Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story – The Definitive Review (Includes Full Reviews of All 42 Games)

I like Jeff Minter. We both come from very different generations, and in fact, at the time I wrote this, you can reverse our ages. I’m 36. He’s 63. I’m an American. He’s English. He’s a game maker. I’m a game critic. But I firmly believe any two people who genuinely LOVE video games can strike-up a friendship. I got to talk with him a lot over, oddly enough, the long lost Atari coin-op that he recently remade: Akka Arrh. I even got to find out about his remake before it was announced. I was puzzled by Jeff’s selection of Atari projects. “Really, Akka Arrh? You’re doing a reclamation project of….. THIS?!” I had just started Akka Arrh and my initial impression was that I was going to give it a NO! Now Jeff wasn’t arguing with me that anything I said bad about the game was necessarily wrong. But he still predicted it would grow on me even though it seemed unlikely. Guess what? HE WAS RIGHT! “How the hell did he know that?” I’ve asked myself. Then it hit me: it probably happened the same way for him.

I learned from this documentary that he and I look at games the same way in that we’re seeking experiences. It’s not about rules or objectives or reaching an ending. It’s the road traveled. “The actual playing of the game should be the reward in and of itself” he says, and I feel exactly the same way. Jeff wants to make games where the fun comes from the experience of playing. Perfect. That’s the type of games I want to play. He calls it “the feedback loop.” I call it “the tempo.” It’s the same thing, people. That’s why it’s easy to connect to Jeff. He’s a gamer who makes games and has no ambition greater than to make an experience that puts a smile on your face. So yeah, I like Jeff Minter. I like him a lot. I’m happy he has his own set. A set that retails for $29.99 and therefore Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story has to make up $30 in value to win an overall YES! from me. I approached this the same way I did with Making of Karateka and Tetris Forever. I went through the documentary feature and played the games in the order they were presented (though I did go off the path a couple times). I had literally never played 40 out of 41 games in this set before. The only one I’ve previously played is Tempest 2000. So this is almost all brand new to me.

This review was made using a Nintendo Switch/Nintendo Switch 2. It should be mostly valid for all versions of this collection.

A  WORD ON EPILEPSY & PHOTOSENSITIVITY

Before I get to the feature, I do have to mention something troubling about this set. Digital Eclipse’s heart was in the right place by including the following disclaimer that you see every time you boot up Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story:

The problem is that they promise to warn players which games are bad with an icon. It’s a BIG problem for reasons I’ll explain. For readers finding me for the first time, I have epilepsy and I’m photosensitive. So warnings like these potentially help me a lot. Ironically, 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of my first seizure, which you can read about here. I don’t speak the King’s English, by the way. I’m from California. I think that’s the opposite of British, but I did that feature with Epilepsy Action in the UK and they ran my editorial through a filter that, among other things, turned the word “mom” into “mum.” Now my mom insists on being called “mum” and I hate you people for it. 🖕HATE!🖕 Either way, I was SO excited that Digital Eclipse included that icon. Except, they couldn’t have bungled it worse. You see, only two games in the entire collection are marked with that icon. It’s the two light synthesizer games Psychedelia and Colourspace. Needless to say, there’s many, many more games that have strobe effects that aren’t marked. One in particular, a collection of six mini-games called Batalyx, has a built in “strobe” toggle that was there in the 1980s that implies it removes the strobe effects:

But that toggle only removes a couple strobe effects, leaving the vast majority in the game, including ones far worse than the ones removed. I’ll give Jeff a pass because I’m going to assume in 1985 Jeff, like so many developers, assumed that people with photosensitivity didn’t play video games. But in 2023, when this set was first released, Digital Eclipse clearly did know that wasn’t the case. Now you would think a game that has a toggle specifically marked with “Stroboscopics” that still produces violent, frequent strobe effects would have the photosensitivity icon that, again, you see every time you boot up Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, plus an additional warning that the game offers a built-in strobe toggle that doesn’t remove ALL the strobe effects (not even close). But it doesn’t. For either. None of the games in this collection besides the two VLMs have that icon.

Here’s why it matters: when you have an icon to warn people of potentially risky games, games NOT marked with that icon are implied to be safe by omission, and that’s insanely dangerous. That icon suggests to someone who isn’t aware of the risk factors associated with Jeff Minter’s catalog that someone carefully went through the catalog and made a list of risky games and not risky games. That’s clearly not the case. There are SO MANY games in this collection that strobe. I didn’t count them, but it might be as many as half, or more. People like me take calculated risks when we play video games. What this inaccurate, functionally useless warning icon does is screw with a person’s ability to calculate the risks. Let’s say you’re in a plane and the engine goes out and you’re crashing. You’re given two options: jump out of the plane using the parachutes or take the controls and attempt to land it. Obviously you jump for it, because having parachutes implies they work. But what if you’re not told the parachutes are every bit as faulty as the airplane’s engines were, and someone knew that and didn’t say? That’s what I mean by screwing up a person’s ability to assess risk. Here’s a clip from Batalyx.

In this clip, the “stroboptics” toggle starts ON, but then I restart the game and turn it OFF. Do you notice any difference? EPILEPSY WARNING to say the least.

Again, no icon for the above game, or any game but Psychedelia or Colourspace. That’s why I’m going to suggest that developers working on game collections should only issue one blanket warning for the entire collection and leave it at that. Don’t try to say which specific games are risky and which aren’t because stuff will get missed and then it’s kind of on you and not the person playing the games. By having a warning icon, you’re saying “we’re aware this is a problem for some people, but don’t worry because we’ve got your back.” And you don’t. I’m lucky because my doctors made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms: gaming will always be a risk for me, for the rest of my life. You don’t want someone who had a doctor who didn’t spell that out for them to get hurt playing your game. I know I have to take precautions like playing in a well-lit room and having distance from the screen, or in the case of this collection, playing on a Nintendo Switch 2 in handheld mode with the screen brightness turned so far down that it probably affected my overall experience.

Precautions that work for me *WORK FOR ME* but anyone who is or suspects they are photosensitive should talk to a doctor before playing any games instead of trying what I do. Seriously, I’ve had twenty years of figuring this stuff out, but no two photosensitivity cases are the same because brains are kind of unique. The bug zapper in my head? Custom made, bitches! Seriously, be safe and talk to actual experts and don’t do things because some idiot on the internet does it too. I shouldn’t even have to say that but apparently people will swallow spoonfuls of cinnamon or eat Tide pods because they saw someone else do it online. 

One final point of photosensitivity: it’s a misnomer that seizures are the most common side effect. In fact, they’re one of the rarer ones. A lot of people are photosensitive and don’t even know it. Ever gotten a headache from strobe lights? Congratulations: you’re likely photosensitive! You should seriously talk to a doctor because it can get worse (and more sensitive) over time. The overwhelming majority of people who are photosensitive never get diagnosed, but one of the most common ways people who suffer migraine headaches experience their first one is through being triggered by light stimuli. I’ve never had a migraine headache, but I’ve heard stories. Strobe effects trigger migraine headaches and other side effects such as nausea, loss of balance, blurred vision, ringing in ears, loss of appetite, confusion, and tons of other things. Nobody should have to stress about those things while playing video games. So be more mindful in the future, please. I’m all about a developer’s creative vision coming before my needs. I’m grateful every time these effects can be turned off with a toggle. If no such toggle exists, I can play a different game. There’s thousands of options. But I do have to draw the line at toggles that don’t work, or icons that don’t accurately identify all the risks thus implying safety where there is none.

And this isn’t anger at Jeff. Guys, Jeff and I are cool. He even gave me a quote for this feature. And I’m cool with the Digital Eclipse guys too. I’d even say I’m friends with all these people. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt playing a video game. Games are people’s escape from the harshness of reality. You don’t want to take that away from anyone, so be smart and be safe, whether you’re a game player or a game maker. It’s OUR pastime. All of ours.

Alright, enough of this serious crap. Let’s talk about llamas and camels and sheep, oh my!

PRESENTATION & FEATURES

Jeff Minter is the original indie developer. Arguably THE face of indie gaming for an entire era. If there were an indie game hall of fame, it’d be housed in a building called the Minter Center or something along those lines. There’s a lovable sad sack quality to his story. The man took forever to make the jump to video game consoles because they weren’t big in the UK. When he finally did, he hitched his wagon to such failed consoles as The Atari Panther and Konix Multi-System. The latter of which eventually evolved in a roundabout kind of way into the Atari Jaguar. Later still, he ended up developing Tempest 3000 for Nuon-abled DVD players. Aww Jeff. Jesus Christ, man. You wouldn’t want to stand next to this guy in a lightning storm. By the way, Tempest 3000 isn’t in this set because Nuon was “a bridge too far” from an emulation point of view. Wait, there actually IS a Nuon? I assumed it was a Sidd Finch-like inside joke among gaming media. Huh. Learn something new everyday.

But Jeff’s story is a cool one. I kind of wish this was a more comprehensive look at his life, in the same way Tetris Forever was for the guys behind Tetris. There’s fewer interviews than in other Gold Master releases, and the interviews do have some audio/volume inconsistencies. Nothing as bad as, say, Henk Rogers’ rogue mustache hair that was so distracting during Tetris Forever. Let’s see that again, for old time’s sake.

Seriously though, the audio levels in Llamasoft needed correcting, but the actual content in them is really good. Some of them I really didn’t expect, but once again, Digital Eclipse scratched off the taboo stuff. Like the famous tiff between Zzap! 64 game critic Gary Penn and Jeff Minter? That gets a full video that’s pretty frank for a set like this. Especially one that actually includes the offending game, Mama Llama. But I’m happy it’s in there because it shows Jeff has gained maturity as a game designer in the years since then. It gets even better because, alongside the normal box art and advertisements you expect in a collection like this, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story contains the full review from Gary Penn that sparked this whole feud, along with angry letters from fans. This led to Jeff working as a part time columnist for Zzap, and some of those articles are included as well. Full magazine features. Very cool. More of that in future sets please, Digital Eclipse.

In total, there’s twelve video interviews that do a good enough job of covering the story of Jeff Minter in a general way that it’s hard to be disappointed in what’s here. I’m more disappointed in what’s not here, IE more interviews specific to the lineup. Additionally, there’s a sizzle reel of all the light synthesizers that Jeff developed over the years called “VLM, Through the Years” that was SUCH a tease since this package only contains two VLMs (well, three if you count the stripped down version of Psychedelia in Batalyx). There’s also a “Gameography” that features Jeff Minter’s game catalog of 61 total games that has at least one screen shot for each game, including ones that aren’t playable in this collection. Again, more teasing (though not as bad as the one in SNK 40th Anniversary, also by Digital Eclipse. HEY, I should do a Definitive Review of that one sometime soon, hint hint).

Outside the interviews, there’s several little text snippets called “Minter-Views” that were sometimes insightful, sometimes funny, or sometimes taken as a quote from long ago. He cracked me up pretty badly by describing Defenda as “cack.” I need a British word-of-the-day calendar. Apparently that means “sh*t.” You know what? I totally agree with you, Jeff: it IS cack. I admire that he’s tough on his original games. Trust me, I’ve come across plenty of developers who think their cack don’t stink. Jeff is easy to cheer for because he recognizes his own learning curve. Anyway, “Minter Views” are fine but I still would have preferred more videos, even short ones, where he talks about each game in detail, especially since he’s such a great storyteller. He’s personable and charming and easy to root for. Don’t get me wrong: you get a LOT of Jeff’s opinions in other ways. This collection has many of the newsletters that Jeff published called “Nature of the Beast.” Issues 1 – 10 are included EXCEPT Issue #7, which I assume is the controversial issue where Jeff proclaimed that alpacas are just llamas that lack ambition. He didn’t really say that. I did.

I’m guessing (only guessing) one of the reasons why the documentary stuff isn’t more comprehensive is because this was apparently made in collaboration with another documentary currently in production called “Heart of Neon” that’s about the life of Jeff Minter and his partner Ivan Zorzin, aka Giles the Goat. (I typed that as “Heart of Nuon”.) Maybe Digital Eclipse didn’t want to usurp Heart of Neon’s (yep, did it again) momentum, but what’s here feels like just a sample of a bigger story. With that said, in terms of variety, this offers a pretty dang good cliff notes museum look at the life and times of Jeff Minter. It’s a feel good story. Like, I literally started weeping at one point when Jeff got choked up talking like he couldn’t believe how happy some of his games made people. That really got me. You’re a good man, Jeff Minter.

What’s missing? Well I almost said “Giles the Goat” but he does show up in the final non-Heart of Neon (AHHHHHHH! Mother f*cker, Cathy! There is something wrong with you!) trailer in timeline, called “Llamasoft’s Later Years.” But the timeline is missing a few things that I would have enjoyed a lot. One of my favorite features in Making of Karateka were the audio commentaries. Now those would be harder to do in non-linear games. No doubt about it, and the majority of games in this collection are arcaders. But, I have faith that Digital Eclipse could come up with a solution anyway. Maybe situational things where the actions pauses to load the commentary when, say, a new enemy first appears or when a level theme changes. Then the action resumes afterward with the commentary playing, then it pauses the game if you finish the stage before the commentary finishes. See, those commentaries not only provide game-specific history lessons for people interested in such things (raises hand) but also can serve as inspiration for the next generation of Jeff Minters out there. Plus they’re just plain cool.

