» As well as making films and
music, Bernie Drummond creates
beautiful artwork like this stunning
self-portrait.From moving blocks to spinning
tops to remote-control DaleksSTAGES OF
EVOLUTION:
KNIGHT
LORE
QThere are rooms
in Knight Lore
where square
blocks move
about on balls that
Sabreman or the Wulf can jump on and guide around by
walking in different directions. Standing on the blocks
gives the heroes extra height to reach high-up items or
exits, but baby steps are required when steering them, as
it’s easy to fall off.BATMAN
QSimilar to Knight
Lore’s mobile
blocks, there’s a
spinning top in
Batman that can be
ridden around on by
making small movements in different directions. Using
the top, you can get Batman safely across a room that’s
guarded by a deadly foe, but try to stay dead centre of it as
any contact with obstacles costs you a life.HEAD OVER
HEELS
QRather than
steering something
around by standing
on it and moving
in the required
direction, in Head Over Heels you remotely control Dalek
hybrids with directional levers. You can use the Daleks
as stepping stones over hazardous surface areas, where
you jump on to them and then hop off them to where you
want to get to.» [MSX ] Batman on the MSX looks like the Z X Spectrum original, but it sounds
like the Amstrad CPC 4 6 4 por t.» [Amstrad CPC] Superhero’s switch-guided cubes are directly
inspired by Head Over Heels’ remote-control Daleks.Heels, and you had to have them doing different
things,” Jon explains, “Firing doughnuts just
seemed suitably silly. I didn’t think of firing things
at the time of Batman. I could have done that, but
the game worked well as it was.”H
ead Over Heels also enjoyed other
differentiations, including a remote-
controlled Dalek with a face like Plug
from The Beano, which evolved from a
mechanic in Batman. “In Batman there was a little
spinning-top thing that you could jump on top of,”
Jon observes. “Its job was to aim at you, so if you
moved your character it tried to move in that same
direction. So in effect you were steering it. The
idea of the Dalek in Head Over Heels appealed to
me as a double-layer, where you were using the
joystick to control something that used a joystick
to control something else!”
Evolutions in Jon’s code subsequently saw
Head Over Heels’ room count far exceed its
predecessor’s, and so he introduced a hub world
with a teleportation mechanic. “Because Head
Over Heels was twice the size of Batman, I thoughtit would be quite nice if you could dip into the
different parts of it,” Jon recalls, “and if you got
stuck because you couldn’t work something out,
well, you always had the other bits. So that was
the basic idea behind the Moonbase.”
A second concession to Head Over Heels’
greater difficultly resulted in Jon curbing his
Batman follow-up’s more challenging rooms.
“I would frequently say: ‘Okay, this one’s a bit
difficult, I’ll give players an alternative route,’” Jon
notes. “What I would try to do was I would make
one physical problem and one mental problem
within each room to give players a choice, and
when you went into a room everything you
needed was in that room. I did stray a bit from that
later with Monster Max, but overall you were never
far away from what you needed there either.”
Monster Max would be the next isometric
adventure that Jon worked on after Head Over
Heels, but during Head Over Heels’ development,
Jon also oversaw an isometric project designed
and coded by a teenage developer. “Paul
Machacek was a young kid, and he was clearly» [Amstrad CPC] Batman can guide a
spinning top, but Head and Heels
take that concept fur ther with
remote-control Daleks.Controllable Assets
38 | RETRO GAMER