I didn't realise it at the time, but I think Wizball is probably the best shoot em up game ever released on the Commodore 64, and probably the best and most original shoot em up game of all time. I know the Commodore 64 was home to some high quality shoot em ups, such as Uridium, Delta and Sanxion, but Wizball was very successful and only received acclaim many years later. It was ported to the other home computers, but none were as perfect as the Commodore 64 original. I knew of it through ZZAP64 magazine where it got a Gold Medal status review, but the screen shots although impressive, I found it initially confusing to see what it was that you were meant to be doing in the game. Because it got a Gold Medal it must have been something special. I eventually got hold of the game on an Ocean Software compilation called The Magnificent Seven, but with a bonus game making it eight. Both Ocean Software and US Gold had excellent reputations when they produced compilations by ensuring there was as little filler as possible. 
Wizball was created by the inappropriately named Sensible Software who had a reputation of producing excellent games up until this point. Also instead of being a one man outfit, Sensible had two members. Wizball had an original colour mixing mechanism, a clever two player mode and was a real challenge to play as well. No conversion ever came close to the original. I remember the Amiga version being a shameful copy of the way the game looked and graphics, but failed to emulate any element of the gameplay whatsoever. Ocean did a shoddy 8 bit and 16 bit versions, it was only the Commodore 64 version programmed by Sensible Software that really was the best. Wizball was a sublime blend of game styles spread over eight levels. It required a lot of skill and a fair amount of strategy. Each stage produced enemies and coloured drops of paint of a certain colour. You could move between each stage collecting and mixing colours to finish the level. Each level required three sets of different mixture of colours to finish the level. Completed levels would open up new levels later on, while completed levels became “dead” of enemies and no longer produced colour drops. Each of the later levels became more difficult, so the strategy was ensuring you didn't complete and close early levels as they would help you finish harder later levels. Once a level was completed it no longer produced coloured paint. When you began the game you had a bouncing ball that slowly got easier to control as you collected power-ups. Then it became a power-up session wherein you built enough power in your Wizball to own a cat, or ‘Catellite’, which would collect the coloured paint that was dropped after shooting enemies. The Amiga version was not programmed by the same team, but they did do a sequel called WizKid which I didn't enjoy as much. In the single player version you controlled both the Wizball and ‘Catellite’, which was a challenge. In the two-player mode, the second player played the cat and made for a more enjoyable experience. One clever element was the idea that you could either boost the Wizball or the ‘Catellite’ not both. So you really needed to work as a team. It also benefited from a beautiful and ethereal opening music track, and even had an impressive electric guitar solo ending when it was game over all composed by Martin Galway. This was a far deeper game than it appeared to be and ever got credit for. It wouldn't be until the release of Shadow of the Beast 2 would a game over guitar sound as good as this. There was a remake done by Graham Goring in 2007 that would emulate the perfection that was the Commodore 64 version.
The seven other games in the inappropriately named Magnificent Seven compilation by Ocean Software were Cobra, an average side scrolling platform shooter based on the then current Sylvester Stallone movie, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, a genuinely original arcade adventure set in a suburban town that was weird and original that didn't seem to have any immediate goal programmed by Denton Designs, The Great Escape, an isometric game similar to Knightlore but required planning to escape also programmed by Denton Designs, Arkanoid, a breakout reboot that I disliked because I don't enjoy Breakout games, Head Over Heels, probably the finest isometric arcade adventure on the Commodore 64, Short Circuit, a side scrolling arcade adventure based on the movie, and the eighth game was Yie Ar Kung Fu, an over-the-top one or two player fighting game. This was a fantastic package of quality games for one price. I didn't enjoy Arkanoid, Cobra or Short Circuit much, but the other five were exceptional games for the money.
Some of the other original games for the Commodore were stunning, such as Forbidden Forest and Aztec Challenge, Boulderdash. Neither of these games were released on any other computer other than the Commodore, so you either played them on the C64 or not at all. Games that were ported over from the Spectrum were poor clones of original version. A lot of classic Spectrum games never arrived on the Commodore and vice versa, and most notably were the Ultimate Play the Games games. It finally began to make sense to own both computers as each of their unique games played to the strengths of the machine.
