What was your favourite ZX Spectrum game?

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

Daley Thompson?

Is that the one where you had to hit the Z and X keys dementedly quickly to make him run?

No wonder there wasn't any child obesity back in those days....

yeah i have the knuckles of an 87 years old.

mind you, if i can remember daley thompson sports then i'm not far off i guess. the archery was particularly good, IIRC

Ha Ha! I remember the hurdles now, where you had to intersperse the Z and X running keys with a slam on the space bar to make him jump.

Jesus. How many hours did is spend doing THAT?

F19 Stealth Fighter (yes, there really was a proper flight sim for the Spectrum) and some football manager game that was pretty ahead of its time. Can't remember what it was called now though. Anyone have any ideas what it was?

hardly the first champiosnhip manager? that was amiga wasn't it?

daley thompson- surely i can download this? emulator anyone? ah the memories. olympic gold on megadrive just can't compare.

there was a great star wars vector game knock off. but if you add up the time played, the usual suspects - elite, jet set willy, jet pac. and tir-na-nog.

Yeah I spent a lot of time on tir-na-nog. And Lords of Midnight. They were sort of vaguely cerebral post-puberty games.

i didn't 'get' LoM at all.

carrier command!

xxxxpost. No, I don't think it was the first Champ Manager. The 'game' element basically consisted of staring at a picture of a stadium. When someone scored, the border went all striped and flashey and the computer made the annoying noise it made when loading.

LoM - I suppose it was a kind of strategy game. It had its own world. It was incredibly engrossing if you bought into it.

Also it came in a lovely big box that still smelt of the printer's ink for YEARS after you bought it.

x-post, btw.

What was the football game where all the players "ran" like the Heineken bear?

This one

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/040/sftwre4.gif

COME HERE glassy-eyed Earthling. Do you want a job working for the Game Lords?

There are good job prospects for anyone entering the Game Lords' Alien Strike Simulator - GLASS!

Too many games so I'm doing favourite publishing house...

1. Ultimate: Underworld, Sabre Wulf, all the 3d ones (alien8, knight lore...) oh man and the early stuff - Jetpac, Jetman, Tranz Am, Pssst, Cookie. Magic.

2. Hewson: Exolon and Zynaps - not such a fan of Cybernoid, looked great but was a bitch to play. Oh and Nebulus.

3. er...

xpost what is that, it looks awesome!

http://www.alt-tab.net/images/chaosAni.gif

target renegade- like having DOUBLE DRAGON at HOME in 1990!

oh renegade was great.

shmups: zynaps, sidewize, crosswize, cronos...

http://www.librador.com/uploads/Driller_for_ZX_Spectrum_screenshot.png

whatever that is above, i recognise it. CHRIST, there were some great spectrum games. i was showing my 8yo nephew "bubble bobble" the other week (although, in fairness, the speccy version wasn't the best).

me: chuckie egg. i've just put an emulator on my mum's ancient iMac so she can play it. i got a very excited e-mail telling me she was up to level 11. jet-set willy: my core gaming experience. i still occasionally dream about finding new rooms. nodes of yesod. starquake (which was really just a NoY rip-off).

about 10 years ago, when i got my first emulator, i played ID for the first time -- that and deus ex machina. high-concept genius that i would never have appreciated at the time.

what else? the birds and the bees: second game i ever got. LOVED it. the hobbit: me and my dad worked out how to get out of the goblins' dungeon. marsport (that came much later, natch).

haven't we done this before? ach well. it bears repeating.

xpost: somehow i totally missed chaos as a kid. more fool me.

Spectrum = gay.

http://www.tonh.net/museum/c64cassdrive.jpg
^^^^awesome

(shite, too many xposts: i mean grandpoint genie's screenshot. i recognise "driller" or whatever it was called.)

Glass was made by Quciksilva. I liked it coz at the time I played it (around 1985 I guess) it was the only game I knew where you actually looked out from the flight deck of a spacecraft. At the end in addition to your score you got a verbal rating, I can't remember the good ones, but two of the bad ones included Commodore User and Alien Zoo Keeper!

