The RZX Request Thread

[TMD2003]

This is something I tried to kick into action on t'other forum four years ago, and while I did manage to get somewhere, I thought, why not try again on a forum that's much more active (even if I won't be around all that much for a while)? It turns out that there were three such threads, one from 2006 and one from 2012 that the search facility hadn't thrown up, which is why I started the new thread. One of these earlier threads had someone asking "if you want an RZX so much, why not make it yourself?" I can answer that question with one title I'd like to see RZXed...

Con-Quest. It's effectively Mastertronic's answer to Atic Atac. Yes, I know, that's a game so many people like and pour reverential praise on, but it's just too manically fast for me. I can't navigate and look for keys and weapons with monster after monster after monster constantly spawning everywhere, faster than I can dispatch them if I have the means to do so, and the health bar runs down faster than a cancer patient with AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera and that recent thing from China, whatever it was called. So what I do when playing Atic Atac, when I do, is run around like a headless chicken until I'm dead, which is inevitably sooner rather than later. Con-Quest ramps up the difficulty ever further as it has a Heretic/Hexen-style inventory which needs to be scrolled through and selected with separate keys to the usual control keys, all while being bombarded by the ever-spawning monsters, some of which are venomous. Fortunately, it has been mapped on Pavero's site, and the map includes the end screen, so it must be possible - unless it was done using infinite energy or lives cheats (which it probably was). I think an Atic Atac expert, armed with this map, could tackle Con-Quest. I couldn't, not even if I lived to be older than Sir Clive.

There are others, inevitably, which I'm hoping someone will be able to tackle, someday.

Red Scorpion barely has any video footage of it in action anywhere on YouTube. It's a game I've owned since 1987 and never quite understood; I get that you have to change between four different views, I get that there are enemies and buildings that have to be destroyed, but at no point have I ever understood how I'm supposed to know what each mission involves (so I'll just wander around, looking for things to shoot, until I get blown up or court martialled). This one might have to be hacked and the code examined to find this out. And a word of warning; the odd controls are Y/H/O/P/J (seriously!) plus A, Enter and the entire bottom row to activate all the various icons at the bottom of the screen. It's complicated (did someone let Tim Pool in here?), that's for sure, but it must be beatable, somehow?

[url=
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/5 ... p_Mountain]The Warlock of Firetop Mountain[/url], known primarily for being another game with a ludicrous number of controls (move this way, face the other, open and shut the doors, draw your sword, put it away, and so on). I stopped mapping it about half way through because it was an enormous task (I should probably finish it someday!), and I think it's just a case of navigating through the maze and finding things to collect while killing things that need to be killed. However, those things that need to be killed move very fast, way too fast for me to handle, and there's all those extra control keys to deal with. Usually it's a case of "here's something that moves; now, what key do I need to draw my sword... never mind, I'm dead". Good news, though; Halls Of The Things, which this game was based on, has been RZXed. Whether or not Robert Maines looks at this forum, though, I have no idea - it was his handiwork and the video's been on the RZX Archive channel for seven years.

Mission Omega is a game I'd owned since 1987 but couldn't play on real Spectrum hardware until I'd bought a job lot of magazine covertapes circa 2004, in which it was lurking in non-Powerload form. I still don't understand it, beyond it being a robot-building real-time-strategy game similar to the (far superior, I would suspect) Nether Earth. It seems I wasn't the only one who was confused, so I hadded it to the RZX Requests pile. It was one that fell on deaf ears... but does anyone here know how to beat it?

Dark Empire, on the other hand, is a real-time-strategy-wargame that I do understand - capture neutral cities, force them to do your bidding, build armies and destroyers and transport ships, capture and secure entire continents, but keeping tabs on all those units when the computer knows where they all are instantly and continuously is a massive disadvantage. This one may need examination of the code to understand the computer's tactics, to which Sun Tzu would surely approve if he'd ever conceived of such a thing as a ZX Spectrum. Or indeed, any computer.