Although the Commodore 64 was home to some of the greatest computer games and computer music of the 8 bit era of the 1980s, I felt I was still missing out on the most popular computer of the time, the ZX Spectrum. Everyone at school seemed to own the Spectrum as it was a far cheaper computer. The ZX Spectrum came out of nowhere to become the single most popular and important home computer of the 1980s. It was incredibly cheap and the proliferation of software for it immense, and because it had a huge array of games (both quality and crap in equal droves). The ZX Spectrum came in two varieties, the 16 and 48k version. There was very little money between the two models, but most of the software released was exclusively for the 48k model. In a matter of a few months it seemed everyone at school owned a Spectrum, and the piracy scene at school was unprecedented. Games were easily copied tape to tape or with many of the easily available copying programs.
When my brother finally decided he wanted a computer as well, I was the one who made the choice on which machine it would be. He was bought a ZX Spectrum 48k+ for his birthday, but it lived in my bedroom, as I was the only one with a spare television. The ZX Spectrum 48k+ was exactly the same as the regular ZX Spectrum but it had a proper keyboard and built in joystick ports meaning it was less prone to crashing or falling apart. With the ZX Spectrum I was exposed to the whole new piracy scene at school, and quickly amassed a huge collection of games in a matter of weeks. Games were traded as easily as music. I stored mine on C90 audio cassette tapes, and whole weekends would disappear whilst going through friend’s tapes. Copying games for the Spectrum was far too easy, you either did it via tape to tape or using one of several copying programs, most notably The Key. My brother’s computer came initially with only one game, PSION Software Tennis, which was a pretty decent version of the game. That game was enough to trade my way up to accumulate a large collection. I remember going around a friends house and within thirty minutes I had a reasonable collection of unknowing classics. The price of games on the 8 bit computers was so cheap, that buying a good game wasn't an issue, plus with both budget software companies (and later re-releases) and big name compilations were becoming common place. Copying games was easier than buying them. Everyone at school who had a computer had a ZX Spectrum because they were cheap and the machine incredibly powerful. It had limited colours and it sounded horrific as well as suffering from “colour clash”, an effect where sprites on a certain colour would bleed colour all over the screen onto other sprites they were passing. It required an add-on to be plugged into the back of the machine to allow you to use a joystick with it, but the games, especially all those by Ultimate Play the Game’s early games like Atic Atac, Jetpac and Sabre Wulf were terrific and hard. Games were hard, and mostly only had limited levels because of memory issues, so games like Manic Miner had twenty of the hardest levels, and even with infinite lives took me ages to get to the later levels, and I still didn't manage to complete it. Piracy on the Commodore 64 was harder as I didn't know anyone with a machine. I only owned a few original games on the Spectrum, mostly second hand or budget and re-releases of games I wanted but never found.
Its amazing to think back to that time with every game almost being a classic and here we were as teenagers unaware of how important these games were to building the industry.
The Sinclair Spectrum had its own form of BASIC called Sinclair BASIC. This was a version of the popular BASIC language, but taught you many bad programming bad habits and poor syntax. What was special about the ZX Spectrum was that each key on the keyboard served many functions and each key was covered by what looked like a confusing array of functions helped only by the colour coding. I never programmed the Spectrum at all. I did buy many joysticks for it, as did pretty much everyone I knew. Odd that I still prefered the keyboard when given a choice, but it makes sense when I think about how quickly I took to Doom using the keyboard, and that it took many years before I’d finally accept keyboard and mouse as a better option, but only because games started to use Mouse Look as an option from Quake onwards.
I later found out one of the reasons why the ZX Spectrum was able to be sold so cheaply, and hence became more successful in terms of numbers, was that it cleverly used failed components from other hardware manufacturers. For example, the ZX Spectrum came with 48k of memory, in three lots of 16k memory blocks. Each of these 16k memory blocks was in fact 48k ram of memory that was defective, and limited to just 16k. Had they not been used, these failed memory chips would have simply been discarded.
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