Reviews

As someone has already mentioned, Elite is a marmite game and I was one of the haters.

For me, Elite is like musicals - I can understand why people love them, yet I find them tedious and dull. Back in the day the Lenslock debacle certainly didn't help matters but even once into the game I simply never enjoyed it (docking being so difficult made matters worse).

All in all as a piece of software technology it is peerless. The incredible routines that Braben and Bell came up with to create a living, breathing universe are exemplary.

All I can say is that the game hugely impressed me but bored the pants off me at the same time!

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I was there in the computer shop on the day Knight Lore was first loaded into the demonstration Speccy. Within 30 seconds there was a crowd about seven deep, everyone clambering over each other to get a better look.

Without a shadow of doubt Knight Lore is one of the few truly jaw-dropping games that have been released over the last 30-odd years and still has the distinction of looking pretty good today.

I've always loved Knight Lore and I readily admit that I ignore it's shortcomings. There's a lot of slowdown on some screens, deaths are sometimes unfair and it is a very samey game.

Nonetheless, it will forever remain my favourite ever Speccy game.

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The best puzzle game on the Speccy by a huge margin and IMO one of the Speccies greatest ever games.

I've played it to completion so many times but have never once got bored of it.

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that it's a better puzzle game than Tetris (on any platform).

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I always preferred the original to this one, but to be honest both are now showing their age badly.

I know this a particularly unfair comparison but you only have to play Pro Evolution on one of the latest platforms to realise how far we've come and how little MD 1 or 2 resembled proper football.

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The first game I ever played on a Speccy and still one of the best games on it. It is still extremely playable today, and how on earth the Stamper boys managed to fit it into 16k beggars belief (16k is a tiny JPEG nowadays).

Jetpac is arguably Ultimate's best game. Knight Lore is my favourite Speccy game of all time but if I were given a choice of only one Ultimate game to play out of their (mostly) stellar list, it would be Jetpac.

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There are a handful of games that absolutely define the Spectrum and Matthew Smith wrote two of them: Jet Set Willy and the year before, this game, Manic Miner.

There are a multitude of reasons why MM is a classic of the 8-bit era and I'm not going to bore you with them! One fact remains though: MM is still a supremely playable platform game, and anyone looking into why the Spectrum is so beloved of Specchums merely has to hunt this game out and give it five minutes.

It is IMO a much better game than its sequel and I'm ashamed to admit that in 25 years I have never completed it - curse you The Warehouse!

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(My review from PSJ's Speccy Years (1985) book and dedicated to the memory of Joffa)

The Spectrum over its lifetime played host to many fine arcade conversions, and Hypersports is arguably the best of the lot.

Released in 1985 its only real competitor was the excellent Daley Thompson's Decathlon (released by Ocean the previous year to much critical acclaim (and sales)). Hypersports made many improvements.

Firstly, the graphics, colour and animation were vastly superior. Sound was also up to the authors usual high standard, but the biggest difference was the variety and quality of each event. Hypersports was truly a testament to the programming skills of Jonathan Smith - it must have been no mean feat converting very distinct events from a vastly superior piece of hardware.

In fact, the only complaint that can be levelled is that the pole vault event of the arcade machine is missing. According to the author this was entirely due to the memory constraints of the Spectrum (which is understandable). Anyone who has got to this event on the arcade machine would explain that this is a very difficult event so its omission is moot. Contrarily, some of the events on the Spectrum were overly easy (skeet-shooting) which had little challenge no matter how many times you clocked the events. The triple jump could prove troublesome if mistimed, and getting the wind direction of the archery wrong could make life very difficult.

Coming back to Hypersports twenty three years on very little has changed. The graphics and sound may look a little rough around the edges but they serve their purpose admirably. Events like the pommel-horse are still well-animated, although the less said about the "crowd roar" at the end of a successful skeet-shooting run the better! Hypersports has stood the test of time remarkably well and is still very playable, it's certainly up there with the likes of Bombjack and Commando.

I must mention before finishing the world record for Swimming. Over twenty years I've attempted to beat it, first on a real Spectrum, later on emulators and have not managed it once. I eventually managed to ask the author, Jonathan Smith, on the World of Spectrum forums if it was possible. I'm sad to say, Jonathan didn't know. When coding the game he entered some times but due to time restrictions didn't test whether it could be beaten! (It has now been proved that it's possible, although it requires a slowed-down emulator).

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(My review from PSJ's Speccy Years (1985) book)

Popeye is one of the Spectrum's more famous releases due to it's pioneering graphic technique developed by programmer Don Priestley. Never before had a Spectrum game featured such huge and colourful sprites and interestingly this was down purely to Popeye's owners, King Features Syndicate, insisting that Popeye be as near as dammit replica down to the colour of his clothes. After careful consideration, Don Priestley, calculated that the only way this was possible was to make Popeye sixteen characters high, at which point he almost gave up.

But give up he did not and Popeye surprised many people on it's release, first and foremost due to the graphics, but secondly, it was a pretty decent game to play. Shifting that huge sprite around over three levels of depth and behind (and inside) buildings was great fun. The object of the game was to collect the hearts dotted around the screens and take them back to the love of your life Olive Oyl. Hindering this task were Popeye stalwart enemies, Brutus, The Sea Hag, and The Bird. There were other non-Popeye enemies such as a UFO(!)

Coming back to Popeye 23 years later it's apparent that the game has aged moderately well. Obviously the graphics cannot hope to compare with today's HD behemoths and the frame rate and animation don't seem as smooth as they did back in 1985. Once you get past this, Popeye is a very decent arcade adventure, with some interesting (and difficult) puzzles it and stands up well to some of the higher-acclaimed and so-called better Spectrum games.

Magazine Reviews: http://zxspectrumreviews.co.uk/search.aspx?wosid=0003830

For a twelve month period, from Xmas 1985 to Xmas 1986, Elite were probably the best arcade conversion software house around - most of them down to the talents of Keith Burkhill - although he wasn't involved in the Bomb Jack conversion.

Bomb Jack is an absolute masterclass of a conversion - in fact I would rather play the Speccy version than the Tehkan/Tecmo coin-op - it's that good!

Overall it's a ridiculously playable game, with lovely colurful backgrounds, decent sound and although the graphics can become a bit of a mess when too many enemies congregate at the bottom of the screen it doesn't detract from a supremely playable game.

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