The 20 games with a <= 10% rating from all three major ZX Spectrum magazines

[PeteProdge]

Last year, I made a thread about all the games that got awards from all major ZX Spectrum magazines. It was titled 'The 52 games with awards from all three major ZX Spectrum magazines', as that's what I found in my initial calculation. However, it's actually 53, as I learnt when @zx4ever responded to point out how I missed Jinxter.

The YouTuber 'Seb's Place' decided to make a video on my research a year later and not bother crediting me, and in his sloppiness, he copied my initial mistake by missing out Jinxter. Yeah, thanks for that, Seb.

This weekend I took the step of identifying the 20 ZX Spectrum games which effectively scored 10% or less as an overall rating from the three major Speccy mags. I look at that as being an 'inverse' award, based on the almost-true rule that Crash would award a Crash Smash when a rating of 90% or higher. (Yeah, they didn't always do that, hence my 'almost-true' caveat.) When it comes to a 1/10 rating, I regard that as being the same as 10%.

Some maths pedants could say I should really go for 0-9% instead as that'd be a lower tenth. Or is it? None of the major three Speccy mags ever gave a 0% rating, although Big K issued a 0/3 rating to seven games and Personal Computer Games issued a 0/10 rating once. If we eliminated both 10% and 1/10 from the criteria, then we'd only be left with six games covered by the trinity of YS/SU/Crash.

Anyway, enough waffle, let's get onto it, by starting with the be... er, um, 'least worst', at the 10% level:

10% or 1/10


Battlecars by Games Workshop
Your Sinclair reviewed this 1984 game in 1988. (Crash 66%, SU n/a)
38% average

SAS: Operation Thunderflash!! by Super Sparklers!
Sinclair User reviewed this £2.99 trash when it was rereleased on Top Ten. It previously positively reviewed it when it debuted on Thorn EMI's unlamented 'premium budget' label (also at £2.99) a year earlier - giving it a 4/5 review. (Crash 63%, YS 4/10)
37.66% average

Count Duckula 2 by Alternative Software
Your Sinclair reviewed this for the second time, in March 1993. It's an individual rating for it as part of Alternative's Kid's Pack 2 compilation of six games at a £6.99 price.(SU 64%, Crash n/a)
37% average

Kickboxing
Sinclair User reviewed Firebird's Silver Range £1.99 effort. (Crash 41%, YS 6/10)
37% average

Time Trax by Mind Games
Sinclair User reviewed this £9.95 game which scored a 'Globella' award from ZX Computing magazine! (Crash 63%, YS n/a)
36.5% average

Peter Shilton's Handball Maradona by Grand Slam
Sinclair User reviewed this turkey for the second time in 1987, as it's a £1.99 rerelease on Bug Byte, having previously rating its full price Grand Slam release as 3/5. (Crash 42%, YS 5/10)
34% average

Realm Of Impossibility by Ariolasoft
Crash reviewed this £8.95 effort, also received 3rd place in the magazine's 'Least Pleasing Game' reader awards. (SU 2/5, YS 3/10)
26.66% average

Space Jack by The Power House
Your Sinclair reviewed this £1.99 dog's egg from this abysmal budget label. (SU 41%, Crash n/a)
25.5% average

Pneumatic Hammers by Firebird
Sinclair User reviewed this budget effort. (Crash 18%, YS 4/10)
22.66% average

Freedom Fighter by The Power House
Sinclair User reviewed this budget game from CRL's notoriously poor budget label. (Crash 19%, YS 2/10)
16.33% average

Saracen by US Gold
Sinclair User reviewed this £7.99 US Gold thing. (Crash 15%, YS n/a)
12.5% average

Piggy by Bug Byte
Sinclair User reviewed this budget effort. (Crash 7%, YS 2/10)
12.33% average

Headstart by Bug-Byte
Sinclair User reviewed this £2.99 game, no other magazine did, even outside of the YS/SU/Crash trinity.
1/10

Survival by Central Solutions
Your Sinclair reviewed this 99p (according to ZXDB) text adventure. (SU and Crash n/a)
1/10

Bananablip and Spacemanblip by Le Lu/Lu's
Sinclair User reviewed this MIA £2.50 homebrew mail order double game pack (a residential address in Blackpool) of puzzle games. (YS and Crash n/a)
1/10

The Boss by Peaksoft
Sinclair User reviewed this 1984 football management game on a 1987 £1.99 rebrand/rerelease from Alternative Software where it got its new name, the previous being 'The Boss', originally being £6.95 in 1984. (YS and Crash n/a)
1/10

Now let's go through the sub-10% efforts, from 'best' (ahem) to the worst...