3-D Ant Attack!

http://sandywhite.co.uk/fun/ants/pics/AACassette003.jpg

also: Back to Skool, The Great Escape, Alien.

i knew you'd be a commie kid, dom.

actually: i loved and coveted the C64, although all the games i've played on emulation since (and how: i went through a couple of months of greedily sucking down everything i could and reliving my ALTERNATIVE C64-OWNING YOUTH) haven't quite been as enjoyable, somehow.

best thing about the C64: the second (i think) version of the ocean loader theme.

oh yeh: back to skool and skooldaze were fuckin' ace, too.

fairlight: just remembered that one, too. shit. it was awesome.

Anyone remember Tornado Low Level?

It's the one where everyone stopped doing what they were supposed to do (bomb targets) and do the more fun thing of flying under bridges.

http://www.emuunlim.com/zxplus/batman128k.gif

And there was helicopter rescue follow up. Awesome colour 3D.

good times. now i can't even work all the buttons on the ps2.

3D Ant Attack was very "Numanesque" imho.

this is xpost hell.

what's yr last one, DG? it's not displaying here.

And there was helicopter rescue follow up. Awesome colour 3D.

cyclone, was it? FUCK ME THAT WAS BRILLIANT

batman teh movie! it had 3d driving levels on 16-bits :(

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

Yeah Cyclone. You had to winch up baskets and survivors. I thought it was OK to play but GREAT to look at.

xpost again.

I gave it up I guess around 85/86. Or rather it gave up on me for about the 5th time and I didn't bother getting a new one. I don't recognise quite a few of the games here.

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

grimly That's part of the Automania series isn't it?

yeh. IIRC: automania, pyjamarama, everyone's a wally, herbert's dummy run, three weeks in paradise. the last two being way too hard for their own good.

once you figured out how to get the proper coin to open the bog door in pyjamarama, the rest was pretty straightforward.

ANOTHER ACE SERIES OF ACENESS:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/6/6d/Spellbound_screen.GIF

finders keepers/spellbound/the one in space/the other one. don't have time to google ... first one to fill in the blanks wins a blank C15 cassette from boots ;)

hang on, celebrity arses actually looks grate.

er, ahem:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/6/6d/Spellbound_screen.GIF

Wizball or Jetset Willy

Was it Mikro-Gen who did a completely out-of-character fantasy game that came in big box with a RAM pack and map etc.?

It was a bugger because you had to actually BUY it (which I did). I seem to remember that it was lovely to look at, but didn't have much in the way of gameplay.....

Oh yeah, and those Back-To-Skool people did a 1930's detective thing that was absolutely BEAUTIFUL. Never got more than about half-way through, mores the pity....

Was it Mikro-Gen who did a completely out-of-character fantasy game that came in big box with a RAM pack and map etc.?

yep: i got it for christmas one year. it was a bit pish -- huge, but a bit pish.

a 1930's detective thing that was absolutely BEAUTIFUL

really? tell me more: i don't remember this at all.

never got those dun darach things. ys gave this away once which i tried to enjoy

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/Hotmopening.jpg

oh, i remember that one, too. heavy on the magick. with a k. i think i'd have enjoyed it if i'd been a bit older and had more patience. (ditto marsport, although i have v fond memories of it.)

"you are in the room of misery" ... yeh, my fuckin' office.

spellbound! wow, that pic just totally gave me the shivers. loved it.

i used to love a ninja game called, possibly, usurper. google's being unhelpful.

i had a speccy plus between 1986 and 1988, at which point i sold it with all its loads of games to my friend al's parents and got an atari st, which i still own (well, it's packed away, but i can still technically play bubble bobble if i want.

and gauntlet!

wait, wait- BARBARIAN

"Contact Sam Cruise"

grimly - info here: http://www.crashonline.org.uk/36/samcruise.htm

That Crash online is pure Gold.

"Trashman" - I loved this!

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/04/trashmn.htm

O yes, that was good. I bought it before it hit the shops properly, at the ZX Microfair.

ah, yeh, i remember that sam cruise thing now ... don't think i ever played it, mind. but, of course, i can rectify that pretty easily ;)

Tir na Nog, Dun Darach, Marsport, Heavy on the Magick - Gargoyle Games brought the next-level shit.

Also Lords of Midnight.

Valhalla.

Now that was a strange one. Amazing graphics for an early game. But what the hell where you supposed to do?

