| 48k Magic |
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| The Sinclair ZX Spectrum By the early 80's, several companies had tried their hand at releasing a Home Computer. Commodore had a couple of goes with the Commodore Pet and the VIC-20. Both of these were rubbish and Commodore would have to wait a while until they finally conquered the world with the amazing Commodore 64. The BBC had some success with the, erm, BBC. Despite the fact that this was also pants, every school in Great Britain insisted on filling valuable classroom space with hordes and hordes of these fucking machines until about 1997 when somebody pointed out at a Headmaster's meeting that he had heard a rumour that technology may have moved on since the last meeting. Even Clive Sinclair had a false start with his dog-turd of a ZX-81 machine. But in April 1982, whilst the BBC Computer was at the height of it's dominance, Clive Sinclair finally unleashed the Sinclair ZX Spectrum at a press conference at The Churchill Hotel with the words "We believe the BBC make the best TV programmes. And that Sinclair makes the best computers." Let's take an in-depth look at some of the most impressive things about this little black box of tricks. 1). It looked bloody horrendous, and you couldn't type properly on the silly rubber keys. 2). It didn't have a joystick port so you had to buy a special Joystick interface. When your joystick stopped working, you were never quite sure if it was the joystick or the interface that had broken. So you took a gamble and bought a new joystick and then you would weep as you realised it was the interface and you had just wasted all your paper round money. 3). The games made a headache-inducing racket when they were loading, a similiar noise to a baboon having his teeth slowly pulled out by a vampire with a cough. 4). The games never worked anyway but they wouldn't tell you that they weren't going to work until right at the very end of the 30-minute loading process. 5) The sound came out of the computer itself rather than your telly which was a very stupid idea but it didn't matter anyway cos the sound was rubbish. 6). Colour? Who needs colour anyway,eh? Actually, some games did have colour but then your main character would fade into the background and get lost in a blur of goblins and zombies. 7). About 90% of the games were wank The ZX Spectrum also had a few downsides too but let us not bother with those in this celebration! Instead, let's take a look at some of the all-time Spectrum Classics. Some of the more famous games and characters (such as Miner Willy and the Ultimate games) are worthy enough to have their very own page in this guide but for now, let Salter take you on a whistle-stop guide to some of the less well-known GREATEST GAMES EVER MADE BY ANYONE EVER..... |
| The Spectrum Classics What really made the Spectrum games so special was that lots of them were likely to have been made by just one guy in his bedroom. (Well,not the same guy obviously.......but you know what I mean). In later years, the money-grabbing software labels would put more effort into securing a brand-name on which to sell their game rather than actually making the game any good. Some idiot at Head Office would buy the rights to make a game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then get in at least 20 programmers to come in and tread on each-other's toes until the final product is released, a piss-poor turgid mess which nobody is happy with. Not so in the glorious olden days when most games were the creation of one warped mind. One creative guy who comes up with the idea, and follows it through until he's proudly made something that he's happy to call his own...... Here's a few of Salter's greatest Spectrum games of all time, all of which can be played again today using a Spectrum Emulator such as Realspec. 3-D Ant Attack/Quicksilva Often referred to as 'the first good game', the object was to rescue your damsel in distress from the Killer Ants in a lovely 3-D environment. You could even choose whether you wanted to play the boy or the girl which was an early example of the Sinclair Spectrum scene pushing back boundaries and making a stand against sexism. Developed by Sandy White in 1983, 3-D Ant Attack is a perfect example of why home computer games were often wiping the floor with the coin-ops at the seaside. Whilst a coin-op had to be immediately playable and relatively simple in order for you to get your value for money out of your ten pence, a home computer game could afford to go that bit further and develop an environment which took a bit of getting used to but would ultimately reward you more than any coin-op. Ant Attack had about a million different control keys, most of which were to change the view of the playing area, and yet beneath it all was a deceptively simple but hugely satisfying maze game with big killer ants. The best feature of all though was that when the tiny matchstick girl character jumped up and down, her skirt flew up and down too which was strangely erotic back in 1983. Or maybe that was just me. A nice PC update of 3-D Ant Attack can be found at Retro Remakes, as can lots of other remakes of classic games. Deathchase/Micromega Amazingly, this superb Spectrum classic actually worked on the original 16k Spectrum and did not need the middle- class 48k upgrade. As such, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, not only the best 16k Spectrum game ever written but an absolute feat of computer programming. Written by Mervyn Estcourt in 1983, the aim of the game is embarrassingly simple. You guide a motorbike through some trees and shoot two other enemy bikers. You can also shoot some tanks and helicopters for bonus points if you really want to,but you don't have to. And that's it. Nobody shoots back at you, the only way of losing a life is by crashing into a tree. You don't even have to drive very fast, but the game makes you put your foot down on the pedal because you don't want to risk losing sight of the enemy bikers. The screenshot may not look much cop but the game feels like such an exhilarating 3-D experience, you won't be able to resist driving through the trees like a madman, you'll be so tempted to swing your bike to the right and shoot a helicopter for 50 measly bonus points, only to slam into another tree. You won't even learn any lessons from this, you will keep on doing it again and again because the game is so great it makes you do it. Several