Your favourite Sinclair ZX Spectrum games

1: Ant Attack
Sandy White/Quicksilva (1983)

Enormously innovative isometric game pitting you against a city plagued by giant ants. You can play it right now over at Sandy White’s website – go go go! Here’s what other folk said:

DarthHoob (SFX forum)
“A clumsy control system still never put you off playing this amazing game. One of the first 3D games. The idea was you entered a city overun by giant ants and rescue damsels (or guys, it wasn’t sexist!) in distress and then lead them to safety. Rescuing people got progressively harder as they would be in harder to reach areas. Not to mention the perils of plunging to your death sometimes.”

Richard Brompton (SFX Facebook page)
“I could never work out Ant Attack!”

2: Starion
David M Webb/Melbourne House (1985)

3D space adventure published by the company which brought you Barbarian, Marble Madness and The Hobbit. Here’s its page on World Of Spectrum and here come the testimonials:

Steve Jarratt (erstwhile editor of Crash magazine, erstwhile group senior editor of SFX)
“The game I played most was Starion, which I played with my mate because it had an alternate two-player mode. A mixture of shooting and puzzles. In space! It was wireframe 3D like Elite but really slick and, to an extent, more immediately enjoyable.”

Sensei Ping (SFX forum)
“Starion was a good combination of shooter and adventure game. You flew a wireframe vector graphic starship, zapped the vector graphic aliens, collected letters to form words to complete a grid puzzle to get the next level.”

3: 3D Deathchase
Mervyn Estcourt/Micromega (1983)

Race through a forest on a motorcycle in pursuit of two rogues. Curiously like a certain Endor sequence and despite its simple effects, consistently rated as one of the most popular games of the time. Your thoughts?

RationalRed (SFX forum)
“Deathchase was another good one: 3D as well, you’re on a motorbike going through a forest chasing two other bikes – successfully shoot them and go on to the next level with a slightly more dense forest.”

cuilean (SFX forum)
“I had a huge soft spot for 3D Deathchase and, I think it was, 3D Starstrike because of their similarity to certain sequences in the Star Wars trilogy…”

4: Kentilla
Derek Brewster/Mastertronic (1984)

Celebrated text adventure by Derek Brewster (who also used to write the adventure column for Crash). Surely there was no bias there… but Crash did give it 10 out of 10 and a “Crash Smash” award. We said:

Rob Power (editorial assistant on SFX)
“Kentilla remains absolutely one of the best text games I ever played. They used to sell the tapes at the newsagent up the road for about a quid. Happy days.”

5: Hungry Horace (And Sequels)
William Tang/Beam Software (1982-1983)

Sort-of Pac-Man clone Hungry Horace paved the way for partial Frogger clone Horace Goes Skiing and kinda Pitfall clone Horace And The Spiders. Who wants to give them a round of applause?

RationalRed (SFX forum)
“Hungry Horace was awesome. As was Horace Goes Skiing: run across the road, get your skis, run back across the road, ski down a mountain (going through flags), run across another road, ski down another mountain…”

Ed the Head (SFX forum)
“I also loved Horace Goes Skiing. And Barbarian and Army Moves.”

Andy Mitch Meldrew Mitchell (SFX Facebook page)
“Way Of The Exploding Fist, Hungry Horace, Jet Set Willy – compilation c90 cassettes with loads of copied games on them with cards detailing at what point the counter on your tape deck would start the next game. Not that I ever took part in ‘piracy’…”