The Valhalla graphics were fucking rubbish! They were little stick men. The game was fun, in some way. It was sort of an adventure game but errr... not really.

the follow-up, "the great space race", got absolutely fucking panned and the company (legend, was it? i'm not looking any of this up, i promise) went under shortly afterwards. sinclair user memorably compared the battle graphics to "two fried eggs fighting in a pan", or something.

it worries me, the effect SU/crash/YS have had on my personality/writing style/life.

more amazing feats of memory: infinite lives in JSW was poke 23296,0. i think manic miner (has no-one mentioned this yet? my (acting) boss looked over my shoulder when i had this window open and said MM should win, hands-down) was 35136,0.

The other John Peel, of Valhalla and TGSR fame.

Why are he and his wife green?

christ, i remember reading that first time round.

hah! "dave ashe and his mouse".

I remember the background graphics of Valhalla being quite good. And I also seem to remember the stick men moving quite well. It had quite a lot of atmosphere iirc.

There was a whole host of Spectrum games that I seem to recall as being unfathomable: Gift From The Gods, Braxx Bluff, Dark Star....they seemed to be graphics experiments with a scoreboard plonked somewhere on the screen.

And did anyone know how to get past the first screen on "The Pyramid"?

I think we could do a few screens on "The Pyramid" but they were all the same boring shit. Spent a lot of time trying to get to the top/bottom tho.

(Clue: just keep the fire button held down)

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/050/sodov2.gif

Sodov the Sorcerer: not a bad, if odd, game for £2.95.

I forgot Avalon and Dragontorc. Man those games were good.

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/shared/sshots/rambo.gif

How many precious hours of my teenage life did I sit playing Rambo? Better than the film, anyway. Good music too!

('Good')

http://www.23mag.com/games/vg/bmxsimsp.jpg

Okay, now THIS fucking rocked! More playable then the C64 version (as usual: better graphics, clunky gameplay), and the slow-motion replay option was useful for viewing your opponant's Spec-tacular crash and burn.

ah, god, "the pyramid"! i really loved that, for some reason.

"sodov the sorcerer" ... hoo hoo, almost sounds like swearing, etc.

What was that one with the wizard floating around & travelling along ley lines? That one was pretty great, and quite creepy in places.

Dragontorc of Avalon! Thx NV!

I remember one bit where you got the mage to open a chest and a pair of super-scary disembodied eyes came out! I got the chills the 1st time I saw it.

Yeah. In Avalon these ghost things used to appear and throw stuff at you if you hung around too long in one room. And the creaky noise that bad guys made as they walked round a room was very atmospheric.

a 1930's detective thing that was absolutely BEAUTIFUL

"Mugsy" or something?

I actually finished "Valhalla". SUMMON ODIN!

nah, mugsy was a much older melbourne house thing. this was contact sam cruise. there's a screenshot above and everything ;)

I think my favourite spectrum games are Ranarama and Quazatron (among the many fine games published by Hewson).
I loved the exploration 'combat' mini-games that allowed you to upgrade your skills if you won the right runes/parts.
Ooh, apparently there was a sequel to Quazatron! Must check that out.

I had an Amstrad CPC rather than a Speccy - but Ranarama was and is a great game. One thing I remember about it: the tape version was cleverly coded so that there was a little tune embedded in the "loading noise" just before the game finished loading.

Is it wrong that I had an ineffable urge to correct Grimly's BASIC syntax up above?

Anyone remember The Alchemist? It was an early 16K game, that was dead easy to complete, but was thoroughly engrossing before you did.

And talking of 16K, let's not forget Chuckie Egg, the crack-cocaine of the Spectrum world........

I still play Chuckie Egg occasionally. My girlfriend was a BBC kid (children of teachers always got BBCs)(except me) so we're gonna have a challenge sometime.

Best ZX81 gane = 3D Monster Maze. Lo-fi t-rex!

Best ZX80 game = ?????

My Brother got insanely good at Chuckie Egg. We were neck and neck at one time (we could both go round about five or six times), but after a while he could spend hours on it.

He was a sort of a black belt 3rd Dan at Chuckie Egg.

5 or 6! I think I only ever got to the third round.

Does gaming have a golden age? I think the Spectrum era would be it, if so.

I had a ZX81 too, with the 16K expansion, but I was only about 6 when its video generator broke, so I can't remember any of the games.

Don't wobble the RAM pack!

