Everyone loved the speeder-bike chase sequence from the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi, and Death Chase on the ZX Spectrum was the closest you got to recreating that experience. It was fast pseudo-three dimensional driving game that had you riding a bike with a headlamp and gun mounted on the front. Your job was to hunt down helicopters and other motorcyclists and shoot them. It alternated between day and night, and then got gradually got harder and more difficult by introducing more trees, and more enemy motorcyclists. It was the Spectrum’s killer app because it ran on even the lowly 16k model.
Deus Ex Machina was and still is one of the most novel and unusual games to have ever existed on the ZX Spectrum. It was ahead of its time, but despite all this Deus Ex Machina was nothing more than a series of mini-games that are laughably amateur in nature, but is made special by the addition of a synchronised audio cassette tape filled with progressive rock music, voice acting and singing by some of the most surprising names possible. Most of the actors are dead now, and include Frankie Howerd, John Pertwee and Ian Drury. It was a mix of narration and oddball songs and was a computer game and musical interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It”, and included many quotes directly lifted from it, including such lines as “All the world's a stage”. The mini games took you from conception to birth, to teenage and eventually old age and death. The games were usually a simple jumping game to avoid obstacles or touching objects as they fell from the sky. It was more of an experience than a game. You started out at 100% life rating, and everything you do in the game reduces it to nil. I played the game twice and both times ended the game at 0%. The game doesn’t end, just keeps going until the story is over. It then shows you the percentage score you had at various stages in the game. I still listen to the audio tape of this game, even as recently as 2014. The game got mixed reviews and was harshly treated by those who didn't like the game or had an agenda against Mel Croucher the author. Getting hold of the game was equally difficult because it was independently published you could only buy it mail order. I don't recall how we got our copy, most likely in a second hand shop.
Wheelie was an unusual Spectrum platform game where you rode a bike on a scrolling screen, but you could change direction and go backwards. I did complete the game, and after you did, you had to return back to the first level by driving the opposite way, but with no enemies, but with a time limit. The game was challenging but not difficult. The main bike sprite had perpetual motion, meaning the bike was always moving left or right, meaning you had to make a quick choice.
The Hobbit on the Spectrum was similar to the Twin Kingdom Valley graphic adventure game, and took just as long to draw each scene, but the storyline was more familiar to me. This was a difficult game because the damn dwarves kept going off and doing their own thing if you left them to real time. And you needed to have several of them present at different times to help you complete certain parts of the game. If you did nothing things still happened in real time. I don't think there was much to do in the game, and the puzzles were solved only one way. I recall starting the game in Bag End, and went east and encountered the Trolls, east again and I was in Rivendell, went east again and met Gollum, went east and arrived at Smaug. It was quite a leap of imagination to expect that something you forgot in Bag-End you could simply “nip back” and collect it and then “pop back” to Mirkwood and carry on, hardly an epic moment. There was a lot of truncating of the journey. The world of Middle Earth was ready to explore and wouldn't resurface until many years later as War in Middle Earth by Mike Singleton.
Way of the Exploding Fist on the Spectrum was a brilliant martial arts game where we all got to hear exactly how much noise the Spectrum could make, and also got to hear the exact sound you would make if you got a punch in the groin. It was fast paced and deadly and you wouldn't see a game as fast paced and as good as this until the arrival of International Karate+ on the Amiga. You had limited health and it was all about getting in the best and most effective hit first time. It was Rock, Paper, Scissors taken to a whole new level. You started each level with two full yin-yang symbols and each hit you received took between half or a full point away. The graphics and animation for the era was stunning. Every hit you made ended that encounter and you started again with your reduced health. This was years before the likes of Street Fighter with its longer health bar and “fight until your health is zero” style of game-play.