Xarq: The Zimmerman Trenches was a game I thought I'd attempt to beat, especially as it's already been mapped for Pavero's site. Having a map is one thing, trying to contend with the shonky controls while I'm being shot at from every direction and avoid all the walls is quite another...


Others took up the challenge of the RZX Request Thread, but never had their calls answered... so here they are.

Micronaut One: Daren asked for this one at the time. He makes a fair few RZXs himself, but never tackled this one.

Martianoids: Daren also asked for this one, and getting in into the RZX Archive (where it can be viewed on YouTube at least) would complete the Ultimate collection.

The Archaeologist: jonesypeter (PeterJ, is that you?) asked for this one. I gave it a go, but I'm about as well-trained at JSW-style games as I am with Atic Atac, i.e. not at all. Even so, I'd have had a chance if it had just been about collecting the flashing objects, but it seems they all need to be collected on a constant basis to keep all five of the meters below the playing area filled. I managed to get through three screens, using Rollback to a ridiculous level, and managed to lose a life just by running out of food and water with absolutely no time or ability to keep the levels up. This one is best left to those who can play through JSW2 with no Multiface or other save-state device without ever losing a life (if such a person has ever existed) - maybe even those who can speedrun it.

Empire!, with an exclamation mark, was requested by matja. I don't know anything about this game, except that it isn't Dark Empire.

Psytron was requested by briscaF1. I think this game had a competition whereby the first to send Beyond evidence they'd completed it won a prize - but as I no longer have the full cardboard box version (just a naked tape that I made a regular-size inlay for) I can't check. I remember getting past the initial "chase the small puppy-like things through the corridors" stage once, but when it came to the shoot-'em-up stage where the sight would only move in the standard Q/A/O/P direction, I was floored. Realistically, I'd need a mouse to tackle it, and this wasn't one of those very rare Kempston mouse games.

N.E.X.U.S. is a game I remember Pavero asking me about while I was sending some maps to him. I never investigated further than the first few screens, but if anyone knows it better than I do, give it a go.

[Alessandro]

I played Con-Quest back in the day, and some years ago I even tried to complete it, under emulation. I still have the savegames from then, but they won't help making a RZX file.

Mission Omega was also a title I knew from the old times. In order to complete it, you must find the room with the three engines, then send a robot armed with rockets, the only weapon able to destroy them and block the alien starship before it reaches Earth. I found the room once but did not manage to send a rocket-armed robot there in time.

On the other hand, yesterday I recorded a RZX file of Ad Lunam Plus demonstrating how to complete the game on medium difficulty and by choosing the historical American approach, i.e. final lunar mission performed with Saturn V, Apollo capsule, LEM and service module B, manned by Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin. You can find it here if you are interested.

[Daren]

Backpackers Guide to the Universe
Battle Command
Defenda 
Energy Warrior
Eureka!
Gunship
Gyron, the Necropolis part which had a prize of £12,500 for the first person to finish it. The easier Atrium has already been submitted.
I, of the Mask
Lords of Chaos
Molecule Man 
Rasputin
Return of the Things
Rock Star Ate My Hamster
Space Crusade
Steg
Swords and Sorcery 
Terror of the Deep
Triaxos
V
Vectron

[Ralf]

Some important but unfortunately also quite difficult games here.
I recorded a lot of games myself but in many cases mentioned here I wouldn't just know what to do.

I have plans to try N.E.X.U.S one day. Actually there exists a walkthrough for C64 so I could just try to copy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAmF4UGdkr4

(yes, in the past it happened to me to copy each move from walkthrough on another platform to make Speccy walkthrough )

And how are you supposed to play Rasputin? That's another game I wanted to complete but couldn't make head or tail of it.