Horace Goes Skiing!

Yes! The Horace series were a good introduction. They came free with the computer iirc.

No money no ski! Words to live by.

http://www.clive.nl/images/10457.jpg

I love this blurb. "...mischevous moving eyes and a rolling gait"! They don't promote modern computer games like that!

Best unexpanded ZX81 games = Breakout and an adventure game I've forgotten the name of, also written by Crystal Computing. An adventure game in 1K! And I never managed to finish it.

A feat:

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/generated/tapethumbnailindex.html

I didn't get any Horace games free with mine. I think you could pay extra to get them bundled though.

I got a weird free cassette with mine, called Horizons or something. The only game on it I remember was one about foxes and rabbits that was meant to demonstrate the dynamics of ecosystems.

Wriggler. About a little worm. That was very good in a totally surreal kind of way. No-one else I knew seemed to play it, however.

I've also just seen on Crash that there apparently was a Spectrum game called "Hampstead"

!!!!!

Track down the Cafe Latte's and organic Prosciutto!

Don't get caught by the sun-dried tomatoes!

I got a weird free cassette with mine, called Horizons or something.

Yes! It had Breakout as well.

Are you sure? I don't think I ever played Breakout on the Spectrum, only the ZX81.

I've also just seen on Crash that there apparently was a Spectrum game called "Hampstead"

!!!!!

Track down the Cafe Latte's and organic Prosciutto!

This is not so far from the reality. It was a humourous take on the adventure game format. Instead of reaching a wizard's castle or whatever, you had to social climb to the lofty heights of Hampstead.

Humorous.

See also Torremolinos, the adventure game of package holidays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizons:_Software_Starter_Pack

Bubblesort is an implementation of the bubble sort sorting algorithm.

Thrilling stuff... actually I only remember breakout and evolution. The Game of Life is awesome but maybe it went over my 9 year old head.

Ah, so you're quite right about Breakout. I must have just had enough of it by the time I got a Spectrum.

I remember thinking Bubblesort ought to be a lot more fun, what with having "bubble" in its name.

I remember one of the launch cassetes for the Spectrum was for working out yr biorhythms! Whatever happened to biorhythms?--they were the big thing for a period. Surely due a revival.

I don't know if it's been mentioned in this thread, but you can play emulated Speccy games online at World of Spectrum.

Blimey -- some people are still trying to flog biorhythm programs:

http://www.diplodock.com/Products/Software/DBS2.htm

Bomb Jack, Jet Set Willy, Monty Mole , Daley Thompsons Decathlon, Paperboy, Ghosts N Goblins were all great. Horace & The Spiders is the game I wanna play most though. Need to get an emulator.

The memories of buying Crash Magazine every month. :)

Is it wrong that I had an ineffable urge to correct Grimly's BASIC syntax up above?

oy! what was wrong with it? apart from it being on one line. oh, and missing the space before the closing quote, i s'pose.

"horizons" is still my core spectrum moment. it was like a portal to another world. i was mesmerised by "foxes and rabbits".

My friend was really stuck on a bit've Monty Mole and I lied and told him I had a poke for infinite lives. He phoned me up, I made up some number Poke 16789726 or whatever and then when it didn't work he got so mad he smashed the casette into pieces. I only told him a few years ago.

i think manic miner (has no-one mentioned this yet? my (acting) boss looked over my shoulder when i had this window open and said MM should win, hands-down) was 35136,0.

There was also something about WRITETYPER, wasn't it?

oy! what was wrong with it? apart from it being on one line. oh, and missing the space before the closing quote, i s'pose.

Given that it was on one line you should have done

10 PRINT "SIMON IS ACE ";:GOTO 10

:-)

I am glad that all these Speccy mags are online now because... well, I have a confession. For ages I read Sinclair User. Even though it's the one of the three I have pretty much no fond memories of, it's the one I spent money on every month. And I only started buying it because I forgot what date Crash was due out, went to the newsagent too early and bought SU instead. Eventually I saw the light they put the price up and I went over to YS though.

Some good free games, mind, but all the mags had their moments in that last-years-of-Spectrum scramble to grab readers by filling them with as many old games as possible every month. Oh, and thank you Crash for awesome reader homebrews (?) Shuriken and Egghead!

