Advanced Lawn Mower Simulator, and other deliberately crap games
July 6, 2023 10:35 PM Subscribe
Guardian: 'The annual CGC (Crap Games Competition) has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years' ... “What makes the CGC entertaining is the self-deprecating, sardonic British humour,” explains 43-year-old Paul Collins from Reading, who first entered the CGC in 2000 with Pear-Shaped (“a simple maze game where you try to collect as many pears as possible”) and Crap Football, featuring a digitised Des Lynam. “There are ideas that can’t possibly work, eg Sim City: The Text Adventure or Blind Flight Simulator. Or names that are just funny, like Whack a Nun II and European Sandwich Hunt.”
Sim City: The Text Adventure is my job and the extent to which it works is a highly debated question
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [21 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [21 favorites]
I would play the crap out of European Sandwich Hunt.
posted by arha at 1:02 AM on July 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by arha at 1:02 AM on July 7, 2023 [10 favorites]
I’m in for Blind Flight Sim. I used to work for an airline and got the chance in a hangar-sized flight simulator to land at SEA-TAC. I crashed the shit out of that plane. Blind can’t be any worse.
posted by bendy at 1:32 AM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by bendy at 1:32 AM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
Then I RTFA. Wikipedia is failing me this evening but wasn’t a Sinclair a really old school computer? I’ve never even heard of Spectrum but I love the concept of crap games.
posted by bendy at 1:51 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by bendy at 1:51 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Surprised that Diarrhea Dan wasn't listed as an original crap game.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:59 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:59 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
wasn’t a Sinclair a really old school computer?
God, I’m old.
posted by Phanx at 2:09 AM on July 7, 2023 [17 favorites]
God, I’m old.
posted by Phanx at 2:09 AM on July 7, 2023 [17 favorites]
Sinclair was the company that made the computers. The ZX Spectrum (or the Speccy as it was known in the school playgrounds of the 1980s) was their most popular line of computers.
posted by tomp at 2:34 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by tomp at 2:34 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
On YouTube there is a [Content Warning] walkthrough of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
posted by Wordshore at 2:54 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Wordshore at 2:54 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
I was a nerd in the 80s but I never heard of these on my school playground. I was in Chess Club!
posted by bendy at 2:55 AM on July 7, 2023
posted by bendy at 2:55 AM on July 7, 2023
The Spectrum was a British computer, and didn't really have much presence in the states. It was the dominant home micro here in the UK, though.
posted by Dysk at 3:19 AM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 3:19 AM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]
I would play the crap out of European Sandwich Hunt.
Philosophical question: would this take European Sandwich Hunt out of the category of crap games?
posted by chavenet at 3:47 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
Philosophical question: would this take European Sandwich Hunt out of the category of crap games?
posted by chavenet at 3:47 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
And buried in there the news that Duncan MacDonald has died. His Mr Cursor column was the reason I used to get PC Zone.
.
posted by tomp at 4:17 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
.
posted by tomp at 4:17 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
Come for the ridiculous names, stay for the craptastic gameplay* ?
* This assumes the games are actually playable.
posted by tommasz at 4:27 AM on July 7, 2023
posted by tommasz at 4:27 AM on July 7, 2023
If you want to play the original, here it is emulated in your browser: Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
A modern remake/homage: Advanced Lawnmower Simulator by Ben James.
As the Speccy (that's the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K to you) waned in market share in the early 1990s, it became a catalyst for a whole ironic cultural scene. Some of the writing that came from it was clever. Some very not clever and extremely disposable. The games themselves became an afterthought to the writing about the games.
The entry bar to development was extremely low: a Speccy, a tape recorder, any TV, some squared paper, a knockoff copy of an assembler, if you were really fancy, a copy of The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly. You could write something in Sinclair BASIC very quickly, but it might run out of steam fast. Because there were so many games written for it by so many people with such, um, varied skill levels there was a huge amount of dross written. And some of it got published. Some of it got celebrated. Some of it - like Advanced Lawnmower Simulator - just won't go away.
(To compare the US experience with the Apple II: a usable Apple II setup in the UK in 1983 cost 10–15× what a Sinclair Spectrum did. The Apple needed expensive floppy drives and likely a special monitor. I know that the Apple II was always expensive even in the US, but early 80s UK didn't have much disposable income, so the cheap and beyond cheerful Speccy fit right in.)
posted by scruss at 5:02 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
A modern remake/homage: Advanced Lawnmower Simulator by Ben James.
As the Speccy (that's the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K to you) waned in market share in the early 1990s, it became a catalyst for a whole ironic cultural scene. Some of the writing that came from it was clever. Some very not clever and extremely disposable. The games themselves became an afterthought to the writing about the games.
The entry bar to development was extremely low: a Speccy, a tape recorder, any TV, some squared paper, a knockoff copy of an assembler, if you were really fancy, a copy of The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly. You could write something in Sinclair BASIC very quickly, but it might run out of steam fast. Because there were so many games written for it by so many people with such, um, varied skill levels there was a huge amount of dross written. And some of it got published. Some of it got celebrated. Some of it - like Advanced Lawnmower Simulator - just won't go away.