9%


Count Duckula 2 by Alternative Software
Your Sinclair reviewed this £3.99 effort in Dec 1992, two months after SU did, and yes, you are reading this again, only this is the original release. (SU 64%, Crash n/a)
36.5% average

Voyage into the Unknown by Mastertronic
Crash reviewed this, no other magazine did. (SU and YS n/a)
9%

8%


Advanced Lawnmower Simulator II by J Aron Software
Your Sinclair reviewed this mod of a joke game as part of special on reader-submitted games which really does seem to be a precursor to CSSCGC. Maybe this doesn't really belong here what with it being a deliberately awful effort, but hey, to be complete, here it is. No other magazine reviewed this, understandably.
8%

7%


Piggy by Bug Byte
Crash reviewed this budget effort. Yes, you read this earlier in the 10% secton. (YS 2/10, SU 1/10)
12.33% average

5%


Video Classics by Silverbird
Crash reviewed this £1.99 compilation of six retro-esque games. (YS 5/10, SU n/a)
27.5% average

3%


Kosmik Pirate by Elephant Software
Crash reviewed this £5.95 BASIC game. Your Spectrum also negatively reviewed it, giving it a 'Miss Of The Month' label but no numerical rating. (YS and SU n/a)
3%

Outside of the YS/SU/Crash holy trinity


Personal Computer Games handed out 1/10 ratings were handed out to 2003: A Space Oddity; Hawks; I'm In Shock; Tomb of Akhenaten and Deathstar

Finally, they had special ire for Pi-Eyed, which was given ZERO out of 10!

Phew... do you think these ratings are deserved? Or should have been even more damning?

[Nick]

I used to quite like The Boss (I owned the Peaksoft original) although I can understand why a slightly modified version released a few years later would get a poor review. However, I believe that had the original release been reviewed then it wouldn't be on this list.

Los Angeles SWAT got awarded 26% by Crash and 2/10 by both SU and YS, so maybe that should be on the list?

Obviously the Power House knew what they were doing by not giving any review copies of SQIJ to any of the magazines.

[PeteProdge]

Los Angeles SWAT got awarded 26% by Crash and 2/10 by both SU and YS, so maybe that should be on the list?

Nope, the parameters for inclusion is to be effectively rated 0%-10%. 26% is too high and 2/10 is effectively 20%. As utterly awful as LA Swat is, it's too high for this thread.

Obviously the Power House knew what they were doing by not giving any review copies of SQIJ to any of the magazines.

I've been listening to a lot of retrogaming podcasts lately, and there's a curious edition about the history of Super Play magazine (Future's effort for Super Nintendo users) and how they decided to go up against the Official Nintendo Magazine (published by EMAP) with a difference maker - to review imported games from Japan and USA that weren't officially out in the UK but widely accessible through specialist import game stores.

Which makes me wonder why the three major Speccy mags were quite complacent in waiting for review copies. Not every Speccy game could be reviewed, but I think if you wanted to attract more readers, just send out a reviewer to a shop to pick up games that aren't on the radar (particularly a lot of budget ones). I'd love to have read a Sqij review!

[XTM]

Am I misunderstanding your thread title? You list games that scored way more than 10% from one or two of the magazines, as confirmed by the averages you mention, yet the thread is called "<= 10% from all three magazines"? To me "from all three" means "The game received a rating of 1/10 or lower from all three - Crash, SU and YS" ...

[Matt_B]

I thought Battlecars was pretty good. There are Crash Smashes that I'd consider worse than it even. It is, of course, a very niche game being an adaptation of a tabletop board/dice game that ideally needs two players, and not exactly the most intuitive thing to pick up and play. Also, Julian Gollop wrote the car designer program.

Realm of Impossibility's Spectrum port isn't the best, and it was a bit old and overpriced at the time it came out, but it's got a cult reputation on other platforms.

Voyage into the Unknown is an utter abomination of a game though. I'm not sure how anything could be worse than it although I'm in no hurry to find out why.

More generally, video game review scores have always had a problem where an average game is more likely to score around 60-70 and, once you get below 50, the numbers become pretty much arbitrary. Things like how much advertising the publisher has booked may play a role too.

[Morkin]

I thought Battlecars was pretty good. There are Crash Smashes that I'd consider worse than it even. It is, of course, a very niche game being an adaptation of a tabletop board/dice game that ideally needs two players, and not exactly the most intuitive thing to pick up and play. Also, Julian Gollop wrote the car designer program.

Yeah, I've got quite fond memories of Battlecars. I checked out the review and they basically just slated it for being in BASIC. I'm not even sure it is, perhaps it's part BASIC, although it's a tad sluggish I doubt you could render the screen that quickly unless it's compiled (or part machine code).

[PeteProdge]

Am I misunderstanding your thread title? You list games that scored way more than 10% from one or two of the magazines, as confirmed by the averages you mention, yet the thread is called "<= 10% from all three magazines"? To me "from all three" means "The game received a rating of 1/10 or lower from all three - Crash, SU and YS" ...

Ah, rats...

