Reviews

A disturbing and violent game from DK'Tronics, which makes me wonder if it's really worth it at all. The trials and tribulations of our nameless protagonist seem somewhat fruitless, even though the idea of the game is obviously to gorge yourself on countless piles of fruit, and sugary fruit by-product. The odds are stacked against you even if you're succeeding, eat too much and you get too fat and suffer a seizure, have 3 seizures and you use all your pills and die. It's OK though if you end up being a right fat twat you can slim off in the sauna. But while you're in the sauna the greedy rat that lives under the screen will eat what you miss and according to the instructions will "Get big and bold" and come up to "Bite you dead", you should also watch out for the hornet who will "Sting you dead" Ho ho the sadism is rife. The hornet will fly over your head if you're standing next to the lift, but the only way to escape it otherwise is to jump in the sauna. Oh yes the lift! When our big and bold friend comes up to bite you dead you can squash the little shit with the lift. Squashing the rat leaves a large smear of blood under the lift, well at first it kind of goes tits up and has a question mark in it, yes the first rat you kill leaves a nice blood stained question mark behind. After that though if you continue to squash rats more and more blood builds up until it starts to look like you've been using the lift to get rid of your victims bodies! Hang on! What victims? What bodies? I've said too much!

Basically the game is more hassle than it's worth really if eating apples and apple jam meant I was going to be swarmed with vermin and stinging insects whilst I got seizure inducingly morbidly obese in a matter of seconds, I think I'll stick to rice cakes, soy beans, and granola thank you.

The insanity aside the game is strangely addictive, even though it is a little crap and considerably warped. I'd say by 1984's standards that it was an OK game (and by DK'Tronics standards it's a bloody good game since they seemed to be one of the mightiest purveyors of complete shite software wise) quite fun for a while if a little frustrating at times, considering you only get one life. It's a good pick up and play game and you can find yourself playing it for longer than you intended to.

I'll give it 3/5 I'd have gave it more a few years back, but I really don't like it as much as I used to.

Jumping Jack is quick and bold with skill his story will unfold...

Skill hmmm yes, and a nice portion of luck occasionally as well.

Jumping Jack is literally a game where the basis is "simplicity is key", the game is very simple indeed....Very simple.

So you are Jack our friendly neighbourhood bulbous headed stickman, and in all your creepy faced glory you have to make it to the top of the screen several times in order to read the poem that the game gives you roughly a line of every time you complete a level. After the first stage Jack is assaulted by a rather random selection of hazards. These hazards range from giant squids, witches, trains, and angry hillbilly types with shotguns to name a few.

As the game progresses more of this myriad of oddball enemies are added til' you get to the point where there's so many onscreen no matter how far you make it up you're likely to spend more time flapping around on the floor and falling back down to the bottom than anything else, as your ears are assaulted with the painful sounding crunches of enemies running over you, and the cascading beeps of you dropping and flailing around rather pathetically on the floor. All can be going so well then one mistake and the whole lot goes completely tits up!

Anyway the graphics are simplistic as I have already stated Jack is a rather portly bonced stick man with a bit of a peado face, and the holes in the floor are well just that holes in the floor. The enemies are quite simplistic too, but represent their character quite well regardless. Basically I guess I'm saying you can tell what the majority of them are supposed to be.

The game is fun, and addictive, and does have that one more go factor, well it does until you get flattened a few times then you might find you want to punch the screen through instead. The only problem I really have with the game is sometimes as you ascend through the holes the extra holes that are generated sometimes appear right behind you, and you drop before you have a chance to react. This isn't so bad on the first few levels, but it gets a little shall we say shady when practically every inch of the screen is out to get you. Annoyingly enough this little problem can occur on the very first screen with the very first hole you jump through pretty much meaning you make 1 move and die, as falling to the very bottom causes you to lose a life. You get an extra life every 4 or 5 screens or so, but once you get about 4 or 5 screens in this doesn't really help too much.

Anyway frustrations aside this is still a pretty sound idea for a game, and it's as fun as it is annoying. I often revisit this game and have done since I first played it about 30 years ago or so, so it can't be that bad can it?

This game embodies sadism, to play it is to indulge in one of the highest forms of Sado-Masochism, to subject somebody to else to it willingly is the highest form of sadism.

This game is so frustrating, so diabolical, so undeniably shit that it borders on extreme cruelty, playing this is like being subjected to a severe, and indescribable form of cruel and unusual punishment.

S.A.S. Operation Thunderflash!! released at a time when the S.A.S. were seen as cool, hardcore, virtually untouchable military problem solvers, it couldn't possibly be a disappointment....WRONG! WRONG!! WRONG!!!

S.A.S. Operation Thunderflash is so badly implemented that it's borderline unplayable. I'm not sure I've ever encountered such a ludicrously unfair, frustrating, annoying, useless, unplayable pile of dog shit on any system. Sure enough the humble Speccy had it's fair share of turkeys, but the sheer magnitude of this gobbler would make Bernard Matthews scared. I had the misfortune to play this game when it was relatively new, but fortunately it was my friend who bought it so my £2.99 was safe. Obviously after about 25 seconds of him playing it he was beginning to feel that although reasonably cheap his £2.99 investment hadn't been the best one he'd ever made. Within 10 minutes I'd reset the Speccy and he was on his way up the street in tears because he realised with that £2.99 he could've got himself a 3 course meal and a King Size Coke from the local Chip Shop, or about 30 packs of Garbage Pail Kids...Poor auld Jimbo, he was never the same after that day.

So picture this you start the game, and at first you have a pretty decent looking iso-3D game in front of you. Then it falls apart almost instantly, as you realise the protagonist doesn't look like an S.A.S. operative, but rather like an overweight buffoon who could possibly have some kind of chromosomal disorder. Then you see the rather twitchy sprite for the terrorist shambling backwards and forwards like he's got some kind of Attention Deficit, this may be because him and all of his fellow terrorists look like a mutant fusion of Charlie Chuck, and a young Bob Geldoff....How unfortunate!

Anyway these properties have obviously made all the terrorists extra murderous, and seeing your characters rather comical appearance has obviously made him an easy target. Our rather portly operative is a sitting duck basically as he shambles along at about 1/3rd of the speed of the terrorists, here's where the thick of the problems begin. The terrorists turn instantly and shoot you the second you're in line with them, infact sometimes they've shot you before you can even turn, sometimes they're shooting you as you're coming into line with them. Also get this....They NEVER miss! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER!!! Did I happen to mention they never miss, because I seem to have noticed that they never miss!

Your character moves directionally, but he turns like the game thinks you have rotational controls, the terrorists can turn from back to front instantly and shoot you, before your halfway through a turn. Annoyingly enough you don't always rotate as you turn, it only happens sometimes, sometimes usually meaning as you're making a desperate attempt to turn and shoot the obviously insanely amphetamine dosed murderers that plague almost every one of this games screens. The enemy are so ruthless that you actually can not run past them either. You can be the furthest possible distance from them, and they can have their back turned and as you try to move you're dead before your eyes have even translated the image to your brain.

This game is basically impossible because it's so badly programmed, which is actually a shame as although a little generic the graphics for the screens and scenery in general unlike the rather comical mongy sprites are quite functional, maybe even nice in some screens. Of course you won't get far enough to see anything really nice, unless it's by luck. I defy anybody to get more than 4 screens in or kill more than 3 terrorists without using POKEs, I genuinely don't think it can be done.

I notice that one of WOS's resident mappers Pavero mapped this game back in 2008. What can I say Pav you rock hard bastard you. Although I imagine those kudos will most likely be ill placed, as I imagine POKEs were used in mapping this septic pile of cat jizz. If POKEs weren't used I bet Pav used at least 1000 save states to get this crap mapped.

Definitely one to avoid, even people who like doing things like Trepanning, Metal Implants, and Hook Suspensions to themselves will find no pleasure in the pain this so called game will invoke.

Utter Trouser Fudge!!!

The 36th Chamber of Shoa Lin is possibly my favourite kung Fu movie of all time starring Chia-Hui Liu (Pai Mei from kill Bill) as San Te the Shoa Lin monk who was eventually responsible for the creation of the 36th chamber of Shoa Lin. It tells the story of how he came to end up at Shoa Lin and how he progressed through the ranks to become a Kung Fu master in a very short time. The movie was directed by the Shaw Brothers who have been making fine kung Fu movies for years and years and years.

However for how much I like the Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies Heartbroken was not written by them. It was written by the Shaw brothers, but not the Kung Fu movie makers. No The Shaw brothers I'm on about aren't responsible for a single Kung Fu movie as far as I can tell. They are however responsible for making Atlantis Software considerably less shit than it was.

Heartbroken is a medieval arcade adventure and features absolutely no Kung Fu what so ever! It does however feature magic spells, trolls, ogres, knights, a dragon, an evil warlock, and of course the obligatory damsel in distress.

The game is quite simple and features the Shaw Brothers usual style of extremely nice looking but minimally animated sprites. I'm still quite in awe how they always have these sprites in their games that have about 2 or 3 frames of animation total, and still manage to make them look and move very nicely. It's pretty much the same story with all their games, and it's not a bad thing at all.

Anyway Merlin has retired and buggered off, but he was nice and left you his Spellbook. Of course the doddering old sod didn't hand it to you, he just casually dropped it off somewhere near the starting screen. The idea of the game is obviously to rescue the princess from the warlock, and this involves you having to find the ingredients to stick into the cauldron to make a key to unlock her cell. Of course first you have to find the spell book, and then you have to be standing in front of the cauldron to use the spells. There is one thing which is quite shady here, and that is just how deviously hidden the cauldron is on the first adventure (There is actually a clue on the cover of the game itself, but the solution may not be obvious right away). First adventure I hear you say? Yes to call yourself a master of this game you have to complete it 3 times in a row. There's no saves after you complete an adventure so you literally do have to play through them all in a row (Or at least you did before emulation).

Sounds daunting, but actually once you know what you're doing you can play through all 3 probably in less than an hour. I did it before I reviewed this game, and it's very easy to do actually.

The game is a flick screen affair with ladders and platforms you can't jump in this game, but to be honest you don't really need to, of course in this day and age a game like this without a jump seems a little unnatural, but it works. Anyway if you did have a jump the game would be way too easy.

There isn't really a lot of love for this game, but personally I think it's a delightful distraction, and for an arcade adventure it's quite lite really, and it's not too taxing. I also like the style of the enemies, and it's apparent that the Shaw Brothers are fans of Ghosts n' Goblins. It could be coincidence, but the ogres, and the ghost demons look a little too familiar to have not been influenced by Capcom's insanely difficult platformer.

The game does suffer from one considerable flaw but it's easily avoidable and that is very rarely the ogres will be invincible, and just keep coming at you no matter how many times you shoot them. This can be remedied by leaving the screen then re-entering it, as this problem never seems to happen twice in a row. Another annoyance is that Ghost Demons have a habit of making a beeline for you when you're climbing a ladder. You can't shoot while your on a ladder, so this becomes frustrating sometimes. The final problem I find is that occasionally the collision detection can be a little off at times, it's not totally ridiculous, but it is noticeable at times that you died unfairly.

These problems aside the game is fun to play, and as I've said not really too taxing. One thing I like in this game that adds a tiny amount of strategy (but not much really) is that to use a magic spell you have to sacrifice your score so you may have to go and grind a little if you don't have enough points to cast a spell. The graphics for the scenery are nice, colourful and quite detailed, and the game even has an ending. The end sequence is pretty simple and nothing special at all really, but at least the effort was made to add an ending.

Once you complete adventure 1 if you choose to continue, adventure 2, and 3 are basically "Arrange Modes". The items are in different places, the enemies are tougher, and it costs more points to cast your spells.

All in all a simple, fun, and colourful arcade adventure, that I enjoyed when I was 10 years old, and still enjoy now. Along with Superkid, and Hop n' Chop this is one of my fave Shaw Brothers games, it may not be the best arcade adventure ever, but it was £1.99 well spent, and I think I may still have my original tape somewhere?

I remember getting this rather unusual arcade adventure from a bargain bin in about 1987 or 1988, along with a handful of Bug-Bytes other 1984 titles namely Antics, Star Trader, and Stay Kool. The nice thing is they were all 50p each!

I vaguely remember thinking that the game looked bloody awful when I first loaded it up, and was ready for disappointment to say the least. What a pleasant surprise it was to me that even though looking like somebody had swallowed a Commodore 64 game and a bottle of castor oil, and projectile sprayed the imminent chunky aftermath onto my screen it was a joy to play. Yep definitely a 100% substance over style game.

The story goes that there has been a rather heinous usurpation by none other than the rather 'orrible Rapscallion the Rogue. You as the newly but unwillingly abdicated king have been somewhat ironically imprisoned in your own dungeon. Help is at hand though as the stickle brick fairy super model is here to turn you into a bird, and also give you the ability to turn into a fly. This although rather silly sounding brings an element of strategy to the game. The bird can pass objects that the fly can not, and vice versa. Add to this element that is costs you one of your lives to transform, and you may find that some careful planning is key to your success.

The game itself is quite impressive, as pretty much each screen contains a new trick, trap, or puzzle for you to interact with or overcome. There is definitely enough variation to keep you busy, and enough enemies to keep you on your toes. Impacts with enemies doesn't necessarily mean death though, for instance cats will kill the bird, but not the fly. Frogs tongues will catch the fly but not the bird. Some enemies even though not lethal may cause some ill effects to the form they can't kill, and this is true of several projectiles in the game. These range mainly from power down type effects like slo-mo, and inverted or mixed up controls. Occasionally you may find you get speeded up, this can be helpful, but also quite hazardous depending on your location.

The game sounds daunting, but the pixies are here to help, no not the band, (although a cameo from Frank Black, Kim Deal, or Joey Santiago would put a smile on my face) but actual magical little pixies. They jump about all happy on their little toadstools, and give you things if you touch them (No not like that you dirty buggers!). The pixies can give you items to overcome puzzles or extra lives. There are also magic gems to collect and upon collecting a gem a hint will be given as to where you can find a pixie, and what he will have for you. For instance "Prolong your life in the Danger Maze", pretty much means hot foot (or fly in this case) over to the danger maze and the pixie will have a number of extra lives for you, yup you read it right lives, sometimes they give you more than 1. Which is nice, but there's a good chance you'll need them so don't waste them.

One nice feature is if you do happen to meet an unfortunate end you become a ghost, you can then fly around all the available screens and just look about, this is useful for mapping or taking notes of the whereabouts of items. Which as far as I can tell are randomly generated each game.

The game is split into 3 parts the wilderness, the labyrinth, and the castle.

To exit the wilderness you must find a key to the labyrinth, to exit the labyrinth you must find 2 genies who will tell you the secret to solving the labyrinth, and to reclaim your throne in the castle you must get a magic wand. When you get the wand Rapscallion will be stripped of his powers and run away from you instead of colliding head on with you. If you catch him you win.

So anyway the game plays very well, even if it does look like it was built out of Duplo. The sounds are functional, some are actually quite nice, but unfortunately some are a little grating in places, and some are so bad they'll make you want to ram knitting needles in your ears.

