Spectrum Computing

The latest version is looking fantastic - thank you @flatduckrecords and @Joefish for making this happen!

Honestly, MODE 3 is amazing for this kind of effect.

What I find amazing about these is that so many of these clones actually used the name "Star Trek" with impunity. Fairly sure I only ever played two of these - the DK'Tronics one and Startrek Adventure. Can't remember which I played first, but I know I went into the second thinking "h...

To my eternal shame, I've only played two of these - Questprobe 2: Spider-man, and Robin of Sherwood. Really must correct that oversight one of these days. Of the two, though, Robin of Sherwood, by a long way. I can remember being really excited to play Spider-Man as a kid, and getting quickly bored...

stupidget can you define "part of the Speccy Retro Scene" please? I mean, I had Spectrums back in the day... I recapped and performed the Composite mod on two of them earlier in the year, but that was more to make it easier for us to introduce my niece to computers and computer gaming as ...

It was all vague guesswork. ... I'm trying to refine it for this version, but it's hard work. Well, it's pretty frickin' impressive for guesswork! Curious to see any refinements you make, as it's already looking amazing, considering the comparatively low screen resolution and low-definition fonts: ...

I've known Phil since the 90s and have seen quite a few "in progress" screen drawings showing them being slowly built up as he works on them pixel by pixel. I can only go by some of his other work, but Phil has a VERY good eye, and his images are often painstakingly detailed. I wouldn't h...

Thanks for the quick response PeterJ ! It honestly wouldn't surprise me if this turned out to not be a feature worth correcting - this new way of accessing YouTube channels hasn't been in effect for long, and there's a good chance the way it works might change over time anyway. Not even sure when Yo...

Meant to bring this up soon after I joined, but it kept slipping my mind. When we set up our user profiles, we have the option of adding a YouTube link... but it seems as though that functionality hasn't kept up with the way YouTube itself operates. For example, my channel can currently be accessed ...

Oh, that's easy: for me, personally, it was when the last of the Spectrum-specific magazines ceased publication, when the multiformat mags stopped covering Spectrum games and, finally, when the last of the publishers stopped supporting the Spectrum. The decline started when the 8-bit Sega and Ninten...

What you wanted was tabletop gaming. Which is pretty much the random dice roll in a text adventure (see e.g. combat in Mountains of Ket) If the books are better, well, damn, books will always be better. I love fine literature but I would never see it as a function of computering. "Warlock of F...

If this project will ever become a game I want it soooo bad ! While it might never be a Star Wars game in name, having written the design document and put together a handful of screenshots, I'm honestly curious to see how well it would work on actual hardware, and whether it would actually present ...

Regarding your comment that players will "imply" a plot when it isn't there... tldr: I am speculating, maybe you were in the industry at the time, tell us what you know from that time. <3 Not that they'd imply (infer?) a plot when there wasn't one, more that, prior to loading a game up, t...

Most PRE-1985 (??) video games cannot be said to have a plot because it was enough to fill the memory with aliens and zapping. So it's quite reasonable (NO) it's quite plausible -- to say "oh, Bomberman is like Pac-Man, but you can blow up your enemies" (even though the bombing makes it t...

I agree with you. Well, I will rate HoH very highly due to its technical execution - it's big, has lots of rooms and creatures and innovative gameplay ... but I just never enjoyed playing it much. It looks amazing, but I think it's too big and too boring (imho). I'm very much inclined to agree on t...

I don't think this question is limited to computer games. Sequels (books, films, video games, board games) are often compared unfavourably and 'marked down' if they are too similar to the progenitor. Very true, and there's also that phenomenon where two different studios release a movie with essent...

I got HoH on the Magnificent Seven compilation and it came as a nice surprise. Actually, a brilliant surprise. I played it to death. I even tried making my own version for the Mac but failed terribly! Going off at a tangent, but have you seen Colin Porch's work-in-progress sequel? He's exhibited it...

Where do you draw the line with regards to a 'clone'? That's basically where this topic came from: the review of MASK 3 unfairly dismissed it as a clone of Exolon, which it clearly isn't, it simply shares some - but not all - of its essential game mechanics, and adds some new mechanics. By most met...

It wasn't though. It massively refines the concept over the ultimate titles... just adds lots more depth to the overall experience. I don't think anyone would argue that, but it doesn't change the fact that Head Over Heels is an isometric platform adventure in the style of Ultimate and therefore no...

Another thing to bear in mind is reviewer apathy. Crash especially, as they had three reviewers for each game for much of its lifetime, so each reviewer was probably inspecting at least a dozen games per month. Probably 20+ during the Speccy's peak years. Even as someone who still adores videogamin...

These two games aren't too similar to begin with, except both having a man walking left to right shooting things (and this was equally "unoriginal" for both of them). Yeah, and by that token, should we also dismiss Metroid as being a MASK 3 clone? Then again, I don't think many games jour...

I can understand why it might be called out in a review if an 'original' game was fresh in everyone's minds - say, if it had been reviewed in the previous issue - but to mark a game down for that reason is ridiculous. Who's to say the game that became MASK 3 wasn't completed before Exolon, but sat i...

But to the subject of misconceptions, they unfortunately continue unabated. I try to reply on twitter / blogs / posts where I see incorrect stuff being printed. Another magazine in the shops had an article at the end of last year. While it was primarily a review of my SAM Mechanical Keyboard, the o...

Looks a damn sight better than Dungeonette... And generally 'cleaner' than a lot of Next games. But, for me, the backgrounds are over the top. Looks as though they've taken the PC version as their basis, but mucked about with the contrast of the floors and walls. Puzzled by the 'serf' wearing a turb...

I've modified @Joefish's code to work on SAM, hopefully it's helpful! That's awesome - thank you! I'll start looking into patching it into the demo today. I've currently got the text crawl running in MODE 3 with some palette changes to handle the fade. Curious to see how it looks using my current f...

While I'm (probably) not going to go back in and 'correct' this, it's occurred to me today that the way I've presented the Dagobah 'assault course' stages may have been misjudged... The more I've thought about it, the more I think it should be more like the Cloud City level, in that it's not so much...