Hypaball (Odin Computer Graphics — 1987)
Author — Bernie Dugggs (that’s me)
I wrote the Spectrum version of Hypaball for Odin Computer Graphics. There’s a long and interesting story behind this one, culminating in me being imprisoned in Steve Weatherill’s house until it was completed. Steve is now a main man at Westwood Studios, so he obviously hasn’t learned his lesson. 😉
Download Hypaball (.z80 snapshot — loads in any ZX Spectrum emulator).
How to play
Select 1 or 2 player, 5 to define your keys, 1 to select keyboard and 0 to begin play. You might find the menus a bit unresponsive — that’s because music would be playing and there are delays in there to stop you double-pressing. (You may also need to click in the window to wake the emulator up.)
It’s a future sports game with three players on each team — your team are white. Two of your players fly through the air, one on either side of the central goal-pod, and the other can walk along the ground. The first thing you must do is select your team members, using the left, right and fire keys. There are some interesting player names, including Linus Burns (my cat), Joffa Smifff (top Spectrum coder and good guy) and Super Mo — as in Maurice Johnston of Celtic, before he turned traitor. The priority, though, is to pick the players with the best abilities. You take it in turns — a bit like picking playground football teams!
You only control one player at a time — whoever is closest to the ball — and once you make contact with the ball to catch it, you only have a short time to throw it away. You control the direction of throwing by hitting the correct direction key at the same time as pressing fire. Hopefully you’ll throw it into the goal! If you don’t throw it quickly enough, it’s a foul, indicated by the red foul marker at the bottom of the screen.
I think the game reflects the rush to finish it (check out those irritating traces of goal pod left on the screen!) but I don’t think it’s as bad as Crash made out. It ran somewhat slower than it should, so maybe a mighty modern CPU helps it to be a lot more playable. 😉
ZX Spectrum links
World of Spectrum · Crash Online · the comp.sys.sinclair newsgroup community.