Sinclair User 130: Great Eight 19
The current running total, and if you looked at the previous poll, there's a spoiler (yes, a genuine one) about what I know, maths-wise:
YS: 24/53 (45%)
SU: 14/53 (26%)
CRASH: 15/39 (38%)
As usual, you know we don't vote for what's in the actual paper magazines, because this is all about the covertapes.
Well, it's the end of an era for the current 'series brand' of the two covertapes. Changes are afoot, and it'll mean fewer items in the future.
Your Sinclair 84: Magnificent Seven 21
Light Corridor, The by Infogrames
Bored Of The Rings: Part 1 by Delta 4 Software
Shanghai (SAM Coupe) by František Fuka
Sergeant Seymour Robot Cop (playable demo) by Code Masters
Soundtracker Song Compiler (utility) by Pentagram
Interlace Demo (scene demo) by Busy Software
Hack Attack 84 (POKEs) by Gerard Sweeney/Raymond Russell
You won't know it from this issue, but this is the final Magnificent Seven, a YS covertape 'brand' that was nearly as long as the Smash Tape (34 of them, if you remember). The next edition will have another Christmas Collection and after that, it's introduction of the Beaut Box. Anyway, let's knuckle down on the last Magnificent Seven for now.
Costing eleven quid the year before, here's The Light Corridor. How can I describe this? Well, you know those Binatone TV consoles and various knock-off derivatives that would let you play Pong back in the late 70s? Quite possibly the first videogame console for quite a few British homes, a simple-plug-and-play thing with built-in games. As much as Pong should be acknowledged as a landmark in gaming history, let's be honest, it's a terrible game with little longevity. There, that's my heresy over and done with. What's the Light Corridor got to do with that? Well, in the first few seconds its seems you are playing a 3D first person view of Pong, taking place in a long wide duct. Thankfully it's more interesting than that, you, as the 'bat' traverse after the ball you've just pelted down into the void and occasionally the ball will return, coming its way towards you and, just like Pong, your bat will need to be in the right place to knock it back. You see, this duct (er, 'corridor') isn't empty as such, it's long and lined with partial walls and other obstacles and your viewing distance is short, so you're never quite sure exactly whereabouts the ball will come from. It's a novel concept, and wow, sticking out an original game at a really high price was a bold gambit in 1991 when coin-op and movie licenses are the things to shift units. It's not too bad, it really feels like a long lost Pete Cooke game, you could swear he came up with this, but no! (And there's a good idea for a thread - games that feel like they're written by a notable developer but actually aren't.) It's okay, but really, should have been mid-price at best. YS liked it back then, they gave it 80% and SU and Crash liked it even more, with respective ratings of 93% and 87%.
Tch, YS has taken a tip from SU's covertapes and is now putting a premium-rate phoneline password sys... oh, hang on, it's not that, thank goodness. No, it's the idea of getting a previously released text adventure that came in multiple parts and then spanning those parts across covertapes. Not great, but hey, this is the highly acclaimed Lord Of The Rings parody from CRL's Delta 4. Well, part one at least!
Cast your minds back to January of this year, where YS plonked the excellent reader-submitted Mahjong game Peking on the tape and here we have a SAM Coupe only game that looks pretty much exactly the same (albeit with the SAM's better visual capabilities of course), judging by the screenshot. It's Shanghai, it's from Czech coder František Fuka and this isn't a proper review because I do these from the perspective of a 128K +2 owner, I don't do SAM Coupe stuff. But if it is like Peking, you SAM owners are in for a treat. I could be wrong, it might not be that good.
