Friday 24 December 2021

SPECIAL VIDEO: 12 Games of Christmas!

It was a close call this year, but here's the special Christmas video presentation, as promised. This year, I'm doing a quick run-through of 12 strictly Christmas-themed games for various retrogaming platforms, most of which have been mentioned in this blog already in some form or another.

With this, I wish you all a very happy, healthy and peaceful Christmas (or whatever holiday you happen to be celebrating), and a better next year! I'll be taking a relatively short break from posting anything here, but keep an eye on more FRGCB content around the end of February or early March.

Thursday 9 December 2021

Retrogame Talkshow Episode #8 out now!

Retrogame Talkshow, my other retrogaming-related project, co-created and co-hosted by my friend Bob Engstrand, is back in action with the 8th full-fledged episode! This time, we're digging deep into the history of PC's in both terms of hardware and games, travel through the beginnings of our personal PC gaming history and listen to lots of great music while at it. Here's the YouTube link to see some gameplay footage while listening to the episode, but it's also available as regular audio-form podcast on Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and loads of other podcasting platforms. Enjoy!



Monday 6 December 2021

FRGR #13: GOLF (Oy Hedengren Ab, 1985)

Written by Kimmo Mäkinen for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k in 1984, and published by Oy Hedengren Ab in 1985.

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INTRODUCTION


Happy Finnish Independence Day, everybody! Today, we have a truly special entry in the history of Finnish games, as it is a game that is effectively lost from wider public even currently. It was only ever reviewed in the Finnish computing and gaming magazine MikroBitti in May 1985, and even there, the review had no screenshots to see. I recently came by this game by an accident, when I bought a bundle of used Spectrum tapes from another collector, and Kimmo Mäkinen's "Golf" was included in the collection. After a long last I have now played it, so I can finally write a review of it. If nothing new is to be learned from this article, this review shall at least fix the hitherto lack of screenshots from public view, although of course I shall attempt to give proper attention to the game itself, as well. Enjoy!