Booty (1984 Firebird)
Disassembly
Introduction
Every time I finished my paper round, and picked up that small white envelope soon stained with the newspaper ink from my fingers… I’d go to either the petrol station on New North Road or the pharmacy, Barry Shooter in Manford Way. The reason being, the nearest actual computer store was in Romford, and a pain to get to (15p each way on the bus for a start!) and both those places in Hainault sold budget ZX Spectrum games which were obviously far more affordable on paper round money than the full price games!
I had a few, I can’t say I bought them all … but I loved a couple of them and played them to death. With obviously, Booty being one of those “couple” (The Wild Bunch being another).
It’s a lovely colourful game and doesn’t feel like your average budget game - it’s very fun, but also very difficult. Most often your turn ends with frustration as it’s quite unforgiving and also perhaps a little buggy. But none of that kept me from playing it and I seem to recall getting fairly far in it (which is unusual for me) but I never did complete it…
Only quite recently I stumbled upon a fascinating secret about “Booty”: it contains a hidden game! Turns out that if you connect a Currah μSpeech device before playing, it unlocks a whole new hidden game! Naturally, I was intrigued when I heard about this and I had to explore this news for myself, especially as back-in-the-day I did actually own a μSpeech unit, and must have never tried it out on Booty (very few games supported it).
I remember one time, after finding out that Lunar Jetman supported the unit, I did try it out on a lot of my games. Such a pity that I didn’t try it on Booty and discover this for myself!
