The best Speccy game by Ultimate: discussion

[FelisSapien]

Tough one. My instant reaction is Sabrewulf. But the game that I got along with my 16k Speccy was Jet Pac. That’s a tough act to follow.

[WIWC]

Easy choice for me.

Cobra ?

Zythum.

[Morkin]

Cobra ?

Zythum.

By MirRAREsoft.

[Turtle_Quality]

Played a lot of trans-am, jetpac and atic atac, but it's definitely Lunar Jetman for me. The speed, the difficulty ramp was just right, the surprises with new aliens, the futile search for a trailer...

[beanz]

Knight Lore, though Alien 8 was more polished.

Sabrewulf was let down by the death from above and below problem, otherwise that would have been a contender.

[ZXDunny]

I can instantly rule out any of their isometric stuff - the controls were abysmal and required you to select a non-rotational system before you started. They also slowed down horribly whenever things got busy.

That leaves their 2D stuff.

Jetpac was fun to play for a few minutes, but after the second screen it just got dull with nothing new to see or do. Great gameplay, but very little to it.

Atic Atac was frantic at times, and amazing fun but too easy to get lost for the child that played it back in the day. Gorgeous to look at though, and a riot of sound. Better than Jet Pac.

Trans-Am was at first glance good fun, but soon became dull. Played it a few times and never went back.

Cookie was too hard for me, so got no pleasure from that. Ditto for Pssst. Too complex for my young mind - needing different coloured spray cans left me bewildered and quickly overrun.

Never played Jetman back in the day and when I did try it a few decades later it was ok. Nothing spectacular though, but then I was by that point somewhat jaded.

UnderWurlde. A huge map. Easy controls. Neat mechanics like bouncing around and bubbles to ride on. Ultimately(!) though, it was a lot of aimless wandering around not really getting anywhere.

And that leaves Sabre Wulf. The king of Ultimate games, the game I played and played and played. Huge map with interesting world, things to see and places to go that you could see but had to wander far out of your way to get to. Great controls (to be fair, I had to get used to them - QWERT was odd but once my fingers figured out that it was just the sinclair joystick keys I was away), fantastically good fun combat method. You learnt little tricks - keys to press to sneak down and past a Rhino without getting hit, when to switch left/right in a vertical tunnel to avoid getting nabbed by a blooming enemy, how to dodge an attack from above/below when you can only kill to the left or right. Using the natives to figure out where the amulet pieces were. Learning the map by its landmarks. Waiting in holes for the Wulf to pass. Tense stuff.

I finished it so many times and still went back for more.

So yeah. Sabre Wulf.

[Climacus]

For me, Underwurlde is the best (althought Ive played Sabre Wulf many, may times...)

Bubbler is a very good game, technicaly and playability (yes you have to learn how to move the ball properly, but it is very interesting for me)

[Vampyre]

This is probably the toughest one we'll have to decide on! They're 1983 to (early) 1986 catalogue is simply littered with classics, it's no surprise that they're remembered so fondly.

Jetpac was the first game I ever played on my Speccy. For that reason alone it has a huge place in my heart never mind the fact that it's still a tremendously fun game to play even today. How they fit it into 16K beggars belief - I can produce a web page today, that does absolutely bugger all that dwarfs the size.

Atic Atac was the second Ultimate game I played on the same day as Jetpac, later that Xmas '83 evening. It was, and still is, an awesome arcade adventure and is better than Sabre Wulf IMO.

Tranz Am, Pssst, Lunar Jetman, Cookie I all played a year or so later. All polished games but Cookie is the stand-out and a very good arcade game. The others I never really got into, with LJ being far too difficult.

Sabre Wulf - I remember the hype at the time and never really felt that it stood up to it. It's a fine game, a very good one even, but Atic Atac is a more fun experience.

Underwurlde - never played it much, although it's a good game, due to...

Knight Lore - Ultimate's masterpiece. I will never ever forget the day the local computer shop loaded it up and within seconds there was a crowd eight-deep surrounding the Speccy with everyone's jaw hitting the floor. It is to this day one of the greatest software releases of it's time and one of the few games that simply changed everything. In hindsight it has it's flaws - it's too big and empty much of the time, the slowdown is annoying and it's a pretty difficult game to complete. But it's impact is legendary. Incidentally, I must be one of the few people who have to play it with rotational controls - every other isometric game I have to play with directional, but not KL. Weird...