[TMD2003]

Defenda

This is one that's on my list to have a crack at, though I suspect that it will beat me quite hard. When I was a nipper I remember shooting just enough landers to make a baiter appear... and it really did just appear out of nowhere and the fraction of a second I had to react to it was nowhere near enough. If I can get a decent RZX of this game, expect it to be with extreme save state abuse, similar to Laser Zone.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

Swords and Sorcery is a fun game. Now I know what RZX things actually are I can probably sort something out. I played it a lot as a kid.

I presume the goal is "play the game and show what it is like" and not "complete the game"? Never got near completing it.

EMPIRE! sounds fun. Warlock of Firetop Mountain sounds it too!

I like the fact that you can save RZX files and then play them back and record the footage as an AVI for YouTube purposes.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

Lords of Chaos is a cracker too.

[Daren]

I presume the goal is "play the game and show what it is like" and not "complete the game"? Never got near completing it.

Completing it please, if it is completable

And another one for the list - A View To A Kill

[WhatHoSnorkers]

"High Frontier" by Activision is also missing. I'll DEFINITELY be covering that soon so we can add it to the list if you want it.

[TMD2003]

Swords and Sorcery is a fun game. Now I know what RZX things actually are I can probably sort something out. I played it a lot as a kid.

I presume the goal is "play the game and show what it is like" and not "complete the game"? Never got near completing it.

The idea of the RZX Archive is "complete it, if it's possible". If never has an ending, show everything that's possible to show.

For instance, a few of mine:
- Spectron: I kept going until I could be sure there would never be any more aliens on each wave, as it's an endless game
- Gridrunner: also endless, and I racked up a silly score with lots and lots of Rollback - then stopped using it at 250,000 points, let the game run its course, and finished around 333,000 points.
- Wibstars: again, endless until you make a loss, so I showed everything the game had to offer, including visiting all the shops once.
- Time Trax: there are two ways to complete it, apparently - one can be done effectively bypassing all the rest of the game, but the game is so badly bugged that even after Bandit had wielded his Z80 toolkit all over it, the "proper" way still didn't reveal itself. So I did everything I could to get to the "proper" ending, then took the easy way out (which I knew worked, as it could be done on the original massively-bugged game).
- Quest for the Holy Joystick: a text adventure with all sorts of weird diversions, so I went on as many of them as possible (and a couple were forced on me) just to show off what would otherwise look like a very small game. It was completed in the end.
- The Atlas Assignment: another text adventure, which I knew how to finish... except for how to find the code to the safe at the end, which even the Classic Adventures Solution Archive doesn't reveal. But I already knew what it was, as I'd previously ignored Martyn C. Davis' warning not to break into the listing to cheat... but renaming a .Z80 snapshot to .TXT and looking at it that way. (Checkmate, 1983!) So I fudged the way I'd found the code in the RZX... watch it and find out!

Some games are quite impressive in their length - The Lords of Midnight takes over six hours to complete the "proper" way, but as none of the results of the keystrokes are actually shown on screen, it's impossible to keep up with what's going on, what each character has done on each turn... maybe it is possible by examining th log of keystrokes and manually interpreting each one, but that's a task that even Hercules would find beyond him.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

none of the results of the keystrokes are actually shown on screen, it's impossible to keep up with what's going on, what each character has done on each turn... maybe it is possible by examining th log of keystrokes and manually interpreting each one, but that's a task that even Hercules would find beyond him.

That's what I found interesting/frustrating about the Aliens completion I found on YouTube. Because it's an RZX and there's no commentary, and the way to win is just to type commands and not use the first person view much at all, you really need to concentrate AND have the map to know what's going on. Some commenters were really confused.

"High Frontier" is one I can do. I've intended on doing a video on it for my channel and bought the type off eBay last year. I can do RZX recordings of Easy, Normal and Hard mode. And then play them back and edit them with commentary. Win/Win!

Swords and Sorcery does have an ending. That'll be a nice project to work on!

