What was your favourite ZX Spectrum game?

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.

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