Rapscallion is an unusual and enjoyable puzzley, arcade adventure, that is quite digest, but can still be devilishly tricky at times. The story is quite clichéd but I can forgive that, as most game stories are even nowadays. If you can find yourself able to get past the chunk o' vision, there's an enjoyable game to be had under the crudely square appearance. Worth firing an emu up for a quick play every now and then, and if you are finding it a bit easy there are multiple difficulty levels to set it to.

I'll give it 4/5 as it's fun to play, and for it's sheer creativity at the time. Who needs good graphics?

Shuttle Shock is an interesting concept that doesn't quite deliver as well as it could or should.

It's a Manic Miner clone with a twist, instead of a jump you have a teleport, although it's more like a translocation device as it only transports you short distances. There's no items to collect a la most single screen platformers, all you have to do is make it to the exit. Sounds simple, but it's quite tricky. Your teleport only moves diagonally up in front of you so you use this to navigate the platforms. Enemies must simply be avoided by use of good timing as you can't jump over them directly, teleporting anywhere but a platform will kill you even if you only fall about 3 pixels, which is ridiculous, but that's just how it is. The graphic for your sprite falling is absolutely atrocious and looks nothing like your sprite while he's walking. It kind of reminds me of a really crap starfish.

The screen graphics are a little bland, the enemy sprites are OK and you can for the most part tell what they're supposed to be. The game has some visible bugs like leaving bits of your sprite behind at the last location you teleported from, some ropey collision detection, and occasionally the moving platforms hanging up for no reason trapping you. These problems aside the game is OK to play and a bit of a variation on a rather tried and tested formula.

Can't really give it more than a 3 as it's not particularly amazing, but there is some short lived amusement to be gleaned from this not so well known title.

A Trick of the Tale is a bit of an unknown title really. Not many people seem to have played it as far as I can tell?

Anyway A Trick of the Tale is an insanely difficult Manic Miner clone in which you control what reminds me of a butler. I don't know if this is the case as the instructions are very very short and don't really seem to give any kind of story?

Sadly the game is not without it's problems, it suffers from some pretty bad sprite flicker, which for an MM clone made in 1986 is pretty much unacceptable, the mechanics on the moving platforms and lifts are certainly questionable, and of course the difficulty is way too high for anybody without the patience of a saint.

I like this game regardless of it's problems but it's definitely not for everybody. Taking these factors into account I can't give it more than a 3, if it was a bit more polished and a little less brutal it may have deserved a 4?

Where to start with this game?

OK so BMX Jungle Bike is a moderately deranged idea, and I'm convinced that it's a dartboard selection game. By which I mean whoever wrote it has a board on the wall with pieces of paper that contain random words stuck to it. The author then then throws 3 darts at the wall, and creates a title from whichever 3 words he hits. The 3 words being BMX, Jungle, and Bike. I doubt the game would have been any better if the 3 words had've been Cosmic Monkey Tennis, although in this day and age I'm surprised there isn't a game called Cosmic Monkey Tennis, and if there was I'd probably be one of the people lining up to play the bugger.

Anyway this game is a really crap hybrid of Wheelie, and I'd say Hunchback, but it's more crap, so let's say Punchy instead. With flick screen instead of scrolling, the jumping mechanics of Eddie Kidd's Jump Challenge, and rather below average graphics.

It's not a fun game at all, the collision detection is all over the place, and I'd have gave it a big fat 1! But! Due to it's attempt to be original by combining ludicrous concepts, and the fact that it did in fact make me laugh, I can give it a 2

....and I'm being very generous there!

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.

Beat Pac-Man over the head for 15 minutes none stop with a baseball bat, snap half of his teeth out, stick him on a unicycle, and send him on his merry way...

Wheelin' Wallie is one of those games I always used to see when I was a kid in the electronics store up the road where I used to live, and always kind of wanted it, just cos' it looked weird. The main problem was the copy the shop had was the C64 version. The inlay had no screenshots on it, but it was one of those the inlay makes the game look intriguing type of affairs. Strangely enough when the shop finally got a Speccy copy in my ma wouldn't let me buy it? Which confused me cos' it was in the shops budget section. Might sound insane but the electronics store up the road to me had a budget section for budget games.....Seriously. If they were older or didn't sell well he'd sell them for either 59p, or £1.59.

Wheelin' Wallie fell into £1.59 territory, and I was almost distraught that my ma wouldn't let me have it. I went back with a few quid what seemed like an eternity afterwards on a Saturday afternoon after I'd been swimming, and the Speccy version was gone, and he was back to just having the C64 version. I never ever saw a real copy of this game again....

Fast forward to about 1998, and I finally got to play it, and thought to myself "Phew thank f**k I didn't buy that game what a load of crap". But! Yes But! Having revisited that game a few times over the years leading on from then I've changed my mind over and over.

OK so the game looks awful, the game sounds awful, the game to a certain extent even plays awful. It's a very simple affair, and a 100% situation involving the cover art making the game look a million times better than it actually is. The game barely comes close to you controlling a giant ginger haired gooseberry on a unicycle in a dark and foreboding world at all. The collision detection is terrible, the sound is below average, the graphics aren't completely terrible given how simple the game actually is, but they are a bit naff even by 1985's standards. Although granted this is a conversion of a commode game which also looked completely shit on it's native system, so I can't knock the Speccy version for looking bad, as the native platform looked bad as well. Very brown I might add.....Very, very brown.....Who would've thunk it?

But strangely enough if you can get past the poor collision detection, the weird gameplay mechanics, and the brutal unfairness of that flying teapot, yes there's a flying teapot that kills you, there is a strangely addictive game here. Granted it's flawed beyond belief the ceiling kills you, but there's no graphic for the ceiling so it's hard to tell just how close to the top of the screen you can go? Maybe just don't touch the Interceptor Software logo that stays there for the entire game (Don't worry the Commode version has "Programmed by Andrew" there for the whole game). The red ball is difficult to avoid unless you hang back, the teapot is impossible to avoid if you're on the same level of the screen when it appears, it travels so fast if you're even halfway in it's plane you're dead simple as no avoiding it.

Get used to the flaws, and it's strangely playable though, I still don't like this game that much, but each time I have that curious "Let's see if I can actually like it" type game of it, I find myself actually getting a little further, and not minding it that much. The enemies tend to come in a set trifecta, it seems to always be frog, then red rubber ball, the flying teapot of death.

Weird thing is this game plays like a mash up between well there's no shooting at all but the way you have to move forwards and backwards at any given moment almost reminds me of the caverns from scramble. The fact you're a floating disembodied mouth munching pellets reminds me of Pac-Man, and that you have to control the wheel under your disembodied mouth reminds me of one of those games where you control 2 vehicles at once, can't think of one off the top of my head sorry. Erm? SWIV maybe?, but this game is bugger all like that haha!

It's not a great game at all, but I've played much worse, and if I persevere I find myself getting a little further each time, So I'll give this game a 3/5.

Lil' Alien or Lil' Al? That is the question!

A rather poor Jet Set Willy clone which does have a few interesting twists, but fails to deliver in the long run.

The story is a little weird but kind of tried and tested. Al has crash landed on a nightmare planet where an insane warlord has pointed a duplicating ray at him and cloned him. This is where the first inconsistences pop up. The basic instructions say you're picking up the parts of your spaceship whereas the story says you're collecting parts of the machine? The machine indeed? What machine? I can only assume it means the machine that duplicated you? Anyway once you have all the parts of your ship, or the machine? You have to find your doppelganger and combine yourself with him to become whole again. Then I guess you get in your ship and go to the pub? Or something like that?

Al is quite an interesting sprite, but I will say a lot of the enemy sprites are very very generic looking, some of them look OK, but they're nothing special really. I do like that the objects you collect are 16x16 sprites as adverse to 8x8 sprites, problem here is it seems to mean the game is limited to one object per room, which is not really acceptable to somebody who likes these types of collect em' up flick screen platform games. Another somewhat bad quality to the gameplay is the jumping mechanics, oh no! It's got the triangle jumping, there's no smooth arch to the jump like JSW, Technician Ted, or Monty Mole, it's just diagonal up, stop, then diagonal down. So many JSW clones that have had potential to be fun games have been ruined by this type of jumping. One strange thing with the jumping is, if you jump while you're not moving you can jump straight up, and keep going about 1/3rd of the screen in height, it adds a little something to the gameplay, but doesn't fix it's brokenness. Bubbles are used as lifts, but they don't catch you, you have to keep jumping to move with them and jumping from them directionally is a pain in the arse, and usually result in you falling through them back to the bottom of where you were. LATHER! RINSE REPEAT! ALWAYS REPEAT!!!

The keys are bit off as well O and P for left and right, and Z for jump? Z??? Why not Space, or M, or even Q at a push. If you're going to use O and P why use Z for jump? It's not game breaking or anything, it's just a tad unusual if you ask me......and on we go.....

The game is quite colourful but the author decided to use some of the most garish colour combo's possible for the rooms, and the tiles. Couple this with the fact that the sprites seem to be constantly flickering, and your eyes start to feel like they're being pierced by hot needles after about 3 minutes of playing. It's weird it's not even like they flicker a lot, there's just enough to make it noticeably annoying, then after a while unbearable. The game also moves really slowly, too slowly in fact, simple as.

I still say for every game like this released after 1984 it should be at least on par with, or be a step ahead of JSW, not taking 2 steps backwards, tripping over the cat, and falling down the stairs.

It's a shame because as a massive fan of this type of game I see the potential in there for a great game, but the package is delivered just not to the correct standard. It's like ordering a Ming vase from ebay, and finding when you get home from work the delivery guy couldn't get an answer, so he shoved it through your letterbox.

....and finally...

Because the game has a few nice touches although terribly implemented I'll be nice and bump the score up from poor to average 3/5

I have fond and also almost violently hateful destructive memories of this game from when I was younger.

Dinamic basically made a brutally difficult platform slasher arcade adventure type thing with this game rather loosely based on the Arthurian legends. The game has 4 levels split into platform jumper type screens and long scrolling sections where you have to walk from left to right or right to left, whilst avoiding, or making a vague attempt to kill things as they come at you.

Each level has a special object with clichéd names like the unburning fire...spoiler...it's a fucking light bulb! But not much of a spoiler as it's on the first screen where you start. The others are equally silly, wait til' you see what the elixir of life is!

You have to take the 4 mystical items to the wise men/druids who drop them in their cauldrons to destroy them? Maybe? The Spanish instructions translated into English are practically the scrawlings of a 4 year old, and the original inlay instructions in the English version were pretty patchy as well if I remember rightly.

I remember this game being one of the few Flippy tapes released in the late 80's early 90's that had Speccy on one side and Amstrad on the other.

Anyway I got my general vitriol aside I think on with the game...

The graphics are really nice, really really nice, but I generally wouldn't expect anything less from Dinamic, the majority of their games looked really nice, even if the difficulty made them borderline unplayable. That aside I somehow....somehow actually managed to finish this game when I was younger? How the hell I managed that I'll never know? I can get near the end of the first level these days and that's about it Hahaha!

The game starts off hard, and continues to the point where it's a memory test, this is fair enough with a game that has infinite continues or an energy bar or some kind of leeway. No this is one hit death, a handful of lives and that's it.

The sword is crap, and if you're lucky you can kill the bees and sometimes the owls if they're at the absolute perfect height and distance to do so, a pixel off and you're royally fucked basically, the jumping is a weird anti-grav pyramid type affair, which is terrible with a 16x8 sprite nevermind a 48x16 sprite. Yet somehow they managed to make the collision detection reasonable, it's not perfect, there will be moments where you know it didn't hit you, but there will also be moments where you're like OK my fault.

Of course none of this matters once you're past the second level and just about every screen needs to be almost robotically traversed, the very very slight margin for error, and I mean very very slight is gone by this stage. It's not really fun at all.

Of course if traversing this insanely difficult game is too much for you and you mash the keyboard in anger, there's a 50/50 chance the ending will pop up Hooray that will save you hours and hours of hair ripping frustration.

So basically a nice looking game, but one that's about as much fun to actually play as getting a pint glass smashed in your face, then having said face stamped on by an angry mob for no reason other than you were standing there minding your own business.

I'd like to give it more than a 3, but no it's so hard that most people won't see more than a few screens into it, most won't even make it past the first scrolling section.

Possibly one of the worst games I have ever played, probably the worst licensed game I've ever played.

Highlander was an awesome movie for it's time, and back when this game was reasonably new I can safely say I am so so glad it was my friends copy I played and not mine. If I had paid the almost comical £7.95 I'd have been one of the few 8 year olds on record to commit suicide...

The graphics are terrible, semi colourful backgrounds which look OK if not a little boring surround an all black floor, upon which lazily ported chunky cut n' pasted C64 sprites bumble around with no true purpose.

Swing your sword at the stickle brick man with your equally useless stickle brick man and watch in dismay as your health bar keeps decreasing, and his goes back up. Then your head falls off in one of the most terribly animated and pathetic deaths in a computer or video game.

Gameplay is lost somewhere? Because I for one could not find it anywhere, sound is pretty much none existent, presentation is fucking crap.

The game is a joke, an absolute farce, and is no doubt one of the nails in Ocean's coffin.

I mentioned it was my friends copy I played back in about 86'/'87, my friend was almost lucky he got this game as part of a compilation, at least he had a couple of other games to play.

We were both quite excited to play this though, but alas about 2 minutes after it was loaded and we'd both had a go, the Speccy was reset and I don't think he ever played it again.

Let's hope he didn't anyway, this game is pure poison! Raw untreated sewage with an 89% shit content, the rest is tampons and used condoms...

Loading this game up these days even in an emulator is an unjustified waste of time even if it takes less than a second to load Avoid like the plague

An orphan raised by monks, and Naijishi the Grand Master of the Dawn in the ways of the god Kwon he who speaks the holy word of power, the supreme master of unarmed combat....

Phew! That's deep man, deep, yet kind of clichéd, but a perfect storyline for a martial arts game from the mid 80's....Or infact anything featuring martial arts from the mid 80's.

OK So Way of the Tiger is based upon a series of adventure game books of the same name (The first being Avenger! Which this game's rather crap sequel is based upon). You play the part of said orphan taking 3 tests set by Naijishi the Grand Master, to become a Ninja. Strangely enough unlike just about every other game based on an adventure book it's not a crappy strategy game or a text adventure, but a fighting game. Of course this makes sense as you're trying to become a Ninja.

The game looked great to me back in the mid 80's when I first played it, and I'll say for the type of game it is and granted how far things have come with the genre since then it's aged quite well for a ye olde fighter. I still enjoy playing it now, even though to be fair I think the controls are bloody awful, and I'm nowhere near as good at it now as I was when my age was in single figures. But anyway the game is split into the 3 tests which are Unarmed Combat, Pole Fighting, and Sword Fighting, the entire game can be played through as such, if you think you're good enough anyway. Or one thing which is quite cool is the game will let you practice any of the 3 tests individually. Of course it's not that great or at least it wasn't back in the day using a real Spectrum because it's multi-load. But today with emulators that problem pretty much is non-existent.