It's a tough one to get into a snappy thread title and looking back, I'd change it to:

The 20 games with a <= 10% rating from the three major ZX Spectrum magazines

...although even that is open to question. I was trying to do the inverse of that "52 games..." thread I made and even that had to be corrected to 53.

[bluespikey]

Yeah, I've got quite fond memories of Battlecars. I checked out the review and they basically just slated it for being in BASIC. I'm not even sure it is, perhaps it's part BASIC, although it's a tad sluggish I doubt you could render the screen that quickly unless it's compiled (or part machine code).

Battlecars is well worth its 66%. Once you get into it, if you have a friend also playing, you can geek out whether its best to have a small gun with lots of ammo vs a big gun with limited shots, or a slow car with armour or a fast car made of balsa wood (A Dacia car?). It could probably use a bit more finesse (I always wanted a Tranzam level of playability), but 66% is justified.

[Ralf]

Well, I don't know many of them but judging by the screenshots maybe that's better.

An interesting case is SAS Operation Thunderflash which is actually an all right looking isometric game. But try to play it and you'll discover very quickly why it got so low notes. It's simply impossible.

Some really bad classics didn't get into that list like the infamous Cage Match:
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... Cage_Match

[AndyC]

It's hard to imagine anything worse than Voyage Into The Unknown.

Count Duckula 2 was atrocious, but it did (sort of) manage to be physically playable (it's better than the Amstrad version where you stop if you hit the top of the screen, rendering many screens impossible without using the "hero" feature to skip them). Sqij might deserve a lower rating, but once you get past the keyboard problem there is ay least a very crap game there. By contrast VitU is essentially "guess what keys to press next" while waiting for slow, crappy BASIC drawing routines.

But, as mentioned, anything below about 80% was magazine code for "not worth the time let alone the money" and just artificially high to keep publishers from pulling all advertising, so ranking something so abysmally low was probably only ever done with publishers who didn't care (because they didn't consider magazine readers the target audience) or didn't spend advertising money anyway.

As to why magazines didn't just go but games? I assume they were too cheap. Why bother spending £9.99 of good drinking money on a Spectrum game when publishers were mostly giving you them for free? Especially given that anything you didn't get sent was probably garbage and the readers probably guessed as much.

[lister_of_smeg]

Count Duckula 2 was atrocious, but it did (sort of) manage to be physically playable (it's better than the Amstrad version where you stop if you hit the top of the screen, rendering many screens impossible without using the "hero" feature to skip them).

Interestingly the tape version (which more people poor unfortunates would have bought BITD) didn't actually suffer from this bug, just the disk version. However, as it's disk images that tend to be used when emulating the CPC these days, the broken version has become the most commonly played.

[PeteProdge]

More generally, video game review scores have always had a problem where an average game is more likely to score around 60-70 and, once you get below 50, the numbers become pretty much arbitrary. Things like how much advertising the publisher has booked may play a role too.

Speaking of which, has anyone ever worked out what the TRUE average of each of the magazine ratings would be? Of course, in an ideal world, the average would be 50%, but I agree that in games magazines the 'average' is likely to be 70% (probably even higher these days).

[Vampyre]

You wouldn't have this one in your list as 1. It's C+VG and 2. C+VG didn't have an Overall rating at the time, but it's possibly the only Speccy review of a game that goes into (averaged) negative marks territory:

https://archive.org/details/ComputerAnd ... ew=theater

Three marks of 0/10 and Value "Less than 0".

[akeley]

But, as mentioned, anything below about 80% was magazine code for "not worth the time let alone the money" and just artificially high to keep publishers from pulling all advertising,

That really sounds like a vastly exaggerated projection. In reality, I bet the scores between 60-80% were mostly just meant to indicate titles which are "not too great, not too bad, have some redeeming qualities", etc.

I'm not sure why there seems to be a trend to paint the old mags as dens of nefariousness, but I'm pretty sure it was just a mixed-up Wild West. Staffed by mostly young people with all kinds of attitudes, where surely some shady things happened, but I don't think it was as all-encompassing as folks in modern times would like to believe.

[PeteProdge]

You wouldn't have this one in your list as 1. It's C+VG and 2. C+VG didn't have an Overall rating at the time, but it's possibly the only Speccy review of a game that goes into (averaged) negative marks territory:

https://archive.org/details/ComputerAnd ... ew=theater

Three marks of 0/10 and Value "Less than 0".

Wow! I love the argument made there and yet, my curiousity is heightened! I see Your Sinclair's review is also damning of that 'sport' yet leaves an above-zero score although it's highly negative (3/10). Crash gives a passing nod to the legalised animal torture being controversial and awards it 57%.

Mind you, if we're to detest horrible things in games, then the amount of times I've given female sex workers a fatal pasting in Renegade and Target Renegade makes me utter scum.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

I rather liked Battlecars when my mate could get it to load!

[Wizwords]

Nice work again Pete - always a fascinating read these threads. Sadly YouTubers often aren't very good at giving credit...