By coincidence, I ran into videos of a guy completing the MSX game ‘Salamander’ (Salamander at Wikipedia). The video is in 4 parts and doesn’t include the very first stage: movies 1, 2, 3 and the end stage, 4. I discussed this game earlier: yesterday, last year and the year before that. Do I see a recurring pattern here?
There were a couple of things I recognized while watching those movies: I could identify most of the player’s actions. One of those actions is to spread out the ‘options’ [or clones as they were called too, so once in a while] as wide as possible so that every corner is covered by your firepower. I also recognized at what point ‘enemies’ would come from behind, a thought I find creepy and that only because it has been too many years ago.
While I’m on this MSX topic: In the early 80s, the MSX was heavily pushed by Microsoft (the company wrote the operating system [MSX-DOS at Wikipedia] and the BASIC programming language) under the slogan ‘one standard for computers’. I discovered this old video in which a very young Bill Gates explains why the MSX computers (both hardware and software) were the ‘logical next step’ in home computing.