All posts by Mallo

Writer and screenshot enthusiast. Ex-PC Zoner.

Mama Llama, Commodore 64

Mama Llama is a scrolling action game where you have to protect a family of llamas from attack with a robotic sphere called a “Killdroid” while destroying waves of enemies on a 10×10 grid. It was written by Jeff Minter and first released by Llamasoft in 1985.

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Batalyx, Commodore 64

Written by Jeff Minter at Llamasoft and first published by Ariolasoft in 1985, Batalyx is a compendium of six minigames that can be played in any order. Completing them all must be done within a set time limit in order to beat the game.

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Sheep in Space, Commodore 64

Sheep in Space is a weird horizontal shoot ’em up, written by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984, and featuring a flying sheep who must complete horizontally-scrolling levels by shooting all the available enemies. Sheep in Space has its roots in Defender and Jeff‘s previous game, Ancipital.

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Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Commodore 64

Revenge of the Mutant Camels is the 1984 sequel to Attack of the Mutant Camels and this time you play as a camel who must fight his way through 42 different attack waves. You can choose sequential or random attack waves, but the aim is the same: you must survive through all 42 waves to beat the game.

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Psychedelia, Commodore 64

Psychedelia, by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, is not a game but a “light synthesizer” – a program that turns input (either from a person via a joystick or keyboard, or from a sound input) into graphical on-screen patterns. Psychedelia was first released in 1984 and was one of the first “light synthesizers” ever made; certainly ever to be made available commercially; and it was the seed that led to the Winamp visualisation plugin craze of the late 90s/early 2000s, and to the evolution of light synthesizers or “sound-to-light” technology in general.

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Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time, ZX Spectrum

Ported by Chris Clark of Salamander Software and first published in 1984, Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time is a straightforward conversion of the VIC-20 original, but with a couple of tweaks here and there.

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Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time, Commodore 64

The 1984 Commodore 64 version of Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time was converted by Aaron Liddiment for Llamasoft and is pretty much the same as the classic VIC-20 original, except with better graphics and arguably better sound.

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Hellgate, Commodore 64

I would say that Hellgate is one of my least favourite Jeff Minter/Llamasoft games. While it is competently-programmed and nicely-presented, Hellgate is also a very difficult game to play effectively as a single-player.

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Traxx, ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum version of Jeff Minter‘s Traxx was published through Quicksilva in 1983. It was written by Salamander Software for Llamasoft and, to be honest, it’s not a very good game at all.

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