Alien 8 - Much of the same as Knight Lore, but more polished. I was still playing Knight Lore too much so it passed me by a little.

Nightshade - Not a particularly good game although Filmation 2 is impressive. I did manage to complete it back in the day so I had some mileage out of it.

Gunfright - Brilliant game. Fun to play, a good use of Filmation 2, and the shoot out is classic Ultimate arcade stuff.

After that I pretty much consider that to be the end of Ultimat/Rare - isn't the jury still out as to whether the Stamper's produced Cyberun and Pentagram? Cyberun was far too obtuse a game anyway - never really got anywhere with it, and Pentagram was rubbish.

So after all that waffle - my decision? As much as I've bleated on about Knight Lore I think my vote will probably go to Jetpac, simply because it's still a fun game to play even after 36 years.

[Sokurah]

My choice would be Atic Atac. Sabre Wulf may be more popular, but I think its map is too big and samey. Atic Atac has more features and more varied gameplay, so that's a winner for me.

Runners up would be Jetpac for the superb arcade action and Knight Lore for what it represents ... even if the gameplay doesn't live up to it.

[toot_toot]

It's a tough one this, as others have said I'd discount most of the Isometric games now as they're really not aged that well (Knightlore, Pentagram, Alien8).

The really late games (Martianoids, Bubbler) weren't really all that great at the time and they've certainly not stood the test of time now (although I'm annoyed I gave away both to my cousin seeing as they're quite rare now, in saying that I got a SNES in return... ).

Some game are impossibly difficult and incredibly unforgiving, like Cyberrun and Lunar Jetman, making them not that much fun to play now.

Some of the early games would really benefit from tweaking or enhancing, like better controls (Cookie and Psst would be great as twin stick shooters, which I get the feeling is what they were inspired by).

Other games were simply outshone by "clones" - Sabre Wulf was outdone by Firelord, Underwurlde was outdone by Starquake.

So that leaves Jet Pac, Tranz Am and Atic Atac (which is still better than Wizard's Lair!). All three are still great to go back to now and play for half an hour or so. Jet Pac also has the really nice enhanced version.

But there's a dark horse. I've always really liked Gunfright! It's very underrated as a game and while it can be annoying and frustrating, it still plays really well today and the graphics are quite charming. It would be nice to get an enhanced version of it...(is there one?)

[Spud]

Pretty overrated publisher/developer to be honest. One great game (Sabre Wulf), one pretty good clone of Wizard's Lair (Atic Atac), and a load of mediocre 2d rubbish followed by an endless stream of isometric crap.

So yeah, I'm with Dunny: Sabre Wulf.

[PQR]

Pretty overrated publisher/developer to be honest. One great game (Sabre Wulf), one pretty good clone of Wizard's Lair (Atic Atac), and a load of mediocre 2d rubbish followed by an endless stream of isometric crap.

Yeah. Incredible that Ultimate never got called out for creating a clone of a 1985 game in 1983!

[CaptainKrenon]

Here's a different answer to this question:

As I'm sure many of you know, Rare (the company founded by the Stampers after Ultimate) published in 2015 a compilation for the Xbox named Rare Replay, which includes 30 of their games.

Among those there are 7 of their Ultimate-era games: Jetpac, all 5 48K games from Lunar Jetman until Knight Lore, plus Gunfright. None of these are remakes or modified versions, as far as I can tell they are the original Spectrum games in all their glory.

Also, all 30 titles in this compilation include a thing they called "snapshots": a small segment of the game with a very simple goal, like for example in the case of Sabre Wulf, "collect 3 different flowers from 3 different locations". This adds achievable goals to each one of the games and encourages people to actually try them.

I found this quite interesting because I think it is probably the only chance we'll ever have to see a new generation of players who never even heard of the Spectrum before to actually play some classics in their original form.

