The best Speccy game by Sinclair Research: discussion

[PeteProdge]

BBC and Acorn users had Acornsoft. Amstrad users had Amsoft. Us lot got Specso... no, wait, it's Sinclair Research.

Sir Clive was notoriously frosty when it game to his beloved computers being used for gaming rather than serious applications, but Sinclair's own software label published quite a few games (and rereleased some from Ultimate for example).

I've come up with 40 tangible games I believe were originally published by Sinclair Research for the ZX Spectrum. Not a Make-A-Chip among them!

Alien Destroyer
Backgammon
Bubble Buster
Chequered Flag
Chess
Chess Tutor 1
Computer Scrabble
Cyrus IS Chess
Docking The Spaceship
Driller Tanks
Drop A Brick
Embassy Assault
Eric & The Floaters
Find The Mate
Flight Simulation
Flippit
Hanger
Horace & The Spiders
Horace Goes Skiing
Hungry Horace
Invasion From Jupiter
Invisible Invader, The
Magic Square
Martian KO
Match Point
Mind The Meteors
Mindboggling
Missile
Nim
Panama Joe
Pangolins
Planetoids
Race Track
Return Of The Jedi: Death Star Battle
Reversi
Solitaire
Space Raiders
Stop The Express
Tower Of Hanoi
Train Race

I do feel when it comes to the poll, this might be a two-horse race between Stop The Express and Bomberma... oh, sorry, Eric & The Floaters.

I mean, with hindsight, the three Horace games are pretty terrible...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Great early classics in that list: the Horace games, Chequered Flag, Flight Simulation, Chess,... but in my opinion there's no competitor against Match Point.

[Starquack]

No Survival?

[Matt_B]

No Survival?

That falls under educational software, along with a number of other debatable ones.

There's also Biorhythms that's classed as a game rather than the pseudoscience that it is.

Edit: There's also Games 1-5 by ICL, not that anyone in their right mind would vote for them.

[blucey]

Some okay games there. Match Point, HGS, Planetoids.

[Hank Scorpio]

Embassy Assault must be a contender for one of the top five worst games ever released for the Spectrum.

[PeterJ]

Embassy Assault must be a contender for one of the top five worst games ever released for the Spectrum.

My parents bought me that as a birthday present soon after I got my Spectrum. I remember being so disappointed. It's an awful game.

Stop the express wins for me.

[zup]

Best game by Sinclair Research? The list is more like Best game published by Sinclair Research... I think that you should make (at least) a list with games by Psion and keep them out of this list.

In any case, I'd say that Flight Simulation was an impressive simulator for the early years of ZX Spectrum (quickly outclassed by Fighter Pilot). The Horace games were funny, but I didn't like those kind of games. I liked Return of the Jedi... but I didnt' play too much.

The games I spent most time playing were Panama Joe and Space Raiders. So the winner is Panama Joe.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Edit: There's also Games 1-5 by ICL, not that anyone in their right mind would vote for them.

I came across those games some time ago and my first impression was they were a sort of Sinclair Research's Cassette 50, but only 4 games per tape.

My second impression was they need to be reviewed and analysed by our forum's crap-game experts in their own thread!

[toot_toot]

I remember the Spectrum Six Pack I got with my humble rubber keyed spectrum for Chrimbo '84 - there was the usual Make a Chip as well as the utilities VU-3D and Tasword Two. It also came with Scrabble, Chess and Chequered Flag. Looking back the pack seems very light on arcade games, but then I wonder if it was designed to show parents that the Spectrum wasn't like games consoles of the time, like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision, but it was a productivity and educational machine, honest!

Chequered Flag was brilliant, I suppose Scrabble was good fun if you wanted a family board game and I couldn't play Chess, so that was useless.

However, seeing Embassy Assault being mentioned, it reminded me of how I used to look at most Sinclair Research games. Ancient and boring. They were the games that would probably go to Church on a Sunday, if games somehow had the ability to believe in religion. I remember market stalls being flooded with them in the mid 80s, selling them at really low prices and I would always steer clear from them. The Sinclair Research label was something to definitely stay away from!

It wasn't until the very late 80s, before I moved on to my Amiga, that I got a C90 chock full of really old games that had somehow skipped me by (I had nothing against old games!). On that tape was Eric and the Floaters and Stop the Express, both were really fun games and I was really surprised that Sinclair had published them.

Looking back, I think Sinclair Research's published titles were part of the big push of affordable home computers and I have to wonder if those early titles helped a lot of kids convince their parents to buy a computer for Christmas. Because thanks to the Spectrum, they'd be able to do their homework, learn to program... oh and maybe play a tiny amount of games. But because so many parents were duped into buying a Spectrum, thanks to the likes of Make a Chip, with their belief that their kids would grow up to be the next 'chairman of ICL' that the wave of brilliant games came along, making the Spectrum more of a games machine than Unlce Clive had originally wanted.

So while they were boring, the importance of the likes of Make a Chip and Survival cannot be underestimated. Without that educational dross, today there would be no UK IT sector. It's as simple as that!

Sinclair Research, we salute you!

(I vote for Stop the Express...)

