What was your favourite ZX Spectrum game?

deathchase

we were playing our cousin's until 1995 or so i think. had a megadrive, but there were seven or eight of us so it saved fights.

was there a game about a kabuki assassin? and smash bros. too.

The football manager game was called Football Manager. It was written in BASIC, at least initially. The beardie guy who invented it used to appear in the adverts for the game. Crash mag (I think) once made a joke about him having loads of porn mags but I don't know what the story behind that was.

The beardie guy who invented it used to appear in the adverts for the game.

Kevin Toms.

did he look like Billy Connelly?

out of interest when did people give up on their spectrums? mine lasted till 1992 when we got a megadrive :)

i got a 48k in 1983, aged eight -- my parents were suckered (like everyone else's at my typically wanky m/c school) into thinking that my entire education would be fucked if i didn't get learn to do 10 PRINT "SIMON IS ACE"; 20 GOTO 10.

in 1986 we got a 128k (the original black one that looked like a plus with a heat-sink tacked on) but kept the wee rubber-keyed one 'cos a couple of games didn't work on the 128.

in 1989 we got -- heh -- an amstrad PC2286 and i flogged the 128 to my mate luke for 50 quid (which felt like a fortune; i was allowed to keep the cash). the 48 had completely given up the ghost by this point. ISTR it had two replacement keyboard membranes but then something melted :/

I imagine Norman Phay playing Tir Na Nog. I could never get to grips with it, or Dun Darach.

Playing lots of these games on an emulator a while ago, the most entertaining remained Quzatron. I spent a whole evening (OK, that's not really that long) playing that again.

Revisiting Match Day was not fun, even upping the clock speed.

The Sentinel is the most extraordinary game.

did he look like Billy Connelly?

like a squashed, sweaty version ... a little.

The Sentinel is the most extraordinary game

we had that on the PC. i remember playing it for hours on end. i should download it again.

http://spectrummagic.emuunlim.com/Pics/footman.gif

^^^^^^ Here's a v exciting pic of it.

I used to be too lazy to save and reload my part finished games of it to cassette so I would just leave my Spectrum turned on for a week. The external power pack would get hot enough to fry an egg on and smell odd.

(x-post)

An exciting pic of that doesn't work.

http://www.exotica.org.uk/gallery/games/images/f/FootballManager90.jpg

Football Managers 3 and World Cup Edition were horrid, 1 and 2 are legit 80s bangers though.

I had one of these:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/plus4.jpg
It was shit because you couldn't get any games for it. The BASIC was better than the C64 though. Whoopee.

The orginal Football Manager was written in BASIC, so you could change "THE ROAD TO WEMBLEY" on the winning screen to say "YOUR MUM" or whatever.

I'm trying to narrow this down from:

Batty
Rescue (Mastertronic version)
Wizards Warriors
R-Type
Who Dares Wins 2
Spindizzy
Rockman
Chuckman

my best mate had a plus 4, and black&white telly. we used to play treasure island on it all the time. it was pretty good.

Yeah it came with Treasure Island, that wasn't too bad. I think I completed that. Fire Ant was good too. And I had Jet Set Willy.

The big problem was that most of the games for plus 4 were written for the C16 so they were pretty basic and didn't use the whopping great 64k capability.

Flying Shark was pretty amazing on the speccy too

i regret never getting an amiga :(

i also regret not being able to get excited about games made after about 1995 :(

actually that's a bit of a lie, i just don't get all this halo bollocks :)

the only other plus game i remember him having was some maze game where you had to paint the walls of the maze, but with a black&white telly some of the levels were invisible.

and manic miner

Ah no, it wasn't Football Manager that I had. I've just tracked it down--it was called 'Cup Football'.

Fruit Machine Simulator, by codemasters. spent hours on that one.

Thrust II
Jasons GEM

The Plot

god so many to choose from

boulderdash

of course

http://members.lycos.co.uk/dizzytheegg/images/screenshots/dizzy1start.png

Of the rly old-skool: HALLS OF THE THINGS!

"Deathchase"

Was that the one where you rode a motorbike at insanely fast speed through a thick forest. That was MENTAL. I remember both me and my brother would crack up laughing while we played it.

Also, what was that diving game where you had to get stuff out of clams without banging your head? Durrell were the publishers, iirc.

Zorro

PhilK - Scuba Diver? I only remember the advert

i regret never getting an amiga :(

i certainly regret getting an amstrad PC instead of one. but my dad didn't think the amiga was "serious" enough.

he might have been right, but that's not the point.

still: i do have a frightening knowledge of DOS arcana, so hey. it wasn't all wasted.

oh, hang on.

