Game of the day...

[TMD2003]

I am now imagining a new version of Rainbow Islands where Bub gets hit and there's a speech bubble that says "SHRIEK" or "DRAT!!" or something similar with six characters. It's the best of both worlds!

[R-Tape]

I am now imagining a new version of Rainbow Islands where Bub gets hit and there's a speech bubble that says "SHRIEK" or "DRAT!!" or something similar with six characters. It's the best of both worlds!

If so then "EGGNOG" would have caught on as an expletive we could use in front of grandma.

[R-Tape]

Toofy's Winter Nuts.

Perhaps the least inventive, but still my favourite of PaulJ's Toofy series. It's a good honest platformer that looks and plays well, and completing it feels just within reach after a couple of goes so you go back for more. I can live with the muffled beeper drumbeats too.

[+3code]

[R-Tape]

Loony Lander. It's from Software Supersavers, so we get their trademark no-frills inlay with a cool drawing (more often than not).

The inertia isn't very sophisticated and takes a lot of getting used to, but it's a decent enough thrust game with all the right graphics and beeps you'd want from an early 80s action game. It's hard, but I wouldn't call it unfair. Only managed level 2 so far with a Hi of 1195.

As far as I could work them out, the keys are 8/0 = L/R, 1/3 D/U.

[R-Tape]

Rock Crush II on the ZX81 16K. It plays nicely and I like the look. There's an enhanced version, but as a fairweather 81 user I want it traditional. Colour and AY on a Zeddy is like plonking wings and a nose cone on a tractor to me.



And while in the boulder dash groove I had to play the fantastic Tourmaline.

[TMD2003]

Rock Crush II on the ZX81 16K. It plays nicely and I like the look. There's an enhanced version, but as a fairweather 81 user I want it traditional. Colour and AY on a Zeddy is like plonking wings and a nose cone on a tractor to me.

Does this need some kind of add-on module for a real ZX81, or is it making those sort-of-UDGs in real time in what might be considered a ZX81 equivalent of Nirvana?

[R-Tape]

Does this need some kind of add-on module for a real ZX81, or is it making those sort-of-UDGs in real time in what might be considered a ZX81 equivalent of Nirvana?

I don't think any add-on is needed beyond extra memory as it's all done in software—I'm assuming the 1K ZX81 doesn't have space for this. There's more info in this thread on SinclairZXworld. Rock Crush uses the 'Video Pseudo Hi-Res Graphics' method which does sound a lot like the interrupt scanline method allowing pixel updates every line.

(The Zeddy isn't my area, so I'm happy to be corrected)

From the manual, the colour and sound is add-ons galore:

Rock Crush II runs on a standard 16K ZX81, but also supports colour via the Chroma interface, sound via AY / ZON X devices (enhanced if 8K-16K area RAM is present) and a joystick via the Chroma or ZXpand interface.

[R-Tape]

Down to Earth. Another Boulder Dash inspired game.

It was probably seen as old hat in 1987, but provided you like Boulderdash it's pretty good, and with the £1.99 pricetag you'd be primed for disappointment but be pleasantly surprised when you played it. I certainly enjoyed playing the first level through. There's scope for a bit more action than Boulderdash because you can actively drop bombs as if you were firing. The 'bustling insect hive' beeper sound is better than no sound. The graphics are pretty good, but with tile based games like this I'm always temped to try a crack.

I'm not sure what all their roles were, but except for Anthony Lill, this is the only Speccy game they made. It also looks like MOS, the loading screen artist, had actually seen the game, but whoever drew the inlay had only been given the vaguest brief!

[Starquack]

Came out around the same time as Curiosity killed the Cat had one of their hits' Down to earth' although I don't know which one was released first

[R-Tape]

Call it displacement activity while deliberating over the best Retrosouls game vote—I found myself playing:

Smuggler

It's a classic trader game: buy a thing in one place and hopefully sell it for more elsewhere with perils and overheads along the way. It's a well tread idea that works well set in a generic galaxy, or in this case Northern Europe and the Med. The more you earn, the bigger the boat you can buy and the more loot you can carry.

It's programmed in BASIC, but even so I wish there were more graphics (it only uses 4 UDGs for the skull and crossbones!). Also of course there are numerous repeated screens that take a little to longer to print than you'd like, and it plays an uninterruptable tune every time it prints the map. Saying all this it's a decent game and I enjoyed it.

My take-home messages are that tools are cheap in England and expensive on the Barbary coast, spices are vice versa, and that perfume sells well in Ireland. I wish there was a little bit more depth and variety, but there was enough to keep me occupied for an hour or so.

It was revealing how risk-averse I am—I always opted to pay the duty instead of smuggling on shore, and I rarely ventured into the Barbary coast!

More Tea Vicar

I know the game and it's unvaried attack patterns well, so I play it for a bit of top notch action, exercise almost, and to hear one of the best AY tracks out there. I've got to the stage where I almost always finish level 3, but do terribly on the last level. I wonder if I'll ever complete it.

[R-Tape]

Agatha Adventure

It's a couple of years old and is paid-for only, but it's worth a couple of quid for such a polished platform adventure game. This one uses MPAGD to make some really nifty puzzles.