The first trial Unarmed Combat sadly is the longest one, and probably the most fun out of the 3, with more variety of enemies, although these are repeated a few times, and range from your typical Ninja, a shapeshifting goblin type thing that turns into a wraith (This goes both ways, sometimes the wraith appears and turns into the goblin, and sometimes neither change at all), a Lizardman, and eventually a huge Ogre type creature that shakes the screen as he walks. The screen scrolls indefinitely one way or the other in this stage, actually making it quite easy to run away if things get a little tough. The pace of this stage is quite slow, but that actually works in it's favour, if this game was faster it would probably be too hard to play. Shrines and statues adorn the background, and strange desert fauna, and wildlife is animated. If you actually have a second to take in the surroundings they're actually quite atmospheric.

Trial number 2 is Pole Fighting, and this one is tricky, the Pole doesn't just point to your weapon, but also what you're fighting on. A large pole above a rapid flowing river. Jumping is a game of hit and miss on this stage, as a badly timed or even a directional jump will end the game regardless of how far you are. The enemies as usual are the typical Ninja, Skeletons, and a really, really, aggressive Dwarf with a club. This level if you can make it through is over a lot quicker than the first, and so long as you can resist the temptation to jump too often, and go toe to toe with the enemy is actually quite easy. Once again the background is quite pretty, but this stage plays out a bit more like a traditional Speccy fighter, on a single screen.

The third and final trial is Sword Fighting, and my oh my this one is pretty tough. Once again you've got the Ninja, also Samurai Warriors, and finally Naijishi the Grand Master himself, who is an absolute sod, and can cut you down in about 3 hits. This level also looks quite nice, although a little bare compared to the other 2, not that that really matters that much. This level is actually quite hard, and gave me quite a bit of stick when I was younger.

Anyway gameplay wise the controls are responsive, even if they are a bit shit (The game uses 10 keys to play it 10!), the sound is quite minimalistic, but this actually works in the games favour. There's a musical jingle at the start of the game, and that's about it. The games noises are basically comprised of the sounds of you and your opponent hitting each other, and occasionally the sounds of your endurance counting down, or getting a slight top up after a victory. This actually helps create a sense of impact with each blow though, the sounds are loud and bold for each hit. Also the Ogre type character from the first level makes stomping noises as he walks, as well as shaking the screen. I'll be honest it gets a little annoying after a while, but it helps add atmosphere to the game none the less.

So basically I'd say we do actually have here one of the better and a little more indepth martial arts games for the Speccy. However I am going to knock off 1 point from the score of excellent, because the controls are dire, and take a lot of getting used to, and even when you do they're fiddly, and not very good when things get hectic. Also apparently you can use kempston, there's no indication of this on the menu screen, and I've never managed to get it to work. Not on an emulator, or on my real Speccy. Although using diagonal up directions for punch without pressing fire would be a bit weird on a stick anyway. Also I'm still not really sure that the original asking price of £9.95 was really worth it at all for any game of this type, but I will say the 1987/88 re-release price of £2.99 was a absolute bloody bargain, and well worth every penny.

So there we have it Ninja action ahoy, still not sure if it's really what could be called a classic because of it's few flaws, but it is still a really good game if you give it the time to sink in, and appreciate it for what it is.

Master of Magic is an early RPG type game for the Speccy.

The story goes basically while you're out exploring a dark cave, you find a dark pool that catches your attention, then some grumpy old wizard called Thelric pulls you into it. You end up in Thelric's world where he teaches you a few magic spells gives you a quest to find the Lost Amulet of Immortality for him, and then sends you on your merry way.

Thelric being a bit of a mean awkward old git as well won't send you back to your own world until you've done this for him...

So the game starts by giving you some options for your controls, once you've got that sorted it then proceeds to tell you the proper version of the rather clichéd drivel I've written above here. Then when you've read the story the game starts. I remember way back when I was a kid my cousin had given me this game on a C90, with a few other games, so I had no instructions, and didn't really have a clue what I was doing. Fortunately the game isn't that hard to work out, and you get the story at the start, so that wasn't a problem for me. I didn't really like this game that much back then, but I persevered and got some enjoyment from it.

Fast forward about 30 years, and ironically I was better at this game as a youngster, or at least it seemed like I could progress quicker at least.

The game itself is not super hard to play, and it looks quite simple. You basically control a 4 pixel sized square, on a small rather oddly coloured white on magenta top down map. The rest of the screen is split into different sections the top right being a scroll which is where all the in game messages appear. The games commands are menu driven when fire is pressed, and the large red bar that goes through the centre of the screen is where your commands and options appear when you do so. The final part of the display is the bottom part of the screen decorated by 2 squiggly pole things with skulls on top on either side. Graphical representations of nearby objects, enemies, or anything else of interest appears in this section of the screen.

Sonically the game doesn't really have much, the one sound you'll mostly hear is the crunchy noises of the enemies hitting you.

The game is quite difficult magic and health are limited, and not replenished often, the enemies brainlessly home in on your character almost zombie like, and continue to follow you until you trap them behind a wall, or kill them, spells miss quite often, and so on. The graphical representations of some things look good, and others are a bit hit and miss really. Attempting to use lots of colour for these images quite often makes them a bit garish to look at, and some of them are just plain ugly.

This particular passage from the instructions amuses me no end though "This joystick or keyboard controlled Menu Driven Adventure enables
you to realistically play the role of the hero. Escape from the Mystical Underworld".

Hmm yes indeed, oh how our imaginations were much more powerful back in the 80's hahaha!

Anyway the game isn't completely terrible, but it barely passes as what's called an RPG really. It's more of a graphical adventure, but back then this was one of the few available "RPG" experiences available. Like I said I never paid for my copy back in the 80's, but the £2.99 asking price was reasonable for the time the game was released.

So there we have it, not a totally crap game, but all in all not really a great one either...

Claws of Despair by Players was a game one of my friends bought when I was younger, and he pretty much hated it. I didn't though and it ended up at my house eventually.

OK so it's a text adventure, which I don't really play very often these days, and I wasn't a massive fan of them back when I was a kid either, but the few I did play I usually ended up liking. This happens to be one of them.

OK so on the grand scale of things this game doesn't have a massive production value, it suffers from scenery at certain locations that takes ages to draw in, and fills in the dithering and colours in the most sluggish, and ugly way possible. Fortunately these images are only drawn once, revisiting the location will just bring the text up.

the game also suffers from some insanely cryptic solutions to it's puzzles that to be honest I still think if Your Sinclair hadn't have printed what you're supposed to do in the tavern or the inn, nobody in the known universe would have ever finished this game. I've been ranting about this since about 1987, but SING IALS? WTF? SING IALS. How is anybody even supposed to guess that? There's no indication in the story, or any of the locations you visit that points to that answer? I don't even know if IALS is a real song? Apart from this rather unfair puzzle though the others although cryptic are quite clever in places, and can be quite satisfying when you finally work out the one random word or phrase the author was wanting you to find.

There's not really much else to say, the game is quite good, and quite well written. I've completed it back in the day, and have played through it a few more times during the age of emulation. The last time probably being in about 2013 or around about then.

Not bad at all, and it was definitely worth the £2.99 my friend paid for it haha....

Shite Rider more like!

Ocean once again blew a really good license, by making a completely terrible game. You'd think the time it took them to get it onto the shelves they may have actually put a game in there.

I was one of the lucky ones, I got to play this game before I even thought about buying it. I really feel sorry for all the people, or peoples parents who parted with their hard earned £7.95 for this debacle. £7.95 in 1986 was quite a bit to part with for a lump of shit in a cassette box.

This is another nail in Oceans coffin, and it probably juts roughly, and offensively out of the wood a few inches away from Highlander.

They knew fine well that regardless of how shit the game was, people would still be suckered by the license.

This game is one of those disastrous curios, that definitely belongs to stay in the past. The graphics are crap the gameplay is sluggish and slow, and pretty much devoid of any redeeming features. Why even have the map screen at all if whenever you don't pick the location the game wants you to go to. You just get the inside of one of the buildings onscreen, and a message from KIT telling you "Sorry Michael we need to be...insert correct location here". Totally pointless.

This game is a glob of the aftermath of a monkey's stress wank!

Kai Temple is an extremely bad rip-off of Shao-Lin's Road.

I feel that even the £1.99 budget price tag is asking a little much to be honest. Gone are any of the features that made the source material a decent arcade action game, and in it's place a poor game, and an equally bad plot.

The game says it has 2 types of enemies, the Divas who can only be dispatched by throwing one of your daggers at them, and the ninjas, who have to be kicked, the instructions state that this must be timed perfectly. They're not wrong either, I'm assuming this was the authors way of covering up the awful collision detection with the write up for the game, because it has to be just in the right spot or it falls short or goes through the ninjas. The daggers which you kill the divas with appear in front of you and slowly chug across the screen at an extremely unrealistic, and uninspiring pace.

The game moves extremely slowly, and your character looks like a caveman, the Ninjas look like fat children, who just want some cake, and the Divas are indescribably crap looking.

Also look out for the flying swords, which look like arrows, and apparently the strange effects the thin mountain air may have on you. This is basically the screen cocktail flipping at random, and this can literally happen seconds after you start. It adds nothing to the gameplay, infact if anything it potentially removes fun from the game. I say potentially because I'm not 100% sure if there's any there regardless?

The graphics are crude, and the actual screen set up looks simplistic and unfinished.

There is a brutal time limit on some of the levels and little margin for error, if you get hit the enemies respawn, but the timer is not reset. If the timer runs out it's game over as well regardless of how many of your 4 hits you have remaining....Challenging? Or terrible design? I'll let you guys decide?

Shao-Lin's Road had boss characters at the end of 2 phases of each stage. This game has 3 phases per stage, and the final one is a pathetic mini game where you have to charge up an energy bar before jumping from the top of the screen onto a see-saw with a boulder or giant iron ball on it. This is in the hope that you can catapult it Wile E Coyote style to the top of the screen to ring a bell. Ringing the bell finishes the level.

The problems I have with this are.... 1 it's total shit! 2 it serves no purpose other than to annoy you! 3 not once is it referenced in the instructions or ingame that you have to hammer the fire button like a lunatic to build up the power bar! 4 It's so relentlessly demanding to the point where you need to throw a disc in your neck out to achieve it! 5 Regardless of how well you do it takes about 3 minutes for you to build up power, then watch the agonizingly slow decent of your fat retard as he floats down to the see saw, only to knock the ball half way up the screen, and for you to be returned to the 3rd phase of the level you were just on. Also you're standing right next to the bell why not just fucking ring it yourself?

This game is absolutely diabolical...

Storm the warrior prince who is so mighty he sends his wizard friend in to do his dirty work instead of going himself the lazy git...

OK so let's just get right to it! Storm is a really, really, really, pathetic flick screen Gauntlet wannabe. Sad thing is you'd think that a game like this would be hard to make a complete arse of, but no Storm was authored by a team of 5....Count that! 5 programmers, 3 of whom actually worked on some really good games. This perhaps fortunately is the remaining 2 programmers only outing. At the risk of sounding incredibly mean, maybe that's a good thing afterall?

OK so let me actually tell you all why the game is so horrible. Well even to start off with the story is terrible. Seeing Storm and Agravian Undead (The wizard) going into the hilariously named Una Cum's interdimensional dungeon laboratory to rescue Storm's wife Correine. The story is totally pointless unless you play 2 player, as the second player actually controls Storm. In 1 player mode it is decided that since Agravian knows magic better or some bumph like that, that he should be the one to go and rescue Corriene. So the game might as well have been called Agravian....total bollocks.

On with the problems then the controls are absolutely piss poor, whoever thought that it was a good idea to make a Gauntlet clone with character based movement, rotational instead of directional controls, and atrocious non-redefinable keys? X, and C to rotate left and right, Z to move forward, and A to fire. I don't know about you but I find that an extremely uncomfortable and useless set up. Making it almost a necessity to stop moving in order to fire. Player 2 is also stuck using keyboard, so in order for 2 people to play you practically have to sit on top of each other, keyboard Twister anybody? At least player 2's keys aren't as shit as player 1's, but they're still pretty gash.

The graphics are ugly, and seem to look like they've been elongated horizontally, the dimensions of everything just looks wrong. Pointless scrolling messages go across the top of the screen adding little or nothing at all to the experience. The enemies could be anything at all, they're just random shapes, or small collections of coloured blobs that vaguely with some imagination may represent humanoid enemies?

Sound is minimal and extremely annoying, just one sound effect over and over again as you kill things, best to play in silence really...

...and finally as already mentioned it's flick screen, so you do this game 1 room at a time, and the pace is slow so it can take a few minutes to clear a room. But wait, if you leave and re-enter a room all the enemies, and the enemy generators have respawned....oh fun!

This is another one of those games I really wanted when I was younger, but then was really disappointed when I eventually did play it. £1.99 was still a bit much to ask for this. This game should've been rotting in the bottom of a bargain bin for 25p 2 days after it's release.

Insane thing is the game is subtitled PART 1: Una Cum's Lair. Thank fuck part 2 never materialized.

Although if you do actually look at the inlay artwork, from the rather confused look on Storms face, maybe it's just as well Agravian went after Una Cum instead of him afterall...

Bloody terrible!

Could this game be the perfect budget release?

Pippo is a fun action puzzle game that I first played at a friends house at the tender age of 7, so basically around about the time it was released. I can thank that friend for several future purchases, and gaming experiences, even if the last time I did speak to him was 1996 when he delivered a pizza to my best mates house when we were drunk.... Thanks mate you're a diamond HAHAHA!

Pippo is one of those odd games that comes along, well there's no strict timeline or anything like that but it just exudes quality! I'd say by 1986's standards for £1.99 this game is ace! The game is quite a simple idea, when you start the game you're presented with a screen which is a grid, you're given a colour to turn each square of the grid, and that's it. You have to make Pippo hop around the grid changing the squares to the given colour. There are holes in the floor though, be very careful not to push against them, you fall down a hole you're greeted to one of the most horrible gut wrenching screams ever to spew forth from an 8-Bit system!

The graphics are cute, and represent everything they're supposed to...Well within reason. It's pretty obvious what the brilliant and creative enemies are supposed to be, but when it comes to old Pippo it a bit hit and miss. Not saying the Sprite is bad it's not it's absolutely great, but it still looks like a mutant fusion of a rabbit and a Space Hopper, that may or may not eat it's own children for the sake of an extra life HAHAHA! Poor Tenerino!

Presentation also is excellent with a fully animated title screen, and optional instructions, which are also animated. When the game finishes loading the loading screen plays music and alternates colours, followed by a demo scene style animated screen before you get to the afformentioned title screen.

The sound for a 48k Speccy is brilliant there's music on the title screen playing throughout, and although quite simple during play the sound is...and I won't say limited because it changes, mainly you'll hear the sounds of Pippo hopping from square to square, and the sounds of him changing the squares colour, but once the enemies show up the sound takes a weird twist, it speeds up, and the whole time the enemies are moving around depending on which ones they are....Well the only thing I can think of to describe the sound is military style drums. That's what it reminds me of anyway.

I have fond memories of this game from childhood, and I'm still occasionally creating fond memories whilst reinforcing the old ones. I suppose the simple way of saying that is I still like to play Pippo, it's brilliant!