Ste - yeah Scuba Diver - really very good.

I don't recognise any of the names on your list above. Are they "late" spectrum games?

http://www.appn72.dsl.pipex.com/wally/img/grab01.gif

i LOVED this. and completed it, i think.

this too, which i definitely completed:

http://remakeszone.com/juegos/42_2.gif

(colour clash in action!)

actually, woah, those mikro-gen games were FUCKIN' ACE.

where you rode a motorbike at insanely fast speed through a thick forest

Forest, that reminds me of "The Forest" -- someone actually had the crazy idea of making an ORIENTEERING SIMULATOR for the Speccy! With enclosed paper maps and whatnot.

Someone mentioned "Deus Ex Machina", that was one ambitious project yeah.

grimly That's part of the Automania series isn't it? I liked it enough, but at the time it was kind of state-of-the-art rather than breaking new ground.

The level of creativity of spectrum games makers was incredible, really.

Philk, not sure i think it's a mixed bag. Not very old tho, definitely not past 88 as i had my amiga then.

oh god i would thrash about on those mikrogen games and get absoloutely nowhere. i don't believe i ever completed a single puzzle.

I imagine Norman Phay playing Tir Na Nog. I could never get to grips with it, or Dun Darach.

Guilty as charged, "Dun Darach" is one of my favourite games ever. Wd pay $$ for a prerelease version w/the missing centre of the map intact. Otherwise, I liked Knight Lore (I never finished it though), Fairlight, that stealth fighter flight sim one, 3d ant attack. My favourite was highway encounter:

http://www.cpcgamereviews.com/h/highway_encounter.png

A weirdly abstract game which drew you into its odd little world quite effectively. What was that one with the wizard floating around & travelling along ley lines? That one was pretty great, and quite creepy in places.

i think a lot of my suggestions are small time budget games

deathchase was famous for being the #1 spectrum game in your sinclair's best games ever list which filled their letters bag with complaints

lucasarts before they made star wars games:

http://www.zxscreens.i12.com/zxscreens/night_shift.gif

Pashmina - I finished Dun Darach, but there was one door I could never get in - it was labelled "Ladyo's" or something. That drove me mad for years!

Fairlight was stunningly attractive if I can remember (or describe a game in such terms).

Did anyone play Explorer? Or understand it? Or get anywhere?

In the 16K category: The Train Game! I think you either became totally addicted, or loathed it from the very start and continued loathing. Rather original, using all the letter keys on the keyboard to control those rail switch things, whatever they're called in English. Come to think of it, might work well as a mobile phone game even today!

too awesome

The door in whicheverroom it was that said "forbidden!" when you tried to open it was the door to the missing bit! If you mapped the game out (which you had to) there was a big gap in the middle - the missing bit was Dun Darcach's red light district, inhabited by courtesans - they pulled it because of fear of bad publicity. I liked the game so much I wanted more of it, so I was totally bummed out when I found out about the cut bit.

Dun Darach probably the forerunner of the GTA 3D games, har.

Ah right. Well I never saw a door called "Forbidden", so I suspect that must have been inside "Laydo's" or "Loyd's" or whatever.

A really intriguing game though. Loved the atmosphere. Especially the "Thieves' Guild".

You know about the annual comp.sys.sinclair Crap Game Competition, right? Every year, the finest Spectrum programmers, or rather the other ones, compete for the title of crappiest game of the year. Some examples of previous years' winners:

Anthea Turner's National Lottery Simulator
http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk/csscgc/image.php?file=ALS.SNA&year=1996

Sheepdog
http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk/csscgc/image.php?file=sheepdog.tap&year=1999

Celebrity Arses
http://www.unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk/csscgc/image.php?file=cel.tap&year=2006

barry mcguigan boxing. has still never been bettered for pugilistic thrills and strategy. daley thompson sports a close runner up

― darraghmac, Thursday, 27 September 2007 13:47 (4 years ago)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Frank Bruno Boxing had better racial stereotypes tho

http://plus4world.powweb.com/dl/covers/f/frank_bruno_side.jpg

pretty sure this game finished off my keyboard

spectrum keyboard held up better than a, b megadrive buttons under the stress of olympic gold 'battery' technique

the old rubber spectrum keyboard eventually stopped working on some keys, the contacts on the sheet underneath must have worn out

luckily this happened just as i was getting old enough to buy booze

'play the big fist' lol

IIRC the +2/+3 keyboard held up better especially to the rigours of Hypersports.

i spent some of my student grant on a Spectrum 128K, obviously they were right to abolish the grant system