By the early 90s, the Oliver Twins's ovulation-based character Dizzy is going great guns on the surviving 8-bit platforms and is making some headway on the 16-bit computers and even the consoles. It's got to the point that Code Masters arrange for the 8-bit work on future Dizzy games to be farmed out to other teams while Phillip and Andrew concentrate on these new markets. And of course, there's that bit of friction when Code Masters proposed a 'Dizzy In Hollywood' game that would see him with Indiana Jones, Robocop, etc which the twins thoroughly detested as their strict rule is that Dizzy never enters 'our' world, he remains in his universe. The Dizzyverse, maybe? Anyway, the budget labels by this stage of the Speccy's life know there's a hungry market for cutesy arcade-adventures in the same vein as Dizzy (hence Slightly Magic and all that) and the aborted Hollywood Dizzy thing is half-hearted transformed into generic blob Seymour (who later became Blur, didn't they? - Ed) and there's a few arcade adventures with this cash-in also-ran character (just like bringing in Poochie the rapping dog into Itchy & Scratchy, Simpsons fans!) Naturally, the next Dizzy-aping step is to bring out an purely arcade-style maze game and that's what this is. A playable demo of Sergeant Seymour Robot Cop (just about keeping the Orion Pictures copyright lawyers at bay with that title, one letter closer and they'd be saying "drop it!"), believed to be the last ever Code Masters game for the Speccy. While Fast Food had that 'Pac Man but not quite' vibe and Kwik Snax was 'Pengo but not really', this effort has the feel of a lot of generic Japanese cutesy coin-ops mashed into a bizarre 'wander round a maze' setting. Avoid baddies, attack baddies to turn them into a cool prize (rather Bubble-Bobble-esque) and um, yeah, it's not got much going for it really. It's hard to see the tiny main sprite on those textured tiles, which really lets it down. Your younger siblings will probably like it though.
In the previous poll I heaped heavy (justifiable) praise on the music application Soundtracker and mentioned how it helped me get a lovely 3-channel AY melody into a BASIC platform game I made. I totally forgot that the reason this was able to happen, was because of this month's follow-up on the covertape. Yes, this is the Soundtracker Song Compiler, which turns your saved Soundtracker project into a thing that can be used in your own creations, whether machine code or BASIC. It's really good, I'm immensely pleased with it and will be using it once I return to writing the game I expect to publish this year (fingers crossed).
Interlacing is a tricky thing to describe to the layman, but I suppose it's like a two-image flick book very rapidly switching between the two. That is pretty much how CRT-era television in most of Europe effectively appears as 50fps when the source is actually 25fps (60/30 for our friends across the Atlantic) and if you had one of those video frame grabbers for your Amiga or PC in the 1990s, a lot of them would grab a full frame natively, and it'd look like two very similar images with a 'comb' pattern of difference on horizontal movement (typically visible on some duffly captured YouTube videos). That's as best as I can put it into words, I know what I'm about, you're probably still confused. Sorry. Anyway, this is a scene demo with the usual bouncy scrolling messages and joyful AY music (one of them based on Limahl's Never Ending Story), but the key features that crop up are these geometric fancy patterns that should effectively come across as twice the resolution of a normal Spectrum graphic because they flicker heavily. Anyone who has used an Amiga in the high-res interlaced mode will know what I'm on about. Does NOT look impressive on computer monitors or the flat screen displays we all use nowadays. Take my word for it, it was quite cool on an actual CRT. Still, even though I'm on a modern flat monitor using the Fuse emulator to do this, I get a rough idea of what Interlace demo was trying to achieve.