You can find lots of videos on YouTube playing and reviewing the games, walkthroughs for all of them, etc., some of them are actually quite impressive (the Knight Lore ones give very detailed information about how the location of the items is generated).

So the question is: how do all these new players like the Spectrum games? My impression, after watching a few videos and reading a few reviews is that many consider them interesting for historical purposes but don't think they aged well (or even that they never were good).

But many people legitimately enjoy some of those games. I think the general consensus is that:

• Jetpac is very good and still fun to play.
• Most people also like Atic Atac a lot, see it as a precursor to Zelda and actually imagine that it was groundbreaking.
• Sabre Wulf is ok but too difficult.
• Knight Lore is not very fun to play. Some people can understand that it was innovative but are not as impressed as with Atic Atac.
• Gunfright is too monotonous and silly (wtf the women kill you??)
• Lunar Jetman is way too difficult.
• Underwurlde is poorly designed, when not downright ridiculous and unplayable.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Surprised there will be more votes for Sabre Wulf than I thought.

[ZXDunny]

Surprised there will be more votes for Sabre Wulf than I thought.

Why so surprised? Sabre Wulf was an excellent game - eminently playable, very few actual flaws (control layout aside, that could have been better) and the only people who complain about it are those that either never played it enough to appreciate the depth or who were unable to grasp the strategies needed to survive.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

I agree (in fact I'll vote for it as I said above).

But I had the feeling that people preferred Atic Atac, Inight Lore or Alien 8 to it.

[Nick]

Jetpac remains a favourite of mine and as enjoyable Psst! and Cookie are if you didn't have a joystick then the QWERT controls made keyboard play, for me at least, a bit awkward.

Likewise I found the whole rotate and move controls of some of their earlier isometric games spoiled my enjoyment of them.

At the moment I'm torn between Jetpac, Sabrewulf, Atic Atac and Gunfright. I actually think that Gunfright is a quite a decent and underrated game.

[hikoki]

Unfortunately I didn't play all these games back in the day. The one I played the most was Jetpac, loved the wasps and taking care of the flower on Pssst. Never got far in Underwurlde though always enjoyed its graphics and the bounce off challenge.

[CaptainKrenon]

I didn't have a Spectrum when the Ultimate games came out, I only played them when the company had already disappeared.

I can imagine that when most games looked like Chuckie Egg or Horace and the Spiders then something like Atic Atac or Sabre Wulf must have caused a great impression. I missed that surprise factor, but I still enjoyed their games. I think my favourites were Knight Lore and Sabre Wulf.

And yet I cannot help but feel that Ultimate were very good at writing game engines, great and colourful graphics, catchy tunes, fast movements, ..., but not so good at actually polishing the final result, gameplay, level design, etc.

Atic Atac is one of their best games but I always thought that it would be much better and more immersive if the mechanics were something different from doors opening and closing randomly for no reason and enemies respawning all the time in the room.

Underwurlde has a great atmosphere, nice graphics, ... but it's so difficult to control that I find it barely playable.

Lunar Jetman is even more difficult, I never liked that game. It's the only one from their first period that I can't stand.

I think many of their games relied too much on randomness. Sabre Wulf works better because it's much easier to control, and also because due to the way the labyrinth is designed you get a sense of actually exploring, progressing and moving forward every time you play.

Knight Lore is great although it was surpassed in every way by the Jon Ritman games, that had much nicer graphics and much better puzzles. But I like it a lot, and it's the only one that I managed to finish.

In retrospect I think their 16K games are the ones that aged better: they're simple, addictive and unpretentious. You can see it when people play Rare Replay: Jet Pac is the one that they like.

I think Alien 8 was their last great game. From the ones that came after that I enjoy Gunfright (although it's a bit silly and simple).

The rest are forgettable, with the exception of Bubbler.

Bubbler is actually a pretty decent game. It's the only one in a long time that doesn't feel like a rehash of their previous ideas. The gameplay is interesting, plenty of map to explore, and variety of enemies and things.

The flaws, we already know: it's too hard, even after getting used to the control system. It's often hard to tell the position of the things on the screen due to the isometric perspective (Bubbler suffers from this more than others). But it's still a game that I come back to every once in a while.