And yeah, there’s a lot of missing games. I’m not the first critic to note that Jeff’s entire post-Tempest 2000 career is missing. And, since I consider this a thing on Digital Eclipse’s end, I would have preferred more Remastered games. The one we got, Gridrunner: Remastered, is really good. Most Digital Eclipse Remastered games are. This formula has literally never gotten a NO! from me. Two games stand out that would have been perfect: Laser Zone and, (sigh) Attack of the Mutant Camels. I didn’t like a single Attack of the Mutant Camels game, but this set wasn’t made for me, either. It’s fan service. There’s also some missing games from platforms they did include like Atari ST that I would have enjoyed playing, even if they were crap. As strong as the documentary was, it’s still clearly the weakest of the entire Gold Master Series yet. I expected to give it less than $20 in value, but I found myself enjoying going through it a second time while I edited this feature. The rich variety of magazine articles and his behind the scenes notes which seem to be written in the same language my hand also writes 😛 were more than enough to satisfy me, even if it left me wanting more. So, for all presentation and features, I’m awarding $20 in value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, which you can subtract $10 from if you have no interest in old ads, box art, concept art, etc. Even if you’re not into print ads/concept art, don’t forget to read the magazine features included. They’re often pretty interesting.

EMULATION

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As expected, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story offers a nearly fully-charged Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. Rewind, save states, button mapping, screen filters, etc. There is a catch: not every platform is capable of pulling off every emulation trick. Most of the games you’d want to have rewind have it. Only one lacks save states, and that’s the unfinished proof of concept for Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89, which is a prototype for the never released Konix Multi-System. There’s literally no reason to need save states for that one (the game is like 40% finished), but like all other games, it does have full button mapping. Some games even have cheat code toggles, though some games don’t offer this despite those games having cheat codes for infinite lives.

One interesting tidbit is that Atari ST games are actually ports of ST games running on a Jaguar emulator. There’s a lot of extra-effort bells & whistles. Llamatron: 2112 offers twin-stick gameplay. Tempest 2000 offers analog controls and hardware overclocking, bumping its performance up to 60fps. But, as a reminder, if you want to preserve your high scores between play sessions, you have to lay down a save state after you enter your name into the game’s leaderboard and then reload the state when you return. That’s annoying but, in my opinion, not worthy of a loss in value. I do have one major problem: I found out that at least one ROM, for Iridis Alpha, crashes when you reach the bonus stage. Jeff later corrected this, but Digital Eclipse used the original, faulty ROM. I can’t just let that go. (UPDATE: Apparently Batalyx also misbehaves, not allowing you to transfer seamlessly from game to game.) Even if I didn’t like the game, some people did, and those fans deserved the best possible version of it. Actually, collections should contain EVERY version of each game and notes on what was changed from version to version. It is supposed to be like a museum, after all. For all the emulation options, I award the max $10 in value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, but I’m fining $5 for not including updated ROMs that fixed crashes/bugs. Thank you to my friend Jason for calling this to my attention.

UPDATE: I’ve heard some things about Llamatron: 2112 having issues with sound and just not being a good version of the Atari ST original. I made a note in the review. I can only review the game in the collection and not the game they didn’t include, but in the not too distant future, I’ll revisit the ST games in this set.

“INSTRUCTIONS? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ INSTRUCTIONS!”

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story features some pretty damn complex games paired with some of the most useless instruction books I’ve seen. Okay, so the plots contained within those books are cute and wacky and I enjoyed them well enough. But instruction books should, you know, teach you how to play a game. Gaming is a visual medium, but most instruction books in this set are text only. Frankly, I don’t think that’s acceptable for any video game that isn’t a 100% sound-based game. But plain text explanations of some of these games really isn’t enough. No screenshots. No context. Just words to explain games like Mama Llama or Iridis Alpha. I had to look up YouTube videos of people who understood how to play these games, and when I did, I noticed those videos tended to have a lot of comments along the lines of “I’ve had this game for thirty years and I never understood it until now! Thank you!” If people who are home computer game fans couldn’t figure these games out in literal decades, why the hell would you rely on only them for any generation of gamers? It’s either cruel or lazy. Take your pick. Here’s the Mama Llama instruction book:

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For such a complex, original game, it’s not helpful. At all. That doesn’t have to be a problem. As I type this, I’m playing Jeff’s remake of Akka Arrh and he does now understand how to do tutorials and have proper instruction. Awesome. But just because Jeff didn’t know that in 1983 – 1991 doesn’t mean a collection in the 2020s should leave it that way. Digital Eclipse could have included modern explanation screens like they have for other collections. They didn’t, and this is a collection with a lot of games that are, by design, unintuitive. The games are certainly not presented in a way that maximizes their potential enjoyment. Jeff Minter fans will probably scream bloody murder about that, but imagine this wasn’t a Jeff Minter set. Imagine this was a chess game that offered only text instructions and feels like it’s rolling its eyes at you if you don’t just somehow read the plain text and understand how Chess works. Imagine explaining the concept of castling with just plain text, or how pawns capture, or how knights move. If that’s not cool for chess, why is it okay for a video game? Because the guy raises llamas? Hardly seems right.

I don’t get why a collection that’s trying to honor a person would take such a hostile stance towards having the games make sense. By the way, almost none of these games have a presence on GameFAQs or StrategyWiki either. I’m so disappointed because sets like these should be accommodating to gamers of all skill levels and should be as accessible as humanly possible, and this feels like it’s only for fans Jeff already had who know how to play these games (or maybe don’t, going off those YouTube comments). Even though, logically, those people already own the games and don’t need a collection like this. I’ve been debating what to do about this for weeks, and it’s moot since even if I fined the full price of the set, the documentary and the games make up the lost value. So far, Jeff’s fans have been great, but the lack of modern instructions made me feel like an unwelcome party crasher. So, let’s do this: 41 games times $0.25 a game, round to the nearest dollar. I’m fining Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story $10 in value for poor instructions. And I’ll be using that standard from now on with every collection.

FINAL VALUE BEFORE PLAYING A SINGLE GAME: $15

Whoa. Usually these Digital Eclipse sets already have earned the cost by this point. This is kind of weird. Thankfully, there’s forty two games to play. Or, technically 41 + 1 unfinished prototype.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

VALUE DISCLAIMER: The value I award any game in any collection, be it a real collection or a hypothetical one, should NOT be compared to the values I award games in other Definitive Reviews. All values are only relative to the other games in the collection I’m reviewing.

Please note that games are presented in a different order in the documentary. These reviews are presented in the order they’re listed in the collection’s game menu.

3D 3D!
Platform: Sinclair ZX81
Year: 1981
Designed by Jeff Minter

Like many millennials, my gaming life started at the dawn of the modern 3D gaming era. The first video game assembled by Santa’s elves specifically for me was Crash Bandicoot, which I got for Christmas in 1996, the same year Super Mario 64 released. Fifteen years before that, Jeff Minter made this elaborate 11x11x11 3D maze. And 3D 3D! really is just a maze. No ghosts chasing you. No locked doors. No mystical treasure to find. Just “find the exit.” A pioneering 3D game was never fated to age gracefully, but Digital Eclipse did their damnedest to prove otherwise. They added completely optional modern first person 3D controls using dual sticks and hardware acceleration, almost completely eliminating the “draw time” that the original hardware would have required for shading the walls (which you have to turn on manually). And they do help, actually. My biggest problem with playing 3D3D was, shaded walls or not, I found myself constantly becoming disoriented while playing it. It’s hard to retain the concept of forward, up, down, and behind you. It was only when moving left and right that I didn’t feel like I had completely lost my sense of direction. I imagine it would be like trying to navigate one of those McDonald’s style tubes and tunnels playgrounds in zero gravity.

The lack of equilibrium made it especially hard for me to cheese 3D3D by just following the traditional “keep your hand on a wall and follow it” rule for solving a maze. Even if my inner compass wasn’t on the fritz, the “hand on wall” rule wouldn’t work without slight modification. The cube twist prevents that. If you choose to use the map, only the shafts that transfer you up a floor are marked. Of course, you’ll want to be moving up and down through the maze. Some of the floors are entirely made up of dead ends on all sides. After I spent the better part of a day having my family scream directions at me while I basically ran laps between the 6th and 8th floors, I started over and fell ass backwards onto the solution. “Jeez, it seems like I went up a lot of floors there. Let me check the map and ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

The fact that I actually felt compelled to finish 3D 3D! at least once for reasons besides the sake of this review probably speaks louder to its value than anything I could write. It’s the type of novelty experience you want to say you completed, just for the sake of it. Yea, it’s an old computer maze game where the bells & whistles are the ability to shade a solid wall in. I don’t really factor a game’s historic status as a curio into my verdicts, but once a game gets that YES! on its gameplay merits, I admit that I’m always a little happy when a pioneering game exceeds my expectations of what can and cannot survive the test of time. I literally can’t imagine what 3D 3D! must have been like for gaming fans in 1981. A taste of things to come? Maybe. I’m just happy that I never got bored. Once I got the hang of the concept of looking up before moving up and then turning my head back to a forward facing position, I actually did have fun. If I’m disappointed by anything, it’s that Digital Eclipse didn’t slap together one of their Reimagined games for this. Otherwise, I have to admit I thought this would certainly be a NO! when I fired it up, and it’s not. We’re off to a good start.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Centipede
Platform: Sinclair ZX81
Year: 1981
Designed by Jeff Minter

“Likely fated to age badly” is going to pop up a lot in these early reviews. Forget the test of time. This take on Centipede, with its complete lack of colors and sound effects that the coin-op relies on for all of its charm, probably had little chance of surviving the test of next year in 1981. There’s one gameplay twist to Llamapede that I did find genuinely fascinating: misfired bullets can functionally act as blocks that impede the pedes. In other words, if your timing is just off and your bullet passes just in front of a centipede, it functions like the mushrooms and causes the centipede to drop a level and change directions as if it ran into a wall on the playfield. It’s actually an interesting concept that I’d like to see future games based on Centipede explore further. Unless they already do that and I somehow never noticed.

Sticking to this version, I just didn’t like it. Even after adjusting to make the game faster or slower, this Centipede has too slow of bullets and demands too much accuracy in your firing. The bigger historic “twist” for this edition of Centipede is that Jeff created this unauthorized port based on screenshots and second hand accounts of what the gameplay was like. He’d never actually played Centipede or even seen it in motion. THAT is amazing and I take my hat off to him. While my heart gives him historic points for one of gaming’s greatest examples of the telephone game (it’s remarkable how close he came to the real deal), this take on the Atari classic isn’t very fun at all.
Verdict: NO! But a very, very impressed NO!

Deflex V
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1981
Designed by Jeff Minter

Although it won’t win any awards for presentation, Deflex V sure is a charmer. It’s such a stupidly simple concept: a ball is bouncing back and forth, and you have to lay down walls to deflect it into a target on the screen. Each wall is dropped to cause an immediate deflection of the ball, which makes things a little tricky, as there’s only two dropping buttons: left and right, but they don’t really reflect which way the ball will deflect. since where the ball will go depends on which direction the ball is traveling. I can’t remember the last time such a simple game had such a sharp learning curve. The longer the game goes, the more clogged up the screen gets with walls. The playfield can have a max of twenty walls total. Attempt to lay more than that and a potential seizure-causing penalty screen appears. I’m not sure what’s worse: the screen flashing or the sound it makes when it happens. It sounds like a duck being electrocuted. Not that I would know what that sounds like. 😶 Okay, I do know. I had a weird experience once in Chile. But I don’t like to talk about it.

The game can be played two ways: with stationary targets and with moving targets. Oddly, when you play the moving target mode, the ball travels at a high speed no matter what difficulty you cue up. Honestly, I felt the stationary target was the stronger of the two modes. There were multiple times in the moving target mode where the ball seemed to hit the target but I didn’t get credit for it. Oddly, the target also disappears for a fraction of a second when that happens. Besides, the stationary target mode felt more like a video sport. By the time I finished my session with it, I was actually kind of stoked to check out the updated versions on this concept still to come in this collection. The only reason I didn’t put more value on this is because it was, in fact, replaced by better versions later on.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Ratman
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

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My expectations for Ratman were set pretty low. Why’s that? Because the feature itself has Jeff talking smack on his own game. I thought “well, we’re our own worst critics. How bad can it be?” The answer is pretty f’n bad. Ratman is a game that I would describe somewhere between the words “unplayable” and “broken.” After Making of Karateka, I thought my days of playing games with super-extreme unresponsiveness were over, but this is on an entirely different level. At its (cold black evil little) heart, Ratman is a whack-a-mole game that has more in common with LCDs than most PC titles from this era. The catch is there’s a hole in the ground that doesn’t seem to kill you, but any mice that make it through become “devils” that poke you with spears. The problem is the game simply does not listen to your commands most of the time. I’d say as much as 90% of your inputs go unregistered. I’d tap the button like crazy to swing a hammer, sometimes pressing the button as many as a dozen times (I counted) before the hammer would actually swing. Holding down the button didn’t improve the massive delay in this, or in steps taken. This might be the worst video game I’ve ever played. It’s completely, utterly broken. It’s okay though, Jeff. The Ratman forgive you.. this time.
Verdict: NO!