Oh yes, much love to all the Horaces, the Dizzy games (even though every single one I couldn't complete even with a walkthrough/map because there was always one last coin that wasn't where the map said it was), Manic Miner and JSW (though I spent longer playing JSW 2 - same game, added space levels, quite a cheap knockoff sequel I suppose with Matthew Smith not involved, but I liked the new areas), er... what else did I spend ages on? Rainbow Islands, Artic's 16k Galaxians, Bruce Lee, but I guess there were better formats for all those.

I gave up on the Speccy in 1991 when within a few months a) I bought Monkey Island for the PC and b) there was an advert in YS for PC Format and I decided the PC was THE FUTURE. A life of already-ancient Sierra games and roguelikes, pissing about in Fractint and POVray, and having to fight with autoexec.bat trying to free enough memory without losing Soundblaster drivers awaited. Woo.

Heh:

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/mrdaveo/reviews/doom.gif

Jet Set Willy 2 was one of my biggest disappointments. Maybe I'll play it on an emulator tonight.

At school we decided Matthew Smith was gay bcz there was a picture of him not wearing socks in some mag.

http://jswremakes.emuunlim.com/Authors/Smith/msmith1s.jpg

I s'pose JSW2 would be a huge disappointment if you'd already got fairly far through JSW1, as you'd have to get halfway across the map just to find some new bits, and if you want to complete it you'd have to do the whole of JSW1 again and then the new bits (it may even have to be in that order, too). But I hadn't really played JSW1 that exhaustively; I played it a bunch at friends' houses, and I'd got a dodgy tape of it that almost never loaded, so when I got 2 being able to explore and spend hours hunched over it drawing tatty little maps at my own leisure was mostly new to me.

Pretty rare for me to want to be any older now, but this thread makes me wish I had been for the Spectrum thing, as there are lots of games here which sound interesting and a lot more cerebral/unusual than my picks, but at the time I was too impatient for that kind of game. (Now I'm even more impatient, any familiar 80s game in an emulator just makes me save the game every screen because I'm way too lazy to start from more than 30 seconds ago every time, and any unfamiliar one gets given up on after about ten minutes because I can't be bothered to learn what to do or squint at the little monochrome graphics)

xpost

i loved JSW2. there's a shitload of arcana about it out there on the web -- derek rowson explaining how it grew out of the amstrad version, and how they came up with some of the rooms (the whole sewer/holt road thing was a big joke about the flat a load of software projects programmers had in liverpool). in fact, here it is:

http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2-programmer-comments.html

http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2-index.html

writetyper

depending on the version of MM (and JSW) you had, you could stand in a certain place in a certain room and type this (or something like it) and then use the number keys to teleport about ... at least, that's how it worked in JSW. except i could never get it to, so used a poke instead ... crash or YS once carried a COMPLETE JSW POKE LIST which brought me so much joy i thought i'd explode.

basic syntax

of course; you could use a colon to separate commands! although surely it's bad practice to have 10 GOTO 10 :)

Pretty rare for me to want to be any older now, but this thread makes me wish I had been for the Spectrum thing

how old are you, out of interest? i'm 32, and i think i caught the whole spectrum thing at just about exactly the right time -- although i was lucky/privileged enough to be able to get into it at a very early age (ie seven or eight).

> There was also something about WRITETYPER, wasn't it?

type in writetyper (or, in manic miner, matthew smith's telephone number. 6031765? something like that) and then hold down number keys denoting the required screen in binary. this almost always ended up with you jumping into a screen full of spikes or falling to your death from the crows nest. (xpost)

(curses, got the last digit wrong, is a nine. and is driving licence rather than telephone number)

i still remember the day underwurlde was delivered. played it 12 hours straight. nice looping arc for the weapons and a dodgy automatic jump if you got too close to the edge of anything.

(correction: it's not derrick rowson interviewed above, actually: it's some other dude. but still.)

underwurlde: i HATED that. i borrowed it off a friend and gave it back the next day. so, so frustrating.

although surely it's bad practice to have 10 GOTO 10 :)

Back in 1983 it was a bad thing, but on a modern emulator you can execute an infinite loop in under five seconds. Honest. ;-)

(geek jokes r us)

Underwurlde was totally infuriating, though the concept was pretty great, and I got pretty heavily into it for a while. I once spent a whole day playing it, NEARLY got to the end, but got knocked off by some kind of flying thing BASTARD.

