davetansley

It's incredibly rare that a set turns out exactly as intended, but it sometimes happens. Like this one - the intention was to make a set that looked like coffee, and that's just what we got!

Fittingly, this set was sold as a gift for a barista!

I have a problem with nostalgia. I'm addicted to it, but it's never enough.

Most of what I do is dedicated to the pursuit of that drug, to experience that particular high. I play ancient videogames in the hope that they make me feel how I felt playing them in the 80s or 90s. I watch old movies for the same reason. I listen to old music, or music that sounds like old music, trying to evoke the spirit of a time long gone. If I could live in a world where the TV played nothing but He-man and Thundercats and Mysterious Cities of Gold, I would...

But over the last few years I've come to realise that this dogged pursuit of the past is a futile endeavour. Beyond fleeting moments of glorious recognition, I never end up feeling how I felt back then. And why would I? How you feel at a particular time is as much a result of the person you are as it is a response to the thing you are doing.

As an increasingly grumpy nearly-50-year-old, I am a very different being to the awkward 13-year-old I was in 1988. These days, I worry more about retirement plans and interest rates than I do about homework and unrequited love. I am the Ship of Theseus, in which every part of me has been replaced multiple times. My reactions to things are dulled, more refined, more cynical. Not worse, just different.

Back then, I felt like I was leading the vanguard of something genuinely new. Every ZX Spectrum game felt like a voyage into the unknown, a private world that few people knew or cared about. This feeling was heightened by scarcity. I saved pocket money for months just to afford a new game. Whether the game was any good or not was less important than finding something in that game to last me till the next far off purchase. That paucity of novelty caused me to find aspects of a game to enjoy, because I had no other choice.

These days, I have too much choice. I have devices filled with every game across multiple decades, shelves filled with cartridges I'll probably never bother to play. Novelty in abundance, and no incentive to make those precious connections.

And maybe I've seen too much? How can I be wowed by the undulating roads of Outrun or Super Hang On when I've driven every part of Liberty City or San Andreas? How can the freedom of Tir Na Nog thrill me when I've walked for days in Azeroth or Tamriel?

Even worse, I've realised that the nostalgia I crave is often not even my own.

I don't crave the 80s of North East England, all social deprivation and baggy jumpers, the 80s of my actual youth. Instead, I crave the cartoon-ish 80s of the movies I grew up on. I crave NES culture, or long summer nights with chirping insects outside the window, falling asleep in front of a black and white movie marathon, the pink and purple sunsets of a caricature that this narcotic industry has created.

I've realised that the pursuit of nostalgia will never give me what I crave, so I'm trying to change.

I'm trying make a conscious effort to enjoy things for what they are, not what they remind me of. I play games because a 48 year old man wants to play them, not a 13 year old boy. I try to make new connections and associations, rather than rekindle old ones. Elden Ring - sure, that reminds me of the year I got married! Super Mario World - ah yes, the time I took a week off work to get all 96 exits and watch SDGQ! I try to generate new nostalgia, rather than wallow in old.

Most of all, I try to accept that nostalgia is a drug best enjoyed in unexpected moments of recognition, rather than as a constant hunt.

What about you? Do you have your nostalgia craving under control? Or do you still seek those glorious and elusive highs?

This set uses one of my favourite techniques - hydro-dipping (or marbling).

With this technique, you drip special inks onto the surface of some water to make a pattern, then carefully dip a blank dice down into the water so that the ink folds around it. You then cast the patterned blank in resin to seal it.

The skulls in these dice were 3D printed on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro printer and hand painted. Then they were cast in blank dice, then recast in proper moulds.

We did a run of this design as a full set last year and it proved popular. This time we're doing a run of D6s (for Warhammer/Yahtzee fans!).

I've been lurking and waiting for a dice making community to pop up :)

Dice making was our "pandemic thing". We just started down that rabbit hole one day and it grew and grew. We ended up making and selling a lot of dice, including this set.

It's a petri pour set - where you drip various inks into resin and gravity pulls down creeping strands into the dice body while it cures.

Life has got in the way of making more sets this last six months, but I'm looking for inspiration to get back into it.

I'd love to hear the conversation that took place sometime in the early 90s about converting Lemmings to the humble ZX Spectrum.

"Sir, we've got this great idea for a Spectrum port!"
"Go on..."
"It's colourful, mouse-driven, with pixel-level graphic detail and many, many moving characters."
"Ummm..."

Anyway, somehow someone thought it would be possible and it happened. In fact, it happened to all the 8-bit home computers. But, did it end up as a floater or was it led over the edge to die?

