Fantam 39 Amstrad Action Revised Budget Gaming By Fantam 39

                                          Amstrad Budget Gaming

  The wonder of saving your money and still been able to play your favorite game was great in the CPC days you could buy really innovative games puzzle,action and sport and it wasn't because they were £2.99/£3.99 that you were going to be given a rubbish game some were highly addictive and some had the feel good factor of a fully priced game, also if you waited long enough £10.99 games would come out on a the software houses budget range so everyone was catered for, but to this day I'm a firm believer in the cheaper games as I am as fully priced Class A games. There was one instance were a game called Big Top Barney came out and it was so cool and packed with innovative features as you performed circus stunts, also there was Spellbound that had the addictive feel of getting items and working out what to do when interacting with other characters, one budget game that still sticks in my mind was Locomotive where you had to rearrange the train tracks for the train to travel on before it crashed into the wrongly positioned track, budget games were just as important to players as were Ocean/US Gold's fully priced games they were in there abundance. That was a huge benefit to the 8 bit days when money wasn't there you just had to spend a few pounds to get yourself something to enjoy until the next big movie tie in came along. I remember if you went to a indoor market you could find expensive games a couple of pounds cheaper than retailers so that was another way to save money. There was a expansion for Gauntlet at the time called the deeper dungeons and I think it was about £4.99 nice little incentives like that were nice as well. The Kixx label was US Gold's budget range were all there big name games would eventually drop to £3.99 and Elite had Encore there price drop label and there was of course Mastertronic with there experimental games and then you had the Oliver Twins own label Code Masters were they chucked out simulators and of course Dizzy the little egg that appeared in numerous games one of my favorite games from them was Seymour once Amstrad Action gave a demo on one of there cover tapes I genuinely liked him more so than Dizzy. Budget games didn't necessarily need big fancy graphics they were for the bedroom player who liked to a good puzzler or mini action game or maybe one of Code Masters simulators they were cheap and great fun until the next big budget game was announced, plus if you'd keep buying them your software library would grow in no time. Who says you have to spend big.