BASTARD. God.

:)

I got my spectrum 48k at Xmas 1984. A year after everyone in my then Primary 7 class got theirs. I had to wait a whole year, it was torture!
I forget when I got my Spectrum 128k+ WITH TAPE MACHINE BUILT IN!!
http://www.mrbads-retro-games.com/Saved%20Scans/Photos/Small_Pics/DCP00819.jpg

My 2 most played games would've been Match Day (or Match Day II) and Graham Gooch Cricket. There was a football manager simulator too that I forget the name of that I loved to play.
Manic Miner was great too. My joystick never recovered from Daley Thompson 1 & 2.

What was that label that sold all the games for £2.99? Spellbound was a cracking game for that price.

Graham Gooch Cricket

arcane fact: you had to type LOAD "" CODE to run it.

i used to know how to do that trick; ie fool the header file into thinking the first block of basic was actually machine code.

What was that label that sold all the games for £2.99? Spellbound was a cracking game for that price

mastertronic, and derivatives thereof ... spellbound was on a "new" £2.99 label as opposed to the normal £1.99 one ... MAD, that was it. "mastertronic added dimension".

nb: i write all this shit as fact, because it's how i remember it. i might be wrong about some of it. it worries me how much i can recall.

Firebird was another cheap label. Booty on Firebird was a cracker.

Best Mastertronic game I had was Millipede.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbound_(computer_game)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f1/Spellbound128.jpg/200px-Spellbound128.jpg

xposts damn you grimly.

Was it Firebird that was owned by BT? Something-bird, at any rate.

Yeah, that's right. Knew it was owned by someone big but couldn't think who.

grimly, I'm 27. Five years older sounds about perfect, actually. There was a Spectrum around the house for as long as I remember (so yes, I was lucky and privileged too) and a fair chunk of my birthday money would go on whichever budget games had the most enticing inlay (i.e. lots of Ricochet rereleases and Mastertronic games here too, then plenty of Codemasters), but by the time I was old enough to start taking it really seriously and keep up with new releases 8-bit was dying.

I'd forgotten how GREAT the cartography room in JSW 2 is! There's a page about it on grimly's link but I spent a while being puzzled and then delighted by it so I won't spoil it myself.

I think it was Firebird. They had some good games but I resented them for some adventure game which I couldn't get past the first few screens of despite using all the items in every possible location. (xpost)

I'd forgotten how GREAT the cartography room in JSW 2 is

it was originally there for debugging! and that's all i'll say about it ;)

there was firebird and (?) rainbird or something, which did full-price "grown-up" games, but not for very long.

"See also Torremolinos, the adventure game of package holidays."

Alba - do you remember "Urban Upstart"? The adventure game about yobbery? It was the only adventure game I finished, and I figured it all out myself. It's must be a time capsule now.....the only game where you could get your head kicked in, in a skin'ead styleeee....

And for those of you who found Underwurlde frustrating, what about Bugaboo? The only people I know who completed it did it by fluke. They could never repeat it.

That's another sub-genre of Spectrum games - the impossible ones. Like the third screen of Hunchback (swinging over the fire) - damn near impossible.

I have a feeling you could get your head kicked in by yobs in Hampstead! No, don't remember Urban Upstart. I'm not sure I ever finished any adventure game. Maybe The Hobbit.

Alba - do you remember "Urban Upstart"? The adventure game about yobbery? It was the only adventure game I finished, and I figured it all out myself. It's must be a time capsule now.....the only game where you could get your head kicked in, in a skin'ead styleeee....

GOD DAMN i loved that game. i *nearly* completed it. got to the plane, got in, tried to fly ... FORGOT TO READ THE FUCKING HANDBOOK and crashed.

actually one of the most evocative and wonderful games of all time. even the time it took to render the graphics -- and the freaky hum my shit telly made displaying the rain scenes -- was evocative of the aesthetic brutalism of the time. the most early-80s game ever.

> LISTEN

[plays frank sinatra]

... that was it, wasn't it? in the chip shop?

http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/01/Urban%20Upstart%203.gif

arse, too much BEER:

http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/01/Urban%20Upstart%203.gif

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/030/sftcnt39.jpg

http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/01/Urban%20Upstart%201.gif

i'm settling on this.

dude went on to do "tau ceti". which i never played.

