Hey, remember that band Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly? Me neither. Couldn't tell you a thing about him/her/them or his/her/their music. But I do remember the name. It stuck in my mind because it sounds like (and no doubt actually is) a series of commands from an old text-based adventure, like Go North, Open Trap(door), Climb Down, Get Trea(sure) and so forth. Such two word parser adventures were my absolute favourite games for years. How well I remember navigating the treacherous unlit mine passages in Eldorado Gold (complete with Mode 7 graphics!), doing strange things with a petrified lungfish in Adventurequest, and utterly failing to get off Earth before it was demolished in The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Adventurequest, a sort of Middle-Earthy sequel to the classic Adventure / Colossal Cave game, took us years to complete, so fiendish were the puzzles and vast the world it occupied (deserts! volcanoes! drowned churches! giant spider webs!). My mum was the trusted guardian of the Adventurequest Solution - a carefully folded square of paper containing the answer to each and every problem in the games, in tiny type. These days you'd just google for a walkthrough to Zombie Face Eater or whatever, but in those days you had to write off for the solution and hand it over to your mum for safe-keeping. Well, we did anyway.
Anyway, thinking about Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, I started making up my own band names based on old computer and video game dialogue. So without further ado, here they are. A point for every game you can identify:
Got The Humanoid (though for years I thought this was Ha Ha Humanoid)
Wizard Shot The Food
How High Can You Try
I Think Therefore... Clever
Run The Dolt
Food And Furs To Leesti
I'd Buy That For A Dollar
With My Brains And Your Brawn
Shake It Baby
Singing A Song About Gold
The Turtle Village
You should know that although this little blogget should have taken me only around 5 minutes to knock up, it has managed to take over two hours, thanks to the painstaking research I have undertaken, courtesy of YouTube, various BBC Micro emulator sites, and Wikipedia. Never before did I suspect I would devote 9 minutes 39 seconds of my life to a walkthrough of 20-year old beat 'em upper Final Fight, but that's how much I value accuracy. Why yes, I do have a lot of free time; why do you ask?
3 comments:
I think I got about five of them!
We must have wasted much of our youth on the same games then! Bloody Philosopher's Quest...
Funny how your brain's archival system can glue certain sounds and places together. In my head, the memory of the intro music to Gauntlet 2 will forever sound strangely echoey, as if someone had stuck a games machine down a tunnel in Chiselhurst caves. Funny that.
I think the aforementioned chaps were a band. A not very good band with a rubbish name.
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