What was your favourite ZX Spectrum game?

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.

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