Superdeflex
Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Year: 1982*
Designed by Jeff Minter

*In the documentary, the games are featured in a different order but, in this feature, they’re listed in the order they’re presented in the games menu.

A potentially superior take on the previous Deflex concept, Superdeflex retains the basic “ball bounces non-stop, drop walls to deflect into targets” concept, but with a few twists and, unfortunately, one major drawback. Here’s the good news: this time, the ball is an alien that you’re guiding to 10 exits per level. Each new level adds extra challenges such as enemies, pits, walls, and clusters of existing walls that can cause domino rally-style chain reactions. The toughest of the obstacles was easily the lightning strikes. At first, I thought they were totally random. They’re not, but you have to look closely to know where they’re aimed. Two tiny little bumps in the north and south walls act as the lightning rods. It’s tough to see them, but once I did, dodging them could have been a lot of fun. Now, for the bad news: like many games in this collection, the concept is failed by laggy, unreliable controls. Timing-based games like this have to either be perfect or, failing that, have a predictable lag that you can clock and account for every single time. Unpredictable and inconsistent lag is something I don’t think I can ever have fun with. It’s just not an enjoyable challenge to overcome because, frankly, you don’t “overcome it.” You just luck out when it doesn’t screw you. Tragically, Superdeflex also had several instances where pressing a button didn’t lay a wall at all. I’m sorry to say it, but for a game like this, that’s a deal breaker.
Verdict: NO!

It was at this point I quit working on this Definitive Review for a year-and-a-half. I figured most games would be laggy like these. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Oh, a few more games are ruined by the unresponsive button presses, but it will come to an end eventually. Surely there has to be a way to make these better. You mean to tell me we can explore Pluto but we can’t make a computer game from 1982 not lag?

City Bomb
aka Bomber
Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

Based on the famous Atari game Canyon Bomber and the 1982 Falklands War, Bomber was originally titled, and I’m not joking, “Bomb Buenos Aires.” Jeff’s sentiment was actually satirical and anti-war, but that doesn’t translate at all to a game title. It reminds me of a famous Kevin Smith story where he joked to New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick about how he was thinking about suing Tim Burton for ripping off a visual from a comic Smith did in Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake. Smith’s tongue was firmly in his cheek and he was giggling the whole time. The context that he was clearly joking was lost along the way, so the blunt print where it said “he’s currently contemplating legal action” came across as dead serious and caused a little bit of a problem for Smith. And that’s basically what happened here. “Bomb Buenos Aires” is stark and blunt and sounds pretty heartless because there’s no context. Thankfully, this happened in 1982 and not 2025. Jeff was a 20 year old kid in 1982 and, get this, 20 year old video game makers aren’t media savvy.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking “all this hubbub over a terrible Canyon Bomber knock-off?” I can sum up this review really easily: you need games like this to be responsive, and Bomber is not. Sometimes the button to drop the bomb just plain doesn’t work. If the lag was consistent enough that you could adjust to it, that would be one thing. But the delay is unpredictable. It can happen even if you wait a while between bomb drops. I wish when it comes to these old PC games that have lag that, in addition to the original game file, they’d create an idealized approximation of what the intent was. Thankfully, I’ll get to review the real Canyon Bomber (or at least David Crane’s 2600 port of it) when I review Atari 50. Which I swear to God I will eventually.
Verdict: NO!

Rox III
Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

Well, if nothing else, Rox III provided my family and I with fits of laughter that I’ll never forget. This is sort of like a stripped down version of the Atari 2600 “classic” Atlantis in that you’re trying to intercept incoming enemies from a stationary position. Instead of three different defensive positions, all your missiles are launched from a central platform in three directions: left, straight up, and right. The enemy asteroids, on the other hand, have a few different channels they can travel down and they can change speeds and eventually even lanes. The timing is unpredictable to the point of feeling luck-based. I broke my family because I had an uncanny knack for near misses grazing the target before going right past them. For god’s sake, people of Earth, do not ever put me in charge of planetary defense.

You don’t die immediately if an asteroid hits the ground, as it’s only when they punch through the ground that it’s game over. The distribution is based on pure chance. I had a game where I missed everything but the sky itself in the first wave and still survived to the next round because the asteroids were distributed across the playfield, but I also had a game where I was killed in the first round because the rocks seemed to be aimed at one spot. Where Rox III really confused me is sometimes I missed but the asteroids seemingly did no damage at all to the terrain. A bigger problem is, once again, we’re playing a timing-based game that has unpredictable input lag that sucks all the fun out of a potentially addictive idea. My family did enjoy laughing at me, but that’s not included in the Llamasoft package. What is included in the package is a much, much better version of Rox, coming up in a little bit.
Verdict: NO!

Turboflex
Platform: Atari 8-Bit*
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

*They seem to have forgotten to include a portal to this in the documentary. The cover art is part of the timeline, but not a way to play the game. You have to access it from the game menu. A last second addition, perhaps? If so, good call including it.

You’re probably reading this just a few minutes after my last “Flex” review, but I played Turboflex a year-and-a-half after Superdeflex, and I had no muscle memory from my prior experiences. Thus, I had to once again rewire my brain to know which way the ball would bounce. Once I did, yep, this is the superior version of the Flex series thanks to having the most responsive controls. Guide a ball to an exit with two buttons and nothing else. This is bare-bones basic, with each loss of life bumping you to the next difficulty level. If you play on the lowest setting, the exit is stationary at first, then it starts to move after you die. Eventually the ball moves faster and the exit will reverse directions when you lay down a wall. It’s the type of simple but potent time waster that works around the weaknesses of hardware instead of trying to brute-force overcome it. While it doesn’t have all the additional features or obstacles seen in Superdeflex, I prefer this optimized version by a big margin. It’s the best game in the collection so far. One final thought on the Flex series: Jeff was so ahead of his time, because this would have been the ideal mobile game thirty years later. You know, I typed that, then I thought “how would that work?” Suddenly I don’t think it would. Okay. Move along.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Abductor
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

You know what I love about this set devoted to the games of one single developer? You can literally feel the learning curve if you experience these games in sequential order. Like someone trying to scale the warped-wall in Ninja Warrior who is so close that they’re getting their finger tips on the top. Abductor is a NO! game that can catch the faint aroma of a YES! I enjoy a nice, old school fixed-screen shooter, and Abductor has potential for that. Waves of fast-moving enemies fly onto the screen in single-file formations that twist and turn around. You have to gun them down before they kidnap six humans at the bottom of the screen. The twist is that, for the first three waves, you’ve only got a small gun, but after that, you automatically, and permanently, power-up into a double gun. Yeah, that’s really weird. Even if you die after that third wave, you come back to life as the double. Never seen THAT before. So, what’s the problem? Well, instead of enemies just spawning from the top of the screen, they can also spawn from below, killing you before you can even see their sprite.

Now the patterns aren’t random so you can brute-force memorize Abductor, but I’m still ain’t a fan of that design mentality. I’m also not a fan of the odds that your bullets will randomly fail increasing as you go along. That’s literally a feature in the game, as the manual says “the probability of shots ‘bouncing off’ the Alien ships’ hulls increases (as you progress).” Well fudge, that’s just a very, very bad idea on so many levels, most of all because the enemies in this game are so damn fast moving. The rescue idea is also a little bungled. When the aliens capture the humans, you can have a small window to shoot them down to return the humans to the ground. Well, except during the first three waves, where your starting ship’s bullets literally cannot reach the furthest left and furthest right humans. Hmph. The best thing I can say about Abductor is there’s no lag to movement or shooting, which I wasn’t expecting at all for this phase of the set. This is a very important step towards better games, but this doesn’t hold up.
Verdict: NO!

Alright, enough of this crap. Let the masterpieces start to flow, baby!

Gridrunner
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1982
Designed by D.J. Jazzy Jeff. No wait, Jeff Minter.

Gridrunner is arguably Jeff’s most famous game, but I’d never played any version of it. My first thought when I booted up this first of multiple versions of it was “another Centipede? Good God, I’m never going to escape this game.” That lasted, oh, about fifteen seconds. Gridrunner ain’t Centipede. Well, not exactly, but “not exactly” in the best ways. This is one of the most intense and rewarding arcade-style games I’ve ever played, and it’s so good. There’s four versions of the original Gridrunner in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story so I’ll try to be brief and specific to each port after this overview. The basic idea is that Gridrunner is a more “aggression from all-sides” take on Centipede. The most noticeable difference between this and the Atari classic are the two lasers that prowl the sidelines along the left and bottom walls outside the playfield.

This is the “grid” part of Gridrunner, because the left one will place a “pod” on the playfield relative to the position of the bottom laser. The pods are the game’s stand-ins for Centipede’s mushrooms, but they’re not just barriers that redirect the ‘Pede. THESE mushrooms will quickly mature into bombs that drop downward. So when the screen fills up with pods, it can be a lot to keep track of, and you still have to watch the lasers too. While the left wall’s laser that places the pod can’t kill you (this changes in other versions), the bottom one’s screen-wide laser will. There’s SO MANY THINGS to keep track of, and for your first couple games, expect it to be overwhelming and maybe even a little demoralizing. At one point I dropped four lives on the first level after a good run, for f*ck’s sake Catherine how could you do that. But thanks largely to some damn impressive-for-the-era scoring balance that makes high score chasing genuinely thrilling, Gridrunner is incredibly fun. Now, everything I’ve just said applies to basically all the Gridrunner games with only minor changes (except the left laser not being lethal). Let’s get to the VIC version.

For the VIC-20, there’s thankfully no lag at all. Gridrunner’s controls are responsive and the graphics are distinct enough that you can tell everything apart. My one and only issue is that the controls are a little loosey-goosey in this build. While it’s difficult to line up with the pods in each build (no analog controls), this is easily the hardest of the Gridrunner games in that regard. Even that has a silver lining of adding both strategic layers and additional risk/reward factors, intentional or not, since avoiding the pods and the points they bring altogether is viable even late in the game. I used a hybrid strategy of not attempting any subtle movements and trying to align my shots by sweeping into place from further away, but if I didn’t get positioned correctly, I didn’t try again and just avoided that pod. Coming up with that was satisfying too and worked for my best scores. Don’t get me wrong, I’d take tighter controllers over this, but it’s not a totally bad thing. The VIC-20 also has the smallest playfield, but again, that might be a plus since it adds to the claustrophobic feeling. The weakest version of Gridrunner still was something I walked away from saying “surely this has to be the best VIC game ever, right?” Jeff would have a couple more of those, though.
Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Andes Attack
aka Defenda
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1982
Designed by Jeff Minter

My longtime readers know that I cherish Defender. If they ever get around to releasing another Midway Arcade Treasures set (my #1 Gold Master Series wish list item), I’ll finally do a review of the coin-op. The fact that Jeff was skilled enough to create a functioning tribute to Defender on the VIC-20 that looks the part speaks volumes to his ability. Sometimes it even comes close to passing the smell test as well. In fact, it’s close enough that I’m guessing huge fans of the Williams arcade classic who owned VIC-20s in 1982 were tickled pink by Andes Attack’s existence. It DOES get a lot right, too. The “defending” part and the consequence of the aliens merging with the people (or, in this case llamas) are here. The mountainous terrain is here. The satisfying bullets that feel like powerful, destructive energy blasts are here. He even has the different enemy types, like the bombers (though they don’t behave the same as the coin-op). This is, frankly, damn impressive.

Unfortunately, a stunning effort for the limitations and era were fated to age badly. The act of turning around has too big of a delay to it, and the collision detection is not great. I had plenty of instances of bullets seemingly going right through enemies. The worst part was things like starting a new wave or even a new game only to have a bullet or enemy that’s literally right in front of me kill me. As a +1 to this museum of one of the most important people in the history of the medium, I’m happy this is here. Hell, let me be clear: I’m happy ALL these games are here and wish all the missing games were here. I’d given them all a chance. But, is Andes Attack fun in 2025? Not at all, and that’s okay because I learned the word “cack.” I’m guessing, like me, Jeff would probably rather play the real Defender. I’ll whoop your ass at it, Yak. Yeah, no I won’t.
Verdict: NO!

Rox 64
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

Like with the Flex games, I’m grateful this set includes a good version of a game where my NO! verdict was decided solely on the basis of input lag. This is the same gameplay concept as Rox III, minus the input lag. It’s NOT the same game, however. In Rox 64, every game is played with a strict sixty-rock limit. In theory, you can play a perfect game of Rox 64 in the same way you can shoot a 300 in bowling. Ooh, that is an interesting idea to really up the addiction factor, and it works. At this point in my review process, I knew I was spending too much time with each game and I needed to speed things along. I told myself “get what you need and move on.” So much for that (in fact, the total playtime of this set ended up being over 160 hours, though it’s closer to 150 since I left the game on without doing anything a few times). I spent two hours with ROX 64 when, realistically, I knew the YES! was locked-in after thirty minutes. That’s despite some very eyebrow-raising warts. Like, sometimes a new game starts and you just spontaneously die.

