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Ocean Revival

This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting on the Ocean Q&A panel at Revival 2014 in Wolverhampton. I worked at Ocean in Manchester in my early 20s on titles like Jurassic Park (PC & Amiga) and Addams Family Values (SNES & Megadrive). It was fun to reminisce about the good old days with other former Ocean employees and people who’d played the games.

Ocean panel

The panel closely coincided with the public release of The History of Ocean Software book by Chris Wilkins which was funded as a Kickstarter:

Ocean the history

There were plenty of old games to play at the event too. I particularly enjoyed Rez on a PS2, Omega Race on a Vic-20 and a Flappy Bird clone on a Commodore 64.

Flappy Bird C64

When we got home, my 7yo and I pulled the Vic-20 out of the garage, and played some more Omega Race with the joystick we’d just picked up:



My 7yo has been picking up Python recently, with a Coding Club - Python Basics book.

One of the tasks is to print out the 5 times table:

number = 1
while i <= 12:
    print(number,"x 5 =",number*5)
    number = number + 1

Funnily enough Vic-20 Basic (circa 1981) was easily up to the challenge too:

5 times table

And good old FizzBuzz was no bother either:

FizzBuzz Vic-20

Then my son had a go at Magic 8-ball, but sadly lost the code he’d spent a while typing in when it is closed, so we re-wrote it again in F# so there was less to type:

let answers =[
   "Go for it!"
   "No way Jose!"
   "I'm not sure. Ask me again."
   "Fear of the unknown is what imprisons us."
   "It would be madness to do that!"
   "Only you can save mankind!"
   "Makes no difference to me, do or don't - whatever."
   "Yes, I think on balance that is the right choice"
   ]

printfn "Welcome to Magic 8-Ball."

printfn "Ask me for advice and then press enter to shake me"
System.Console.ReadLine() |> ignore

for i = 1 to 4 do printfn "Shaking..."

let rand = System.Random()
let choice = rand.Next(answers.Length)

printfn "%s" (answers.[choice])

Why not dig out your old computers and have some programming and games fun! :)
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