Reviews

Infamous game, widely regarded in the ZX Spectrum community as the worst game ever written for the machine.

Whilst writing a negative review of it is rather like shooting a fish in a barrel, I do tend to wholeheartedly agree with the above assessment.

Everything about the game is wrong. The underlying idea of controlling some sort of mutated, docile bird does not actually seem appealing to start off with. It's written entirely in BASIC, yet the player-controlled bird "sprite" is so unwieldly and huge it's obviously going to run like molasses. The sprite leaves so called "droppings" on the screen as it moves around, due to one of the numerous bugs. Fatally though, it's just completely unplayable due to the sluggishness and awkwardness of the bird sprite.

The icing on the cake is of course the notorious "CAPS LOCK" bug, meaning the game can't even be played at all without BREAKing into the progam and manually POKEing it to fix this problem. Over the years, people have pondered how this could ever happen in a final release of a game which actually ended up on the shelves. There's just no rational explanation for it.

I have only touched on the most well known problems with the game, but believe me someone could write pages of further criticism of it if they were so inclined.

If you look at the code, you'll likely be amazed at the depth of abuse of the BASIC programming language. It's just totally insane. I've never seen anything like it. Hundreds of lines manually setting scores of meaningless numbered variables. "GO TO abuse" is rampant in the extreme.

The game could only ever be used as some sort of training exercise in how not to develop software. It has to be seen to be believed. Ironically, the title has become prominent due to its infamy. So, it won't be forgotten in a hurry!

Verdict: In terms of notoriety, Sqij is the nearest thing the speccy has to "ET" on the Atari 2600. The only difference is that we don't have any deserts in the UK in which to bury it.

1987 The Power House (UK)
by Jason Creighton

How can you release a game and not test the controls first?!
Unplayable.
Jason was probably a teen back in the day. That's his excuse, what's The Power House's folks excuse?

Hint: Press Break and then POKE 23658,0 in order to turn Caps lock off, otherwise you wont be able to play the game.


Also check out the review Jason wrote about the game here on Spectrum 2.0, which seems to have been deleted:
http://www.shadowmagic.org.uk/spectrum/sqij.html

Awful!

No one actually solved the puzzle of Caps-lock bug, and how this game managed to find it's way to Your Sinclair's "News" page *and* market shelves.

The game was written in Laser Basic, and distributed with laser basic binaries in memory, which is not legal. So you got full price LaserBasic with squij at budget price!

If you break and check the basic program, you will see the most interesting IF-goto list ever. I'm sure the game's current situation can be explained by spagetti code, and you can see the autor's mental situation in it too: "Well done old bean! You've done it! But for me, it means another 2 months in a dark dank bedroom (which badly needs decorating) writeing a followup. Oh well"

So it's a state of the art creation of carefree people, from it's author to the publisher. But because it brings fun and joy to the scene (read DigitalPrawn's review for a good laugh please) it needs a higher score then "1". But I don't want to ruin its success of "unsuccesfulness", so Sqij will have another "1" from me.

wait... "sqij?" what's that?

I don't know whether this sort of binary monstrosity - which only by a very long stretch of imagination can be referred to as a "game" - was an actual piece of commercially distributed software, or just a plain joke. A very sick joke!

Sqij is a port (and I use that term loosely) of a game on an inferior computer. The first thing you notice - after discovering that it won't work in 128K mode - is that the pigeon you control takes up most of the screen. The second thing you notice is that although you can't actually move due to an ingenious bug in the game (it POKEs caps lock on and then checks for lower-case key presses), you are racking up score anyway and won't die if you stay there.

Truly dire.

Wow! What a fine mess of a game this is! It's the worst game for a reason folks....because you can't blinking move in it unless you BREAK into the program to insert a poke, leaving us wishing we could PHYSICALLY break the program. How the heck this got a commercially release without seemingly being tested I'll never know. Even if you broke into the game to make it work you'd wind up regretting it anyway because it's just poor, absolutely abysmal.

The ZX Spectrum has it's high points and it's low points - they don't get much lower than SQIJ!

What sort of mind programmed this ??

Too gruesome to be put into words .

Unanimously crap.

Does this really need a review?