This happened to me the first time in my second or third game, and I didn’t know what happened. Was I supposed to press buttons during this sequence? This is why scanning instruction manuals instead of assigning someone to type in new instructions is a bad idea. The next game, I just mashed every button during the landing and I survived, so I kept doing that each game afterward. But eventually I spontaneously died at the start again. Now I’m not sure if this is a bug or a practical joke by Jeff. Seriously, would you put it past him? At least it never happens in the middle of a live game. A bigger potential issue is that sometimes the asteroids enter the playfield on a trajectory where seemingly no angle can possibly intercept them at any point, so you either have to use one of your three bombs or, new to this game, you can abort at any time and cash-in for 5,000 points. I’m not a fan of unavoidable enemies in games like this. With that said, the abort idea is actually pretty smart and added a unique layer that turned Rox 64 into a competitive hit in my house. I didn’t expect any game in this collection to be one of those “everyone gathers around and takes turns” games, but Rox 64 was and everyone had fun. When they didn’t die right out of the starting gate, I mean.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Gridrunner
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

The best of the trilogy of old school Gridrunners included in this package, this is the first Gridrunner where the left laser can kill you while it’s producing the pods. Besides that, the biggest change is that the playfield feels huge even if it’s only marginally bigger than on the VIC-20. The movement is also a lot less loose. It’s still tough to align shots, but hell, I suck at getting the last segment on Centipede and basically every Centipede sequel and/or knockoff that lacks power-ups. The last subtle change is that the overall speed is turned down a very small but noticeable notch. I think that’s to the game’s advantage, as none of Gridrunner’s intensity is loss. If anything, I think it allows you to pay closer attention, and this in a game where there’s so much to watch out for. It became apparent to me very quickly why Gridrunner is held up as one of the classic arcaders of the Commodore 64. It’s brutally difficult, but that fine-tuned scoring and pitch perfect enemy balance makes it a fair challenge, and a damn fine one. This might be my new favorite old school Centipede-like (spoiler: it won’t hold that title long). It was also yet another game where I told myself “get what you need” and ended up playing for hours trying (and failing) to break 100K. I never got bored for a second. Some reputations are justified.
Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
And as a reminder, value is relative to other games in the set. For Gridrunner, it will matter.

Attack of the Mutant Camels
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

Attack of the Mutant Camels: the game that did what Spaceballs did four years before Spaceballs even released: parody Star Wars. My spoilsport father said “Mad Magazine beat them both to it.” Of course they did. Still, of all the randomly weird things I’ve played, this is certainly one of the weirdest. I’d heard of Attack of the Mutant Camels, but I’d never played it or even seen a screenshot of it. When I saw WHAT it was, I was legitimately startled, and then I thought “why would anyone ever copy Empire Strikes Back?” For whatever reason, Jeff decided that the 1982 Parker Bros. game for the Atari 2600 (and later for Intellivision) had gameplay worthy of attempting to replicate and graphics worthy of satire because a magazine called Computer & Video Games famously described the AT-ATs as looking like camels.

Do they though?

(squints and tilts head) I guess they KIND of look like camels, except, no, not really at all. They’re too leggy. No, those look like 2600 versions of AT-ATs to me, and Jeff’s camels look like camels. The funny thing is, Jeff didn’t see the camel connection either, but he still turned a throwaway joke in a famous gaming magazine into one of his most famous games. One that I was fated not to enjoy because, frankly, I thought the Empire Strikes Back 2600 game was REALLY boring (I reviewed it in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include Part Two). This isn’t a clone, though. Actually, a lot of features are missing. As far as I can tell, there’s no Force bonus if you stay alive long enough. You can’t land to repair your ship and get hit points back. The camels have no specific weak spot for quick take-downs like they do in the Atari game. On the other hand, the Camels’ shots are easier to get a feel for but still tricky enough to keep you honest. Unless you just scroll in a way where the camel’s ass is showing but not its head, like so:

As long as the camel’s head isn’t on screen, they’ll never fire at you. It’s not an entirely safe method since you have to keep a screen-wide distance, which slows your rate of fire, which allows the camels to advance much further towards the base, which applies to the whole herd and basically increases the odds that you will fail. But it does work if you’re low and life and.. oh hey, is that a risk/reward factor? Well I’ll be damned, it is! And I like the scoring system of each camel doubling in value until the end of the level, a combo system which is reset if you die. There’s also a wave of missiles between each stage that you have to dodge (no shooting allowed) instead of just jumping straight to another wave of camels. So it’s not a total wash and if I had to choose between this or Empire Strikes Back, I’d take Mutant Camels for the more nuanced scoring system which should give it more replay value. But, this is still a pretty boring gameplay concept. And they do actually look more like pregnant kangaroos. Darn it Sasha, I hate you.
Verdict: NO!

Headbanger’s Heaven
Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Year: 1983
Designed by Whatshisface. You know, the bearded guy.

Headbanger’s Heaven is an LCD-like cross-the-road game that actually made me get so angry that I had to stop and count to ten. The object is to get from the left of the screen to the right, grab the money, and bring it back to the left side for 500 points. While this happens, hammers rain down from the ceiling, and if you take a direct blow to the head (not shoulders or arm, but head) while NOT MOVING, you score points and the pain meter fills by one. You can fill the pain meter all the way to nine, but you will die on the tenth one, or if you’re moving at all when the hammer registers. If you take a red hammer to the head, your pain meter is reset. This could have been AWESOME. You know, if your movement registered every single time you pressed the move button, and also if you were guaranteed to move when you pressed that button without delay. I mean, read the description I just wrote. Sounds exactly like a game that 100% no questions asked REQUIRES precision movement, right? Look how full the screen gets!

But, like so many other games in Llamasoft, and I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, the movement can have lagginess, or just as often, pressing the move button doesn’t work on the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Yeah, one time I tapped “LEFT” three times and nothing happened and I died. Again, look how full that screen is. This is not a game where you always want to hold a button down. You’re going to be inching your way across the screen, and that means you need those button presses to work every time. Your window to move forward might only be the time you can press the button once. If you press it and nothing happens and you die, that’s not fun. And I’m getting so sick of this sh*t at this point. I don’t care if the ZX Spectrum does this with most games. I’m not really playing this on a Spectrum, am I? We live in an era where a random guy who isn’t even a professional game designer took the NES disaster Super Pitfall and turned it into a borderline masterpiece. You mean to tell me that’s possible but Digital Eclipse, with their hundreds of collective years of experience, can’t take a forty year old game and make it so when you press a button, something happens every time? THAT’S a bridge too far? Wishful thinking? Impossible? That? Really?
Verdict: NO!

Gridrunner
Platform: Atari 8-Bit
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

Hey, I ain’t going to complain about more Gridrunner, though this was my least favorite of the trilogy. Easily. Actually, this is the rare comparison situation I’ve done where my final preference came down to the visual differences. Atari Gridrunner’s gameplay is closer to the C64 build than the VIC-20 game, with only negligible timing differences. It was maybe a little easier to use the walls to pick off the last segments in the Atari 8-Bit build. Maybe. On the other hand, the graphics of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 versions of Gridrunner POP. Ain’t no popping in the Atari 8-Bit build. The blue sprites don’t stand out enough. It’s not an entirely superficial problem, either. Gridrunner is a game where the challenge comes largely from giving a player so many different things to keep track of that it becomes overwhelming. This is difficult enough when the graphics stand out. Here, the blue enemy sprites blend a little too well. This makes the pods especially problematic, as their sprites lack the details that give you an instinctive feel of when they’re about to ripen and drop. It’s STILL Gridrunner and Gridrunner is awesome, but there’s two better builds to play in this set. The Atari 8-Bit build is really just a bonus curio.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Laser Zone
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

When it comes to white-knuckle arcaders, Jeff Minter came up with some great designs. Laser Zone is a gallery shooter played from two simultaneous angles. LEFT and RIGHT controls the bottom turret while UP and DOWN controls another along the right wall, and a life is lost if EITHER turret dies. There’s a lot more to it than that, as you can actually shoot diagonally as well, though there’s a steep learning curve to it. Oh, and friendly fire is turned on and I had an uncanny knack for shooting the other turret. The turrets will come out the other side if you travel as far as you can, which can be used for defense if enemies reach the walls. You also get bombs, with one added to your stockpile for each wave. The most complicated aspect of VIC-20 Laser Zone, and my biggest knock on the game, is WHEN you can shoot. See the little notches under the walls? Those actually matter. I’ll just post the instruction manual screenshot to explain it.

Since this shooting limitation isn’t in the Commodore 64 build, I assume this is some sort of bug that became a feature. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, I *never* felt comfortable with lining up my shots the correct “armed” way. Maybe that’s in-part because the movement isn’t quite accurate enough. I wish I could play this with Tempest-like dial controls (seriously, that’d be so sweet). It’s not a deal breaker as I really did enjoy Laser Zone. It’s one of those games that can turn on a dime. I had many instances where I went from being in complete control of the playfield to letting one enemy through my defense and suddenly I was overwhelmed while playing defense and trying to find a diagonal angle to pick off the enemies so I didn’t have to use a bomb. I’ll talk more about Laser Zone in the C64 review but for now, this VIC-20 port is solid and even has an advantage over the C64 version: the playfield feels bigger. I certainly shot my own turrets far less in this version, and it wasn’t even close. I’d still give the edge to the C64 build. Can I just say that I admire that Jeff kept supporting a weaker platform even after the Commodore 64 came out. That’s a “for the love of the game” designer right there.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Matrix: Gridrunner 2
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

The original Gridrunner might be the lure of The Jeff Minter Story for fans of classic computer games, but Matrix is so clearly the stronger game and one of the absolute best arcaders in PC gaming history. The most important change, at least in my opinion, doesn’t involve a new play mechanic or enemy. It’s the limit of how high you can move up the playfield. I’m going to include screenshots for both versions of each game. For the original game, you’re capped at moving this high (VIC-20 on Left, C64 on Right):

For the sequel, the invisible barrier is now almost near the top of the screen:

This seemingly small change yields massive gameplay ramifications. The dirty little secret of arcade shooters like this is that, as counterintuitive as it seems, the shooting isn’t actually the fun part. It’s the defensive side of the equation that generates most of the excitement. Without the close calls and the bobbing and weaving through enemies and obstacles, all you have left is accuracy of your own shots to generate the fun. That means the entertainment value is totally dependent on how well YOU play the game. But a game with a strong-but-fair defensive design is fun at all skill levels, regardless of how good a player you are. As long as the game keeps the pressure of avoidance going in a fair and logical way, the excitement never lets up. If you don’t believe me, play Gridrunner 1 and 2 back-to-back. In the first game, your defensive space is limited to the lower third of the playfield. It’s still well done, but it limits your flexibility and discourages improvisation. In many situations, your defensive choices are made for you. But with double the space, not only do you have more room to avoid enemies, but you have more options to blend avoiding enemies while attacking others. Matrix has essentially limitless strategic options, and I love it for that because I put the highest stock in games like this allowing players to come up with their own strategies.

The playfield movement alone would have been enough for me, but I’m playing a compilation of forty games in 2025. I admit that it would make for a lousy sequel in 1983. It’s not exactly something that looks great in an advertisement. So Jeff did what Jeff always does: add camels (see the above caption). He also added shot reflectors and an indestructible little guy at the top of the screen who actually costs you points if you shoot him. I figured “well that must be the guy you’re rescuing” at first. Except, no. He’ll stop and wave if you cross paths with him, and if the bottom turret is under you, it’ll fire. It’s yet another thing you have to keep an eye on, but it totally works!

