Your favourite ZX Spectrum games

[Dave Bradley]

Hi folks

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, that plucky little home computer which influenced so many, is 30 years old in a few days' time. I want to celebrate that on the website with a quick blog about our favourite games. Let's open that out to our forum users: let me know, what's your favourite Spectrum game? Hit me with its title and a few words of recollection!

To get the ball rolling, here's what Your Sinclair's own Matt Bielby said such a thing to me this week: "I'll plump for a slice of 'pure' Spectrum gaming: the early platform game Manic Miner (1983) - home-made, ground-breaking, genre-delineating, technically remarkable, entirely lovable."

So, what's your most fondly recalled Spectrum game and why?

Cheers, Dave

[Leviakhan]

Fave game on the spectum must be Knight Tyme, it was the the first sci-fi game I bought and I absolutely loved it to bits.

It was also the first game I managed to complete without having to look at walkthroughs or 'peek'ing or 'poke'ing it!

He won't like me saying this but my Dad used to play Scabble on the spectrum whenever he could, he used to call the computer 'FRED' as the keys were next to each another.....it got to the point where he started to have nightmares about FRED, he stopped shortly afterwards!

[glunark]

I used to love a game called "Movie", it was a 30's style dective game in isometric view, there was mysteries to solve, guns to shoot, and femme fatals to woo.

Only one life though, so back to the start if you get it wrong.

[Engeloid]

I always loved the Dizzy games - I was very entertained by bouncing a little egg around my screen!! I also used to love Gauntlet but never finished it as my sister lost tape 2. My mum used to love playing a Mahjong style game that I'd got free with a copy of a Spectrum mag but I had to leave the spectrum set up for her to just type in the right commands and hit play on the tape drive, otherwise it confused her too much.

Ah, I remember the days of putting a game on to load then going and making a cup of tea whilst it loaded!!

[Aeyjay]

Hello dave

in a recent post about XCOM I was praisng the game rebelstar

WOW look at the amazing graphics kids!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebelstar#Rebelstar

"Rebelstar was also ranked as the second greatest Spectrum game of all time by Your Sinclair"

I also played a game called Uridium alot which was a side scrolling spaceship shooter. Of the top of my head Green Beret was fun, Jet Set Willy was a frustrating platformer. There was also a Batman game which looked amazing with isometric levels

from wikipedia

Also known as Batman: The Movie, the game is loosely based on the 1989 Batman film, it was coded by and released by Ocean Software.
Ocean were now noted for producing a wide range of film-licensed games that consisted largely of a series of sub-games. When the Batman games were released in 1989, this style was relatively new, and the game was well-received by the video gaming press.
The 16-bit versions are similar to the 8-bit versions, but the extra memory, processor power, and graphic capabilities were put to use in the second and fourth levels, creating a full 3D effect instead of the side-scrolling subgames present in the 8-bit versions. Batman became the bundled game with the Amiga.
The game was number one in the Spectrum sales chart for the month of February 1990[7]
The game won the award for Game Of The Year 1989 in Crash magazine.[8]

I also remember a pretty good ghostbusters game whic h saw you driving round a very basic city block map and then trapping ghost by penning them in with your photon streams and then getting a trap ready.

and then of course (though not sci fi) the ultimate joystick/keypad breaker daley thompson's decathlon. The only question was what was going to break first the buttons on your keyboard or your fingers!.

[Veela Magnet]

Okay, this might be cheating a little bit, but there was a ton of overlap with my own computer, the Amstrad CPC464, so I'm gonna list the games which appeared on both (they even released some games as "Flippy/Flippy" which had each formats on either side of the tape!), and to be fair, I had a friend in infant school who had many of the same games on his Speccy, so it was always fun comparing and contrasting the ports...

Head Over Heels
Even to this day this game still holds up as one of my favourites, the central conceit being that you started off playing as two halves of a symbiotic organism, who meet up during the game, and when joined together, gain the power of the other (one can jump high, the other can run fast). But then there were times where the level design dictated the progess or either character, so periodically you would have to go your separate ways only to meet up again later. A brilliant design choice, which I've never really seen since.

It was an absolute landmark exploration game which allowed to you to do as much or as little as you liked. You didn't necessarily have to collect all five crowns (there were four optional worlds to explore), but just managing to make your escape from the planet was a mission in itself. They remade it for the PC a few years ago, and rightly so; it's an absolute masterclass in 8-bit isometric exploration.

My single bugbear was that some of the collision detection (especially on the hazardous elements of the scenery) was a little suspect, and with limited lives, you could quite easily have one of the characters die, thus rendering the game unfinishable by the surviving one.

The Dizzy Series.
Again, another title/series which really got me into adventure game genre; in fact I even did a two-part review of the series for The Register (shameless plug ), and came to the conclusion that the structure of "take item A to location B to achieve C" was pretty much just "Resident Evil, with added egg". And Philip Oliver, one of the Oliver Twins, messaged me about it -- I was sooo stoked!

Manic Miner
I agree with Mr. Bielby (didn't he also have a short stint on my all-time favourite gaming mag, Mean Machines?), and while everyone seemed to fondly remember the expansive, more epic sequel Jet Set Willy, I'll always have a place in my heart for the episodic original which started it all.

Starquake
Another vast exploration game, and one in which no two playthroughs were ever the same, as the items required to complete the game were always placed in random locations. Crucial items which laid out Lemmings-style bridge platforms out for you were scarce (as your character couldn't jump), so I never did manage to complete this one.

Might add some more later if that's okay?

[Aeyjay]

wikilinks to more of my faves

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uridium
great space shooter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yie_Ar_Kung-Fu
eat it streetfighterXtekken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter
loved this but I was really bad at it if I remember I could never get into the weapens van to upgrade my stuff bah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(1985_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_(video_game)
2 excellent action shooters

the one thing I am recalling about all these games was that they were by modern standards absolutely rock hard and unfogiving .

kids today don't know they're born tsk

[FoldsFive]

My favourite would have to be CHAOS - a game for between 2 and 8 computer/human controlled players in which wizards battled it out till there was one remaining. Simple, addictive and still gets dragged out onto the Spectrum emulator for the occasional game now.

[Veela Magnet]

Originally Posted by Aeyjay

the one thing I am recalling about all these games was that they were by modern standards absolutely rock hard and unfogiving.

kids today don't know they're born tsk

Ha! I hear that; playing them again recently, I did rediscover just how nails many of those games were; Although there were many pokes in magazines which granted you infinite lives and/or level warps. In fact, the only way I ever managed to defeat Zaks in Dizzy 1 was with a level warp. The third game, Fantasy World Dizzy actually had a bug in it where you didn't need to plant the bean in the manure; you could just chuck water over it and the beanstalk would grow anyway, thus creating a path to the endpoint of the game!

[RationalRed]

Oh good lord. The spectrum. I started off with an old 16k version before upgrading to 48k.

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...

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.

3D Tunnel, fly along a tube tunnel avoiding or shooting toads, bats and other denizens until you hit the last level where you had to avoid the oncoming tube trains (although this last level was on the 48k version only).

Oh lordy, now I feel old.