For ages I read Sinclair User.

I am not alone woohoo! Started early enough that not all covers were just copies of exciting promo material they'd been sent. Can any of us remember the name of the ROCK BAND that adorned the cover on one occasion, who used the Speccy in their music making? (Also, Gordo Greatbelly. Crap conceit w/ knowingly dim fantasy story taking up 1/3 of column, but useful hints.)

nb: i write all this shit as fact, because it's how i remember it. i might be wrong about some of it. it worries me how much i can recall.

Yes yes me too. This means nothing except that what we remember is the actual TRUTH.

Age disclosure subthread: 38, and I also feel I got an Spectrum at exactly the right time. Then again, I spurn all editions without rubber keys and/or > 48K as "compromising the dream" or something.

Obligatory game mention: Maziacs!

"You need(ed) some sustenance!"

I have a horrible feeling I'll spend far too much time this weekend hitting the emulatz0rs oh noes.

clarifyin: without rubber keys and/or with >48K = not a nactual Spectrum.

you sinclair user readers need to be punched in the throat :)

Can any of us remember the name of the ROCK BAND that adorned the cover on one occasion, who used the Speccy in their music making?

All the SU covers are here:
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/covers.htm
I think you mean issue 26 from May 1984:
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/026/index.htm

And looking at some of those covers reminds me of a disturbing fact: my dad looks like Clive Sinclair, if he was bald - and ginger...

Oh blimey. That is not a rock band. I remember that issue.

Sinclair User had another cover around that time with some equally baffling "Mersey Beat: The knives are out" line.

Actually it may have been on some even crappier mag I had.

What is Mark Radcliffe doing on the front of Sinclair user no.30?

!!

]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v417/albaalba/ilx/SUCover017.jpg

I think you mean issue 26 from May 1984

YES YES I DO. Scariest thing is I envisaged the face of #2 from left when I wrote above, and mental picture was totally accurate! The other ones, incl. notable moustache person lower right I have absolutely no memory of, but those were different times, maybe he was then less notable.

They appear to have been called Mensana! That rings no bells either, but offers a hint twds why they would do such a thing.

"MORE PAGES THAN EVER!" The times when it was actually possible to feel there were too few words, sentences and paragraphs to read about your interests...

I envisaged the face of #2 from left

Looking closer, I am not entirely sure that isn't Tuomas, at the exact same age as today, plus hair, plus specs, minus beard?

The guy holding the Spectrum looks like Bamber Gascoine, and the dude with the guitar looks like Chuck Norris! They seem familiar even though I don't recall the name.
The box labelled "Upstream" is a MIDI interface so presumably they were just using the Spectrum as a sequencer rather than as a sound source. Which is a pity as then they'd be the first chiptune band!

And speaking of making music with a Spectrum, this is probably my favourite "Fred Harris demonstrates something" clip - this time the SpecDrum.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=cLfYT6yXgEc

MORE COWBELL FRED!

presumably they were just using the Spectrum as a sequencer rather than as a sound source.

I think this was the case, yes. Prob seems less cool now than using it as a sound source*, but ooth they must've made their own interface to plug into the raw circuitboard exposed at the back-right, which is cool in its own right.

*) also cmon twas a simple on-off-to-the-speaker thing, that would not be specific to the computer and sound exactly the same made by one's own flipflop circuits or whatever.

they must've made their own interface

The interface was a commercial product, but maybe the band were involved in designing it? There's a whole pile of stuff here:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/
...including a lot of information on hardware. As a BBC Micro owner that was the thing I envied Spectrum users, because they had a vast range of hardware for that expansion slot.

And speaking of making music with a Spectrum, this is probably my favourite "Fred Harris demonstrates something" clip - this time the SpecDrum.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=cLfYT6yXgEc

MORE COWBELL FRED!

-- snoball, Saturday, 29 September 2007 00:36 (1 hour ago)

AWESOME

"it's like a word processor for drum beats"

There's another Speccy/puter mag thread somewhere where I bigged up Sinclair User, which, I believe, became the daddy Speccy mag from issue 56 onward.

It always had really really awful covers though, which went from cheesy photo-covers in the early days to garish, messy drawings in its heyday.

http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/019/su019.gif

Okay, WHAT were they thinking?

