Skool Daze

ZX Spectrum game. You would walk around school and cause as much mischief as possible without being caught by a teacher. You could use your catapult to shoot at teachers. You did however have to go to class, which involved trying to find the room then invariably pushing someone out of their seat before the teacher turned round to see you.

My memories of this game are fairly hazy, but I suppose someone has an emulator for it now to save me hunting out the tape :)

The aim of this game (apart from scoring points in various ways) was first to hit all 15 shields that were scattered around the school, and then to get the combination for the head teacher's safe and open it. Some shields you could hit just by jumping up to them, others required you to bounce bullets off teachers' heads. After you had hit all 15 shields, the teachers other than the history teacher would yell out a letter of the combination when you shot them. I heard that you could get the history teacher's letter by writing his date of birth on the blackboard, but never actually tried this.

Tip for getting points: when teachers are shot they always blame the nearest boy. Try to make sure this is the swot or bully.

There was a sequel called "Back to Skool" which introduced lots of new features including a girls' school, but I don't know much about it because my tape stopped working after only a couple of games.

Skool Daze used a really great idea. You had to be in certain places at certain times, for instance, you had to go for assembly and sit down first thing in the morning. You could go off to explore during break or lunch, or even just write something obscene on one of the blackboards. The thing I enjoyed about it was that the world carried on regardless of what you were doing. If you were late for a lesson because you were up in the loft, then a teacher would search for you and give you lines. If you stood up in the middle of assembly, while everyone else was sitting down, you would get more lines, just like real life

This idea was used again recently in 'Prisoner of War' published by codemasters, where the main character would have to go to roll call and lunch at certain times. Unfortunately Skool Daze was a good game, and 'Prisoner of War' was a very poor game.