Lords of Midnight on the Spectrum was a truly unique and beautifully stylish epic game that allowed you to complete it in many different ways. Unrivalled in its scope and delivery you could win the game through following the adventure quest, creating your own storyline or by recruiting other lords and waging an epic war. In truth the game required you to indulge in all three. Doomdark’s Revenge also on the Spectrum was the sequel to Lords of Midnight. I only played it briefly, but wanted to finish the first game before I even attempted the sequel, and because I never finished the original, I never really got to explore this at any length. The game had no music or sound, but this was understandable as the memory was used for graphics and text and not music. Both these games came out for the Commodore 64 but I always felt they should be played on the silent Spectrum with some epic movie soundtrack music playing in the background. The introductory novel that came with it perfectly set the scene. I was reading fantasy novels at the time and Lords of Midnight really captured that epic story feel of a war against an intelligent enemy and the natural ice. To ensure you stood the best chance of winning you approached the game in three different ways with the four main characters at various stages of the game. The fire and ice elements of the story has sat with me for many years. It would prove to be Mike Singleton’s finest game, and despite his best efforts (sequels and Midwinter) none of his later games would achieve the same level of status even though his later games were equally as good as Lords of Midnight.
The first wave of Spectrum games released by Ultimate Play the Game, Jetpac, Pssst!, Cookie and TransAm, was an incredible mix of arcade games that really made people sit up and notice what both the Spectrum was capable of and of how brilliant Ultimate Play the Game were as a company. Prior to their arrival, most Spectrum games were pleasant affairs with nothing outstanding to report on. But Ultimate Play the Game released a consistently prolific series of highly polished and exceptional games, it seemed everyone owned these games. Of the four, it was Jetpac I played the most and clocked it several times before quitting. I didn't enjoy the single screen games of Pssst! and Cookie (the games were virtually identical) and TransAm while impressively fast, didn't really feel like there was a game inside to play. Their second wave of releases was heralded by Sabre Wulf on the Spectrum. A flick screen sword waggling hero. A rather tense game, and a difficult one at that. I have seen the map for this game and its very extensive. Sabre Wulf had you wandering around a flick screen map looking for the infamous four parts of an amulet which would open the doorway to the exit. The screen was always busy and full of enemies to fight, and there was also the unkillable Sabre Wulf himself that lurked around the edges of the map. I never completed the game as I was never a huge fan of the classic arcade adventure. I would play games like Avalon, Feud and Zug, but any game where map making was essential was a turn off. Also in this wave was Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman. Despite all this they created some of the finest games for the Spectrum and really managed to push the machine to its limits. Ultimate Play The Game/Rare Spectrum games are hard to find online as for legal reasons these ROMs are hidden/protected.
Jetpac was the closest you could get to an arcade game experience (at the time) on the Spectrum. The game was fast, fluid and colourful. Playing like a single screen mixture of Defender and Joust, this game was enjoyable to play, and became, along with Manic Miner a leading symbol of the success of the Spectrum. You had a hero character who fired lasers across the screen in a very satisfying “spray” of colour. You jetpac hero also had real world physics and required bursts of jets to keep him hovering. It was an incredible achievement. Of all their games, this was the one I played the most. I played Jetpac and managed to “clock” the game, i.e. I went through all the different waves of enemies and built every different type of spaceship, before the game cycled around to the start again.
Psst! and Cookie almost seemed to be the same game as both looked and played almost identical. Psst! had you trying to grow a sunflower whilst exterminating insects that tried to eat it. You killed an insect with the same colour bug spray. Cookie had the same screen layout, but had you throwing flour bombs at ingredients knocking them into a mixing bowl. It makes sense to reuse the game engine.
Trans-Am was a top down driving game, but it seemed to make no sense to me. The game tasked you to drive to check points around a heavily shrunken map of Northern America. Whilst trying to do this you were chased by black cars attempted to bump and knock you off course. You also had to keep an eye on your fuel as an empty tank meant game over. You drove over fuel pumps to increase your fuel and carry on. It played like a very large scale game of Dodge-ems but with none of the fun. A lot of people really liked this game, but I didn't really see the appeal. There was no way to dispatch any of the chasing cars easily, and if you did, they simply reappeared.