This is one of those Budget titles that was worth every single penny of it's £1.99 asking price. After playing this at my friends house this was the next game I got, after bugging my mother for the £1.99 to buy it. By 1984, or 1985's standards I have no doubt this game could've been sold for a mid-range price. I'd probably have been happy to pay £4.91 for this in 1986...See weird price.

Brilliant game back then! Still brilliant now!...and I actually mean brilliant! Not Codemasters Brilliant! I mean actually brilliant!...

Oh Dear!

I'm curious as to why Electric Dreams even bothered with this?

Aliens the US version? I was curious nowadays if this was the US version of Aliens for the C64 that was converted to the Speccy (and other 8-bits in Europe)? I have no idea if this is the case but the shoddiness of the title in question makes me think maybe it was?

Why Electric Dreams even gave this the time of day is beyond me? The previous year they brought us the rather Brilliant...erm Aliens. But in 1987 they brought us the rather shite Aliens US version.

This is an early example of why Americans should not be allowed to make video/computer games without a Japanese or European influence, to put it quite bluntly and harshly most turn out terrible, full of stereotypical cheese, and basically end up crap.

Aliens US version is basically a naff collection of piss poor mini-games that pisses all over the legacy of the rather good Aliens...erm...Not US version, and to think they charged £9.99 for this dire sub-standard shit lump, it's enough to make you vomit in your sleep and choke to death on it.

This game is a piss poor joke, and a shameless attempt to cash in, on something that had basically already been cashed in on.

Even the budget re-release price of £2.99 was a rip-off!

The Colditz Story....

Sad thing is even though this game was written in 1987, it literally could have been written in 1984, or 1985.

Yet there is something strangely compelling about playing it, and what's disturbing is it's published by Atlantis Software, pre-Shaw Brothers Atlantis, which means it's published by Shatlantis! But yet it's still a strangely enjoyable game.

It's blatantly written in basic, which has either been compiled or has machine code routine running along with it. Try loading it in to a 128k Speccy and witness the glorius SPECTRUM SPECTRUM SPECTRUM memory bank problem happen hahahaha!

The game is basically an arcade adventure where you must escape from Castle Colditz. It's quite simple you're presented with a map, and you move around it, each screen has a selection of options depending on your location. It's the usual fare Search, open, and so on, unless you encounter guards.

The guard encounters is where the games "action" comes into play, and it's basically a selection of mini-games. I'll give it, it's dues it's simple but effective, and one of them even requires you to know (or realistically at the time of release guess) a basic knowledge of German (Oooo Edu-macational). These mini-games range from you like mentioned above having to select the correct German response to a guard who asks you a question, crawling past guards while their backs are turned, or having to shoot a guard while his back is turned.

Yup It's actually pretty brutal, and I think the Colditz Story may have been the first game I ever saw blood in. The game is unforgiving, and to be honest that sets the scene perfectly it is set during World War II after all. If you mess up one of the sections the guards tell you such wonders as "If I catch you again...", then there's a selection of follow ups such as "Shot at dawn", or "Boiled in oil" Hahaha!

Get caught 3 times, and it's in front of the firing squad, where the Nazi's shoot you to death and your lifeless corpse falls to the floor with blood spilling out into the morning sun.

I've made it sound way better than it is, and to be honest the game was dated by at least 2 years when it appeared. I am willing to go out on a limb though and say regardless of seemingly simple gameplay there is a very enjoyable game underneath the rough exterior. Which actually take a little bit of time and thought to succeed at. Which to be honest is more than can be said of a lot of the full price action titles of the era.

So I'm gonna give it an insane 4, because it IS good, regardless of how shit it appears if you have a 30 second go of it and say..."ERGH!".

I remember Holiday in Sumaria, it was one of those games that the cover art made look really awesome. I almost bought it on a few occasions when I was a kid, but always found something slightly more interesting to spend my couple of quid on.

Man am I glad about that, when I finally played it years later, I realised I'd dodged a bullet there. This would've been another classic example of a crap game's rather interesting cover art duping somebody out of their coinage. Although by mid-late 1987 I'd began to grow wise to not just throwing money at a game that looks good on first impressions, even if it was cheap.

It's another typically average isometric 3D affair, which practically chugs to a halt if anything other than you is moving onscreen. The scenery graphics are serviceable, and that's basically all you'll look at as most rooms are so overcrowded with them it makes it borderline impossible to navigate, which also makes solving the simplest of puzzles an absolute chore. The actual moving sprites are well there's no other word for them really.....SHITE!

Sound is a bit arse as well, but not much surprise there, it usually is in iso-3D games.

A below average attempt, which is a chore to play, to the point it's almost physically uncomfortable.

Righty ho! Renegade...Good ol' Rene as it's so affectionately known in certain circles.

This is an odd one for me as I don't usually review arcade conversions, as to me in this day and age with emulators why play a conversion when you can just play the actual arcade? Well not this time, not this time my friends!

The Spectrum conversion of Renegade is one of those few rare gems, that if by some programming miracle, or just by the sheer skill of the people who worked on it actually surpassed the arcade in terms of playability. Yup you read that right, the Speccy version of Renegade is better than the arcade version!

The graphics on the Speccy version are great, a bit more gritty and serious looking than the arcade if you ask me, I prefer them as the Speccy version envisions the grime of the 80's underworld, and gives that feeling of danger one gets when venturing down a dark alleyway, or street late at night, whereas the arcade has bubble headed spaz's bumbling around, in some kind of cheesy 50's greaser charade. If the arcade version is Rockabilly, then the Speccy version is Hardcore Punk!

Also Renegade is one of the first Speccy games where I remember actual improvements in 128k mode over 48k mode, not just the usual multi-load games fitting into one giant half hour long load.

48k version is still brilliant, you get enough of the game to still absolutely appreciate it. There's no in-game music, but you get the familiar jingles at the beginning, and end of levels, and when you die.

128k improvements include individual AY ditties for each level, an extra background for level 4. In 48k mode both levels 4 and 5 play out inside the big bosses hideout, in 128k mode you fight the bosses henchmen outside on level 4. Now this one could be a game breaker for some? But the addition of the shoulder throw in 128k mode, it's not there in 48k mode, although the bizarre thing is I'm pretty sure it was on my copy? I had the Hit-Squad re-release, and I'm pretty sure you could do the throw? I did get the full price release back in 1987, but for some reason it would not load on my Speccy, no matter how many copies I tried, no matter how much I messed with my tape deck. You can imagine I was pretty heartbroken at the time.

Even after all these years though I still prefer the Speccy version of Rene, I think the rose tinted spex are definitely off with that one as well having been able to play the actual arcade machine whenever I want, I genuinely prefer the Speccy version. Although I will say I have a big soft spot for Nekketsu Kouha Kunio Kun, I find the Japanese arcade version quite enjoyable, but I almost class it as a different game.

So there we go, and I'd like to say if Rene was an original title I'd have gave it a 4 or a 4.5, but since it's an arcade conversion that far surpasses the source material it deserves max points. Shit I'd give it a 6/5 if it'd let me.

The TV show has always been shit!....But!.....

If Bernard Manning had an enema, and then Ben and Jerry turned it into an ice cream flavor, it would taste like this game.

Avoid

Ultimate Combat Mission, or U.C.M. as it's also known is a top down vertically scrolling shooter from M.A.D. software,....aaaaand....it's not actually that bad to be honest.

I played this quite a bit when I was younger, it came on a compilation disk I got with my second Speccy way back in 1993.

First up though firing it up again to review it, well it's honestly not aged that well. It's a little sluggish, and I always knew it wasn't the best game in the world, but time certainly seems to have made it a little bit worse.

You play the part of Mandroid 002, a Renegade imprisoned in a futuristic prison in space, the goal is obviously to escape that prison.

The good!

Decent AY tunes for the menus, and ingame, in 128k mode anyway.

Well you may be the Renegade Mandroid 002, but if you have an actual friend in real life he can join you as the Mercenary Warmonger 003...There are no real differences between the two...

It's a challenge, and a decent length game.


The bad!

Slow, and sluggish, rose tinted spex may be all that saves this game, a new player may just instantly want to turn it off.

Your bullets travel about an inch before disappearing.

Collision is a bit ropey especially near the holes in the floor.

Gun fires on the side you're holding it instead of centered. I appreciate realism, but it makes it extremely difficult to dispatch enemies when you're in a tight spot, which happens often.


The unusual!

There are lots of holes in the floor on the levels, this game not only has a fire button, but also a jump button, doesn't really affect the game much earlier on, but later on in the game there's pipes that need to be jumped between, and so on.

The game ends on a total cliffhanger, you never know if you actually won? I'd have put that above, but it is weird. Maybe they had a sequel planned?


So there we have it, it's not an awful game, but it's certainly not brilliant. I used to like it years ago, but not so much now. I got my copy for free, but I'm thinking for a semi-decent futuristic top down shooter from 1987 it was probably worth the £2.99 asking price.

Thundercats Hoooooooo!

Or just "Ho" as in whoring a fucking shit cartoon into a shit game.

I still to this day have no idea why this simplistic, boring, half baked bollocks of a game has even half the acclaim it has?

Yeah the scrolling is great.

Yeah the graphics look about a 7/10 or some shit like that...

But the game is complete wank, and I mean complete and utter wank. Run along chop, run along chop, run along chop has no effect on tiny enemy...DIE!

Repeat for 10 million levels till you maybe find Mumm-Ra if you're lucky.

Lather rinse repeat.

For all the people that say this game is great I'm right here to tell them "Fuck off! It's generic shite!". Hobgoblin by Shatlantis is better, and I'm not even joking!

Absolute crap! knuckle Buggers!

I start as I mean to go on! Absolute crap! Knuckle Buggers, I really had that written on the case of my copy as well.

I can't believe Melbourne house shat this shat out as a fucking full price title, what a fucking laugh!

I bought this on the Ricochet re-release, and was super disappointed I always thought it looked really great.

I was expecting some kind of tribute to Knuckle Joe, which is a pretty bog standard smack-em'-up coin-op, but it has it's merits. The Commode version of this game seems to bare some homage towards the said title.

The Speccy version seems to have completely lost it though. Better hope you have a working joystick, because if you want to use keys the pause seems to think its perpetually the fire button. Get past this shit and it's running along with you overweight football helmet wearing spaz, as reject Cybermen with Downs Syndrome attack from all directions.

Have fun jumping up and down between the 3 levels of platforms and getting kicked to death in seconds, as your punches and kicks do nothing in return.

Graphics are decent but stupid, and completely miss the point, the instructions well I won't say they lied, but they're certainly misleading.

The game is a total wank splat, I'd rather have Barry Sheen autograph both my eyeballs with the bare source material than ever play this fucking travesty of a game ever again!

£8.95 for a fucking turd like this was a pisstake in 1987, I'd have slit my wrists if I'd wasted that kind of money on the full price release I felt like doing it after paying £1.99 for it.

Fortunately there were lots of other things that could make me slightly happy back then, stuff that would make me feel not so happy now.....Growing up sucks....

The original game in this series Ninja Master was total arse, but at least it kind of knew it was. Under the guise of "Ninja" it was basically a sports game. You know bunch of mini-games that involve timed button presses or joystick waggling., and although the instructions mention skill it really all boils down to how fast your reflexes are, and more luck than "Spawny Git" from the Viz!

As for the sequel...Well what can I say?

DIE! DIE!...and DIE! again...

Put your luck and reflexes to the maximum test as you jump over rocket propelled snakes, as Rolf Harris constantly tries to stick a finger in your arsehole.

Play the game....You'll see what I mean...

Total shambles!

Ocean fucked up again!

It's conversions like this that ensured that companies like Nintendo stopped licensing out their characters a long time before they became exclusive content.

At £7.95 in 1987, for a conversion of a game from 1983 this is pitiful. I know I couldn't do better, but this was a big, if not at the time "THE" software house, who had it all.

We all know after all these years though it was bells and whistles, and if certain people weren't working on certain licenses they were going to be wank.

Pity we didn't know back in the day, could've saved a few pennies...

A sequel too far, which is sad as it's only the second game in the series.

The original was great, unfortunately this isn't a patch on it, and also plays bugger all like it.

Bomb Jack II? More like crappy stabby gold grabbing man....Where's the Bombs? Where's the fun?

Alright it's not total shit but it's a severely weak effort in comparison to it's predecessor.

Nice backgrounds, it's just a pity that what's happening in the foreground is a trite and somewhat watered down experience. Realistically this game could have carried any name, could have been a stand alone game without anything to do with Bomb Jack, could've cost about 6 quid less, and it would have done fine I think.

As it stands it really is a total bunch of arse compared to just Bomb Jack.

Shame! It could have been so much better, if it ain't broken don't fix it, or in this case don't re-invent the wheel, and make it a Rhombus...

Out Run...Out Crawl more like!

Harsh, but true I suppose, although I will say I did get some enjoyment from this game as late on as 1993 when I got my second Speccy. Which fortunately was a +3. I got the disk of this game in the Bundle that came with the machine.

This is this games one saving grace for me, as it took a few seconds to load each level in, I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of my tape deck owning brethren when it comes to playing this rather bog standard conversion.

Graphics are mono, gameplay is very hit and miss, but I will say even though I have heard several people say the sound is crap as well, that I quite like the AY rendition of Magical Sound Shower it's certainly not abysmal by any means (even though it does seem to skip a few notes here and there, especially when the screen fills up). I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of my 48k owning brethren not only having to multi-load, but playing in silence as well.

I'll be honest looking back the game is pretty turd, and it kind of looks and moves like a Tiger handheld game, who knows maybe the Tiger Handheld version is better than the Speccy? I cannot even begin to imagine the frustrations of everybody 48k or 128k, disk or tapedeck owning, that a crappy pocket game potentially might have been better than a home computer version that cost an extortionate £8.99, or an even more extortionate £12.99 for the disk (which incidentally I got for free, another blow softened I'd say).

I'll give it an average score, I've played worse arcade conversions for more powerful machines, and to be fair back in '93 when I first played it on my own Speccy it didn't seem that slow. I'd played it previously nearer to the release date, but can't even remember where, probably one of my cousin's friends houses?

I suppose it's a nice curio for collectors if you have a big box disk in good condition, but you might as well play the actual arcade machine on MAME these days (Or one of Sega's many other newer games, they seem to love shoving it into their more modern games as a mini-game these days).

Octan by Silverbird? Cheap and cheerful I suppose!

Octan is a vertically scrolling shoot em' up, which actually isn't that bad. It does kind of plod along at a moderate pace, but that's fine, the enemy sprites look OK, and the graphics are quite well defined in general.

I like the way you have lasers, and missiles. The lasers are for shooting your moving targets, and the missiles are for destroying ground based gun turrets.

BUT...

The graphical choices in places are pretty shall we say out there. The basic floor when you're not flying over solid ground is this weird abstract wireframe type thing, which looks OK in theory, but in practice coupled with the green on black monochrome colour choice, it's pretty bad. It pretty much makes your eyes play Pontoon, meaning one sticks, and the other one twists.

I feel like having some breaks in the wireframe, or just patches of it would have been way more acceptable, or even though it's a bit generic and boring plain black background, or even just a starfield.

The game also suffers from single shot syndrome, by which I mean you can only fire once, and can't fire again until it either hits something, or exits the screen. This is one thing I really, really hate in all shooters that have it.