[Lethargeek]

Not a specific request but a generic suggestion. Dear RZX makers! Whenever possible, please do all your recordings with just basic Spectrum-128 config and sna/z80 snapshots, as it is the option compatible with most of the games and most of the emulators. Do not set rare and exotic models like +3 or Pentagon-512 and szx snapshots unless absolutely necessary (like there is not a single game version compatible with the basic config).

[pavero]

Thanks [mention]Ralf[/mention] for your RZX of Rampage. After this experience you could try Ramparts also.

And of course your eternally "favorite" game Street Fighter II.

[Ralf]

Nice to hear that you like it Pavero.

Actually I owned Rampage in the 80s and really liked it although my record was only 15 screens or so. Out of 40 as it turns.
It would be really cool to record Ramage with 3 human players playing. Maybe one day, at some retro meeting...

Anyway for the last few months I was writing my recent Yoyo and doing nothing else on Speccy. Now when it's done I'd like to
return to some games recording. Even today I did another game.

I could try to do Street Fighter 2. Just we need to remember that it look nice on screenshots but moves and plays badly so it won't
be a great show.

[pavero]

[mention]Ralf[/mention] Perfect work with your RZX for Street Fighter 2.

[Daren]

The Final Matrix. A huge mf of a game.

[equinox]

Moonlight Madness. It's similar to Booty (same author) but you have to go around a mansion finding keys and setting the digits of a safe. The game is full of buttons with various effects (spawn monsters, move platforms, change safe digits in another room, etc. etc.) and somebody has done a map indicating what the buttons do. However, it's still really hard to plan a route that will work.

[Daren]

Con-Quest can be ticked off from the list. Finally finished an rzx of this pretty difficult game, with an equally difficult control scheme. Not one I want to visit again in a hurry...

https://youtu.be/bzIbzQxPwhU

[TMD2003]

Award yourself an extra-chunky corned beef sandwich for that one! An hour and a half? And there I was thinking it was an Atic Atac knock off that could be beaten in ten minutes. Time hasn't been too kind to my memory of the game - I was convinced the baddies just kept on spawning the way they do in Atic Atac - but even seeing that they don't, I'd never have been able to do this one myself.

I'll have to have a look at the list to see if there's one I can do. Mission Omega may be worth another look.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Great! Love that game

[Daren]

Finally finished "V", a game I've wanted to see completed for years. Many thanks to [mention]Bandit[/mention] for his help with this! In particular his guide for helping to reveal the codes to unlock the doors.

https://youtu.be/SCywGpG3EJ4

[Daren]

Many thanks to [mention]Lee Bee[/mention] for his 3-hour rzx of The Final Matrix. Another one to cross off the list.

https://youtu.be/jb4a9YlXkyk

[Ralf]

You are doing a great job guys! Sorry thar I'm not able to help at the moment.

[equinox]

"Trace It!"
I got as far as the "Minor Drag" level in this piece of sh*t (haha, it's actually quite a good game) but then the usual problem hit, viz. ridiculously short time limits. So you might need a poke.

[equinox]

I'm going to add "Bite the Dust", a semi-faithful clone of the BBC Micro's puzzle game "Repton".
I've tried this twice... never again...
First of all, screen 004 is provably impossible, since boulders immediately fall on your head and there is no way to avoid them. I repeatedly played this and pressed every possible direction and you always die.
But there is a password for each level, so I simply chose to skip that one and go to the next.
Then on screen 005 there's that interesting pit of gems and boulders at the bottom left, where there seems to be no way to take them all and live to tell the tale. I'm sure there is a solution, but as I was experimenting, I got anally raped by the time limit. Bear in mind I was using rollback so I had solved the rest of the level at pretty much maximum speed. Yet another game where time limits are totally unreasonable. At this point I thought f*** it.
However, you could use a time poke...

I've RZXed most of the Boulder Dash clones, including the very difficult Riptoff, and all 28 levels of Rockfall rollback-less without losing a life, quite a feat. So I am certain I'm one of the best Spectrum players in this game genre. But this one really is a bast.