I was actually kind of nervous going into Matrix. Unlike the original Gridrunner, I’d never heard of it. I figured there had to be a reason for that, but playing it, I couldn’t find one. Gridrunner 2 is so good that it kind of broke my heart that it has no clout in modern gaming. How absurd! It’d be like if Super Mario Bros. 3 was totally engulfed by the original game to the point that hardly anyone talks about it. Surely THIS has to be the best VIC-20 action game, right? And it certainly has a place in a wide assortment of “most underrated” discussions, including “most underrated game EVER made.” It controls fantastic. The enemies sprites are clear and distinct, which I appreciate a LOT more now that I’ve played the 8-Bit Atari version of Gridrunner. I can’t think of anything really to complain about except maybe I think the camels should be worth slightly more points in order to incentivize not letting them escape, which could in theory dial up some minor risk/reward factors. Oh who am I kidding? If there’s such a thing as a perfect action game, this is it. At least on the VIC-20. Indeed, I believe this build is far superior as an OVERALL gaming experience than the Commodore 64 version. Wow, VIC-20 won a head-to-head? Huh. I didn’t see that coming (spoiler: it won’t be the last time).
Verdict: YES! $6 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Matrix: Gridrunner 2
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

Unlike the original Gridrunner, an argument can be made that the VIC-20 version of Matrix bests the graphically superior Commodore 64 version in every other way that matters except “potential challenge.” I’m prepared to make that argument: the Commodore 64 version is too damn intense. Matrix 64 is much faster in every way, including your own controls. Precision aiming is slightly harder, but that “slightly” is amplified when you consider how fast the enemies can move AND attack. Both versions have centipedes that drop missiles like the pods, but that attack on C64 comes especially quickly. Even the little man at the top that triggers the bottom cannon follows you more closely. This all makes the C64 version of Matrix: Gridrunner 2 the unofficial “hard mode” of what is an already very difficult game. Please don’t mistake that as a deal breaker. Matrix on C64 is also one of the best games in this set. It just doesn’t, in my opinion, offer the balanced challenge that the VIC-20 version did. It makes me happy for those players that didn’t upgrade to the C64. They might not have had the horsepower, but they had the best version of one of the best action games ever on a Commodore platform.
Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Laser Zone
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

The C64 build of Laser Zone has larger, more detailed graphics, but at a cost: the playfield feels smaller. A lot smaller, actually, and certainly more claustrophobic. This also led to me shooting my own turrets a lot more than I did on the VIC-20 build. There’s a HUGE learning curve to the movement, especially as it relates to diagonal shooting. For my first half-hour or so of gameplay, I died just as much or more from shooting myself than I did from enemies, and that’s no exaggeration. To make up for all of this, the “you can’t shoot unless lined-up with the notches correctly” mechanic was dropped entirely. A wise decision, indeed, because the end result is one of my favorite games in this set. Laser Zone 64 is a seriously addictive shooter. It’s fast-paced, white knuckle, but it also has a lot of risk/reward factors related to the bombs and, yes, the diagonal shooting.

I do have two complaints. The first is that you have to shoot enemies dead-solid in the center. Otherwise, bullets pass through them. I’d prefer sprite-based collision. Second is a weird one: the scaling seems kind of off, but not in the way you would expect. Around the eighth wave, it felt like things got easier for a couple waves, and the waves felt shorter before the difficulty ramped up again. It was weird. At first, I figured I just had a lucky run, but it happened again when I nearly broke my high score. “The calm before the storm, perhaps?” my father suggested. Maybe, but it still felt jarring. That’s a REALLY minor complaint though, because I really loved Laser Zone. It’s so good that it made me feel bad that the world never got a Jeff Minter coin-op during this era. Imagine what he could have done in arcades in 1983. Final thought on Laser Zone: Gridrunner is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but Laser Zone is, at the bare minimum, just as good. Yet, I’d never heard of it before this set. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page for f*ck’s sake. Laser Zone being relegated to historic footnote is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice I’ve experienced as a critic. This is why comprehensive sets like the kind Digital Eclipse does are so important.
Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Hover Bovver
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Something

The idea of Hover Bovver is that you’ve borrowed (“borrowed”) a neighbor’s lawnmower, but he wants it back, so you have to cut all the grass without him catching you. You also can’t touch the dog, which, yeah, that’d make quite the mess and, assuming it survives, it’d probably walk funny afterwards and swear vengeance. “Who’s the no good son of a bitch that ran over my paw?” But I digress. The twist to the game is the neighbor can walk through the flowers, but if YOU mow a flower, an angry gardener will come at you. He’s got essentially the same attack pattern as the neighbor, which is to say he just inelegantly heat seeks you. So does the dog when he grows tired of your noisy lawnmower, though the dog can’t go through the flowers. Also, technically the dog works for you, and you can sic ’em on the neighbor up to a certain point. But eventually the dog will become annoyed by the lawnmower and attack it, which means running it over.

You don’t die if you run over the dog, which wanders around randomly until you call for an attack or run out of “dog tolerance” points. But it was the dog that led to most of my deaths because you’re left stun-locked for quite a long time if you touch it. It’s too stiff of a penalty for a game with such inelegant enemy attack patterns. Sometimes I recovered from the penalty only to immediately hit the dog again because it’s right f*cking there. Although the neighbor can become trapped behind a wall, so can the dog that you might need to fend him off. Later levels have fewer walls and, elaborate as they might be, they don’t feel optimized for exciting gameplay. I think it would only take a few minor tweaks to make Hover Bovver a decent game. Ditch the mower overheating mechanic and the ability to speed-up as you mow, and shorten the penalty for hitting the dog. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, I dunno. I just play these things, but I know that I really couldn’t wait to be done with Hover Bovver. I also know it’s one of his most popular games but I found it to be really boring. I would’ve liked to have seen this remade with a bigger playfield and smarter enemy/dog behavior, but there’s only one Digital Eclipse “remake” in this set.
Verdict: NO!

Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time
aka Meta-Llamas
Platform: Commodore VIC-20
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

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Jeff calls this “possibly the most stupidly named game of all-time.” I mean, I’ve played through like a dozen Legend of Zelda games and Zelda Fitzgerald hasn’t shown up a single time, but sure, it’s Meta-Llamas, Jeff. 🙄 Okay, so this is sort of meant to be another gag game as the premise sounds like it’s going to be some kind of epic, but it’s really just a very simple arcade shooter. But the joke’s on Jeff…… I think but it’s hard to tell with him…… because Meta-Llamas is actually a solid arcader. It’s neat, as it’s a simple shooter with the twist being that shots are always diagonal and you have to ricochet them to find the angle to zap the spiders. To further aid you in this, you can raise and lower the ceiling. It also has an intelligent scoring system with historically good risk/reward balance. THIS is a joke game? It’s really good! Maybe the best game I’ve ever assigned only $1 in value to. I should also note that the shooting angle on VIC feels completely different from the C64 game. In a shooter based on banking your shots, that’s a big deal because it does authentically make both versions of Meta-Llama worth a look.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Revenge of the Mutant Camels
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by a fever dream, I’m guessing.

Revenge of the Mutant Camels is a satire of a satire, and also a pseudo-sequel to Attack of the Mutant Camels. Spoiler: there’s a sequel to this coming up. Admittedly, I’m afraid of booting that game up. I’m terrified that it could unleash the dreaded satire-sequel-satire-pseudo-sequel-satire-satire singularly and destroy the entire universe, leaving nobody alive to hear the Big Rim Shot that expands out to form a new satire-based universe shaped like a pie-to-the-face where all physics and matter is governed by Mel Brooks. What I’m saying is, yes, Jeff Minter might possibly kill us all. (nods) In this game, YOU control the camels and have to survive waves of increasingly wacky enemies, including Pac-Man and the Ghost Monsters and even clones of Jeff Minter himself. SEE! HE’S TRYING TO KILL US ALL! Oh wait, the camel in this is probably evil. It’s one of those “play as the villain” games, isn’t it?

In all seriousness, this is one of Jeff’s more famous games, but I didn’t like it at all. Going back to what I said about Gridrunner 2 and how action games are dependent on a strong defensive game, Revenge of the Mutant Camels could be exhibit A of that argument. I really like side-scrolling shmups in case you haven’t noticed, and the idea of one where you run around the ground and have to jump to avoid things instead of flying all over the screen? It’s been done well before, but you need good physics and nimble movement. This has neither. The camel handles slowly and awkwardly. I get the sense that you’re not expected to avoid all damage and maybe barely hold on for dear life before reaching the end of a wave, where you get SOME life back. While I like that there’s tons of enemy sprites with different attack patterns, frankly I didn’t think the shooting felt great either. This was probably my least favorite C64 game in the set.
Verdict: NO!

Hellgate
Platform: VIC-20
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter in collaboration with Satan himself.

I sincerely admire that Jeff experimented heavily with his games. A lot of the focus goes on the silly llamas or camels, but the truth is, he did do some bold experiments. Some worked better than others and Hellgate is with “the others” in that regard. The idea is you control four turrets at once that have to shoot at enemies that spawn in the center of the screen. The turrets are controlled in pairs. You move the side cannons with UP and DOWN while the top and bottom turrets are moved with LEFT and RIGHT. You can’t sit still or you’ll overheat. Since this is a lot to handle, the game offers one kindness: bombs are fired automatically when an enemy touches you. Okay, now kill all baddies and enjoy the pounding headache that comes with keeping track of all these things.

Hellgate on the VIC-20 might actually be the single most intense arcader I’ve ever played. At first, I was certain this would get a NO! I’m happy I stuck it out because I slowly started to improve to the point that rounds were enjoyable. Oh, never to the point I was “good.” Even my best rounds never passed the 80K mark. I think some players might legitimately be physically incapable of playing this well. The problem isn’t just the four turrets but the fact that one side moves the opposite direction of the other, IE moving the left turret up also moves the right turret down. It’s overwhelming. I do think Hellgate is a worthy experience for anyone who enjoys arcade-style action games. I make no guarantees you’ll actually have fun, but as a test of the absolute limits of your hand-eye coordination? If you’re ready to really find out, this might be the game for you.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Hellgate
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter

Hellgate 64 is yet another Commodore 64 upgrade that seems to provide a kinder, gentler experience over its VIC-20 counterpart. I mean relatively speaking, of course. This is still a MADDENING game that requires a full rewiring of your gray matter if you hope to fully control all four turrets. But the movement is a little more accurate on C64 while the pace of the enemies being released is a little slower, allowing for quicker adjustments and, in theory, more time to set your shots. Okay, so it should be the better version, right? Not so fast, because you sure seem to overheat a LOT more quickly on the C64. Now in theory you can prevent this by staying in constant motion, because you don’t gain heat if you keep moving. In practice, all that does is leave you open for enemies. Most of my deaths on the VIC were via running out of bombs and dying to the enemies. The overwhelming majority of my deaths on the C64 were due to overheating. This really was one thing too many to keep track of. As if having to move four things to control at once (two of which have the controls inverted, mind you) while having enemies come at you from all sides wasn’t tough enough. I learned to live with it on the VIC-20, but here it proved to be ruinous for any and all entertainment value.
Verdict: NO!

Sheep in Space
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter

Sheep in Space is a more complicated version of Defender. So complicated that I was worried I would never have that “ah, I get it” moment. It took a while (seriously about an hour of playing and dying) before I “got it” because I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to bomb the power generators or guard them. It’s guard them. Again, modern instructions would have been nice. Sheep in Space has the same basic concept as Defender: kill all the enemies in a large battlefield by using radar to hunt them down. Instead of kidnapping people, enemies take power stations to charge what’s essentially a bomb that will blow up the planet. So far, so Defender, but the complications are about to start. The playfield, which is much, much larger than Defender’s, is divided into different speed zones. If you’re in the center of the screen, your sheep does an impression of a bat out of hell. But, the further away you are from the center, the slower you travel due to the planetary gravity. It’s SUCH a neat idea. Hell, even your shots become drawn to the floor and ceiling due to gravity.

It sounds great, and it can be! I’m giving it a YES! along with one of the highest values in this set. I really had fun. But there’s one mechanic in this that I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and knock Jeff over the head with a shovel before he added it to the game. While you do all the combat, your sheep becomes progressively more hungry and requires you to stop and land to feed it. There’s designated grasslands on both the floor and ceiling that the sheep will eat at what could generously be called a “leisurely pace.” It takes FOREVER to recharge its hunger status and it just sucks the f*cking excitement out of what is otherwise one of the best twists on Defender I’ve seen.

The good news is, in counter to the ridiculously slow feeding stuff, there’s some additional mechanics to help increase the tempo of the action. At first, I thought the planets were too damn big. Make no mistake, they’re HUGE, especially compared to Defender. But Jeff built in not one, not two, but THREE hyperspace options that are different from any other game in this genre. In games like Asteroids or Defender, hyperspace usually places you in a totally random spot that could be lethal. You only use hyperspace out of desperation when you’re out of options. Here, the hyperspace is designed specifically to speed-up gameplay by warping you to a random enemy, with two additional styles of hyperspace that specify targets on the ceiling or floor. It works without feeling like too much of a shortcut since you still often have to give chase to the baddies.

The best way I can describe Sheep in Space is “what if most Defender encounters felt like drag races?” The different speeds of the screen WORK and there’s few things as satisfying as running down an enemy in the center of the screen, then doing a u-turn and shooting it. Or even colliding with it, since unlike Defender, you can absorb damage and get so many hits before you die. Most of my deaths were a result of the planet blowing up and being unable to survive the manic wave of enemies that you get as punishment for allowing it to happen. So don’t mistake Sheep in Space as a copy of Defender. It’s a love letter to it. It’s one of the reasons I’m not deleting Llamasoft from my Switch after I finish this. I think it’ll be Sheep in Space that I come back to when I have a Defender itch and want something different to scratch it. It’s a lot of fun. I just wish the sheep ate quicker.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Attack of the Mutant Camels
Platform: Atari 8-Bit
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter

One of the best games in the set is immediately followed by possibly the worst game in the set, at least among the games where the controller actually listens to you. Although this is structured like the previous Attack of the Mutant Camels and remains a satire of the Atari 2600’s Empire Strikes Back game, this plays far, far worse than either of those games. Unlike the Commodore 64 game, you can’t disable colliding with the camels. The playfield is more compact and the controls are VERY touchy. This is supposed to be much more inertia-based than the original Attack of the Mutant Camels build and closer to how the Star Wars game played. Except impacting a camel sends you flying like both the camel and the ship are made of flubber. Same with the bullets. EVERYTHING sends you flying quickly backwards with extreme violence. Because of how little room you have to dodge anything combined with the insane knock-back, an already mediocre-at-best gameplay concept is rendered completely unplayable. Maybe Jeff just hated Atari’s home computer line. (Cathy from the Future: if that’s the case, he had a funny way of showing it.)
Verdict: NO!

Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time
aka Meta-Llamas
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1983
Designed by Jeff Minter

Two levels into my second game and I found a “sweet spot” to stand that allows for easy cheesing of Meta Llama’s first eight or so stages. Call this the conservative strategy designed to preserve lives (no extra lives in this game) for later levels. Just position your Llama above the O and U in “BONUS” then lower the ceiling a little bit and hold the fire button down. You won’t die for the first few levels and you’ll not completely be hosed on points, though you certainly won’t earn what you CAN earn. Once you can no longer stand still, don’t sweat it. You’ll only have to move a little bit for the next few levels after that. I didn’t have to be more careful until a dozen or so levels in. In literally only my second game, I put up a score of 149,467 and made it all the way to level 18. In my third game, I got to level 19 and 167,084. Each of Jeff’s instruction books have a target score for “good players” and for Meta-Llamas, it’s only 100K. In my sixth game, I broke for 211,796. Good for me, but six games to DOUBLE the stated target score? Yikes.

Now, here’s the good news: like the VIC game, Meta has a very well-crafted scoring system that discourages what the above video showed. If you shoot the spider directly off its web, it’s only 100 points. The web scores between 700 and 200 points, depending on how quickly you shoot it, and landed spiders score 600 points. So each enemy, all-in, is worth potentially 1,300 points. This is a fantastic risk/reward design because, once those spiders land, it’s hard to find a good angle for them. Close range ones are especially tough. I often finished levels doing a little dance of wiggling from the left to right sides of the screen using the screen-wrap. Once I understood that…….. I died more quickly. Never did end up topping that 200K game. Oh well. Like the VIC game, this is fun in small doses. Oddly enough, if I had to pick one or the other, I think I’d take the VIC version. Thankfully, I don’t have to make such a choice.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Ancipital
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1984
Designed by Yak the Hairy

It’s bonkers how many games in this collection had “all-timer” potential that’s squandered for no good reason. Ancipital is in the same boat as Sheep in Space in that it’s got so much going on that it’s overwhelming at first, but it eventually reveals itself as one of the most unique games in the set. The idea is that you’re in a gigantic maze with one hundred rooms. In each room you have to manipulate enemies in a way that transforms the walls into pathways to the next room. The actual action is a frantic shooting/platforming hybrid where you have to swap gravity on the fly. You can walk on all four walls and I loves me some anti-gravity games. However, Ancipital has a very steep learning curve to its gravity gameplay. You have to swap direction mid-air, and the speed of movement is too damn quick. Plus you can NEVER touch a wall with anything but your feet. This means you have to practically avoid the corners altogether. It’s an instakill otherwise. It’s really touchy too, so I admit this was the game I cheated with the most. Even cheating, I couldn’t survive long enough to beat the game (maxed out at like 65% of the maze) because the enemies pull some damn dirty pool.

By far the biggest problem with Ancipital is there’s often no elegance at all to the enemy attacks and no means to defend yourself. Even spamming attacks doesn’t work because the enemies will still hit you. Around the time you have knocked-out about a third of the maze, the enemies become far too aggressive. Too many rooms have the enemies either heat-seek you in a way that you could never hope to avoid, move too quickly to reasonably dodge, are unaffected by your weapon, outright life-slap you when you spawn in a room, or some combination of those. While the game offers life refills when you open up a wall, it doesn’t really matter because a game that’s focused on combat has boring combat. Fighting enemies that behave the way these ones do isn’t fun. Again, defense is where the excitement is, and this game feels like defense takes a back seat to trollish design. Consequently, what should be an engaging, addictive concept for a game that appeals directly to my escape room fandom actually isn’t fun at all. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I really thought the action in this was too frustrating to be enjoyable.

You can’t just have enemies rain down on the player like Ancipital does constantly. The nail in the coffin was the room timers are too long and tick away too slowly. What should be a fast-paced action game grinds to a slog when you have to just avoid enemies that resist being avoided in underhanded ways while the clock its ass off at you. Removing the clock alone would have probably turned Ancipital into a contender for best game in this set. With a slow clock and enemies THIS punishing? I didn’t think it was fun at all. The shame is, the basic navigation concept had me sit up in my seat. Hidden somewhere within the maze are five magical goats and camels that act as keys that unlock solid walls. This is one of those “you’re expected to make your own map” games and I intended to play along until I realized that the action was not getting better. I’d love to play a remake of this that has more reasonable difficulty. Mind you, I played this on easy. There’s not only a good game in here but possibly Jeff’s best game. No other NO! in this set hurt more than this one.
Verdict: NO!

Hover Bovver
Platform: Atari 8-Bit
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter

Hover Bovver on the Atari 8-Bit is a slight improvement over the C64 build. It’s a little easier to scratch-out distance between you and the neighbor and the controls are slightly but perceptively better. It still suffers from all the same problems of inelegant enemy design and too stiff a penalty for touching the dog. In this version, the dog tolerance seems to run out faster, too, and when that runs out, the dog beelines for you. Actually, the best thing I can say about the 8-Bit build is that it made it more clear the “dog tolerance” mechanic is the problem. The neighbor and a randomly moving dog is tricky enough to avoid without the dog turning on you having an insanely long stun lock to worry about. I think a better way to have balanced the challenge was to just shrink the amount of attack time you get with the dog. Either way, I didn’t like either version at all.
Verdict: NO!

Psychedelia
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1984
Designed by Jeff Minter

I didn’t see this one coming. Psychedelia is NOT a video game. It’s the first of two “light synthesizer” programs in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. You can use a variety of tools and preset shapes to create a pattern of colored lights. These days, this would be like a mini-game in an art-based game. Like I could totally see something like this being in a modern version of Mario Paint. It’s easy to use, too. Keyboard functions were mapped to a menu using the trigger buttons. It’s very intuitive, which I didn’t expect. I messed around with it for a couple minutes and, while grabbing screenshots, I got the above picture and was satisfied enough. You can see the jackalope too, right? See, it’s got a bunny face and antlers. “It looks more like a devil version of a beaver or some kind of rodent to me” said Sasha the Kid, who I’m THIS CLOSE to renaming “Sasha the Killjoy.” Fine, it’s a beaver with devil horns. Whatever. What I didn’t expect was, when I showed Psychedelia to my family, everyone wanted a turn.

From 10 year old Sasha the Kid (“you know I’m not 10 yet, right?” I’m rounding up. I totally know your birthday. Nod. Just don’t quiz me on it!) to my godfather, AJ. He’s pushing 80 years old and he’s not a “gamer” but he took a turn, and everyone in all ages in between. Everyone took a turn, and everyone loved it. It reminded me of the Rotoscope Theater feature from Making of Karateka. Less a game than a digital toy. I watched as the controller got passed around and everyone fiddled with it for a minute or two, giggling and enjoying it. It’s not going to be like Hidden in Plain Sight or Chompy Chomp Chomp, IE games we bust out during the holidays. But for fifteen-to-twenty minutes, my family enjoyed making pretty lights dance on our TV, laughing and smiling the entire time and I watched, realizing “I’ll look back on this moment someday and smile, and I think the kids will too.” You know what? Dammit, that counts for something in my book.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
I would have added more but Colourspace offers the same concept with more options.

The next game was so critically lambasted that there’s a video about the negative response to it in the feature. Additionally, the negative review that sparked the controversy is included in the documentary timeline in its entirety. Wow. You know what? Props to Jeff and Digital Eclipse for keeping it real. Okay, let’s do this! My body is ready!

Mama Llama
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1985
Designed by Jeff Minter

My body wasn’t ready. I spent the better part of a day trying to make sense of Mama Llama. I read the instruction book (as a reminder, the original books are the ONLY instructions offered in this collection) but it didn’t have a single gameplay visual aid. It’s almost beyond belief considering Mama Llama one of the most convoluted games I’ve ever seen. It’s totally inexcusable and grounds for a NO! by itself. Imagine any instruction book for something that’s not a video game. Let’s say it was a ham radio kit with all the parts to build the radio, a fairly complicated piece of machinery. Only instead of telling you what each of the components in the kit is, the instructions just described all the different parts. There’s no diagrams of what goes where using which screw or fastener and the kit just expects users to somehow know based on words with no context. Anyone would be f*cking furious about that. It’s frustrating that Jeff took negative reviews so personally once upon a time given how overly complicated the game is versus the amount of proper instruction players were given. Taking the ham radio thought experiment further, it would be like the person who made the prototype of the ham radio saying “how come YOU can’t build the thing? *I* know how to build it!” Well no sh*t you do! You made it! But you didn’t do a whole lot for everyone else playing it!

If figuring out how to play Mama Llama was fun or rewarding by itself, I wouldn’t complain. Nor would I complain if the gameplay itself or the objective were intuitive. It’s not at all. I THOUGHT I had figured it out, but then I ultimately needed to find a YouTube video that clarified the gameplay. I was also relieved to see a couple comments in that clip of people saying they’d tried for years to make sense of the game and couldn’t until they found that clip. Even after I realized that you’re going through waves with different gravity and objectives and using a cursor to kill enemies while trying to keep your baby llamas alive, I didn’t think it was worth the effort or fun at all. Like Ancipital, the attack patterns lack elegance. Also like Ancipital, some of the rooms require you to figure out the actual objective, IE how to kill the enemies. Jeff seemed to have understood how unintuitive some of the rooms in Ancipital were and included help screens. There’s no such thing in Mama Llama. There’s no help at all really. Whatever. I thought the action was sloppy and boring and the controls were some of the worst in this entire set. I wish I had just abandoned ship and moved on to the next game sooner than I did. Any critic who shat upon this in 1984? You’re vindicated. This was crap. Though I’m happy Jeff came to terms with it. I’ve met plenty of developers who never have that come to Jesus moment with their bad games. You’re a good dude, Jeff Minter.
Verdict: NO!

Colourspace
Platform: Atari 8-Bit
Year: 1985
Designed by Jeff Minter

Take everything I said about Psychedelia and multiply it by three or four. Jeff famously visualized colors and shapes moving to the beat of Pink Floyd. I speculated that he had an experience with what’s called Chromesthesia as a child but Jeff disagreed that it was anything neurological and actually gave me a quote for this feature (I added some commas only).

I think it was just that the synth riffs and filter sweeps of some of Floyd’s music inspired in me abstract dynamic geometric visualizations in my imagination, and I’d lie in the dark listening and imagining this stuff. And as I grew up, whereas most kids daydream about playing guitar in a band or whatever, I would imagine that one day someone would make some kind of “instrument” to externalize these things and I’d be “playing” that. It was only years later having learnt to code and started making games I realized that I could use those tools to try making such a thing myself.

In a way I consider that my real life’s work, as it goes back deeper than before I ever saw a video game, and I am still developing the idea to this day, and always will be, until I’m planted. In later years the games stuff and the lightsynth stuff have drawn closely together, and in my new engine they pretty much fully intertwine.
-Jeff Minter

I’ll tell you this: Jeff wanted to give people an experience like he had. He succeeded. Even if Jeff’s motivation for these wasn’t to make a video art toy, that’s what they are, and damn fun art toys at that. Like, I got a Spirograph for Christmas one year. I bet a LOT of you reading this did as well, and, of course, Jeff had one too. These light synthesizers are essentially video game versions of a Spirograph type of toy. Only I never could quite get things to look good with my Spirograph. Mostly I just made bland circles and had no clue what I was doing. I equally had no clue what I was doing with Colourspace but it’s a lot easier to “make art” with it. After watching everyone in my family take their turns, I used the built-in music overlay, tweaked a few of the options, and got this thirty second clip. Okay, so it’s not going to be played on loop in the Louvre, but I was pretty happy with it!

And if that looks too good to be Atari 8-Bit, you’re right. Digital Eclipse added a few options, something that’s not advertised anywhere in the package, as far as I could tell. They then used the updated Colourspace to generate all the backgrounds in The Jeff Minter Story’s menus. It’s hypnotic and beautiful. Simply beautiful. Okay, so there’s a LOT more options for Colourspace, even a two player mode. More options means a steeper learning curve than Psychedelia. But after playing Mama Llama, trust me, this thing is Pong levels of intuitive in comparison. Besides, the learning process is fun by itself since you get to see the effects of each toggle play out in real time. Most importantly, everyone had a great time with this, from children as young as Sasha the Kid to my nearly 80-year-old godfather. Again. Jeff gave me two experiences with a family of non-gamers who were smiling and laughing while complementing each-other’s efforts, and I’ll never forget it. Will I ever play it again after I finish this project? Maybe not, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if I busted this out from time to time to show people how easy you can make art with a mere “video game.” Deciding the value relative to the other games in this collection was hard, so I decided to go off the fact that Colourspace made everyone I love happy, and dammit, that matters a whole lot to me.
Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Batalyx
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1985
Designed by Jeff Minter

This is six different, smaller games, so I’ll just treat this like six separate reviews. And I’ll note that you’re apparently supposed to be able to switch to different mini-games on the fly and that was lost in translation. I can only review the game I’m presented with, not what I’m supposed to be able to do. But take this review with a grain of salt because apparently Digital Eclipse messed this up.