Other odd flaws follow, the enemies bullets all follow you, weither they come from the grounded gun turrets, or the moving enemies. I like the idea of heat seekers, but this is totally unfair when there's a load of enemies onscreen, you've only got one shot at a time, you're desperately hammering the fire button, and an enemy right in front of you shoots, you move to avoid it and it follows you giving you no time or even any chance of getting away.

Checkpoints are few and far between, but at least the game does have checkpoints in places, having to start all the way from the beginning every time you die is a big no-no in my books, especially with shoot em' ups.

Back to the good stuff though flaws aside it's not a terrible game to play once you get used to it, and for just under 3 quid it was a reasonable effort. I will say I'd have preferred to pay £1.99 for it, but I suppose it really was worth the £2.99 asking price, and with 8 levels, and bosses, you're getting your money's worth. I've played much worse games for much larger price tags.

Still it's only getting an average score, for all it's not terrible, it's definitely not groundbreaking stuff either, and some of the problems I mentioned above are gamebreakers for me I'm afraid. I enjoy the game to a certain extent but I don't like eyestrain or headaches as I'm sure nobody else does either. These problems stop this semi-decent game from getting the 4 it could have deserved with just a little more spit n' polish.

This is a game I was always intrigued by back in the day. I remember seeing the ad for it in CRASH! But never actually seeing any screenshots of the game, or ever reading a review for it. I forgot about it for 30 years, and the memory faded into obscurity somewhere in the dirty dark pits of my subconscious....That is until today.

I was messing around with the infoseek on World of Spectrum, and I saw the inlay artwork for this game, and thought to myself I remember seeing that in CRASH! years, and years ago, but never knew what it was about.

My thirst for knowledge was about to be slaked by bitter truth....Never expect a game you thought looked interesting 30 years ago to live up to your expectations....

Upon loading I was greeted with poor presentation, and no idea what was going on I hammered lots of buttons, and the game started...froze. I pressed space which was the fire button, and things started happening. Fortunately for me the keys were O,P,Q,A, and SPACE by default, so instant accessibility at least. I was curious the game instantly reminded me of Sega's Fantasy Zone....and that is where it went wrong.

The enemy Behaviour patterns reminded me of Sega's Fantasy Zone, the backgrounds reminded me of Sega's Fantasy Zone.

So basically this game is what's classically known as piss poor budget game quality Fantasy Zone rip-off of Sega's Fantasy Zone. I knew instantly looking at the backgrounds style of blockiness, and cruddy dithering that I was looking at lazily ported graphics from the C64 version.

The enemy bullets are basically bubbles, at first I collided with one as I thought it was a pickup that had been dropped for shooting a wave of enemies, and died. When I did discover the pickups they look practically the same, but they're not filled, these after you grab a few give you a powerup. The powerups don't last too long, but after getting the same one 2 or 3 times a balloon type thing with a "B" on it floats down from the top of the screen, just like the shop does in GFantasy Zone when you pick up a certain amount of money.

Now I did a little research after I found this game my brain forgot, and noticed on the ad that the game even boasted the "Wide Beam" as a powerup, this is what's classically known as the "Boss Killer" in Fantasy Zone. So I'm thinking to myself alright cool. You have 8 pics on the bottom of the screen which represent powerups I think, the last one is a big ship, that looks nothing like yours. I was wondering if it's once you collect a certain amount of powerup things the boss appears? Nope I'm assuming it's the extra ship...

I fly up into the B I mentioned earlier, and I'm taken to the bonus stage, so I see lots and lots of what looks like the enemies shots coming at me, so I start shooting, my shots are destroying them, and my score is rising, so I just keep going. With how inconsistent this game is, I was wondering if I was supposed to collect them? But since my shots were destroying them and I was gaining points, I just kept doing that. After what seemed like forever it just stopped, and "Level 2" started.

Now I'm feeling disappointed, and glad I never actually got excited about this game back in 1987 because if I had of I'd have been REALLY FUCKING ANNOYED!!!!!

This game is total bollocks! They ripped off a great game took all that was great about it and turned it into a budget game that just so happened to cost £8.99. Coupled with the fact that the backgrounds as mentioned above are crap cut n' pastes of a fucking Commode game boils my piss no end! What's funny is as well if you look at the CPC version they barely even tried to hide the fact they ripped of Fantasy Zone, the ship on that game looks practically the same as Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone.

What annoys me all the more is now that I think back I think the Speccy could have done a pretty functional version of Fantasy Zone if they'd adopted the Master System versions style, and done away with the vertical scrolling, and just stuck to bi-horizontal.

I may be being harsh since I've waited 30 years to play this game, but probably not, there's a lot of hidden gems I missed on the Speccy from years gone by, that I think to myself "I can't believe I missed this first time around! I'd have loved it back then!".

So no sympathy for this fucking shit! Terrible game, lazy C64 graphics, so really from their track record Reaktor Software hasn't really done anything different. Infact screw what I said about this being Budget game quality, this should've been a magazine Covertape game, that's a little fairer, but still a bit too generous really!

I wish I could hate on this game I really do, because I fucking hate how much people gush on about how fucking great it is!

OOOH Hewson Did it again! OOOOOOOH It looks so great OOOOOH! It's the best shooter ever!

Sadly they're almost right, I can't deny it....

...Or at least I couldn't if the game didn't hide the 1 shot syndrome behind the fact the ship shoots from the top or bottom. I can't work out if it's random or sequential, but it's still 1 shot syndrome! Only being able to fire one shot til' it hits or exits the screen is fucking bullshit my friends! It's a shoot em' up, let the player fucking shoot you bastards! Don't make the game intentionally harder through shit design please it's not funny, and people who actually play and enjoy games notice dirty fucking tricks like this!

Being able to get powerups to increase the amount of shots is not an acceptable excuse for crippling the player from square one either, you die you lose those powerups, you get dropped in the hardest part of a level and have to try and powerup again in one shit mode...Haha...that was a typo but I'm going to leave it, because it's true...it's shit!

this game could have been the amazing shooter everyone spunks their undies over if the smooth scrolling and tidy graphics didn't polish over another typical shooter.....Hewson really did do it again...I guess!

I'm giving it a 3, I was gonna give it a 4, but I thought about it and it made me angry so no! It defo doesn't deserve a 5

Hooray! A conversion that Ocean didn't completely fuck up, Although technically it was Imagine, but they were pretty much the same thing by this time!

Arkanoid is a conversion of Taito's 1987 Breakout Clone. It's basically Breakout with power-ups, enemies, and end of game boss, and a rather stupid clichéd story to boot. The Vaus Scrambled from the mothership Arkanoid, before it was destroyed, dimension wibble! Blah! Blah! Blah!

I actually prefer playing the Speccy version of Arkanoid over the arcade version. The default controls are awful and keys are not re-definable, fortunately you can use Sinclair, or a Kempston if you have one plugged in. Or at least you can if you're playing on a real Speccy anyway, with emulation there's several control solutions available which negate programmers, or developers love of awful key layouts.

This games choice is quite awful though V, and B for left and right ergh! I can understand perhaps the need or want for a more central point on the keyboard, given the nature of the game, but it just made me uncomfortable. I remember how much my left hand hurt playing this back in the day on a plastic keyed 48k+.

Anyway the game....Even though there appears to be a total lack of any kind of options screen the game is none the less presented quite nicely, with stills of the intro minus the Vaus actually Scrambling from the Arkanoid, and the Arkanoid actually being destroyed.

Graphics are quite simple, and colourful, enemies look quite good, and are animated quite well.

The in-game sounds are quite minimal but there's a nice variety of beeps, and pips, and buzzes, that fit the action quite nicely. The Paddle...Sorry Vaus moves at a fair pace, and thankfully never feels too slow to catch up with the ball once it starts to blur the edges of time with it's speed. It does take a little bit of getting used to as the game does try to speed the paddle or slow the paddle depending on the balls position.

I always got a little annoyed with how easily the ball can drop through the sides of the Vaus when it looks like you blatantly hit it though. After all these years though I've noticed the arcade kind of has the same problem, so I can't really fault the Speccy version for that, if anything as annoying as it is maybe it should be praised for accuracy?....But probably not!

As per usual I don't normally review direct Arcade Conversions, but as I mentioned above I think I actually enjoy the Speccy version more. That's a good enough reason for me to do so.

It's a simple game, but it's fun, and addictive.

Batty! Rasclaat! Bumba......Oh hang on? What? Oh not that kind of Batty then?

OK then Batty, by Elite Software, as in Bat and Ball, not Pidgin' English, or Patois for arse then? It's a Breakout Clone would you believe, released the same year as another pretty popular Breakout Clone. The debate is that some say it's actually better than that Breakout Clone? Is it? Maybe?

OK it's Arkanoid, but you all knew it was Arkanoid didn't you! Anyway Elite's Batty does tick all the right boxes to actually be a superior product to Imagine's Arkanoid, but you know how good ideas can be? Sometimes the execution can be a little poor, and innovation doesn't always make for a big success. Sometimes it requires tweaking, honing, dedication.

Anyway Batty is quite well presented, there's no story as such, just use your bat to smack the ball at the bricks and break them. Even though the game plays just like it fits with the story of Arkanoid, maybe a little better than Arkanoid does. Batty unlike Arkanoid actually has an options menu, with some control options available. On top of that the game has options for turn based 2 player, so you and another player can compete life per life for a higher score. But it gets better, you can have simultaneous 2 player co-op....Ooh take that Arkanaoid! You actually have to work together as well, no trying to gank each other, if the ball drops out of play you both die. You can both totally dominate the level if you're both decent players, and you get the split powerup. However the buffer for the centre of the screen can be a pain in the arse, and a little bit of a dead zone for the ball. There's times where it feels like both players could camp at the divide, and the ball could drop between them regardless. It's a minor grievance, but it's still an annoyance in the middle of a heated 2 player game.

The graphics are a lot more polished for everything in Batty, although since Batty has background graphics the paddle is monochrome rather than the nice defined stand out colour of the Vaus in Arkanoid. The background graphics for batty though tend to be quite sensible, and won't make your retinas feel like they're being slowly burned with a cheap disposable BIC lighter. The enemy sprites are also monochrome because of the background, and also resemble living things, instead of Arkanoid's weird simplistic flying Mr. Whippy Ice Creams, turds, and distorted Geometric nightmares. The definition of Batty's sprites is good, and they do look better. But overall I'd say Batty loses a little something, by having the enemies, and the player the same colour as the background.

The power-ups in Batty are pretty much the same as Arkanoid give or take one or two of them. I particularly like the Smash Ball in Batty, as it literally just ploughs through the bricks without rebounding off them. Also it's not a major difference but Batty's level Skip power-up the Rocket Pack is infinitely better than Arkanoids "Break" Capsule. You don't have to try to keep the ball in play, as you desperately scramble for the teleporter at the edge of the screen before it closes, you touch that rocket pack and you fly off the screen in style...Oh Yeah!!!

Right OK sounds like Arkanoid has the quirks and Batty has the polish eh? Not all the way, the enemies in Batty drop bombs, bombs which kill you, bombs which sometimes in order to not get hit by them you have to move away from the ball and die. No! No! No! Not cool, adds a challenge? Or an added challenge to purposely make the game intentionally harder so it takes longer to get anywhere? The response on the paddle also isn't as good as Arkanoid's, it moves OK but it's not as good. The plus side is you can tap the ball with the edge of it, and there's a good chance it'll fly off at an insanely obtuse angle, instead of flying right through it. Batty has ball trap type things on some stages that catch the ball and do unspeakable things to it, I don't particularly like these, as they're unavoidable, no degree of skill can stop the ball from entering their airspace at least once per level, once again....Not cool.

Sound is simple, music appears to not exist, Arkanoid gets a total win on that one.

I know this is a review of Batty, but for 2 almost identical concepts, one an official conversion, one a blatant but technically more impressive rip-off, and both released in the same year, I couldn't not compare the two really.

So at the end of that Batty is basically a very impressive Breakout clone with nice graphics, very good, if not at times erratic gameplay, options galore, slightly better power-ups than Arkanoid, but is it better? No not really, but this'll annoy you more, I'm giving it a 4, which I also gave to Arkanoid. I like Batty's polish, and desire to be the better game and I love Arkanoid's simplicity, and that it's more enjoyable than it's source material, even with it's inadequacies at times.

They both have good and bad points over each other. Batty's major advantage is though that it was a brilliant Breakout Clone that was given away free on a mag tape (and as part of a compilation later on). Whereas Arkanoid was a full price release, I got my "official" copy of Arkanoid on the Magnificent 7 compilation, near the end of 1987 for my 9th birthday if I remember rightly. I'd been playing it for a good while before then if you catch my drift. I may not have liked Arkanoid as much if I'd paid full price for just that game, but the dice were already thrown.

Batty gets to share a 4 with Arkanoid, they both deserve it really.

A really nice idea badly implemented!

It's as simple as that!

Ball Breaker has decent presentation, an options screen, several things available on that options screen.

It's a Breakout Clone in Iso-3D, and boy oh boy does it fucking suck the big fat hemorrhoids, infact it doesn't just suck them it chews on them a little bit before they burst.

Seriously what annoys me the most though is the makings of a great game are all here there's just a few design flaws that break the whole thing basically, not breaking in a good way, this game could have broke the mould instead it just turned it upside down, and shook it about a bit while the mould was trying it's hardest to set in humid conditions...

The game is sound in design that's a given, Breakout in Iso-3D wasn't that risky come 87' it could have been done a lot better than this.

Sounds are pretty much not there, in 48k, or 128k...blip, blip, blip.

Graphics are totally fine, even nice, but sharp visuals ain't worth sh*t without nothin' to back em' up. Thing that annoys me, the game could have been totally playable I mean 100% improved if the ball just had a shadow under it. Seriously it may not have made huge difference, but I really think it would have made it more playable, I really do. The ball just seems totally disembodied from the play area, and lining the paddle up when it speeds up, infact fuck it even when it's slow is total guess work.

As it stands the game is an unplayable mess at the best of times, and borderline fucking impossible once the ball speeds up...Seriously? There's nothing else to say it's a fucking mess!

This game makes me feel kind of sad though as I wanted to like it, as conceptually it's not bad at all, and it's a nice idea, and with just a few literally minor tweaks, and tweaks well within reason as well, it could have been great.

Sadly it's shit, and got buried in amongst all the regular 2D bat and ball games.

Bolloxpharm!

Oh fuck off!

I can't even be arsed to write a real review!

Dro(ss) Soft do it again, take a simple idea, and turn it into something even it's mother could hate.

Terrible game, annoying sounds, terrible collision, death when the ball is on the same level as the paddle, no last minute rescues here...Nope ball reaches the same level as the paddle, if the paddle is not dead centre, and I mean dead centre under it...DEATH!

Fucking shite!

Krakout from the loading screen makes me think yes indeed, as in crack one out, that's a mighty funny looking truncheon...

