Iain Mew
@superchartisland.com
1.1K followers 792 following 2.1K posts
Writing a British history of popular video games one UK sales chart #1 at a time. Now in 1988. Also into pop music and writing on The Singles Jukebox. He/him. www.superchartisland.com
![Mike Lamb talked about the pride he took in squeezing as much as they could from the hardware and it’s not hard to see how Target: Renegade offered the happy chance to refine some elements of the original game. He had been forced to give every character sprite the same legs in Renegade for memory reasons, and Target: Renegade’s women in skirts and heels are surely there in part to best demonstrate that the compromise was no longer necessary.
[Screenshot: Target: Renegade (Imagine, 1988, ZX Spectrum)]
Movement still works on a flip-screen basis rather than scrolling horizontally (“it would have slowed the game down a lot to scroll instead of flipping. It didn’t make much difference to the gameplay” said Lamb). There is, though, a wonderful touch in the first level where each time you take a lift down a floor it’s shown by the entire screen scrolling up and reappearing at the bottom, a visual technique I also loved in Final Fantasy VII.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uiwmxzrdnxnnjb55alohkgmz/bafkreihpdalz6onpd5kg5gcvdwz2i3c63fu5g7hi4jloddc24jvau7kr7q)
![Iain Mew: Sometimes, when a singer is really baring their emotions, there is a moment when their voice breaks and they depart from the melody. It’s often a highlight of the song. Alyssa Grace noticed this, and had a thought: with such a powerful technique available, why only use it once or twice? Why not put it into every single line, until any melody is pretty much theoretical, exponentially enhancing the emotional force of the song? The result made for the most viscerally unpleasant first listen of any song in the UK top 40 this year, but it’s at least kind of fascinating. “Bloodstream” is maybe the most hyperpop song anyone has played with mostly just an acoustic guitar.
[2]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uiwmxzrdnxnnjb55alohkgmz/bafkreifo5l2zow52xlf5jzq7bqhu4noz5hs55j6kck62n47rfq3oxyzeey)