Let's go!

Screenshot of Amiga Lemmings

Everyone knows Amiga Lemmings, right? Of course you do... it's almost the Mario of the Amiga scene. Level after level of convoluted, destructible landscapes. A continuous stream of tiny, potentially multi-talented rodents. Some quirky British humour that manifests in things like the self-destruct button or the catchy music...

It's a game that has aged like fine wine and can still entertain today. If you somehow haven't played it, go dig up a copy today. It's great!

Screenshot of Spectrum Lemmings

Uhoh! first and worst of all is the ZX Spectrum. Actually, I found it difficult to know where to place this one. It plays reasonably well, and captures that basic Lemmings-ness. But it looks so... ugh.

I appreciate the problem. Lemmings requires pixel-level detail; Spectrums can do two colours per 8x8 square. So it is monochrome by necessity. But BOY is it monochrome. It's aggressively monochrome. No nuance or detail. It looks like the Amiga gfx were sampled down to 2 colours and that's it.

Boo!

Screenshot of Amstrad Lemmings

The Amstrad port is better, in looks at least. The graphics are bright and chunky, and the play area is large. What lets this port down is the speed. It's very slow. The "mouse" pointer is unresponsive and sluggish which makes it hard to control.

Also, the music sounds ever so slightly wrong, to the point where it makes you feel on edge.

It's not terrible though.

Screenshot of C64 Lemmings

Best of the 8-bits is the C64 version. This port has good music, the graphics are nice and detailed, and the game is snappy and controls well.

What let's this one down is that the play area is kind of squeezed down to a narrow strip in the centre of the screen. For a game that requires you to see what is coming to the left and the right, this means you end up scrolling a lot. Still, it's not a deal breaker.

So, for 8-bits at least, a C64 win!

Console port comparison

There were many other Lemmings ports, of course, most notably to the popular consoles of the day. This isn't a format you'd expect to do well with a generally mouse-based game, but they all turned out pretty good...

MegaDrive and SNES both got a port. The MD version was my weapon of choice growing up, and it plays really well. The SNES version is similarly good, and both are well worth a look today.

NES got a port, and it's okay, the worst of the consoles... It seems to play way too fast, which makes even the early levels tricksy.

Biggest surprise is the MasterSystem. Its port is rad! Looks great, sounds great, plays really well and has some amazingly clear speech samples.

A comparison of the ports of Green Beret

Green Beret is a difficult game to love, because Green Beret is a difficult game to play. Honestly, it's brutal. Utterly unforgiving, unfair in places, and generally infuriating. Especially since every life lost is greeted by a shrill siren sound that will have even the most understanding spouse reaching for her earbuds (trust me).

The arcade version of Green Beret

It's also a simple game... move to the right, murder fools with your knife and your deep fear of communist expansion, pick up the occasional flame thrower or rocket launch to murder more efficiently... win!!!

But how did the home computer conversions handle the absurd difficulty of the coin-op? They'd have toned it down, right? Right??

The Amstrad version of Green Beret

Amstrad: This port is the worst of the three main ones. There's just something off about it. Maybe it's the loose controls or the insane difficulty, or maybe it's the fact that your green beret looks more like Robin Hood and the communist aggressors look more like merry men. Still, everything from the arcade is represented here. Just not brilliantly. And it is so so difficult...

The Spectrum version of Green Beret

Spectrum: Next up is the Spectrum. It's a port by the late great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith and it is a really neat conversion. The graphics are bright and crisp, it controls and moves around well, and it feels like the original arcade. But goddamn it's hard. I had to figure out how to use a Multiface, just so that I could poke in a cheat and get to my screenshot spot for this one!

The C64 version of Green Beret

C64: The C64 port is probably the best of the bunch, but not by a long way. It looks and sounds great, definitely the closest to the arcade. It's main problem - believe it or not - is difficulty. Again, it is insanely hard. And it suffers from some unfair hit box issues - if you jump and collide with an enemy on a level above, you lose a life, which feels wrong.

The Atari version of Green Beret

Atari: Finally, a dishonourable discharge for the Atari 8-bit version which is, frankly, a bit of a war crime.

It's beyond hard and enters an entirely different realm of frustration, with your hero wielding the smallest knife imaginable and enemies requiring the intimate closeness of a secret lover before they'll shuffle off this mortal coil

Combine this with invisible bullets (pesky Russian tech) and that awful siren that plays at the start of EVERY life and it's a recipe for an 800XL out the window.