Some would say it's a Breakout clone, me personally would call it Evil Pong.

it's a great game in it's own right, but it's not that well implemented. The power-ups are what kind of make it shine, sadly that's a big factor in having any fun. Once the ball speeds up it's borderline unplayable...Unless you've got the extend power-up. One thing I do like about this game is when you uncover a power-up it stays there, basically back to that the ball rebounds off it, and it doesn't move, you've got to hit that spot again to get the power-up.

Now let me say why I made a big deal about the extend power-up, the game is practically fucking unplayable without it, fortunately it pops up practically every 2 bricks you hit, and I'm assuming the programmers knew this, because if it wasn't so common this would be a really, really, shit game.

Graphics are nice, sound is OK, presentation is decent with options available. You can even switch the side of the screen you play on, you don't like the bat on the right, flip the game backwards. That's a pretty precise preference right there, shit you think the game's easy flip it backwards for shit's n' giggles..

Overall, it's a good game, a little frustrating, a little annoying, but still a good game.

Not sure given the perspective, and the way it plays it's 100% fair to call it a Breakout Clone, but if that's what it is it's one of the good ones.

The game has OK graphics, the sound is fucking awful, and annoying, the concept is kind of nice.

The game is so flawed though I want to say it's fucking complete gash!

It isn't complete gash, but it's not far from it.

The game has a few pretty interesting ideas, it starts you off with 2 balls you have to deflect this is pretty fucked up, but you don't die if they hit the bottom of the screen, so long as you deflect them. If you don't you lose health I guess, and the bottom of the screen changes colour.

The solution, but also part of the problem is if you collect power-ups, you start to build a blocker on the bottom. the balls will bounce off that without you having to deflect them. You can also get a power-up that splits your paddle in 2, and they both work mirror image. this is actually quite a good power-up, as the majority of the time the main 2 balls strangely enough for how random they move when you're controlling a single paddle seem to adopt some kind of almost symmetry when you're controlling 2, but not always.

Worst powerup, or is the splitter, in any other Breakout clone it's fine. Split the ball into 3 means extra destruction, keep them in play as long as you can, but if 2 drop it's fine so long as 1 remains. Not in this game, getting the power-up that multiplies the balls is the worst thing you can do in this game it just means 1 more obstacle to stop hitting the bottom of the screen. It just gets annoying, it's bad.

This is not a good game at all, but it does contain some admirable ideas, and for that as crap as it is I'm not giving it the lowest score available. It contains some potentially great ideas, they were just so poorly implemented that it was about as much fun to play as getting kicked in the face, and I'm speaking from experience there. Getting kicked in the face is not fun....But neither is this game...

What a heap of shit!

It's actually not that badly programmed, but the gameplay style needs to be accentuated by naked girls in the background, that's just how kind of shit it is.

It's Pirate Software as well, but at least this isn't written by Harry price, it's at least an original game.

Well original code anyway, original game is more than stretching that definition.

Yep it's crap, but I almost wish it wasn't.

Even if you lived in a box, which would be totally unrealistic by 1987's standards, and you'd paid the £1.99 they charged for this it's apparent you'd be completely deluding yourself that you were enjoying this piece of shit. But I assume in this day and age nobody is that much of a spaz?

Oh my! Dragons Lair II...

A rather oddball outing to even attempt on the Speccy which manages to be almost as shit as the first game. You'd think there'd have been a lesson learned somewhere in there, but no money talks louder than common sense apparently.

I understand at the time that not a single one of the home computer versions were even going to scrape the Laserdisc based arcade machine in the looks department. Which was a perfect opportunity to make the home version play nothing like them, and maybe, just maybe be a semi-enjoyable experience. The arcade itself is a complete pile of crap relying 50% on memorization, and 50% on luck. There's little or no skill involved in hitting the button when it flashes, or mashing the joystick in the direction of the seizure inducing yellow light.

Much like the first Dragons Lair, graphics are OK with some rather ugly colour choices, sound is annoying, gameplay is practically none existent. Much like the first outing each level is a below par mini-game with the playability of a Game and watch with a broken button.

Not as shit as the first one, but still total shit! Can I smell a license cash in?

I think so! Pfffft!!!

Agent X II is a rather good sequel to the rather OK Agent X.

It's quite a good game, and much like the original has multi-format levels. The first of which is the longest and hardest, but pretty decent, you basically fly on your way to a base on the moon using a jetpack, and shoot lots of generic looking enemies. I like that the powerups are sweets, lemon drops, raspberry drops, and so on. It's a horizontally scrolling shooter basically, there's 2 boss encounters with the same big weird brain looking creature, and after the second you reach the moon base. The first level in 128k mode has a really nice AY Chip tune playing throughout, very atmospheric indeed. problem with this section is it's a bit of a memory test, if you know the order the enemies come in you can successfully navigate it, but it's gonna take a while.

After this there's a rather crap jump up the levels type vertical level, which isn't that much fun, but I'm pretty sure you can just keep jumping up til' you reach the top, after that the final confrontation with the Mad Prof, which is a breakout clone. It's pretty good, but the graphics are a bit naff, and it can take ages to actually win, maybe hours of bouncing the ball around.

OK I made it sound a little slapdash, but for under 2 quid at the time no complaints from me, and it's infinitely better than the first installment in the series.

I can't work out if it's a good or a bad thing the 3rd game never appeared? Could go either way?

I marked it a 4 on the site as I do enjoy it, it's a really good budget game, but I personally gave it a 3.5, which mathematically would be technically rounded up to a 4. So there we have it, cheap and cheerful wins again.

Short but sweet with this one!

Great little pool game played on a hexagonal table, and there's not much else to be said. You can play vs CPU, vs, a friend, or do trick shots.....There's a frame designer as well so technically the fun never ends.

Woohoo!

4/5 Great Budget Game!

Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Deathstalker, and to a lesser extent Beastmaster, and the Mighty Tor.....

There may have been a thing in the 80's for unhinged mullet heads in underpants killing things with a big sword.

This game was it!

Great graphics for the time and beheadings, and a totally unfair last boss.....

I tells yer' this game had Mortal Kombat licked long before the censors shit their pants, or before midway actually patented the formula of beheadings and massively unfair last bosses.

Great game.....Worth a 4 simply because it was great at the time, but continued to be great afterwards. It was surpassed, but years later to be fair...

Butch Hard Guy? He's not actually that hard....

I'd like to say something nice about this shambolic turd of a game, but I find it quite difficult.

The graphics are average, the collision detection is laughable, Butch's jump is useless, he falls anti-gravity style from the platforms, and usually into the path of the robot enemies. His punches, and kicks are flimsy and crap.

But the sad thing is for all it's total shite, there is a bizarre urge in there to prove the game wrong.....it is shite, it is total and utter crap, yet you may find yourself having another go. Just remember not to pick Veeeeeegan Mind Control as your control type.....A pretty unfunny joke even at the time, although to be fair, it's kind of your own fault if you did pick it.

Anyway it's laughable this game cost £7.95 at the time when £2.99 would have seemed steep for what you got. 20 Screens of broken bullshit...

There is a game hidden under the flaws, that may even be slightly fun, but the asking price at the time is what makes me mark it a 2 instead of a 3, this is a budget game, and nothing more, how dare they charge £7.95.

By 1987 standards that's like paying £30 now.

Thinking back would you be happy if you'd paid that much money for this shit?

Dizzy....Many hate....But many also love...

I'm not going to say the first game is the best, but it was pretty much the most pure as an adventure game, you could drag it on as long as you wanted, if you wanted to kill everything you could, or you could speed things up and avoid the enemies that might not get in your way. Personally I found carrying a certain item that did away with a certain type of enemy around until you'd made passing certain screens easier. I'd like to say it cheapened, and made an easy game harder or unnecessarily drawn out, but let's face it many games that are acclaimed these days are super guilty of that, and nobody seems to really take up arms.

I'm gonna cut this review kind of short, because for all the hate for the egg you can't deny that for £1.99 it was an excellent game, and the only problem I ever had with it was the bridge near the start that collapsed if you stepped in the middle of it, as I'm pretty sure that it made the game impossible to finish. My ma got this for me right when it came out, the guy at the electronics store near her work literally hailed her down and yelled "This is just new in I think your son will love it!", how right that goofy nerdy fucker was.

Looking back it was great, but that bridge stops it from getting the 5, especially since it becomes a chore to avoid that bridge every time you have to go by it.

Exolon...Cecco's gush fest...

You know after all these years I decided this game isn't that great.

Think about it, you walk along and shoot bubbles for about 9 hours, and what is not bubbles, are very generic enemies. Unfair deaths await you at the edge of the screen, and the game is actually pretty fucking slow.

So I'm gonna keep the review short, me and a good friend of mine played through this game from start to finish back in the day, and it's really not that great. You walk along shoot, walk along shoot, teleport, and walk along shoot, and you get a bonus if you don't use the exo-skeleton.

Really that's it, it goes on for hours like this, and lordy forbid you accidentally shoot off one of your rockets, better get ready to reset the game if you do, because if you can't blow up the weird looking thingies you're stuck......OK Excellent game!

3.5/5 as it's slightly above average, and I don't want to get assassinated in my sleep for saying it's crap, but take a good look at it, it's got all the flaws of a bad game, but since it was a Cecco, people seem to think it's amazing, and other than looking nice after all these years I'm not afraid to point out it's terrible flaws.

I used to be in the camp that this was an excellent game, but really it's not at all. It's OK, and it looks nice, but that's about it really.

Treasure 100 points! Eat Food to Gain Health! Shots now hurt other players!......Oh no hang on that was Gauntlet wasn't it?

Duet is a rubbish Gauntlet clone with crap looking army men instead of monsters, and ludicrously touted as a pseudo-sequel to Commando. Glad it wasn't officially released as Commando '87, as I'm sure that would've left a very sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths.

A poor game that was already surpassed before it was even released.

2/10

Gunstar! Oooooh It's actually not bad!

A decent vertical shooter for just under 2 quid, at the time not bad at all. There's a lot of other games from 1987 that cost a lot more than £1.99, that weren't as good as this. This is a good budget title that surpasses the £1.99 mark. I'd not have been upset if I'd paid £3.99 for it.

The game looks good, sounds OK, has a decent challenge for the player. Of course once you go round it once, you've pretty much seen it all and it becomes a high score challenge basically, there's no ending, round and round you go. This game however is great for a quick go.

You have a lives count, but really, you may as well only have 1 life, as when you die you start again from the first phase. I do very much like the fact that every time you start you get a new pilot, with new stats, but the problem with that is also pointing to the right from the start every time you die.

Defeats the purpose of having lives.

Anyway flaws aside great game, and perfect for a quick go.

3.5/5

Sounds like an awesome game, and it really could have been.....Couldn't it?

Unfortunately Technocop was shite! I did quite like it at the time though, annoyed me the Speccy versions bosses, or "villains" all look exactly the same, and pretty much behave the same. When on the other systems they were all different. I didn't actually notice this til' even after playing the Amiga version at a mates house, cos' even though we could all play the Speccy version we were all shite at the miggy version.

I even went as far as hiring Razorsoft's Megadrive version of it, that was the moment I realised just how crap it actually was. Even with the different "villains" to catch it still played like absolute crap. It dawned on me just how out of date it was when it was released on the home comps roughly 4-6 years before Razorsoft brought it out. The different villains were all really generic as well. Guy with Mohawk and machine gun, girl on jetbike, fat man with flamethrower, and so forth. It added nothing really, which made me realise that the villains not being different on the Speccy actually wasn't that bad.

The graphics are serviceable although dreadfully cartoony on the Speccy, whereas every other version attempted seriousness. Strangely enough though I found the driving section on the Speccy version to be considerably fairer, and more playable than versions released on machines twice as powerful as it. This, and a few nostalgic memories are pretty much all that saves me from giving the game a 1.

Techno-Cop defo wasn't worth £7.99 (or a whopping £12.99 on disk.....Remember this was 1988), even the budget re-release price of £3.99, was a little steep, about £1 too expensive if you ask me. I suppose £2.99, would have been more reasonable, you just may have got your moneys worth at that price.

So not very good at all really, and why on the loading screen does our hero look like an aged Flash Gordon?

If Willy's Mansion was in space, and was in fact a huge tower situated on top of a mine, and all the enemies were humans, and Willy was a humanoid Dinosaur creature with a bloody big gun, it'd be a great game, but still not as good as Rex.

Rex actually is all the above, and more, although to be fair is absolutely nothing to do with Jet Set Willy. Rex is a mercenary who has travelled to Planet Zenith to destroy all the humans basically, and the great tower, and that's basically the story, and that's about all you need really.

Rex starts in the caves at the mine entrance, and from here you advance through the mine killing, or wrecking everything that gets in your way, until you reach the Great Tower, and then continue to do pretty much the same until your encounter with "im' upstairs", erm? No wrong game, I mean "The Big Squidgy thing".

One thing you'll notice when playing Rex is the use of colour, the game is very colourful, and this is because it's a flick screen platformer, but don't let that put you off, this game is every bit as good as a game that scrolls. Sprites are all one colour, but this isn't a problem at all. The sprites are small, but fantastically detailed. looking at still screens you may think to yourself well the humans look like nothing more than stick men in space suits, and you'd be half right, but it's the animation that makes them so charming, the animation on the humans is superbly charismatic, you'll love watching them walk about. However you won't love them blowing your brains out too much, so shoot first if you can. The mine is teaming with life, trains transport ore and minerals along tracks, humans guard and patrol in sequence, and others chase after you.

One thing you'll notice is whilst playing, this game is not a cake walk, no this game is hard. The humans aren't your only problem, laser, and machine gun placements riddle the mine. Some of these can be shot quite easily, others may require the use of a smart bomb. Also when the going gets tough, and Rex finds himself mobbed, which can happen more than you'd imagine, you have a limited amount of shields that can be used to defend yourself. Humans walking into your shield will also go splat! Muahahahahaha!

Don't worry about the difficulty too much though, this game has a pretty fair learning curve. You will get a little further each time you play, and multiple routes are available through the mine, so a little experimentation can often be rewarded.

Controls are tight, responsive, and very good, you'll find that after playing this for a while, you justly will not be able to blame them for your own crapness, no matter how much you want to.

Sounds like a great game so far eh? Well this is only the first part, the game was so big and colourful, and awesome they had to make it 2 loads. After completing the mine, you get the code for the Great Tower which you can then load in and enter the code from the mine to play it.

The Great Tower is a lot more linear than the mine, multiple routes are not available to the player, but increased difficulty and absolute chaos are. The mine was basically just a training program for the Great Tower. However though if you actually make it through the Tower and survive your encounter with the Big Squishy Thing, you can safely pat yourself on the back and say well done.

Rex is a bloody great game that was worth every penny of the £8.99 of it's original asking price. Possibly my fave game of 1988, definitely the best platformer released that year, by miles. I'd have said the £14.99 for the disk was OK, but really it was a bit pointless, most people with a disk drive also had a tape deck, and most people with a +3 also had a tape deck. There's no multi-load as such. The only perk of that extra 6 quid is being able to go straight to the tower after the mine I Suppose. I'd have preferred the tape version, and 3 Mastertronic titles personally.

A well deserved 5/5 this game is Ace Skillo, or as Codemasters would say "Absolutely Brilliant!" (But it actually was).

Warlock....Almost as crap as the series of movies with the same name!