SPLIT DECISION: Hallucin-O-Bomblets

Have you ever blown up a balloon then let go of it and watched it fly around the room as the air let out of it? Okay, Hallucin-O-Bomblets is like that if you put a gun on the balloon. Which I tried once, and my parents are still pissy with me. Oh come, Mom! You can barely notice your limp! H-O-B is not the deepest game but it’s enjoyable enough as a time waster. The idea is you only move via the blow back of your gun, so you’re pushed in the opposite direction you shoot. I had enough fun that I have to give it a YES! but I need to also point out that, in only my second round, I seemingly built-up so much life from playing well (and I played kind of conservatively) that I basically couldn’t die. I think that’s what happened, anyway. Once I reached 4.7 million points, I noticed that I wasn’t dying from crashing into enemies. Oh I was losing more progress, but I could get that right back. In fact, my “health” was barely ticking down at all. I still have a ton of games left to review and I needed to move on, so I gave up on playing carefully and just held diagonally on my controller. Despite crashing into one enemy after another, it took me over five minutes to game over and I finished with 4.9 million points. IN MY SECOND GAME! There’s an excellent arcader in here but the challenge and health system needs to be completely retooled.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

SPLIT DECISION: Attack of the Mutant Camels II

For what it’s worth, this sequel does somewhat improve the combat of the Attack of the Mutant Camels/Empire Strikes Back formula because the camels do something besides lumber forward. They also now jump, duck, and sometimes new ones fall from the sky. It’s raining camels, which is ridiculous. It’s like Moses’ brother wanted to one-up him for the frogs and gnats and just took it too far. “For f*ck’s sake, brother! God was planning on wiping out the first born of each Egyptian and you somehow did worse THAN THAT! AND THERE’S CAMEL JUICE EVERYWHERE!” Anyway, their projectiles are also much more balanced instead of being too quick to reasonably avoid. So yeah, this is an overall improvement, but the problem is, it’s the same formula for Empire Strikes Back that I found to be really boring. And that part is unchanged.
Verdict: NO!

SPLIT DECISION: The Activation of Iridis Base

This is kind of like a Dragon’s Lair type of game. You’re given a direction to push, and you have to push it. It mostly didn’t seem to respond to my button presses. Especially with the fire button. I tried holding the button and pressing the direction. I tried pressing the direction and the fire button at the same time. I’m almost certain I NEVER succeeded when the fire button was involved. Then again, I’m pretty sure most of my left-directions also failed. I had a couple other people in the family try this one out and they experienced the same thing: the fire button stuff never seemed to work. Maybe we’re playing it wrong, but if that’s the case, maybe you should have included better instructions, Digital Eclipse. We tried rewinding the fire button stuff and redoing it every possible way and it still failed. Whatever. I doubt anyone is buying this collection to play this.
Verdict: NO! 

SPLIT DECISION: Cippy On The Run

Easily the most compelling game in the set and one of the most original in the entire Llamasoft collection. Using the same gravity engine that Jeff previously implemented in other games, the object is to guide a goat across a floor and a ceiling. Walking on any gray tiles turns them colorful. The object is simply to change all the gray tiles to colored tiles. The enemies don’t actually screw with you but they can cost you by changing the tiles into the dreaded green-blue titles (anyone who plays Magic: The Gathering knows that green-blue players are inhuman creatures made not of flesh and blood like you or I but instead out of pure, unadulterated evil) that cause you to reverse gravity. Or they do other undesirable and seemingly random effects like send you away from the section you’re working on. It’s actually totally possible to play this without shooting and still have a good time.

The only way you can die is by falling in a pit. At first, I thought you moved too quickly for a game with pits, but then I noticed the radar that gives you more than ample warning that they’re coming. When I kept an eye on the radar, I suddenly felt this exhilarating rush as I was able to run without stopping, swapping from the ceiling to the floor and experiencing a sense of speed that few games of this era offered. The controls are responsive enough that Cippy almost feels like a precursor to a certain blue hedgehog in terms of the velocity at which you can play this. Cippy feels like a prototype for a potentially historically awesome game. I wish it did more, but what it does was pretty addictive, actually. I’d like to see this concept explored more. A lot more, actually.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Best Game in Batalyx

SPLIT DECISION: Syncro II

I can honestly say I’ve never seen a concept like Syncro II. You have a 8×5 grid of mats that are functionally like treadmills that you can set to move in eight different directions. Moving one of a color moves ALL of that color (and matching patterns). While you do this, orbs are bouncing around the playfield, and the object of the game is to simply get the orbs to stop moving. It’s a really neat idea that’s failed by some maddeningly loose controls. It’s too damn hard to move the cursor one space. This in a game where you probably want to make small movements since the idea is you’re trying to create a pathway that will guide the orbs into a treadmill that is the exact opposite speed and trajectory they’re moving, which is what stops them. If movement was accurate, I’d given this a YES! in a heartbeat for pure, charming originality. Instead, pressing a direction pad might move two or more spaces in that direction instead of one. It’s too loose for a game where precision is so necessary.
Verdict: NO!
Seriously, redo this with better controls and I’m in.

SPLIT DECISION: Psychedelia

The only reason I’m giving this a NO! is because this version of Psychedelia has a lot fewer options than the other version of Psychedelia. You can sort of see the “horizon effect” here that you can adjust to look a variety of different ways. It’s fun for a minute or two but nothing compared to the full Psychedelia release, and coming after Colourspace, it’s really got nothing left to offer. Tellingly, nobody really wanted to play this build. They wanted more time with Colourspace. Actually, I kind of think I could go back and change the original Psychedelia to a NO! as well since NOBODY wants to go back and play it, but everyone kind of wants to replay Colourspace. I’m not going to retroactively drop the original build’s YES!, but really, if you play with just Colourspace, you won’t miss out on anything.
Verdict: NO!
Total Value for Batalyx: $3

Iridis Alpha
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1986
Designed by Jeff Minter
Apparently Uses Incorrect ROM

The game that I kept calling “Idris Elba” is yet another experimental, high concept shooter that I thought just wasn’t worth the effort of learning. The idea is that you control a ship in two channels at once and have to transfer energy between the two. It’s kind of like Defender in that each wave requires you to destroy X amount of ships, but it’s not “Defender-like” in the same way that Sheep in Space was. Since the playfield is split in two AND has to accommodate a status bar, the playfields are really cramped and I felt that made the action pretty bland, actually. It’s too hard to avoid enemies or things you don’t want to collect. Unlike Llama Mama, I decided to not spend an entire day trying to force myself to understand what exactly Jeff was aiming for here. Iridis Alpha made me appreciate what a vast, open playfield does for games like Defender, because I thought this was difficult to the point of being demoralizing and f*cking boring as an action game. When I reached the fourth level and died, respawned and immediately died again, I thought “I have never enjoyed a game that does that type of design. What am I doing with my life?” Not playing this anymore, that’s for sure. Thankfully, the end of the convoluted games has arrived.
Verdict: NO!

Revenge of the Mutant Camels II
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1987
Designed by Jeff Minter

Holy smokes! I like a Mutant Camel game! This is a BIG improvement over the original Revenge of the Mutant Camels. Movement is still stiff, but it’s not as sluggish as it was. Most importantly, you move faster and the enemy attack patterns are much more elegant. This is what I think he wanted Revenge 1 to be and it wasn’t. Plus, you’re not stuck to the ground with only a heavy jump at your disposal. This time, the camel can fly. It’s a little awkward to get the hang of, but after a few minutes I was able to bob-and-weave around enemies, and the eight-way shooting is more responsive too. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t exactly Konami SHMUP levels of satisfying. But it’s still a vast upgrade, and there’s even more.

You can enter a shop between stages to buy extra lives, health refills, or temporary upgrades to guns. Two of those upgrades I wasn’t impressed with: heat seeking bullets that you don’t even really shoot and ones called “yo-yo bullets” that return to you. Hell, some levels you can’t even use the heat seeking ones because you don’t actually want to kill some things, but you can’t know that until you go into the stage. Seems kind of like a dick move to even include that option but whatever. I didn’t like using them anyway. The gigantic bullets, on the other hand, were really satisfying. Honestly Jeff should have considered making them permanent.

Now, the catch to the shop is that you only get a limited amount of currency even if you play the levels well, and each time you buy something, the price goes up for the next time. This means you’re incentivized to use the shop sparingly, since nothing besides lives and health carry over between stages. I don’t know if the prices are necessarily properly balanced, but the idea does work. Yet, I kind of wish the big bullets were just a thing the game did. I was even able to test this.Revenge of Mutant Camels II is one of a handful of games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story that offers cheat code toggles. The toggle for this game? Unlimited currency. So after trying (and failing) for several hours to beat the game on its terms, I decided to turn on the toggle, crank up my lives, and see how much fun I could have with just the big bullets. And I had a LOT more fun with those bullets. I also still died a whole lot. The game would have sacrificed essentially nothing by just making them THE bullets. Either way, I liked this.
Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

At this point, the documentary had a clip for another light synthesizer called “Trip-a-Tron” that’s not included but it looks positively tantalizing. I’m guessing this is one of those “only works with a mouse and keyboard” things, except the documentary says it works with a joystick. Awwww. What a tease.

Voidrunner
Platform: Commodore 64
Year: 1987
Designed by Jeff Minter

As the finale of the Commodore 64 era of this set, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting swan song than Voidrunner. The third game in the Gridrunner series is the best yet and, yet again, one of the best arcaders ever on a home computer. Don’t worry though, because Voidrunner has enough newness to not give me “broken record” syndrome. Actually, it feels very modern in many ways. Take the existing Gridrunner formula and sprinkle a little WarioWare on it. Just a little. Voidrunner’s twist is that you control four ships at once. For the first level, they’re lined up with the middle two ships together and two more flanking their corners. All four are pointed at the ceiling and you just fire away at the standard Gridrunner/Centipede arrangement with four times the firepower. Okay, that alone is interesting for a minor upgrade, though I admit at first I was like “that’s grasping at straws for a sequel.” But then the second level had the same aligned formation, only with the ships pointed downward, and I sat up in my chair. Then in the third level, this happened:

And yes, the formation changes every level. Like I said, it makes Voidrunner feel slick and modern in a way few games from this era do. Hell, Voidrunner could have stuck to the same enemy attack formations and it would still feel fresh from the player formations alone, but Voidrunner doesn’t do that. Each stage genuinely does feel like it tailors the enemy attacks to the stage’s formation. There’s no sense of being arbitrary. I thought “surely it’ll run out of steam at some point.” It doesn’t because there’s so many twists along the way. Some stages have ships that can be separated, with one or more ships moving the opposite direction the primary ship (which is always green) does. Sometimes the ships are arranged in pairs that face each other with only a tiny gap between them that requires you to sandwich enemies.

Now, there is one annoyance: I hated the static-like background. THAT’S NOT A VOID! It’s too visually loud, and having the pods match the color of the little static dots in the background can be very annoying. A lot of Jeff’s games, especially these days, tend to be “graphically noisy” for the sake of punishing players for not paying close enough attention. Voidrunner feels like the first game in this collection where that idea is leaned heavily into and, maybe, is meant to be the main challenge. It was an idea too ahead of its time, as I really think I would have liked the game more if I could have turned this off. That’s little more than a nitpick though. Honestly, I feel like Voidrunner is the game where Jeff Minter proved that Gridrunner or Laser Zone weren’t flukes. With Voidrunner, he proved beyond any lingering doubt that he’s an ELITE game designer. It’s not even as hard as you would think, either. It’s one of his most balanced games. It’s like everything that I’ve played so far led up to this: a game with all of the best action and none of the garbage. A pure action masterpiece and a killer app for this package.
Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Awarded “Killer App” Status for Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Super Gridrunner
Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar
Year: 1989
Designed by Jeff Minter

When Jeff’s in the mood to make an intense game, he really puts his back into it. Among the YES! games in this collection, this is probably second only to Hellgate in terms of difficulty. This is the result of having a much more compact playfield. There’s not a ton of room to dodge, and after just a few levels the enemies can fly onto the screen VERY fast. Like, I’ve used fast forward on some emulators before to get past boring parts in games and the fast forward wasn’t as fast as the enemies in this game. I’m not a fan of that, by the way. I really think the status bar at the bottom is too big at the cost of the playfield. It’s a claustrophobic game, and sometimes that works out, but I don’t think it’s to Super Griddy’s benefit. Again, look how fast enemies can enter the screen.