[R-Tape]

Agatha Adventure

Completed! It was the easy version but that was enough of a challenge. Great work @disoba!

[R-Tape]

I was in the mood for some good clean platforming fun, David Pagett's Page's Castle Quest and Curse of the Pharoah. It's mostly fair, but the extra lives you can collect are put in the most precarious positions—almost every one I collected resulting in the loss of at least another!

[druellan]

Roaming the database I stumbled into this title: A journey One Spring
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... One_Spring

I was intrigued by the fact that it is a text-based adventure game for the 128k Spectrum that includes AY sound effects. I was surprised to find that the game has almost no graphics, but that's okay because the descriptions are rich and detailed.



However, the game is challenging in terms of vocabulary, and some actions require waiting at arbitrary locations, making it more of a curiosity than a competent adventure.

[WIWC]

Booty [Firebird, 1984] by John F. Cain



I've been playing this budget classic quite a bit lately, in fact, more than I did back in the day, when I had it in a couple of italian pirated tapes and now it's in my top ten games for 1984.

I even found my old review for the Spectrum 2.0 site, which is currently off line, and I seem to agree with myself, so I'll paste it here:

"Flip screen platform'n'ladders'n'doors game. Collect all the treasures, avoid the pirates, parrots and rats, don't fall from the platforms, and use the numbered keys to open the relative door, inside the same screen. The other doors, not numbered, take you to another screen. If in a specific screen there's an unreachable spot, closed by a door with an unreachable key, probably you can get there from a door in an another screen.
Nice jolly [roger] tune, beautiful glimmering loading screen, ok colourful graphics, with a bit of colour clash, it's quite addictive, partially because it's a bit frustrating, and you get a bit angry at the game [well, I did]: there are too many random deaths. Rats and parrots coming out of nowhere while you have no possible escape, doors that sometimes, in a particular game, take you directly in the arms of some affectionate pirate, items hiding bombs, appearing while a pirate is chasing you and such. The thing is that these defects aside, is quite playable. It's cute. Just slightly sadistic, at times."

One thing I didn't mention, among the frustrating feature is that the items are collected only once you touch their right extremity, which makes no sense, and the effect is that if you come from the left, when there's a bomb hidden in the item you have less chances to get away, because you're right on the bomb.

Anyway, there are excellent pokes in the archive that can help improving the playability, for example you can choose to be invulnerable limited to rats and parrots.

[Art]

I always liked Booty, but I must agree with your frustration points. I would appreciate if someone could find POKEs for:
Much bigger time limit to find the last key.
To move the point of collection of an item to its centre.
Better detection for moving platforms. Now it's too easy to fall down through a platform.

[Morkin]

I always liked Booty, but I must agree with your frustration points. I would appreciate if someone could find POKEs for:
Much bigger time limit to find the last key.
To move the point of collection of an item to its centre.
Better detection for moving platforms. Now it's too easy to fall down through a platform.

...Also fix the issue with that tiny note-length pause/delay in the tune... Drives me crackers.

[disoba]

Completed! It was the easy version but that was enough of a challenge. Great work @disoba!

Thanks a lot , R type, the ide is that Ppl have fun
Daniel Isoba

[WIWC]

I always liked Booty, but I must agree with your frustration points. I would appreciate if someone could find POKEs for:
Much bigger time limit to find the last key.
To move the point of collection of an item to its centre.
Better detection for moving platforms. Now it's too easy to fall down through a platform.

Absolutely, that was one of the thing I wanted to complain about, but I forgot to add it to my list.
Usually I wait for the platform to come downward, as I find it less difficult to climb on them.
Most of the times I fall through the "elevators" when I try walk on them while they're coming up.
One more frustrating thing is that you have to start again from the first screen when you die, but there's a poke solving this.

[TMD2003]

Not that this is a game, that I've been playing, more doing for real...



Carpet Capers. As in, I've had some new carpet (and vinyl) fitted this morning. It looks a lot less messy than this.

As you were...

[Daveysloan]

Fun fact, Carpet Capers was programmed in a house just down the road from me & I've been trying to get a copy of it ever since I found that out.

Also my Dad was a carpet fitter. That is less Speccy related though.

[R-Tape]

Fun fact, Carpet Capers was programmed in a house just down the road from me & I've been trying to get a copy of it ever since I found that out.

Also my Dad was a carpet fitter. That is less Speccy related though.

Hopefully you're not the inspiration, given that the tagline is "A tactical fun game about deranged carpet fitters"!

[R-Tape]

Saboteur: Deep Cover. It took me longer than it should to solve the initial part that leads into the main game, and the chaos that ensued just after (if you've played it you'll know what I mean) certainly got the pulse going more than any horror game I've ever played. Now that I've sussed out what to do I can relax a bit and enjoy what can be summed up as an action graphic text adventure with a bloody big map. Nice work Andy and Clive.

[R-Tape]

I've returned to the text adventure A Strange Affair after a long break, and made a fair bit of progress. I don't think there is much more to solve but I've started going in circles. Hopefully a short rest will help unblock the next puzzle.

I do like the setting—done right, the deserted English village can feel very spooky indeed.

EDIT - Scratch that COMPLETED! I just had to find the right phrase. You have to pay for it, but I'd recommend this to fellow text adventure duffers. If I can complete it anyone can.