Where's Jon North? Where are the Practical POKEs? What's Hack Attack? Please don't tell me YS wants to do their equivalent of Leigh Thompson's thing, oh no... oh phew! These aren't playing tips, they're proper load-in cheats - actual POKEs, just like Poke City, Pokemania and Practical Pokes, put together by Raymond Russell and the still-on-the-scene-today hacker Gerard Sweeney. The scrolly mentions they have support from Jon North, so presumably this has his blessing then? The magazine claims they're giving Jon a break from working so hard. Well, this is intuitive, and the POKEs are split into sections of: Players Software; 'Cutesy'; Code Masters; All Dizzy games and Lemmings. The Lemmings menu is like one of those 'trainer' intros you'd get on pirated Commodore 64/Atari ST/Amiga games, offering you yes/no options on infinite time, floaters, athletes, etc. Quite astonishing. Well, here's a list of all games POKEable by this:
Blinky's Scary School
Bubble Dizzy
CJ In The USA
CJ's Elephant Antics
Deadly Evil
Dizzy
Dizzy Down The Rapids
Dizzy Panic
Elven Warrior
Fantasy World Dizzy
Fast Food
Fruit Machine Simulator
Fruit Machine Simulator 2
Hawk Storm +2A/+3
Hawk Storm 48/128K
Italian Super Car
KGB Super Spy
Kwik Snax
Lemmings
Magicland Dizzy
Miami Cobra GT
Monte Carlo Casino
Moto X Simulator
Mountain Bike 500
Moving Target
Operation Gunship
Operation Hanoi
Pro Boxing Simulator
Pro Skateboard Simulator
Prohibition
Rock Star Ate My Hamster
Seymour
Sidewinder II
Slightly Magic
Spellbound Dizzy
Spike in Transylvania
Steel Eagle
Super Hero
Super Seymour
Treasure Island Dizzy
Wacky Darts
Yolk Folk
Zybots
Sinclair User 130: Great Eight 19
Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz by Audiogenic
Tarantula by Creative Sparks
Pieces Of Eight by Mike Westlake
Street Cred by Redwood Designs
Page System Word Processor (application) by Miles Kinloch
Instant Recall (utility) by Supersoft
Cash Book (application) by Supersoft
Pokemania (POKEs) by Graham Mason
You won't know it from this issue, but this is the final Great Eight, an SU covertape 'brand' that was nearly as long as the Mega Tape (27 of them, if you remember). The next edition sees the introduction of the Fun Four. Anyway, let's knuckle down on the last Great Eight for now.
Like YS, Sinclair User is leading with a high-priced commercial release that didn't set the world alight. It's Emlyn Hughes International Soccer, literally the greatest football game on the ZX Spectrum and I say that as someone not keen on the sport, it's way better than yer Match Day II, it's so underrated (er, Pete, this is Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz - Ed). What!? (Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz - Ed.) Er... well, I love arcade quiz machines, but why's it fronted by Emlyn Hughes? Why not Chris Tarrant? (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire won't exist for a number of years, you dolt - Ed.) I guess Audiogenic sat on a license to use Emlyn Hughes' name and likeness in computer games. It wouldn't surprise me, a former boss of mine was a friend of his and would tell me he'd license his name to all kinds of things and then forget about it. Still, fronting a quiz on general knowledge instead of one solely dedicated to sport? It's all a bit 'Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank'. Anyway, I'd love to tell you about my experience playing this game, but sadly, I cannot find a single cassette image on the internet that successfully loads up on Fuse, ZX Spin or even the JSpeccy browser emulator. I get as far as the menu screen, try to start, the game wants to find "QUEST1.HDR" on the cassette. I know there's a B-side image, but try as I might, it won't find it. Snapshots aren't great, but what else can I do? So I tried the .z80 file and although it lets me define keys, there's no way of getting into the actual game. I can't play it, it's like a Sega Saturn emulator! Well, I hate to do this, it's not really a proper review, but I can only go on the YouTube playthrough. Certainly not SU's fault I can't play the game (and I'm glad the password system is now a thing of the past). It's an interesting 'question and three multiple choice answers' set-up with the kind of format you'd expect from a machine sitting in the corner of a pub. I really like it. Far better than Elite's Pop Quiz/Question Of Sport quiz engine. The games (and playable demo) on YS's tape don't do much for me, but on this alone, SU has impressed me. Can anyone come up with a working version for us lot who have to emulate due to a broken physical Speccy?
From the unlamented Creative Sparks label, here is Tarantula, supposedly authored by Mike Westlake. It's not a bad game if it was the mid-1980s, but you can't ignore the fact that Mr Westlake has done a 'Harry S Price' on Elite's Rollercoaster. Yep, this is a legally dubious mod of the Jet-Set-Willy-esque game that itself appeared on the SU covertape in May. At first glance, this seems like a graphically poor version of Mastertronic's Universal Hero, as you're an astronaut roaming around the caves of a planet in space. It's rather dated, but alright as a five-minute distraction. We'll be sampling another piece of Mike's work (and this time it seems to be 100% original at least) in the next paragraph, which starts...
