Sir!-like game from 1989.

[hodge]

This is a little off-topic, but I thought it interesting enough to share. I recently came across this 1989 game for the Atari ST and Amiga.



It's called 'Siege On London' and it's an open-world first-person game set in a Britain beset by malevolent robots. Sound familiar?

(more screenshots here)

It wasn't quite the same as Sir!: as the name implies it was set in London rather than in the countryside, and the robots were more of the HG Wells stompy tripod variety. Instead of procedurally generating things it was going to have a preset landscape based on the real London, and it also looks like it would have played more like a Battlezone-type shooter than a sneaky FPS. Still, I can't think of a game that's closer to Sir! in terms of basic premise.

It was never finished - it was only about 15% done when the publisher went under, and the programmer went on to create Hunter, another ambitous game which was a kind of before-its-time GTA with a military setting.

There's a tech-demo of sorts available that can be run with an Amiga emulator. It's not really playable as such, but you can still zoom around the world, admiring the mostly-missing scenery and dodging the few existing enemies. You can find that here along with an interview with the programmer, provided you're prepared to lock wills with the world's most atrociously designed website.

So there you go. It's a shame that nothing came of it. Maybe the Big Robot guys could implement it as a strech-goal.

[rossignol]

Awesome! Hunter was brilliant.

[CodyJarrett]

provided you're prepared to lock wills with the world's most atrociously designed website.

Thanks! I feel honoured to have beaten millions of websites to achieve this accolade. Is there a trophy?

Can you list some of the specific issues that you have with the website? Do you refer to the visual design or the way the site is structured?

I'm planning to redesign the site but I'm useless with visual design and numerous previous attempts to recruit a proper designer failed. There are some known issues I need to work on; support for mobile devices, less reliance on JavaScript and a design that doesn't look like Microsoft Office, for example.

[hodge]

You should feel honoured! My research was thorough and exhaustive!

Or maybe not - when I wrote that I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek jab, but re-reading it now it just comes off as mean spirited. So apologies for that .

My main gripe is with the scrolling on that particular page. Using the mouse wheel only scrolls a tiny amount of screen at a time, and trying to use the scroll bar on the right doesn't work. I had to navigate the page with the arrow keys, flipping through the cells as if in a spreadsheet.

Basically, if you'd just typed it up as a plain text file and linked to that it would have be easier to read/navigate :-).

This is with Firefox - just had a quick go with Chromium and it seems to work fine there, so it looks like a browser specific thing.

And having said all that, the actual content on the site is brilliant. I just read that Graftgold feature and it's awesome .

[CodyJarrett]

It seems that Firefox's smooth scrolling feature (Options -> Advanced -> Use smooth scrolling) was causing problems with the scrolling speed. I've updated the JavaScript GUI library and it looks like that has fixed it. Thanks for the bug report.

[hodge]

Thanks for your good humour! And also for the fix - I can confirm that it's working for me as well .

[stewba]

Awesome! Hunter was brilliant.

I loved Hunter on the Amiga, I'm going to have to go and dig my 500 out of the closet now :P