Skooldaze

Skooldaze. A blast from the past.

I’ve found something that takes me back to my youth. Jasper is an Java based ZX Spectrum simulator. The Spectrum was my second computer.

I originally had a ZX81, which was a 3.25 Mhz machine with 8k ROM and a whole kilobyte of RAM as standard. This might not sound like a lot now, but what you have to remember is that back in 1981, it… well it wasn’t a lot then either. That’s why there was a 16k ram pack made to sit on the back in rather wobbly manner. It’s the butt of many a joke, usually from people who never had one, as it would often crash. Sometimes as much as once a day if the code was buggy. This was back in the day before most home computers ran Microsoft operating systems and a crash was considered a serious flaw, rather than an opportunity to make a cup of tea while the system reboots.

The Spectrum was a step up with 16k of ROM and 48k of RAM and colour graphics rather than black and white. For a nine year old was important because the games were better. There is a lot of nostalgia for Spectrum games found on the web. There’s a feeling that because programmers were forced to cope with the limitations of the machine they were more inventive in terms of gameplay.

I can’t see it myself. Manic Miner was good for its time, but its time was a quarter of a century ago. I think it’s nostalgia for youth rather than the games themselves. Half-Life or Rome: Total War are far better games than anything ever written for the Spectrum. The only one which does catch my eye still is Skooldaze.

The aim of Skooldaze is to replace your bad school report with a good one. To do this you need to open the safe, and this requires a code. Each teacher has a letter of the code and you get this out of them by knocking down the school shields. Except for the History Teacher. The History Teacher is so old he’s had to have a hypnotic trigger. He’ll reveal his letter when he sees the year of his birth written. Interviews with the author made it clear he had a sense of humour. On the hints pages of magazines, along with how to kill aliens or jump spiders in games were short lists along the lines of “Evesham (1265), Bannockburn (1314), Crecy (1346), Poiters (1356), Shrewsbury (1403)…“.

If history really were about battles and dates then the game would have been sheer genius.

I’ve found this page that gives the instructions on how to play. It’s not as complex as it looks and to be honest even surviving a day in school is an acheivement. There was a sequel, Back 2 Skool, but that’s far more complex than it looks.