Sabre Wulf was the first of the Sabre Man games and was a difficult flick screen arcade adventure game where you had to hunt for the four parts of a key which would open a gate to allow you to escape and win. It was at the time a big and difficult game to play.
Atic Atac was another flick screen arcade adventure but made very different by the inclusion of a choice of three different characters to play. Whilst each one shot the same powered weapon (albeit with different graphics), what made it different was that each character used a different set of secret doors. I think you had a Wizard, a Knight or Serf. The Wizard used bookcases to warp around, the Knight an armoury rack and the Serf used something else. If an enemy hit you, you didn't lose a life instantly, but instead you had an energy bar represented by a cooked chicken which slowly was eaten away to reveal a chicken bone carcass. You did have weapons to fire at the enemies, but it wasn't that accurate.
Lunar Jetman was the sequel to Jetpac and was a mixture of platformer, the original Jetpac game and the classic Moon Patrol. While it was incredibly beautiful to look at, it was a bitch to play as there was so much going on in the screen at once and was a challenge to play and coordinate yourself. There was two elements to the game, the flying around like you could in Jetpac and then the driving sections like Moon Patrol. Often you would encounter craters which required repairing before you could drive over them, meaning you had to get out of the buggy, avoid or shoot enemies to make the repair good. The only trouble was quite often the destroyed enemies left even more craters than before. I never managed to get far.
Knightlore on the Spectrum was the first game to have isometric graphics. It was unheard of before and heralded in the first of the forced perspective three dimensional isometric graphics. I remember being ill one day from school and played this game the whole day. Knightlore had you wandering around forty or so flick screens looking for spell components to mix into a wizards cauldron in the centre of the map. Once you collected all the components, the wizard would brew a potion to turn you back to human permanently. The game had a set time limit of forty days and nights. I remember watching the game as I had cuppa soup while waiting for the forty days and nights to see if you really did die and stay a werewolf and also to time how long the game actually lasted. There were three clever things with this game that hadn't been seen before. First was that enemies reacted differently to your hero depending on whether you were man or werewolf, second, the change between the two forms paralysed you for a brief moment, you meaning you had to find somewhere safe for it to happen or you’d die and third, every time you played the game the location of the various spell components had limited randomisation. The game cleverly solved the colour clash problem by having the entire screen the same colour, but then each screen being a different colour. These isometric puzzle games reached their zenith with Head Over Heels on the Commodore 64. I did have a quick guide which would help you find the spell components rather than wander aimlessly, but it still was a difficult game to play, you still had to make pixel perfect jumps and avoid the faster moving enemies and you still had limited lives. I don't think I ever completed this game, but it took a lot of my time up.
The sequel, Underwurld was not as enjoyable, as I spent far too long learning how to swing on my rope to really enjoy the exploring, and did away with the isometric look and went back to side scrolling action.
Valhalla for the Spectrum was a flick screen text graphic adventure game based on Viking mythology, that had some humour and was interesting to watch characters move and interact without any player input. It have innovative graphics that seemed ahead of its time, but was in fact a front end for a very BASIC game. The game sometimes would crash and reveal its BASIC origins, only the graphics were drawn by machine code. The company would only ever release one other game, The Great Space Race before they called it a day.
School Daze was a perfect game for a school kid to be playing. A single (bi-directional scrolling) level which mimicked a school and you spent a day being the naughty school kid you always dreamed of. All of the teachers and head staff were male, and the school itself was all boys. I watched someone complete this on Youtube many years later and it's shocking to see how difficult the game was. One of the goals of the game was to destroy the trophies the school had won and this was accomplished by knocking over a schoolmate, and then using the catapult to bounce stones off their head and up to knock the trophy down. Knocking them over in the right spot was a real challenge and then hoping a teacher didn't spot you and also doing it within a set time limit before the knocked over schoolmate got back on his feet and came chasing after you. Most of the humour came from being able to rename all the kids and teachers to your own and your mates with your actual teacher’s names. It was a great school simulator in that you could skive off lessons and write on the chalkboard when no one was watching. The game did get a sequel which added extra elements and more variety, but was still a big game and again was just fun to play regardless of whether you won or not. It did get converted to the Commodore 64, but it was an exact copy of the Spectrum and ultimately pointless.