Warlock is a decidedly poor 3D isometric game with crap sprites, and bollocks sound, shat out by one of the most overrated, and obnoxious companies to ever grace the world of computer, and video games.

The screens are overloaded to the point of being barely playable, and it actually plays like it was authored by a 9 year old using 3D Game Maker. Although don't say that out loud in public as I'm sure Langdell will deny it, claim the code belonged to his company, and sue you.

I was so scared to say the company name incase I got took to court that I didn't!

Oh fuck it! Edge! EDGE! EDGE-ITTY EDGE!!!!

Shite game by the way....

Berk! Feed me!

Nope not in this game.....

Boni has ended up down the Trap Door kidnapped by a headless bird or bat skeleton, and it's up to Berk to jump down there and rescue him, and that's about it for a story.

Gone is the free roaming fun of wandering round the castle basement, solving puzzles and whipping up moderately disgusting culinary delights for 'im upstairs, and in it's place is a crappy pseudo platformer. You can switch between Berk, and Drut the spider in a rather pathetic, and paper thin attempt to solve the puzzles, which actually seem to be annoyingly impossible jumps, and sections of getting past enemies that kill you over, and over again without actually touching you. Doing these parts usually involves eating a sweet which gives you an ability, or "power-up" of some kind. Some of these sweets only last a short amount of time, some only last for a single attempt. Don't get it wrong, or you can't continue with the game. Such game breaking bullshit should have been eradicated from all software by 1987.

Trap Door all the way as far as I'm concerned, this sequel was borderline unplayable cack with ropey collision detection, and with very little margin for error, get something wrong, or time something wrong and you might as well restart.

Should’ve been called Through the Crap Door.

Whereas if the first game had’ve been put out by Code Masters they could’ve put their signature “Absolutely Brilliant!” all over the cover, and they wouldn’t have been talking out their arse for change...

An absolute stain compared to the original game.

Oh jeez! one of the crappiest most overrated graphical wankfests from the Amiga finds it's way onto a machine it has no real business being on.

I hate this game, absolutely hate it, in pretty much all forms. The game is a frustrating mess with next to no gameplay at all.

The Speccy version is pretty much devoid of the soundtrack, which is the one redeeming feature from the Amiga version, that wasn't outdated on release. Nice graphics do not make a game, and the original "Beast" is a prime example of this.

I'm however giving the Speccy version a 2 instead of a 1, as they managed to faithfully convert "The Beast" in it's entire shitness to a machine that supposedly couldn't do it. It's still a fucking pile of complete and utter shit, but it's here in glorious yellow monochrome (and a few different colours later on I suppose) for the whole world to be unimpressed with all over again. It's also multi-load hell, best use an emulator to play it if you feel inclined to waste your life doing so.

Such effort to convert a massive shit, I feel the programmers skills could have been used to convert a much better game. I'm not knocking the people that did convert this, they did a great job, of converting this mediocre pile of wank as best they could.

It's not the programmers fault if the source material is a seeping yeast infected gash waiting to be sterilised with a victorian steam iron....


Great conversion of a terrible game, not the programmers fault at all! They did the best they could with what they had.

Sadly enough the remake of Shadow of the Beast on Playstation....actually softened me towards the series. It's not an amazing game, but it made me hate the entire series slightly less, as it's actually fun for a little while. Who would've thought after all these years a game based on the license that plays and looks pretty much nothing like the original might be good....Oh hang on...

This was actually a fun game with some great features, and some surprisingly violent imagery for a time when such things were quite frowned upon by stuffy nosed politicians, and PC-Brigade types.

It was quite a fun game, and actually looked, and sounded pretty decent.

But no sorry, any game that is released in a bugged form that is impossible to finish because of said bug is a piece of shit.

No POKEs, or bug fixed releases forthcoming makes it even worse, a complete an utter failure of what would have been an otherwise really good and atmospheric game.

It's a shame, because if it wasn't broken I'd have gave it a 3 or a 4....

This is an absolutely terrible game.

But it has a certain charm I like for some reason?

It's actually as much fun to play as being repeatedly kicked in the bollocks with a golf shoe, but hey some people will pay for that type of kink supposedly HAHAHA!

It's predecessor Jock and the Time Rings was a pretty bog standard flick screen maze game released by Pre-Shaw Brothers Shatlantis, but was considerably less drab, and terrible than this sequel.

But that's not really saying that much.

Cheap and nasty you could say if the game didn't cost £7.99 at release.

The Fist series seems to be a little confused to be honest? The original Way of the Exploding Fist was an amazing game at the time, and I personally think destroyed International Karate with minimal effort.

Fast forward a few years and we get the really confused Fist II, which seemed like it was set in Feudal times but in China from the Jungle-esque backdrops of the game, and the bamboo, and mud/wood huts, although still using the Karate based move set from Way of the Exploding Fist.

Fast forward once again to 1988, and IK+ has pretty much trumped Way of the Exploding Fist, and Fist II barely even counts against it.

What can we do to rival IK+, and regain our throne? "I know let's take the inferior practice mode from the B-Side of Fist II, and add 1 extra person in the mix"....On top of that we'll take it from a Karate game, to a weird Eastern Asian based Jungle adventure back to modern days, and have those sprites from the second game fighting in front of Piccadilly Circus (Or maybe it's meant to be Times Square in New York? Who knows?). That'll be a winner.

It's not at all, it's a cheap and dirty fix no doubt recycling code, and sprites from Fist II, and putting out a game which is kind of fun, but still a massively inferior game compared to the game they were attempting to rival.

The Fist series may have dominated the Karate games early on, but International Karate came up with a clear unbeatable winner later on down the line.

If IK+ was Blade Runner, this game would be Android. If IK+ was Indiana Jones, this game would be Raiders of the Lost Code. If IK+ was Universal Soldier, this game would be Solo (Mario Van Peebles movie).

Infact sod the bad cheap movie rip-off comparisons. Let's just Say the Fist series lead at one time, but if IK+ was any Hollywood movie, then Fist + is the Bollywood equivalent. Yeah it's fun, it's campy, yeah it might be based on great source material, but you know secretly deep down it's crap, it's made on a budget of about 50 quid, churned out almost daily like a batch of Country Life "Buttah!", and much like the characters in this game the fighting pretty much involves dancing around in the streets like a bunch of idiots instead of actual fighting.

Not a terrible game, just a crap attempt to imitate a superior game, after a massive fall from grace.

I did some drugs and played this! It was great!

Possibly one of the biggest piles of crap I have ever played!

Fortunately back in the 80's I never actually owned a real copy of this or at least I don't think I did? But I know at least one of my friends did. I acquired a copy of it with my second Spectrum way back in 1993. I didn't pay for it, but I feel like I should've been paid to take it off the previous owners hands.

I do recall the Electronics shop where I used to get my budget games from, up the road to where I lived had it in there and used to sell it for only £1.59, as they did with a lot of the budget games they couldn't shift.

Anyway Supposedly you are Aladdin, and you have to fly your magic carpet through a load of caves to recover your magic lamp from thieves.


More like guide your quadriplegic Jelly Baby, as he sits on a post it note through several screens where almost every pixel is lethal. This game is borderline impossible. Avoid deadly Swiss Cheese, overweight pigeons, floors, ceilings, walls, and oxygen as you attempt to progress more than 3 inches from the starting point.

Supposedly the lamp is guarded by a ferocious fire breathing dragon......Good luck ever getting there!

Utter shit!

I never bought this game thankfully.

Utter dross, terrible game, and even by 1984's standards the graphics, and inlay art are bordering on racism.
If this game had've been part of a larger program it may have been OK, as a standalone game it falls way short of anything worth playing.

If this had maybe been shoved out by Mastertronic for £1.99 it may have been slightly more palatable, or at least less of a blow when you loaded it up and realised it was shite. But over a fiver for this was an utter rip.
I understand it was 1984, but that's not really an excuse this was Ocean, and by this time bedroom coders had put out better games as a solo author, not as a collective of "professionals".
5 programmers worked on this game, count 'em 5, and this is all they could come up with?

It's works like this that makes me doubt Ocean were ever the so called powerhouse people seem to think they were.

It's been over 30 years, and I still have no idea how to play this game.

I bought this game back in about 1986, or 1987, thankfully I bought the Firebird Re-Release, and didn't end up paying the ridiculous original asking price of £9.99, that would have psychologically damaged me beyond repair.

As I'm sure with most kids back in the 80's full price games came along usually at birthdays, and Christmas, maybe Easter if you were lucky. Wasting one of those opportunities on this drudge fest would not have been a good thing.

First things first ignore the instructions they are lies they don't work, just make the game up as you go along. Skateboard into things, punch people, get punched, and walk backwards and forwards across the same few screens over and over. I have no idea if there is anything else beyond that? I don't think I have ever successfully used an item, I think I've had them vanish, from my inventory, but nothing actually appeared to happen.


So....

In a nutshell it's Shite!

An old friend of mine paid £2.99 for this heap of dogshit!

Haha! What a complete mug!

Glad it wasn't me, that's for sure!

It's one of those delightfully terrible curios, that it would almost be worth owning a real copy, just so you can say you own one of the worst games ever released on the Spectrum.

If a game emerged with this title these days the garden in question would actually probably just be as lethal as the garden portrayed in this game.

You'd risk life, and limb as you tried not to fall over the rusty wheelbarrow, as you tip toed through the patch of filth encrusted used heroin needles, shimmied carefully through the square of dogshit, only to be attacked by the 2 sickly malnourished and half crazed with starvation pit bulls that laid all of those turds in the first place.

You'd then have to take a running leap to clear the massive pile of broken glass, left behind by broken bottles of almost expired 50p a bottle on clearance Spar lager, and landing safely in a pile of crushed plastic White Storm, Frosty Jack and Pulse cider bottles.

Only then can you safely clip your ganja plants. After that it's s trip to the jobcentre to sign on, and then off to the backlane behind the local chippy to sell the weed from the garden to a 12 year old.

Sadly the game in question isn't anywhere near as interesting as a day in the life of one of those gutter rat people who live a symbiotic relationship with a Diadora Shellsuit and a pair of second hand Britsh Knights Basketball boots.

I suppose the game was alright for a freebie, but the rest of the tape it came on was actually more interesting. Still not as bad as a Harry Price game, although a game like Ned's Garden would've probably made a perfect template for one of his pieces of work.

Clive Townsend's somewhat diabolical swan song on the Speccy. I understand the shitness of this game was not entirely Clive's fault due to "complications" at the time, but still.

It gets a 2/5 instead of a 1 because all the swearing was entertaining for about 25 seconds.

What I say to this game?

"Fuck off! Wank Head!"

;)

More like 2 girls 1 cup.

Or at least there's just as much shit involved.

Now that I look back I played this game way more than it deserved back in the 80's. Now that I think back to that time, me, and a couple of my friends actually liked that game for a while.

Until we discovered one awesome thing! If you hold the jump button down you're invincible, and you don't die in water, and you can also jump into and across rocks.....

Breakthru was potentially the easist speccy game ever made. However sometimes you'd get stuck in an endless loop of Scenery on the last level, and eventually die if you let go of the jump button.

Basically a broken mess that should not have been released in the state it was in, and was an absolute joke that it was. Full price for this as well, daylight robbery.


No real fond memories here, I think I dropped my rose tinted spex and broke them on the way to throw this pile of crap straight through the window of the nearest WHSmiths.

If this is all it takes to be a Ninja Master sign me up!

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Game Over!

Well I can safely say this game is a bunch of arse! Glad I got it for free with my Spectrum +3 cos' even £1.99 was too much for this poop! Even the discounted £1.59 my local electronics store sold it for was too much...and yes I did actually buy this there, but luckily the stars, karma, and universe were in perfect alignment that day as when I got it home and tried to load it, it didn't work! I'm sure I swapped it for something equally as crap, but that story is lost to the mists of time. Which is probably just as well now that I think about it.

Lucky me!

Cheekah's Exploits with a facelift.

Nice one 'Arry!

He even used the built in editor with the original game to design some of the levels for this one, then included it with his rip-off! Then charged money for it, it was originally a magazine cover tape freebie!

You cheeky bastard!

I reviewed this game about 9 years ago for Paul Johns, and Michael Frasers ZX Spectrum Bible. I've been avoiding reviewing any of the games I reviewed for that book, just because well why do it again. So I'm gonna do something I wouldn't usually do. I still have texts from back then so here goes!

Taken from Paul Johns, and Michael Frasers ZX Spectrum Bible from way back in 2009.


Kickbox vigilante


I'm sure I've seen this before???

Oh yes I have it was called Yie Ar kung Fu!

Zepplin released this rather average one on one fighter way back in 1991, during the Speccy's twilight years a game like this would probably be unacceptable, IF it was full price. As it stands though Kickbox Vigilante was only 2.99 and quite OK for that price really. It's influences from other games are so shamelessly blatant it's like they didn't even try to subtly hide them at all. The guy you control looks like Oolong from Yie Ar Kung Fu, the first guy you fight is a big fat bald dude (no he doesn't fly at you, it's not that shameless), the second a ninja, and so on.

The gameplay itself is a mixed bag, and if you're willing to not take it too seriously it was possible to get some enjoyment from your few quid, I've loaded this game up a few times during the age of emulation, and stuck playing it for at least 20 minutes each time, sometimes longer. The moves are a mix between shameless rip offs and comical, for instance you have 2 low punches one is basically Oolong from Yie Ar kung Fu's downwards low punch, and the other looks like some kind of spazzy backhand, which looks like if it was the real world it would hurt you more as it only ever seems to connect with your enemies knee. The front kick is fantastic I still laugh at it now it looks like your little kickbox geezer is taking a penalty shot or actually purposely aiming for the bollocks haha. The flying kick looks like a poorly executed ballet maneuver, and when kneeing your guy looks like he's trying to impersonate the guitarists dancing from the video to the Fine Young Cannibals "Johnny Come Home". The high kick is one of the few sensible moves and that's exactly what it is, and all it is, simply a high kick. The punch is brutal looking as you step forward whilst doing it, and the headbutt although silly looking seems to inflict quite a bit of damage.

One of the games really annoying features is the fact you have to beat each opponent twice using 1 energy bar, whereas as soon as you get beat at anytime it's game over, no lives no continues, nothing. But I suppose given the game only has 5 (or is that 4?) enemies before it loops back to the start, I suppose they needed to drag it out a bit more. The other annoying thing is if you can get your enemy in the right spot you can "1 move" them to death, get them in the corner and just hold down the key combo for high kick or low punch and watch their energy vanish.

Sonically the game is a little dire, there's no music that I could tell, and the only sounds are when you or you enemy connect with each other, granted though you get a nice crunch when you hit your enemy, and they get a less impressive high pitched "peep".

Graphically it's nice in places the main sprite moves quite nicely (although rather oddly at times too), and a couple of the enemies do too, but a couple of the enemies like the first one for instance seem a little awkward almost wooden at times. As far as I can also tell the background never changes either, which isn't that important but does make the game a little stale after a while.

All in all a lot of mixed feelings towards this game, I think I owned it first time around, I defo played it on a real Speccy, and I think I may have liked it better when I was younger. I'll say play it just to see for yourself, as die hard fighting nostalgists may get a laugh out of it, and people who don't really like fighting games can just laugh at it.

