The Joy of Stacks – 16/11/25 – Megan’s Twin | Follow the Tiger Road | ARChive | Oh Mummy! | Erik ‘Steve’ Simon
Bolololololololo
Bolo’s a strange one. Ostensibly, it’s a Breakout clone. But it’s so much more than that. It’s more even than just an Arkanoid clone. In fact, it blows Taito’s iconic ball-and-bat-em-up out of the water entirely. You’d be Batty not to try it.
Published by Application Systems Heidelberg and developed by Meinolf Schneider to be played on either a mono, high resolution or colour, low resolution monitor (but far crispier in mono, it must be said), Bolo takes the bat and ball genre and runs with it. A very long distance. You could say it’s the Dean Karnazes of the genre.
Bolo is mouse controlled and allows you to freely move with precision in both dimensions (yes, all two of them). This alone would make it a remarkable entry into the canon, but there’s more. After a gentle introduction to how the game works, it starts hitting you with new gameplay mechanics. There are blocks that unleash deadly enemies when you hit them. There are blocks that add and then increase the gravitational force enacted on the ball when you hit them. There are blocks that can only be destroyed by direct contact with the paddle. There are blocks that will send you back a level if you hit them. Bolo has something in common with the very best puzzle games: it introduces cool mechanics and then plays with them through excellent level design. And I’m here for it.
Mr Schneider only ever made three games for the ST: Bolo, Oxyd and Esprit. All with his signature mono, high res, beautifully bestippled and beveled style. He did also create some fun little screensaver-ish desktop toys for the ST. Here’s one which allows you to shoot up your GEM desktop. Handy for those particularly frustrating debugging sessions, I’d imagine:
Meinholf Schneider would go on to found his own software company known as Dongleware Verlag and then produce a version of Bolo for DOS which seems to have similar gameplay but a very different aesthetic:
We’re playing the ST version as part of STOT season 7, round 11. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
References
Bolo at Atarimania
Meinholf’s Schneider’s desktop toys at Milan Kovac’s archive
Dongleware Verlags at Mobygames
The Sunday Papers
I absolutely love reading about people’s gaming memories. Here’s another Steve talking about his experiences of getting done over by a gang of shambling mummies on the Atari ST.
I wanted all of this week’s links to be about Steves, but there’s no way I couldn’t share this amazing interview with an ST demoscene legend. I wonder if he would mind changing his name to Steve?
Gears of Steve played Sidewinder. After playing Sidewinder 2. Because he’s a maverick and cares naught for your rules and preconceived notions of the order of things.
This Week’s TJoS Videos
They’re twins! They’re… well… sort of decent chaps, I suppose
After playing ST games for the best part of three decades, it’s nice when a game that is relatively unknown to you turns out to be pretty decent. During my recent sortie into the realms of Capcom’s arcade conversions on the ST, I was getting used to games being ‘good if…’ Games that are ‘this close’ to being good, if only it wasn’t for some oversight or glitch or bad design choice. This one has a pretty decent bash at porting over what makes the original coin-op a quirky and interesting game.
That’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right, I really am indifferent to that Tiger Road.
This game looks terrible in screenshots. In the flesh, it’s a pretty good representation of the arcade original, but faithfully recreates the tedium of the original game and adds a few more annoying quirks for good measure. The ST version has a natty tune at least. And the cutscene that shows your hideous child being carried away by a death knight or something is pretty cool.
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