1902–1985). In 1947, under the direction of 'Pat' Winfrey, the family's newspaper titles were consolidated to form the East Midland Allied Press (EMAP): this was achieved by the merger of the Northamptonshire Printing an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinclair User
The ''Sinclair User'' was a magazine dedicated to the Sinclair Research range of home computers, most specifically the ZX Spectrum (while also occasionally covering arcade games). Initially published by ECC Publications, and later EMAP, it was published in the UK between 1982 and 1993, and was the longest running Sinclair-based magazine. The magazine contained news, game reviews, previews, tips, help guides, columns, readers' letters, and cover-mounted game demos. History In earlier years, the magazine built up personality cults around some of its "hilariously" monikered staff, including Bill "Incorruptible" Scolding, John "Disgusting" Gilbert, Chris "Lunchbreaks" Bourne, Claire "Ligger" Edgely, Richard Price (writer of the "Gordo Greatbelly" adventure tips section), and columnist Andrew Hewson (founder of Hewson Consultants software). Under David Kelly's editorial tenure, the magazine began to focus more on the gaming scene, and featured more colour graphics under designer Gar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World Cup Carnival
''World Cup Carnival'' is a 1986 sports video game developed by Artic Computing and published by U.S. Gold for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum; it is the first licensed World Cup video game and is based on the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. Initially meant as an entirely different game, development problems made U.S. Gold decide to recycle Artic Computing's 1984 title ''World Cup Football'', with the added FIFA license and extras included in the box. Upon release, ''World Cup Carnival'' received unanimously negative reviews from critics, players and retailers alike for its poor graphics, gameplay, sound and blatant recycling of ''World Cup Football''; several magazines included angry letters from people who had bought the game, many of which were returned to stores. Gameplay Ten teams (Uruguay, Italy, Germany, Brazil, England, Argentina, France, Spain, Mexico and Scotland) are available in the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions of the game while all 24 teams tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
