The best Speccy game by Ultimate: discussion

[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.