This is one of my favourite games from when I was a little kid.
Specventure is a fun little game that comes across as almost being educational in it's execution, although it isn't really as it's bit silly when you think about it. You play the part of a machine code instruction who has to debug not only software, but hardware inside the spectrum. The items you collect are escaped bytes, which basically show up as flashing squares. The enemies are system bugs, which basically are your typical enemy sprites in a game like this. If you read the instructions the game is kind of full of plot holes, and is made to sound way more technical than it actually is.
This game is basically a single screen top down puzzle shooter in which you wander round each level collecting the bytes, when you have them all you have to take them to the output, then the I/O port will open and let you move onto the next level. You look like a robot, and considering one of the tunes in the game is the Star Wars theme I'm assuming the author based the main Sprite on R2D2, and it shows really. Each screen is timed, and the timer bar is apparently your battery life, I was unaware that Z80 machine code instructions came with batteries.....I know I'm nitpicking a game I'm supposed to like here, not doing it any favours really.
Anyway you work your way through the 30 screens of the game, and the comical thing that makes me laugh every time is when you finish the game you exit via the Speaker, and then you get an advert for the sequel Microventure which never appeared.
The game is still quite playable doesn't look too bad, is quite tricky to play, and will provide a challenge especially in the later screens, there's 9 tunes that play throughout the game at random, even though the instructions say you can choose. Quite a feat for 85', although the loading screen says 1984, I'm assuming that's when it was written, but it wasn't released til' 85'. At the time it was quite a unique concept for a game, and to be honest the closest thing to even a spiritual successor on the Speccy is the recent Lost in my Spectrum by Alessandro Grussu (2012), see I was nice I didn't say Grusso hahaha!
This is a fun, but quite simple game that I still enjoy 30 years later, I may be playing it through my rose tinted spex, but I think it's a great little game, and deserves a little recognition. So I'm going to give it a tasty 4/5.
