Reviews

128k Music & Carols covers two sides of a Spectrum cassette. The first side covers various songs such as Imagine or When I'm 64 while the second side contains numerous much loved carols for you to sing along to.

Being a big fan of SID music on the C64 I was intrigued to see how the Speccy could handle Christmas carols. Now, I'm not going to suggest that 128k Music & Carols is the best the Spectrum has to offer but nonetheless I can comfortably say you're not going to be blown away by what's on offer.

Actually it feels a bit tragic that it does actually need a 128k Spectrum given the quality of tunes available on the C64 with half the RAM. In fairness, as the title came out in 1986 it serves as an early adopter of the 128k system, certainly within a few years the 128k capabilities were being much better utilised (I think), though not in all cases as you'll see below.

That said the carols aren't the worst thing you'll ever hear and they have the lyrics up on screen for you to sing along to. It's cute in it's own way and certainly better than the pretty pointless 'songs' side of the cassette.

If you have some fellow chiptune loving friends coming round for eggnog (for US readers), or mulled wine and mince pies to sing some carols, then you may get something out of 128k Music & Carols. Likewise if you have a well developed sense of irony and a social circle who'd get a kick out of sitting round a Speccy singing carols it may be worth a go.

Otherwise, while the carol section is cute in it's own way I'm not sure this will find much of an audience today. Despite that I think as a child I would have demanded my family gather round and sing along at some point. In fact, I might just inflict it on them again some day.

Taken from my website: www.zombiesatemyxbox.com