remakes of this are knocking about on the net and none of them even come close to matching the frenetic brilliance of the original, even though the remakes have about a squillion per cent more memory to play with. Do yourself a favour, download a Spectrum Emulator and play the original Deathchase until your bollocks hurt from the strain. Wheelie/Microsphere For some bizarre reason, there is more than one motorbike game to make Salter's Greatest Games Ever list. Coincidence??? Erm, yes, probably. I don't even particularly like motorbikes very much, not since I lost that left leg in the accident back in '68. But if Deathchase wears the crown of Best Game Ever To Fit In Such A Small Amount Of Memory, then Wheelie, with all it's 48k, is a strong contender for Best Game Ever Full Stop. In fact, I'll stick my neck on the line and give Wheelie the prestigious Pigeon Loft Award for Best Game Ever Not To Feature Miner Willy.Cos it's ace. The game is utterly unique. You control a biker who must navigate his way through mysterious green tunnels, along the way jumping over buses and cars whilst avoiding killer hedgehogs and wallabies with the eventual aim of finding the spooky Ghost Rider right at the end of the tunnel and challenging him to race the way back. The game is hard. Dead Hard. But this perhaps explains why these early Spectrum classics are so much more magical than the current crap floating around today. These days you can pick up an Xbox game and get to the fifth level within the first half-hour. The sense of achievement you feel in Wheelie after finally finding the Ghost Rider will stay with you for the rest of your life and will be more important to you in future years than passing your driving test or even your wedding day. The game has such a wonderfully weird atmosphere and is just so fantastically playable and addictive. Not nearly enough people in the world are even aware of Wheelie's existence. Spread the word, Wheelie is better than Jesus and that's official. Jungle Trouble/Durell Whilst we're on the subject of games that are dead hard, take a look at this devilish swine of a game, quite possibly the hardest game ever created and yet worryingly addictive rather than frustrating in any way. It's a simple one-screen affair and you play a little matchstick man with an axe. Your first task is to jump over the stepping stones and avoid the crocodile in the water below. Sounds easy? It will take you FUCKING FOREVER and yet you will keep on trying because you can't bring yourself to believe that a game that looks this simple can be so teeth-achingly hard. Even when you do finally achieve this momentous task, you're in even further trouble because now you've got to chop the trees down but the bastard monkeys will get a sniff of you and hop onto the screen to nick your axe which means you've got to go all the way back via the crocodile to get a new one. Which another monkey will come and nick it again. If you're still sane after all this, you've got a tricky rope jump over fire to get through and just when you think you've conquered the last hurdle, and you can safely see the 'home' sign within walking distance, the fucking ground will hilariously start to crumble beneath you and you'll have to do it all over again. This would normally sound like the kind of game which would tempt you to throw your Spectrum right out of the window but there's something so utterly charming about the whole thing that you won't be able to stop yourself playing it until you've managed to get home (unless you're a big girl's blouse, of course.) If you're really clever, you can even work out how to KILL THE MONKEYS but I've only ever managed that about three times out of twenty years of playing. Fiendishly brilliant, Jungle Trouble is definately one of the Spectrum's finest moments and you can even play a really really nice remake of it here. Stop The Express/Hudson In contrast to the spasm-inducing difficulty of the games above, here we have a nice and bouncy game which is reasonable easy to complete but still keeps me coming back after twenty-odd years. You must guide a cute spikey-haired kid across the tops of the moving train carriages,whilst avoiding telegraph poles and the terrifying REDMEN who creep up behind you and throw nasty things at you. You can sometimes get your own back on the REDMEN by catching, erm, a really beaky bird and erm, throwing it back in their faces. There's another level to the game in which you get inside the actual carriages and you have to try and find a key whilst avoiding, erm....a big blobby octopus thing and.... erm.......look,it doesn't really matter. I don't even know the plot of this game or why indeed this particular express needs stopping so badly. But it's such a lovely cute game with absolutely fantastic sound effects, it makes you think you really are jumping around on the top of a train and throwing beaky birds at strange red men. It's a little bit sick too, whenever the kid falls off the train, he plunges to the floor in a big spazzy mess with arms and legs and head akimbo. Maybe this game carried an important safety message behind the cute exterior - if you do find yourself on the top of a train, make sure you time your jumps as accurately as possible and don't take too many risks when trying to pluck a bird out of the sky. Of course, there were many other classic Speccy games, all of which can easily be downloaded by doing a quick search on Google once you've found yourself a nice emulator. (Did I mention Realspec? Yes?) Naturally, don't get too excitable and download everything you can find - about 99% of them really have dated terribly, but if you look hard enough you will find the rare glittering diamond in the ocean of horse manure which can still give you hours of pleasure today FOR FREE. What an amazing world we live in, people. We're spoilt, we really are. Back in the 80's, I must have spent close to £500 on getting together a small collection of Spectrum games. Now you can get the whole damn lot for free and you don't even have to wait for them to load in and crash. Remarkable. But now, let's turn our attention to the greatest hero ever to have graced our small portable televison sets in our tiny cramped bedrooms.....yes, Salter has finally got round to writing a page about Miner Willy.... |
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| Rough Guide To Home Computing & The Arcades Click here to go back to the Title page and view the whole Guide |