Druid II from Firebird Software on the Commodore 64 was a one or two player Gauntlet clone which benefited from added variety and an optional second player controlled golem. I have always been fascinated by asymmetrical multi-player games where each player is involved with a different element of the game or uses a different control system, or where each player has a different role to play within the same game. Druid II, Silkworm, SWIV and Wizball are just a few 8 bit examples. It was a much slower paced game than Gauntlet and consequently a more difficult game that only had eight levels. You collected magical boxes which increased the number of magic spells or bullets you could fire. There were four different types of spells, water, fire, ice and electricity. Each enemy could be only killed effectively by one type, and be slightly wounded by any other type. The only way to find out was pure experimentation. We only ever saw the first two levels because the game was difficult, and when you lost all your lives you started from level one again. The first level had several safe areas you could camp at and get your gameplay and strategy sorted before making your attacks and slowly advance to the exit, whereas the second level seemed to have no safe areas and required intense combat. It also had a lot of enemies and required you to learn which spell worked best. There was unlimited enemies like in Gauntlet until you destroyed the monster generators. I always played as the Druid, while my brother waited to be the golem I'd summon. The golem was an incredibly clever addition and also had immense amount of hit points, meaning he could clear the way for your weak wizard. In one player mode you could give the golem three options, attack, defend, or go that way, obviously in two player mode he was under direct player control and far more effective. The golem’s only power was huge hit points and hand to hand which would easily kill the enemy. It took a lot of power to summon the golem and left the wizard weak until he could build up his magical powers again. Another way to play the game in single player was to find somewhere for your wizard to hide, and control the golem yourself or with your feet. It was several years later that I would find out that it was Peter Molyneux’s new company Taurus Impex (later Bullfrog Productions) who did the rather excellent conversion on the Commodore 64 for this game.
Thanatos on the Spectrum was a beautiful game and with a haunting piece of music opening the menu of this majestic game released by Durrell Software. I think that is a lost classic. You played a huge dragon creature as it flew across the screen and the background incorporated parallax scrolling. You really did believe you were a majestic dragon and wielded immense power, but more remarkable was how they got this to work on the simple Spectrum. You flew across the land trying to save the witch who was about to be burnt at the stake by peasants. Once you freed her she would mount on your back and you would then ride on to take on knights and castles. My friend Alan bought this for my eighteenth birthday.
Durrell Software had an incredible reputation for producing big sprites and stunning games, and they continued this with the release of Saboteur 1 and 2 on the ZX Spectrum as well. I played the first game extensively, but because of the slow nature of the game and its progress I didn't really explore any of the levels or missions other than the first one. The second game added new elements, like dogs, but was bigger in scope. A lot of the mission was looking all over the map for an invisible security key to open a door to get a security card to unlock a safe to key a code to open a door to get the secret papers and then escape. There was a lot of backtracking, which I got bored of very quickly.
Uridium for the Commodore 64 was a tough shoot em up game that truly enabled you to demonstrate your skills as a player. The ship was a shameful clone of the Millennium Falcon, but apart from that everything about the game was original. The ship was incredibly responsive, you got to fly it both left and right, turned sideways and straight. A game where you really could fly with style and for the first time show off your piloting skills. Andrew Braybrook would later release Uridium+, which was a faster running version of the game which had a higher frame rate, and at the beginning of the game the mothership would drop off your craft much quicker meaning you got into the game quicker. The games always had sixteen levels, and the highest level I managed was level seven or eight. Each dreadnaught was given a name after a rare metal.