And mind you that, when you kill enemies, they become pods that eventually drop missiles. But the pods also become solid surfaces that can change the direction of the other enemies. When they move that quickly, it’s asking a lot from players since they inevitably deflect off their deceased comrades. I could have used a bomb there, except, there’s a catch. Smart bombs in Super Gridrunner are called in the game’s instruction booklet, I sh*t you not, “Voluntary Martyrdom.” You lose a life, your ship turns into a ghost for ten seconds, and all enemies on the screen are turned into bonus points, you don’t have to restart the stage, and you get to keep your multiplier. Thankfully, the game offers a lot of flexibility to make up for the tomfoolery in the form of being able to turn the nose of your ship into a turret.

Inspired by R-Type, the nosecone function can be used two ways. You can either set it up as something that you shoot to “augment” your bullets and launch them in different directions that you manually set. The other option is what I mostly opted for: placing the nosecone on one half the screen while I stayed in the other half. There’s a sharp learning curve to positioning it, but it works and is a nice touch. Sigh. Honestly, the gameplay is probably the most flawed of any game that put over $2 in value into the pot because I really do think that some of the enemy patterns and especially their speed is trollish. But the action is also REALLY good in this, and it certainly offers the most intense challenge in the franchise yet. I think Voidrunner was more worthy of the “Super” title but this version of Gridrunner is fine.
Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89*
Platform: Konix Multi-System
Unreleased Work-in-Progress Prototype* (Ver 0.4)
Designed by Jeff Minter

*Because this is so early into production that it doesn’t have win/fail conditions or even a title screen, I’m not issuing a verdict for it. It’s in the proof of concept stage of development, so please consider Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89 to be a special bonus for the collection and not a featured game.

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The Konix Multi-System was an ambitious and powerful game machine designed by some Sinclair castaways who founded a company called Flare Technology. The Konix started life as a platform/standard called “Flare One” that was used in a handful of unsuccessful arcade units before it became the Konix Multi-System. After the Multi-System was cancelled, the team didn’t give up and developed the Flare II, which did eventually get bought and released under a different name. You know it now as the Atari Jaguar. My sister said it best: “these guys should sell their life’s story. There’s a wacky dramedy in there somewhere.” Yeah, especially since at least one of them didn’t recognize Tempest 2000 as a good game. That actually explains a lot, come to think of it. Jeff developed this updated Mutant Camels game for it, but what’s here isn’t even close to a finished game. Be warned: I died just seconds into my first game when I got hit by a rocket. Not that it matters. There’s no lives and no limits to how often you can switch your guns. A BIG variety of guns, mind you, most of which are satisfying to use. It also controls well, but this isn’t close to finished. It makes for a one-of-a-kind curio though and is worth a look.
I’m awarding $1 in bonus value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story for it.

Llamatron: 2112
Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar*
Year: 1991
Designed by Jeff Minter

*UPDATE: I’ve gotten a few people who noted that this version is not a very good approximation of the ST original. Specifically the sound is considered exceptionally bad in this build. For collections like this, my review is for the version IN the collection. Sometime in the near future, I will try to play the original Atari ST build via an ST-specific emulator.

Aww jeez. While watching the shareware portion of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, Jeff choked up when he talked about Llamatron, and that had me wiping tears. Unlike many shareware products of the 90s, Llamasoft just gave away the full Llamatron game and said “if you like it, please register it for £5.” Approximately eight hundred people did, but some didn’t just send him a “fiver.” They thought it was an underpay and sent him more. I didn’t know what to expect except a game that directly satirized the legendary Williams arcade classic Robotron: 2084. And it’s basically that, only with power-ups, warps, and a ton of wacky humor. There’s some genuinely inspired twists on the formula. Even environmental ones, despite keeping strictly to the Robotron formula. Like this:

Now, all is not perfect, as I don’t think the difficulty curve is well balanced at all. It starts off pretty good and feels like it scales properly, but then at level 18 (which you can warp to from level 13) the game straight up says “alright, you’ve had your fun. Now you must die.” I thought it was because I had warped, so on my second playthrough, I wasn’t going to…… only the damn item to warp sort of drifted over to me and I did it anyway. AND THEN IT DID IT AGAIN IN THE THIRD GAME! In the fourth game, I cheated and used save states to make sure I could finally play levels 14 – 17, and my hypothesis was wrong. Those levels scaled, more or less, how they should have, and then level 18 is just a gigantic wall with the words F*CK YOU! written on them.

The good news is you get three continues, so it’s not like I *died died* on Level 18. I just burned through all the lives I built up, and then everything after level 18 feels like the game spontaneously switched from NORMAL to EXTRA HARD. As frustrating as that is, holy cow, Llamatron has a legitimate argument for being the best game in this entire collection. I’m not quite going there because I think Voidrunner and Tempest 2000 are exceptionally strong games, but please don’t mistake this as a Robotron clone (and actually please delete the word “clone” from your gaming vocabulary unless you’re talking about a literal carbon copy clone). But Llamatron is clearly in the top three. I wish there were a little more in the way of power-ups and I wish some elements didn’t flash as badly so I could have seen things better, but I really enjoyed this a lot. And by the by, since I know you’re reading this Digital Eclipse: will you get off your butts and get the Midway/Williams/Bally license so we can get a modern Midway Arcade Treasures? Please? Pretty please?
Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Awarded “Killer App” Status for Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Revenge of the Mutant Camels
Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar
Year: 1991
Designed by Jeff Minter

I’ve heard that some people aren’t thrilled with the Atari ST emulation in this set, which runs through the Atari Jaguar’s emulator. For Llamatron (shrug) I pointed at something and it died. But for this final Mutant Camel game in the collection, there’s a pronounced sluggishness. Maybe that’s on brand for the Mutant Camel franchise, but jumping almost straight from Llamatron to this game, I felt the difference in responsiveness and wasn’t happy at all. So I must have hated Revenge of the Mutant Camels ST, right? I did at first, but once I got over the controls, I have to admit that I went from wishing to be done with it so I could FINALLY play Tempest 2000 to not being sad that I needed a few more rounds. The twist: an NPC helper (that can double as player two’s character if you go that route), worked well. I like how it works too: you can leave it to its own devices and let it just wander around and shoot things. Or, you can lay down and the goat will ride you, and it’ll target things more smartly.

The items did too, including some pretty inspired ones. Some items even do things like speed up the scrolling, which is useful in a game that’s about distance covered and not enemies slain. There’s even layers to the NPC too, since it can collect items independently that benefits you both. I still preferred having the goat ride me, but I’m all about player decisions and strategic flexibility. Meanwhile, while the level themes from the original Mutant Camels return, they just play better here, with more elegant enemy attacks (though not as good as Revenge II in my opinion). I’m still not happy with the movement, and there’s too many whammy items that screw with that movement, but the final computer game of this collection is a good finishing note.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft – The Jeff Minter Story

Tempest 2000
Platform: Atari Jaguar
Year: 1994
Designed by Jeff Minter
Also Included in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (Core Set)

When Jeff Minter met one of the architects of the Jaguar hardware, they were apparently unaware he was the designer of Tempest 2000 and proceeded to slam the game to him, saying it didn’t show off the potential of the Jaguar and was a “make-weight game” which I didn’t know what that meant but apparently it’s the same as me saying some games are +1s to collections, only without any potential for positivity (hey, I’ve praised many +1s). Anyway, the Jaguar designer wasn’t done, telling Jeff he thought it was “rubbish.” This isn’t one of those situations where I’m clutching my pearls saying “I can’t believe someone who was responsible for the Jaguar said that about Tempest 2000!” Actually, I could believe someone responsible for the Jaguar would say something so clueless because, going off the architecture of the Jaguar, it’s clear the people behind it wouldn’t know a decent video game if it sat on their face and had a little wiggle. Tempest 2000 is a bonafide masterpiece, Jeff’s finest hour, and one of the greatest video games ever made.

And the best part is, if you want just the original, no frills Tempest, only updated for the Jaguar (and without the spinner, obviously), that’s here too. Or, you can play Tempest Plus, which also offers features like a permanent CPU assistant. I thought this made the game a little too easy since the CPU is one of the better independent CPU drones in an action game. It IS reliable and doesn’t just blindly follow you around. But really, the meat of the game is the Tempest 2000 mode that has power-ups. The main one is a gun that’s better at carpeting the channels with bullets while moving. One brings back the drone from Tempest Plus and it’s just as useful and intelligent as it was in that game. And then one grants you the ability to jump. A jump with TONS of hang time that allows you to rain bullets on enemies that have reached the surface. I loved this jump. I’d put it right up there with Pac-Mania’s jump in the annals of all-time underrated gaming jumps.

Even better is you get a bomb EVERY stage, and you also get an extra life every 20,000 points. You can even build up more lives than the game is capable of displaying. It’s one of Jeff’s most generous games, and it’s not as hard as you would think. It does eventually show its teeth, but it takes a while to get there. Maybe a couple dozen levels, but it’s never boring even when you have to start over from the beginning. I mean, you don’t HAVE to start over. The game offers a “key” system that allows you to continue from a previous point. Honestly, I preferred just to start over. The action in Tempest 2000 is just amazing. It’s so much more balanced than the coin-op original. This is the rare arcade-like game that remembers that it already has the player’s money and isn’t trying to siphon as many quarters as possible. It’s balanced, and it’s so fun. Believe all the hype on this one. Well, almost all of it.

Yeah, the two bonus stages I managed to find weren’t very good at all. One of them involved flying through rings while the other involved staying on a green road. Neither of them feels at all connected to Tempest in any way, shape, or form. The cynic in me figured these were mandated by Atari to show off the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar but Jeff told me I was wrong and that he just figured players would want a break. I’d preferred bonus stages that were still twists on the shooting action. But it’s not a deal breaker. Tempest 2000 is the rare shooting gallery-style game that feels like it’s fun for everyone. And hell, if *I* could get nearly 500,000 points (though I never did end up getting #1 on the leaderboard, which is that 500K mark) anyone should be able to. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story even allows you to overclock the Jaguar emulator to play at 60fps AND you can turn on analog controls. It’s never looked or played better. What more can I say? Sometimes, legends live up to the hype.
Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
But, if you already own Atari 50, you can remove this entirely from the tally. It won’t matter.
WINNER: Best Game in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

Gridrunner: Remastered
Platform: Reimagined
Year: 2023
Designed by Mike J. Mika
Published by Digital Eclipse

Yeah, this is weird because it wouldn’t have been my first choice to get the full remastered treatment among the games in this set. I’d preferred something like Sheep in Space, Voidrunner, or even Laser Zone for that. Hell, even Hellgate would have been preferred. Don’t get me wrong: this is the best version of the original Gridrunner in this collection and a damn fun game in its own right. It’s much easier to tell when the lasers are going to fire. It’s much easier to tell when the pods are about to ripen. I was even able to deal with the last segments of the centipede better. It looks fantastic and modern. Getting the kids to try the “old” games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story was challenging, but if you paint over that old game with new graphics, it’s a cinch. I know this because the kids wanted to try it, and they liked it. A lot. Much like the Yars’ Revenge remastering in Atari 50, there’s nothing inherently sacred about the way the game looked in 1983. If Jeff could have made it look like this, he would have. Hell, he would have made it even more trippy. But a fun game is a fun game. That’s all I care about.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

One hundred and sixty-one hours of gameplay later and I’m finally done. Sigh. I made it.

FINAL TOTAL

YES!: 25
NO!: 16
Total Game Value: $92 (including the $1 bonus for the Konix prototype)
Features & Emulation: $30
Total Fines: $15
Target Value: $30
Actual Value of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story: $107

This is one of the best collections in terms of value for your dollar I’ve reviewed so far. Let’s play around with the combinations. As I noted above, if you already own Atari 50, go ahead and cross out $15 for Tempest 2000. Even removing the highest earning game in this set and you’re still at three-times the value of the price. And let’s say you really don’t give a squirt about old magazine ads or concept art. Drop the Features & Emulation total from $30 to $20. You’re still at $82 in value. God damn! Okay, let’s add back that $10 because you SHOULD think concept art and magazine ads are cool. What if this was “Gridrunner: The Jeff Minter Story” and it only featured games from that series? The Gridrunner franchise by itself earned $35 and made up the price of the set by themselves.

Commodore 64 games earned $35 in value. Commodore VIC-12 games earned $15 in value, for a combined value of $58. Sinclair fans, please don’t hate me. These were not the best games to show off your favorite 80s PC. The ZX Spectrum earned $0 while the ZX81 at least got on the scoreboard with $1. Atari platforms earned $35, with the ST putting up $13 of that, $15 from Tempest on the Jag, and Atari 8-Bit computers getting $7. So what if you’re NOT a fan of old computers? Uh, hello! Guys, I’m 36! I grew up with Windows. I’ve literally never touched a real Commodore computer. If I can enjoy these games, anyone can. Almost all of them are arcade games in everything but name. This isn’t a set for old timey computers. It’s a set for great video games that anyone can enjoy. It’s a fantastic set made by a fantastic designer of games, and I’m happy to have finally played through it.

Merry Jeffmas, everyone!