There’s a perfectly normal lawn mower available in the UK, or at least perfectly normal if you live there. The Flymo may not be exclusive to Britain but it’s close enough, and is a weird piece of hardware if you’re from anywhere else. The lawnmower has no wheels and instead floats on a cushion of air created by a fan attached to the blades, making for a mower that can strafe as easily as pushing forward. While being battery-powered electric means you probably wouldn’t want to use a Flymo on a larger lawn it’s perfect for smaller ones, not to mention great at detail work. It also helps that the outline is fairly iconic, making it the perfect tool for the early-days Llamasoft game Hover Bovver.
Hover Bovver is a semi-Pac-Man-ish game about moving a lawn while avoiding some unhappy people out to take the mower away. For one there’s the neighbor who you “borrowed” the mower from, always chasing you down to try to get it back. The other antagonist is a gardener who doesn’t start out in the single-screen level but appears if you mow his flowers. Finally there’s the dog, who will chase away the neighbor or gardener but also isn’t a fan of the mower at all and will bite it when it gets too close. The object is to mow the lawn while avoiding the neighbor and attempting not to accidentally summon the gardener despite the Flymo’s slippery physics. The mower is efficient at clearing off the small grass squares but is more than happy to drift into a diagonal if you’re not careful and precise with the controls, and as often as not the slide ends up in the flower bed.
Hover Bovver originally came out in 1983 and got a fairly substantially-updated sequel in 2002, and that was basically the end of it until Jeff Minter (founder and currently 50% of Llamasoft) ran across8 Bit Workshopand decided to poke at it a bit. Hover Bovver always seemed like it would work nicely on the old Galaxian/Scramble hardware, so with a bit of tinkering and poking at code a new version of the old game has been freely released for any emulator capable of running the classics. Installing is as simple as hitting upthis link, clicking the Download button upper left to get the teeny little .zip file, and then dumping it in the ROMs directory of MAME. Obviously MAME has no way to know what Hover Bovver is so the .zip is named Scramble, and while MAME will grumble a bit that it’s not quite the right ROM when you tell it to run Scramble, once past that Hover Bovver plays perfectly. It’s worth noting the link will probably change eventually, because there’s no sound at the moment but it will be along as Jeff Minter and Giles (the other 50% of Llamasoft) play with the code more. The current plan, as noted in the readme file included in the .zip, is to verify the game runs on the original arcade hardware because apparently, when you code games for a living, it also makes sense to code them for the simpler hardware of a long-gone era in your down time.