(To compare the US experience with the Apple II: a usable Apple II setup in the UK in 1983 cost 10–15× what a Sinclair Spectrum did. The Apple needed expensive floppy drives and likely a special monitor. I know that the Apple II was always expensive even in the US, but early 80s UK didn't have much disposable income, so the cheap and beyond cheerful Speccy fit right in.)
posted by scruss at 5:02 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
And for any non-Brits excited to go discuss this computing phenomenon with anyone who’ll listen, just remember that it’s pronounced Zed Ex Spectrum.
posted by rh at 5:09 AM on July 7, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by rh at 5:09 AM on July 7, 2023 [9 favorites]
I could swear that at one point someone did a movie or TV episode with a blind person landing a plane; turns out that it's not that wacky of an idea, especially if you expand it to include the legally blind. I could totally see someone doing a flight simulator mod that would include a lot of audible navigation and sound cues for instruments.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:41 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:41 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]
I don't know if it's on this list but I wanted to take the opportunity to share The Good News: Goat Simulator is a real game and is actually a huge amount of chaos fun. We are now up to v3 and I think v1 has been ported to mobile
posted by DarlingBri at 6:52 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by DarlingBri at 6:52 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Grew up in the 80s in the US and never knew of this platform, the magazine, or this competition. I'm thrilled to follow this annual tradition. My cousin has some fundamental programming skills so I might persuade him to make an entry. With my creative input, he did manage to create a mostly functional game wildly inferior to Atari 2600 Combat called "Armored Aggression" which was a two-player game where each of us could move our tank around, rotate the turret to aim and fire at the other tank. He programmed it on a PC in Pascal in either 1995 or 1996.
posted by gestalt saloon at 6:59 AM on July 7, 2023
posted by gestalt saloon at 6:59 AM on July 7, 2023
Note that it's the comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Competition - it's nice to see the Guardian reporting on goings-on on Usenet!
The article only links to the 2023 competition. Further amusement along similar lines can be found at 2022, 2021 (the organiser did a really elaborate job this year), 2020, (it didn't run in 2019), (2018's site appears to be down), 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 and earlier.
posted by offog at 7:13 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
The article only links to the 2023 competition. Further amusement along similar lines can be found at 2022, 2021 (the organiser did a really elaborate job this year), 2020, (it didn't run in 2019), (2018's site appears to be down), 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 and earlier.
posted by offog at 7:13 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]
And for any non-Brits excited to go discuss this computing phenomenon with anyone who’ll listen, just remember that it’s pronounced Zed Ex Spectrum.
I believe we've established it's Zed Ex Speccy.
posted by slogger at 7:49 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
I believe we've established it's Zed Ex Speccy.
posted by slogger at 7:49 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator sounds like a demake of Jeff Minter’s Hover Bovver from a few years earlier, which is actually a pretty fun little arcade game about the aggressively mundane and boring chore of mowing your lawn. (And Minter’s 2002 remake of it is free on itch.io.)
posted by egypturnash at 7:59 AM on July 7, 2023
posted by egypturnash at 7:59 AM on July 7, 2023
I’m American, but I did a year abroad in Norwich in 1989-90. I just remembered that when I went to stay with a friend in Shrewsbury over Christmas, I played a ton of Elite (space sim) on his ZX Spectrum. I think I was really rude about wanting to play it instead of hanging out.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:55 AM on July 7, 2023
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:55 AM on July 7, 2023
Usenet
There was a link here recently that described Usenet as something like “a predecessor to Reddit.”
posted by bendy at 7:11 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
There was a link here recently that described Usenet as something like “a predecessor to Reddit.”
posted by bendy at 7:11 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]
As an owner of the Americanized Spectrum (the Timex/ Sinclair 2068) I love this. They used to sell some sort of ROM switching daughterboard kit for the TS2068 that would let you sort of run most 48K Spectrum games. I didn't have the foresight to buy one, so hardware based play of Lawnmower Simulator and European Sandwich Hunt will remain out of grasp forever.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 5:41 AM on July 8, 2023
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 5:41 AM on July 8, 2023
A few screenshots (which sadly don't show much gameplay) from European Sandwich Hunt.
posted by Wordshore at 9:12 AM on July 8, 2023
posted by Wordshore at 9:12 AM on July 8, 2023
It’s very stupid. You can read this article and decide if you want to go further!
posted by Mid at 10:17 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Mid at 10:17 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
At some level the NFT crazy wins "worst video game ever" definitively. I cannot open twitter urls from this device anymore, but my twitter device suggested some further implosion lately, maybe this. lol
posted by jeffburdges at 1:14 PM on July 9, 2023
posted by jeffburdges at 1:14 PM on July 9, 2023
→
I don't think it qualifies as crap, though. It doesn't even run on a Speccy!
posted by scruss at 1:33 PM on July 9, 2023
It’s very stupid
I don't think it qualifies as crap, though. It doesn't even run on a Speccy!
posted by scruss at 1:33 PM on July 9, 2023
Meanwhile, I unironically play Power Wash Simulator, which is basically the same as Advanced Lawn Mower Simulator. Maybe the graphics are a little better, and it's hooked into the XBOX achievements system, but it's pretty much the same.
posted by bruzie at 5:09 PM on July 9, 2023
posted by bruzie at 5:09 PM on July 9, 2023
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posted by bendy at 11:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]