[Dark]

Match Point I only discovered quite recently and have really enjoyed playing. Reckon if I had this game back in the day then I would lost many a weekend through constant playing of it.

For me Sinclair Research were associated with the six games that came with my +2. For which I can only see Alien Destroyer on that list. So I'm assuming that Oh Mummy, Treasure Island, Disco Dan and the other two which escape my mind at the moment, were produced by someone else and repackage by Amstrad as Sinclair Research to help sell the +2. None of those games were particularly good, so I didn't feel compelled to go find other games by the company.

[Turtle_Quality]

There's a number of real gems there, amongst some simple Basic dross that presumably only existed for kids to learn to edit and improve.

Match point has simple graphics but the gameplay is superb and it really feels like a tennis match

Scrabble was technically amazing (so many words packed into 48K) and I still play the Spectrum version regularly. I just found out there was a Deluxe 128K version by Leisure Genius... need to check that out.

Of the Hudson Soft games, Eric and the Floaters started the whole Bomberman succession of games and Stop The Express was great fun, but it seems I will have to drop one of them to pick my top 3

The Horace games were iconic but, well "terrible" is harsh Peter but I don't feel the urge to play them these days... they were "of their time"

[PeteProdge]

Best game by Sinclair Research? The list is more like Best game published by Sinclair Research... I think that you should make (at least) a list with games by Psion and keep them out of this list.

Well, to be fair, that's how these polls have always been collated. It's based on original release publisher, not on developer brand.

[Nick]

Thro' The Wall should be added to the list surely? It's probably the only program on the Horizons tape that people loaded up more than once.

[uglifruit]

Stop The Express.
Eric And The Floaters.
Match Point.

All obvious contenders.

I also think MAGNETS although being listed as 'Educational' is definitely a game, and should be included.

[Vampyre]

Match Point for me. It was the best tennis game across all systems for years - until Super Tennis on SNES.

Big shout for Stop The Express though - it's a magnificently designed Speccy game.

[PeteProdge]

Thro' The Wall should be added to the list surely? It's probably the only program on the Horizons tape that people loaded up more than once.

Good point! I can't think why it got omitted. Anyway, that'll be in the poll when it starts.

Also, wasn't Thro' The Wall literally the first published game for the ZX Spectrum?

[RWAC]

I mean, Stop The Express, DUH, next question please.

I concur.

[PeteProdge]

I also think MAGNETS although being listed as 'Educational' is definitely a game, and should be included.

Hmm, it's a tough one this.

There's a lot of education software which isn't really going to cut it as a game.

I've just downloaded Magnets, given it a go, and there's something about it that makes it a credible game.

I think I'll include it. Any objections?

[PeteProdge]

I mean, Stop The Express, DUH, next question please.

I concur.

Eric & The Floaters though.

[Matt_B]

I'd think that the two Hudson Soft classics are going to be up there, but write off the Psion games at your peril.

Match Point, Scrabble and Chequered Flag were all neatly presented technical marvels in their time and hold up quite well even today.

The elephant in the room though is the Horace games. I'm sure a lot of people think of them like I do as simple throwaway mashups of existing arcade games. However, they had a ridiculously long commercial lifetime, and kept working their way into bundles and compilations until well into the late eighties, where the Hudson Soft ones were hot for three months and then pretty much forgotten about until the emulation era.

Then there's the dark horse that is Panama Joe.

[Matt_B]

The main thing that makes Chequered Flag hold up is that the screen update is pretty quick compared to other 80s sim racers. Games like Revs, TT Racer and F1GP were far more sophisticated, but look like stop motion in comparison and require a lot more patience.

[toot_toot]

If you’re to remove nostalgia then Stop The Express is one of those games that gives an unique experience that was never really improved upon by later systems. Unlike Match Point of Chequered Flag, where lets be honest, given the ability most people have to play any system through emulation - why would you play Match Point over say Virtua Tennis? Some games feel like they’ve been superseded and are just curios now, Eric and the Floaters being another one.

When I’m showing my son Spectrum games, I tend to show him games that are a unique experience to the Spectrum that still stand up today. He loves playing Death Chase, Back To Skool and Chaos, because not only do they stand up well, you can’t really experience those games on anything else but the Spectrum. (He hates Jet PAC and Manic Miner, though, mainly because the controls seem so unintuitive compared with the likes of Mario games).

I think the YS Top 100 captured a lot of those games, it would be interesting to pull out the games that were superseded by better games in that genre, or arcade conversions (let’s face it, you’ll play the Rainbow Islands arcade rom instead of the Spectrum version) and just be left with the games like Death Chase or Stop the Express. That would be a great list, it would really show off those unique gaming experiences only available on the humble Speccy...

[vanpeebles]

Last Christmas I got the famicom version of STE, the train level is just the first stage. It's got a big map area and caves etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwfI2tPO334

[Matt_B]

So, now it turns out that Stop The Express wasn't a uniquely Spectrum experience that was never improved upon after all, is it still worthy of inclusion?

Dare I suggest that the original MSX version was better too? A few rounds of that and the Spectrum version feels like you're wading through soup.