Paradroid also for the Commodore 64 was another difficult game that combined shooting and strategy as well as talent. A shoot-em-up with heavy amounts of strategy. The transfer game added extra layers of skill. You started out as a lowly 001 droid with little power and defence. The initial game had you destroying and taking over lesser robots in the hope you would take over the master 999 droid. But the strategy was about ensuring you left enough low level droids to make your way up to the powerful droids later in the game. I loved all of Andrew Braybrook’s games, including Gribbly’s Day Out, but the only game of Andrew’s I failed to understand and enjoy despite my best efforts was Morpheus, which is a shame as I am certain its a game I would love if only I knew how to play or was shown how to play. He was responsible for some impressive Amiga games, but after he left the 16 bit era behind he was never heard from again.
Kickstart II by Mastertronic for the Commodore 64 was a truly brilliant and value for money game. I played the original Kickstart many years later and glad I didn't play it first. A one pound and ninety-nine pence budget game that came with twenty courses, two player mode, random level select and a track creator. This was as much fun as Pitstop 2. It was a side scrolling split screen motorcycling game which required skill and control as it wasn't just about speed. Shaun Southern would later go on to form Magnetic Fields Software and produce the brilliant Super Cars series on the 16 bit computers. The music from the television series, Kickstart even played in the background, and despite its repetitive looping sound, never got old.
Impossible Mission was the perfect definitive Commodore 64 platform game. The random nature of the levels and location of the secret codes made this game brilliantly replayable and nerve-wrackingly difficult. It was as challenging and tricky as Manic Miner, but mixed in with the puzzling made this a classic. Your job was to find the old fashioned computer punch cards which when combined like pieces of a puzzle gave you the password to exit the game. The puzzle element really set this game apart from anything else. You could rotate the cards, flip them, mirror them or change their colour (you could only combine cards which had the same colour). So you played the game until you felt you had collected enough to start to decode the puzzle. They released a sequel which used musical notes instead of punch cards, but while brilliant, didn't outshine the original. Its incredible to think that every element of the game was right. There was very little room for improvement. Some of the rooms were impossible unless approached from a certain angle, and some of the jumps required you to be pixel perfect. And that voice at the start from Alvin Atombender the mad scientist, “Stay a while, stay forever” was prophetic in that the game was so good you really did want to say forever. In both games you had unlimited lives, but playing the game the time counter counted down, and each death reduced your time limit down until you ran out of time and the game ended. It perfected the existing platform genre as well as introducing stealth elements and gameplay that would become standard.
Battlezone was a progressively difficult three dimensional tank battle game by Atari that got ridiculously difficult very quickly by smothering your tank with too many enemy tanks too quickly to defeat. It came from the arcades and was a deliberate attempt to milk you out of money to keep playing. The home versions didn't change this aspect. Encounter was different as it had far more variety and really used the sound to great effect, and the game was more balanced and got slowly harder. It also had some terrifying sound effects and ambient sounds as enemies approached you from a distance and got faster as they got closer. You got to hear the enemies before you saw them which added to the panic effect. I have first played this game on the Atari 800 and enjoyed it equally on the Commodore. The game’s magic was in the speed, and simple filled polygons made it move extremely fast.
Crazy Comets on the Commodore 64 was the first game where I was blown away by the music. Rob Hubbard literally made the Commodore sing, I felt the game was nothing special but the music was legendary. The actual game itself was pretty average and also fairly difficult. The game got a sequel but I never played it called Mega Apocalypse. Both games were about shooting planets against a swirling background until they exploded. The issue I had with the game was the sheer number of hits required to finish off each planet, and the screen would sometimes have four or five of them at any one time. Part of the audio problem on the first game was that one of the sound channels was given over to the weapon sound, and every time you fired your weapon it interrupted one of these channels and made the music sound empty. I remember just having this game loaded onto the title screen to listen to and enjoy the music.
Crazy Comets did get a sequel, but it never really took the gaming scene by storm as did the original.