I am gonna play the shit out of Marsport today.

b-b-but he's not dancing with a spectrum. he's dancing with a ZX81, isn't he?

fools.

i started with sinclair user, then progressed to crash and -- occasionally -- your spectrum. when your spectrum became your sinclair and started ripping off smash hits left, right and centre, it became my core speccy read, and i heartily wish i'd kept all my back issues. t'zer! markus berkmann! phil south! these people helped define my youth. and the free viz giveaway helped define my puerile adulthood.

xpost lucky sod. i need to shuttle about between hospitals and in-laws' houses and shit.

:-(

Hope everything's okay there dude.

ach, it's a slowly ongoing process involving my ageing father-in-law and his surprising lazarus-style japes ;)

i did keep all my back issues :(

there's always this

First snag: can't find any squared paper in the house and I'm too hungover to go buy some. But Marsport is the most user-friendly of the Gargoyle adventures because of its grid layout, so I'm going for it freehand on plain paper.

I dunno, I had Marsport, but I never liked it as much as TNN and DD. Partly cos it didn't quite have the atmosphere, but partly also because it was an example of a software house coming up with an innovative idea and then repeating it with diminishing returns.

It was like Ultimate after Knight Lore. Alien 8 was OK, but then they just churned out further Knight Lore copies to ever reduced effect.

As to the plastic/rubber keyboard thing, I seem to remember that this was keenly debated by connoisseurs of Daley Thompson's Dectathlon. iirc, the plastic keyboard was WELL-favoured for the running events

Oh yeah grimly - wasn't there a pre-"Urban Upstart" game by the same fella? I seem to recall that it involved a desert island. It was my second favourite adventure game iirc (out of two, natch), but I only got about 1/3 the way through it.

the plastic keyboard was WELL-favoured for the running events

The Spectrum +3's keyboard was essential for my dominance in Hypersports. Rubbish for typing but excellent for doing the tricky left/right/breathe combination for swimming, and also hair trigger enough for me to get a perfect score in skeet shooting practically every time.

xpost

Yeah, the plastic keyboard had quite a responsive kickback, iirc.

I'd forgotten how irritating it is when one of those Sept warrior things mugs you and you have to go back to the start and go through all the same tasks again like a soft fucking bastard.

I seem to recall that it involved a desert island.

This narrows it down to 90% of adventures.

There's an I Love Games thread about modern text adventures somewhere.

No.

90% of adventures involve dwarves.

Both are true. 85% of adventures involve dwarves on desert islands.

The very best thing for Daley running etc was a joystick which was both

a) very small (ie fingertip control rather than grabaround) and
b) programmable (ie up, down, left, right, fire could be assigned to the keys of your choice).

My devious trick was to assign the running buttons to Down and Right, so that the distance between the two was very short.

Yes. I remember insanely waggling my Kempston from side to side, while a vein no doubt bulged on my forehead. Didn't think of the down/right trick though.....

I remember that you couldn't do this in front of anyone else (esp. brothers etc.) as the proto-masturbatory symbolism was bound to provoke laughter.

Ha! Pashmina!

I've just done a bit of googling and found out that the "Forbidden" part of Dun Darach was originally called "Lady Q's" and was a brothel.

I got a very early copy, and mine said "Lady Q's" (not "Ladyo's" apparently) and NOT "Forbidden".

I still couldn't find a way in, but some early copies must have got out before the sign was changed to "Forbidden".

Still the intriguing possibility exists that some may have got out with the centre bit still in.....

"invincible island", it'll be. never played it myself, but think i will:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showscreen.cgi?screen=screens/load/i/gif/InvincibleIsland.gif

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showscreen.cgi?screen=screens/in-game/i/InvincibleIsland.gif

cocks, obviously no hotlinking to that one. WoS wanks.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Invincible+Island$&pub=^Richard+Shepherd+Software+Ltd$&loadpics=on

JESUS CHRIST SIMON

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0006490

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt9BsZCifgU&feature=colike

gaming has gone downhill since the 1980s: discuss

challops have gone downhill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g1KeQUYA5w&feature=colike

RIP Joffa (3:23 into the first docu)

was looking through Javascript books recently and discovered one by Raffaele Cecco of Exolon/Cybernoid fame

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