Spectrum Computing

Unsurprisingly, by a huge margin, Starquake is the winner here, with 33 votes. Nearest thing to it, is Firelord, a distant second with seven votes. Factory Breakout get three votes to be in third place. Joint fourth goes to Laser Snaker and Wizard's Lair - two votes each. Similar story on the propor...

I think your editing has somewhat merged Intravoid with Mindfighter somewhere. Oops!! I forgot to close BB tag somewhere! Perhaps there's still time to edit the post. Sadly, no, but the next best thing is to post up the corrected profiles, which I'll do now! Intravoid by Delta 4 Software https://ww...

You're an early bird today Prodge - has switching to BST messed with your biorhythms too? Naah, nothing to do with the long Easter weekend. I just sometimes go for a Saturday afternoon/evening beer binge, go home, have dinner and go to sleep early and then wake at stupid o'clock! This one is a comp...

Playable demo (of a full price game) Phew, the first category I'm suggesting and it's a very long list! 104 entries in this proposed list: 19 Part 1: Boot Camp (playable demo) by Cascade Games Addams Family, The (playable demo) by Ocean Adidas Championship Football (playable demo) by Ocean Altered ...

Cricket Challenge Football Fever Racing Game, The Rugby Fifteen Sporting Combination Yep, another mail order software house identified from page 93 of #YS 19. I believe the above is their tangible ZX Spectrum output. Let me know if there are any errors in the above before I start the poll properly n...

1) Fruity. Well, it's obvious. The most recent (1987) and clearly most feature-packed. It's practically objective, isn't it? 2) Fruit 2010. Er, the second most recent and clearly an advance on the previous, which is... 3) Fruit 2000. Duh! Pretty much, I expect everyone to arrive at the same conclusi...

It's the poll everybody has been waiting for! [citation needed] Contain your excitement as we cover the software brand that everybody fondly remember [citation needed] and always talks about! [citation needed] Yep, from page 93 of YS #19, we've hit the classified ads and it's homebrew gaming before ...

The final of this series, for now. It'll return at some point. I'm concentrating on a series of polls about covertape items , but not a retread of the Covertape Wars polls. Honest. Anyway, here is a poll about Fergus McNeil's games output for the ZX Spectrum, lots of it being Delta 4 text adventures...

I always heard the main one as "Minky". I have absolutely no idea what this means and I'm almost certainly mishearing it.

They’re using the Amiga or ST version of Starglider Oof! Well, that's a spectacular clanger from me then. I clocked the Spectrum ROM font and the low amount of colours, which felt quite Spectrum-ish, especially on the blurry resolution of a VHS recording - but yes, I very much stand corrected. And ...

No, it's not actually Covertape Wars again, but I am delving back to that era. This time, I'm not portraying it as a YS vs SU vs Crash battle, but breaking it down into a 'best covertape [thing]' of a certain type. I do try to keep my polls objectively configured and there'll always be a few grey ar...

I remember the Get Mucky segment on ITV Saturday morning show Get Fresh using Starglider in series 2, and then Xenon on some 16-bit platform for series 3. Not being a computer owner at the time, I couldn't distinguish which platform was used for Starglider, but someone's uploaded a nearly full editi...

Horace And The 10 Foot Bargepole Acting as Horace, you have to cross a busy road probably once used by a giant frog, to pick up a 10-foot bargepole. Once you are armed with it, navigate your way through a maze where cassettes from an ethically dubious 'IP rights holder' are floating about. You must...

Using Vampyre 's prompt in Google's AI offering, Gemini, brings a result citing a shorter game list which will give you deja vu. The ZX Spectrum: A Spark That Ignited the UK Gaming Industry The arrival of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1982 wasn't just a moment in tech history, it was a revolution for ...

I'd go further and speculate that the author got AI to "write" most of it. The whole thing just seems like a lot of hot air to me. [chatGPT impersonation] The thing to remember about the popular 1980s ZX Sinclair Spectrum is that it was a captivating home microcomputer that was hugely in ...

I'd make a special case for The Hobbit. It was well known amongst kids at the time, even if they never went on to play any other adventures. "Thorin sits down and sings about gold" seems to be well known meme, you can even get it on TShirts (https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/4334758-thori...

At the end of the day, it feels like the author has gone for a list of things that - and I have to bring in television game shows here - would score you big points on Family Fortunes and get you almost nothing on Pointless, if the question was "name a ZX Spectrum game". Nothing wrong with ...

So, wait, games like Chaos (plus all the other fare from JG), Stonkers, Nether Earth, Vulcan, or Lords Of Midnight are routinely ranked as pioneering and high on best-of lists, and yet the genre is supposed to be "minor" at the same time? Not minor by any means, but there's a chasm betwee...

*YS Not just that it never got given away with SU, Chaos was first on YS's cover tape in 1990, and again in 1993. Yes, it was a fairly obscure and underrated game around the time of its release, no doubt about that, but it achieved cult status from that first appearance on YS's covertape. That's wh...

A quick scan through any of the main mags 1983-1988 would indicate immediately that strategy and role-playing games were minor in comparison to arcade and arcade-adventure titles. Crash had a small section devoted to Strategy (Frontlines). Articles like this with these kind of inaccuracies are both...

bluespikey wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 9:03 am If we are talking about iconic rather than best, I'd remove Chaos

DISBELIEVE

bluespikey wrote: ↑Tue Mar 26, 2024 9:03 amI never saw it in the shops until the yellow SU coverdisk in 1991.

Eh!!?

For the purposes of this I would probably suggest combining the Dragonstar entries. They're really multiple parts of the same game and when I asked Fergus I seem to remember that he thought the advert that suggests he was selling them separately may have just been badly worded. (They were only ever...

It's an article spoilt by very dodgy assertions about the Spectrum's games library. Robocop: "While that [action-focused] genre was never really the platform’s bread and butter (that would probably be strategy and role-playing games)" WTF? The software charts for the Speccy were loaded wit...

Honestly, I'd have thought the requirements for running in just 16K (tiny amount of RAM, can't use IM2 etc) would make such a thing extremely unlikely and little more than a proof of concept if it did exist. Ah, but a homebrew guy came up with a 16K version of Manic Miner (and that's for the ZX81, ...

We're used to the concept of a 48K/128K Spectrum game, like Renegade; Auf Wiedersehen Monty; Slightly Magic; Out Run, etc. Works on a 48K in a ~4 minute load, works on a 128K after a longer load and gives you AY music and possibly some extra 'bells and whistles'. But has there ever been a game that ...