...now. As the name implies, Pieces Of Eight has you as a stereotypical pirate captain, you have to go through a flip-screen world to collect back your smuggled goods, so it's a 'find the keys' principle. And of course, the screens are littered with moving baddies that you have to avoid by ducking and jumping. The main takeaway from this is that your sprite is incredibly tall, and the author has seen fit not to properly mask it over background scenery, but simply to do an OVER 1, which he's done with the baddie sprites, making things rather difficult to see. It's truly atrocious and it heavily reminds me of Merlin by Firebird. To little surprise, I learn that Merlin was by the same author. It's just a light reskinning of graphics and a different map really! Abysmal stuff, but as far as I can tell, it's not illegally using anybody else's code. The remainder of Mike Westlake's ZX Spectrum games output - S.A.S. Combat Assault and Merlin - will appear across the next two SU covertapes, sadly.
The 1980s were a toe-curling time, of 'dudes' putting on shades and using phrases like "street cred". Well, this is Street Cred, which is like someone has turned Crash's Nick Roberts into an actual computer game. It's by one of the many incarnations of the Shaw Brothers. The game is pretty much like Ocean's Daley Thompson series, only in an urban setting, with incessant BEEP music and vastly inferior game play. I can see why no budget label wanted to commercially release this back when it was coded in 1988 and it appears its only public outing is being picked out of a dusty drawer and sent for SU's covertape four years later!
All those COVID conspiracy theorists want to take down that evil Bill Gates and this was their chance. The ZX Spectrum could have been a worthy alternative to Microsoft's Word program if only more people took note of Page System Word Processor. Alas, this is more like editing teletext than being anywhere near the quality of the word processing capabilities that you could witness on rival 8-bit computers like the Amstrad CPC.
The utilities/applications continue with a database program. Oh yes, you can feel Bill Gates getting nervous as this covertape is going to decimate the Office suite now. It's taking aim at Microsoft Access! Sadly, there was never really any good database utilities on the Speccy. I remember getting Tynesoft's Superfile as the pack-in non-game with my 128K +2 (thanks, Dixons), which was really slow and sluggish and even though it took advantage of the 128K capacity, you wouldn't really seriously use it in a business context. This is Instant Recall and while it's highly intuitive to use, I don't think the 20-character limit on field values is going to dent anyone's decision to buy one of them IBM PC OR COMPATIBLES!
The cringeworthy idea of anyone using a ZX Spectrum to do office work, even at a basic level, at the fag-end of 1992, continues! This is Cash Book, with its instructions taking up a page and a half in the magazine. I suppose it's mildly okay for your personal accounts, what with this being the days when banking meant going into physical branches, having your current account book (replete with role number) printed on at the cashier's desk. Alright, even by this time I had one of those new-fangled Halifax Maxim debit cards, so I was moving away from paper history of what I was spending my money on (in most cases I was pretty much a cash-only guy and being a care-free teenager, barely saved anything). This is aimed at more serious users, what with the ability to bring in VAT. Might have been useful to a handful of people running a micro-business at home. I'm in that situation but I certainly wouldn't dream of this. Keep yer Xero and Quickbooks subscriptions going, this is no replacement!
Those previous three utilities/applications generated another four pages for the magazine's next issue, with some helpful tutorials. By this year, Bill Gates was worth $6.3 billion.
Graham Mason's found some time to dust off his Speccy. The Pokemania load-in cheats this edition are for:
Gunpowder, Treason And Plot
Boid
Jack The Nipper 2: Coconut Capters
Auf Wiedersehen Monty
Super Fruit Machine
And there are multiface POKEs listed for those five games too.
Well, I've really dumped on SU's covertape (yet again, it's quite a regular theme), but I reckon for Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz, it just about has the edge over YS's offerings. The one thing on YS's tape that I really love is that Soundtracker compiler, which brought life to a BASIC game I made. I know to compare a utility with a quiz game is very much an 'apples vs oranges' comparison, but that's what I'm boiling down my vote to - the two best things from these competing compilations that otherwise don't really offer any compelling items for a reload. I haven't truly played Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz as it appears all .tzx and .z80 files of it are borked for emulation, I admit that in my 'review', so right now, I'm holding off casting my vote until give it a proper play. So yeah, leaning towards SU for once, but who knows?
Next poll has us into the era of SU's Fab Four and YS's Beaut Box...