In order to play this game you'll need to press break then POKE 23658,0 to turn capslock off. Sqij is infamous but you won't believe just how bad it is until you play it.

SQJI! [The Power House]

It could run for the title of worst game of the year [or ever] even only for the absurd and unpronounceable title, but there's more, much more to it.
First all, the very articulated option screen has actually got only one option, which is "start game". Once you start, you see your sprite, a giant white bird occupying a great deal of the playing area, surrounded by two supposedly lethal platform or blocks going up and down. But you're not going to discover what they are. You can't move. I checked the instructions, found the control keys, pressed them, and nothing happened. Then I pressed every single other key and, still, nothing happened. Eventually I discovered [reading other people's experiences with SQJI] that the only way to make the game work was and is breaking into the program, and insert some command lines, then start it again: The Power House released an almost totally not working game and even wanted you to pay for it: extraordinaire. Or maybe it was just an ingenious way to stimulate the kids to really use their brain and learn to program, in order to correct the game and play it. By the way, those who really played it say that, anyway, is still totally crap.
1/5

SQIJ, pronounced skidge rather than squige I believe, is one of the most laughable, infamous games on the ZX Spectrum, the main reason being for a bug in the game's code which has been discussed in earlier reviews so I'll leave with them to explain it. But in short, it's unplayable as a result.

Now for my book, a fair number of these reviews have probably been written without breaking into the game, fixing this caps lock bug and then actually playing the game, which is what I'm going to do. Then we will see if it is actually playable rather than one of the worst games ever most likely based on the fact that you can't move.

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Nope, it's still shit.

And to think The Power House released this game TWICE! It's inexcusable.

And it's clearly the fault of the publisher, sure Jason Creighton wrote the game and he deliberately wrote it this badly because of a falling out with The Power House, but when you're writing a game it's so easy to do so with bugs in it and it's up to the publishers to test the game and discover these bugs, "oh he corrupts when he dies", "when time expires you keep playing rather than die", "kempston is spelt wrong", then it's a matter of contacting the author to go through the code and sort these errors out, send it back in a few days and we'll look into it again.

But it's clear The Power House never even bothered their asses to test their games, which is why most of them were pretty crap, this being the worst of them all. How could they not have discovered that you cannot move AT ALL during the game? And then to release it in a compilation afterwards as well!? How dumb can one company get?

And then even when you do fix the bug and you are able to play the game it's still unplayable as it is almost impossible to exit the first screen, in fact I'm certain it IS impossible to exit the first screen.

So yeah, SQIJ is a disaster in more ways than one. Take it from me, there were a lot of bad games in the mighty Spectrum and some absolute stinkers too, but none will be worse than SQIJ, that is a guarantee.

The Spectrum version of SQIJ came into existence in the early 17th Century during a botched attempt by occultists to raise the devil. Instead of Satan, a twisted homunculus of an idea entered the astral plane, struggling and thrashing against the tide, accreting malevolence, until one day in 1987 it found its outlet via the most atrocious hatespunk of Sinclair BASIC the world has ever seen. Then, inexplicably, it was deemed worthy of a cassette release by The Power House and a number of young gamers learned a valuable lesson about human nature.

SQIJ is a very poor game. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t actually work – you have to POKE 23658,0 if you want to play it. The giant sprite does not make up for the ropey graphics, numerous bugs and slow gameplay. It’s nearly impossible to say anything good about it, other than the fact that it’s become a wellspring for banter and an important part of Speccy history.

Although I couldn’t resist taking the piss, I do feel sorry for the author. If he continued as a software developer it’s probably something to miss off the CV. It was intended as an ‘up yours’ gesture to the publisher and get him out of what he presumably saw as an unfair contract (it wouldn’t be the first case of a developer being treated badly), it was never meant to see the light of day. I’d love to hear a ‘warts and all’ account of what process (or very long lunch) lead to The Power House calling his bluff and releasing the bloody thing.

The C64 had a decent version of SQIJ, I gather it was too hard, but it was a proper game with graphics, sound and it ACTUALLY WORKED. This 8 bit inequity was finally put to bed in 2018, when Tardis Remakes released SQIJ 2018.

Rating: Trouble is, 1 is the lowest possible vote, and if the 1 - 5 scale isn't exponential it should really go up to a million.