I guess it was worth the £2.99 as I suppose after all these years I've gotten my moneys worth out of it.



That's what I wrote roughly 9 years ago for the series of books mentioned above, and I haven't really changed my opinion too much, it's a cheap and cheerful if not decidedly average Yie Ar Kung Fu clone, nothing more, nothing less really.

looking back even though it probably would have also been crap, this game should have been a platformer, a top down shooter, or a multi-format level game.

As it turns out it's a beat em' up without any fighting....Well OK that's stretching it a little bit. It's a 2.5D shoot em' up, and it's quite frankly crap!

I never actually managed to finish the game way back when it came out, as well I have no idea if me and my friends (Who's copy it was, once again glad I didn't pay for this) version of Predator was bugged, or it was every copy that was broken, but the game would freeze up at the finale (Although I have encountered this problem during emulation as well).
We never got to call the Predator one ugly motherfucker, and watch him blow himself up, as our hero took a running jump into some mud to avoid a thermo nuclear blast, and survived.


For shame!

Guilty pleasure of mine.

I have played this game way more than any human ever should have, and I may or may not have got to the end way back when.

...and I can still kind of play it these days.

It only cost me £1.59, and I actually liked it, but looking back I know it was total bollocks!

I'm still gonna give it 3, because even though it's dire it has held my attention since I was a kid, and sadly I know I will come back and play it again one day.

This game was complete shit!

But being based on a character from KP skips that was kind of obnoxious and stupid anyway what could one truly expect?

Well a motorbike racing game, or a stunt game or something moderately cliched, but half amusing.

No you got to drive around town, doing none quests for dumbfucks, and that's if you could even find said dumbfucks, and not end up walking into empty houses.

What a complete waste of life!

I never did manage to fuck Gretha :(

Bollocks of the highest order!

Cursed IP even at the time, the arcade game was shit! The home computer versions of the game were all shit, regardless of system! I mean it also doesn't help that the actual movie it was all based on was also complete shit! Not to mention a creepy ego trip for the ever skin tonally challenged "King of Pop".

About a year later Sega managed to make a semi-serviceable platformer for the Megadrive/Genesis, and Master System.

But that doesn't save this heap of crap from anything.

Best thing to do now is drink a King Size can of "Jesus Juice" call up my 14 year old friend Gavin for a sleepover, and take a fistful of horse tranquilizers.


What a party!


.....Did I go too far?

Jeez! What a stress fest!

After playing this I really need a snout!

Beat em' ups or fighters in "iso-3D" always fail.

Glad that it was once again a friends copy of this I played all them years ago.

Revisiting it via emulation is equally horrifying...

I have no idea why they even bothered with a sequel?

The original game was a flawed unfair piece of shit with gamebreaking "Don't get it right first time, you have to restart" syndrome. I don't care if it has Cecco's name on it, and a few fairies with their tits out, it was shite!

More of the same eh? hmmmm? Great idea that is!

For once I'm left Speechless!

I was gonna go on and on about how I didn't play this game til' I got it on a Crash! Covertape, and how even though it was years after release I'd have still thought it was shite back in 1986 due to my pretty good ability to retrospectively look at games I missed first time around.

Nah I don't need to YOR's declaration of this game as an unplayable nonce made me laugh so hard I literally spat alchoholic Root Beer all over my monitor and had to wipe it off....

He's right though ;)

Piss poor effort in BASIC, that Virgin should have rejected. Although it was 1983, so probably normal for the time.

The authors music on side 2 of the tape was way better than the game.

But for all this is a shite game I really wish I still had my real copy of it.

The infamous game that wouldn't load!

I got bought this game as a gift something like twice for my birthday by 2 different people one year, then once for my birthday, and twice for Christmas the following year.

None of those copies worked!

Guess I dodged a bullet, but I'm breaking the mould a little here, this is the first game I'm reviewing based on that particular experience. I know the game is a pile of crap, and I know I'd probably give it a 1, because shooters in iso-3D work almost as badly as fighting games in the same perspective. But I haven't actually played this game at all...


To add insult to injury way back in 1998 when I got my first PC the emulator image of this game wouldn't load either.

I'm aware this problem has been fixed, but after all these years I just outright refuse to actually play this shitfest now as I know it would basically be a waste of time!


Some might say I'm being unfair as I've never played it, but I know it's shit, I don't actually need to play it. You know when you just know?

Yup right here that feeling, for reals!

Worthless, average, boring, fiddly, shameless cash in.

Let's buy a license based on the 1980's potentially most popular Sci-Fi show ever. But then make the game a boring trudge-o-thon with no fucking lizard people in it!

Yep V has no actual V's in it.

...and the old Jewish guy in the show who shows the kid how to graffiti the alien propaganda poster with a "V for Victory" would be pissed off, that's for sure!

The only V this game should have anything to do with is 2 fucking fingers!


2 fingers right up!

Spinads?

….More like Gonads!

This is the worst Bodega ever! I can't even buy a swiss cheese and ham there!

Bad arcade conversion.

But I'm not gonna knock it too bad, as I paid the budget re-release price of £2.99 in 1989. Hilarious thing is I remember buying it from WHSmiths, and seconds before I picked it up on the shelf I'd seen one of the stockers move all the full price versions of this game they still had leftover infront of the budget versions.

I made a point of digging one out from behind the 5 or 6 large case £9.99 copies and saying "Oh this one's only £2.99!".

If looks could kill I'd have been dead almost 3 decades ago.

Anyway the game does not play much like it's parent machine at all, enemies just seem to be randomly thrown at you, or there's a mass bald spot when none come at all. The graphics are serviceable, but could have been infinitely better. I think the whole game is kind of there, but it seemed to loop back to the start after about 3 or 4 levels? I don't know if I missed something?

Not a great game but I have played worse conversions, and to be fair it's not too much damage done to the gaming world, it's not like Xain'd Sleena was a really well known arcade machine anyway. I'm left thinking half the people who played it probably didn't even realise it was an arcade conversion, and really Xain'd Sleena wasn't exactly a phenominal arcade experience anyway.

Shite game which only saw the light of day due a disgusting peado!

Nuff said I think!

Brainache?

More like piss poor unresponsive controls and eyestrain!

This game has some of the worst colour clash to grace the Speccy since William Wobbler.

It's almost playable on a black and white CRT TV though, not a great selling point for sure.

I remember this arcade conversion being quite highly acclaimed around about the time of it's release.

But quite frankly I have no idea why? I'll be honest the conversion for all it's Poorly colour schemed monochrome clutter, is basically a semi decent conversion. Sadly the subject material was average at best, the arcade itself was a bit crap, and I understand the feudal aspect, many enemies coming! This is War! Let's ride into battle on a horse and cut down loads of the bastards! A classic case of nice idea, but shit execution.


I'm feeling like if Capcom had've made the first game in the series like it's sequel Tenchi o Kurau II/Warriors of Fate it may have been a much better game, however by 1990 if this had've been the case, the Speccy version may have ended up being a sluggish shitfest like Final Fight ended up being. The smaller sprites, and general shoddiness of the arcade itself gave the Speccy a fighting chance at doing a decent version.

Converting the sequel to the Speccy would have been way unrealistic, as even though it's a 1991 Capcom CPS Changer game it pretty much pushed that system to the point where you'd think it was a CPS2 game.

Quite frankly it would never have happened on the Speccy, and let's face it, sadly it's probably just as well. Dynasty Warriors though, as it stands is a decent conversion, of an average arcade, but when the original game is shit, how can I give the Speccy higher marks?

No sympathy vote here I'm afraid!

I wish I could believe the hype! I wish I could be sympathetic to the effort that did go into this game.

But no! It was never going to work, and making it fixed directional shooting, and cutting the amount of enemies down, and doing 8x8 masked character jumpy bollocks.

It's a different bloody game altogether, sorry, but no!

Home computer versions of this were never going to work. Either it'd be 8 keys 4 for movement, and 4 for the gun, which surely would've brought on early arthritis, or using both player 1, and player 2's joystick ports for 1 player.

Both considerably more impractical than 2 dedicated joysticks, or a controller with a D-Pad, and 6 buttons. Or later on for re-releases a controller with 2 analogue sticks.

Bad!

Shanghai - China!
Karate - Japan!

No!

It's errors like this that piss me off even 30 years later or so, a blatant attempt to throw anything together for a few quid, besides the fact it's a crap game as well doesn't help.

Shite game, but better and considerably more convincing than actual Wrestling.

You are Kwon! Kwon is Strong!

Load of crap!

Take Street Fighter, buy the game engine code for a fiver from Go! Cut the backgrounds down to a static screen, instead of scrolling, and make them really stereotypical. Then take Street Fighters usual racially stereotyped characters, and make them even worse, and you're getting close to this games end goal.


Keep the exact same move set from the game you used the code from for the main character. Make the characters you're fighting do massive amounts of damage compared to your attacks, and make it so you have to beat them 5 times each, and you have a long drawn out piss poor clone of a game that wasn't that great in the first place.


Fight a Russian dog called "Shepski", fight a German prostitute who's built like a brick shithouse called "Helga", fight a Matador called "Miguel", then to top it off end the game with a Syrian called Sagan who has a rocket launcher strapped to his back, but only has about 6 frames of animation, and practically kills you with 1 hit.

Pure win! By which I mean the complete opposite.

Always thought this game looked good way back when, glad I never got it, I'd have cried.

Nearing the end of the Speccy's commercial life Ocean had some kind of weird 180 degree turn!

This game much like Navy Seals is a game related to that turn. Instead of doing their usual and making a shit game based on a good movie they released a really good game based on a completely shit movie. Funny how things work out sometimes, and I'd scoff usually, but like I mentioned Navy Seals is another prime example of this phenomenon.

Hudson Hawk as it stands is a cartoony affair, and a platformer with great level design, enough colour used for it not to look bland and boring, with decent responsive controls, and it's actually really fun to play. I'm still not sure at the time if it was really worth the £10.99 asking price, or the insane £15.99 for a disk version, but the £3.99 budget re-release price was really good value for money.

As much as I want to hate this game, I can't, it's really good, really, really, good, and proof that even in it's twilight years the good ol' Speccy could still produce a high quality and fun game.

I was never a huge fan of Dan Dare when I was a kid, even though they tried to keep him going for way, way longer than his welcome, he was pretty much dying a death in the 1980's. Suffering from the typical situation of Sci-Fi characters from previous decades falling into that cheesy 50's Sci-Fi type affair, and already being considerably outdated at the time. It's kind of like Marvel now, why when exposed to all that Gamma Radiation didn't Bruce Banner just die a horrible slow agonizing death like most humans would?

Anyway I kind of lost it for a second.....

Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, and it's sequels soon after in the following years actually managed to breathe a little bit of life back into the old Space Colonel as it were. I don't need to explain that really, I can just let the game speak for itself.

So the story goes the Mekon has hollowed out an Asteroid, and set it on a propelled course to collide with Earth unless the Earth government bend to his will it will destroy the planet. Well Dan's not gonna stand for that shit so him and Digby jump in the Anastasia and off they go towards the Asteroid!

After a rather nice cinematic intro which may I add was not something particularly common in 1986, Dan is beamed down to the surface of the Asteroid by Digby, and the game begins proper. The game could best be described as an arcade adventure, as there is some mild puzzling to be solved, and there are items to pick up. There is a jump function as well as the usual run, duck, and shoot, but this game doesn't have a great deal of platforming really.

The goal of the game is to find the 5 SOS keys for the self destruct sequence of the Asteroid, and escape after priming it. However you only have 2 hours to do it, and although Dan cannot actually be physically killed during the game, if his energy runs out, not only do the Treens put him in jail, but it takes a good chunk of your 2 hours away from you as well. This is explained as the Treens knocking Dan over the head and him taking time to recover from the ordeal. Fair enough I suppose.


The sound is functional I'll give it that, but the games visuals are where it shines. The Sprites are all green, but the backgrounds, playfield upon which the characters move, and foregrounds, are very nicely detailed, and also very nicely coloured. Also to add a nice effect at points during the game when Dan is captured, or performs a key action that is integral to progression, comic book style boxes appear on screen. This is a really nice touch, and shows that the programmers at Virgin at the time really tried to focus on the games Comic Book origins, and try to keep the game in spirit with that.


That's about all I really need to say, the game is extremely playable, extemely well presented with so much extra polish that wasn't really a necessity at the time of the games release but infinitely adds to the atmosphere because of it, and even if it wasn't there the game would still be pretty good if it was a bare bones experience.


Also I'd like to add that the Speccy version is the best version of this game out there. Much better than the weird condensed and orange, and purple mess that is the CPC version, and INFINITELY better than the crapfest that is the weird Commode 64 version. Where I might add Dan wanders round at a snails pace, the Treens look like they have fish bowls or lighbulbs on their heads, and for some reason Dan is followed round by a really annoying Aardvark like creature. It has more of an actual comic book intro, but the colours on it are awful. Dan Looks like he's been nursing a burger, and pie addiction, the Mekon looks like Barry Norman, and Digby looks like Rodney Dangerfield.....Sometimes less is more I think.

Speccy version for the win, and this game wins it's max point score with great ease. A true classic!

£9.95 at release was quite a bit, but it's a licensed game nonetheless, and may have just been worth that. It's budget re-release a year or so later at £1.99 was an absolute steal Ricochet Software got some really good licenses early on and this gem along with classics like Way of the Exploding Fist, and Aliens, just so happens to be one of them.

I never understood why this game got the praise it did, it's another boring multi-level format Ocean license.

The first level is a pretty bog standard platformer.

Then a driving level which is pretty crap, some fun twists like grappling lampposts to turn quickly. Why it doesn't rip batmans arm off I don't know?

Solve a crappy puzzle thing.

The Batplane to stop the balloon full of poison gas, boring, and super unfair in places.

...and the last level back to bog standard generic platforming.

Not a great game on the Speccy, but I remember some of my friends practically cumming their pants over the Amiga version at the time, which was exactly the same shite game with a lick of paint. A year or so later Sunsoft managed to make a version for the Megadrive with better levels, gameplay, and graphics, but it was still average at best.

Not a good game, and the rose tinted spex are off for one of those later Speccy title type explanations, budget houses were bringing out better games than this in 1989, and charging between 1/5th-1/3rd of the price for them.

.....and what makes this a really sad state affairs is that Ocean brought out Batman: Caped Crusader a year before this game, and it was great, pretty much 2 games in one, and both way more involved in the Batman Universe than this tosh. Shit! Even John Ritmans nonesensical iso-3D Batman was a pleasure compared to this pile of steaming nob!....and I hate iso-3D games!

Average yet coin munching beast of an arcade machine, gets a pretty decent conversion.

I'll give it 3 since the Speccy version even though brutally difficult still is actually easier than the arcade version which is pathetically difficult, and not that much fun once you get past about level 2, and use a credit roughly every 8 seconds.

But in the age of emulators I've discovered that the arcade is really not that fun, the levels are a bit crap, and the bosses are very unimaginative. I get the impression TAD weren't expecting people to ever get to the end of the game in the arcades, as the game actually becomes worse as it progresses.

Surely in that case it's not the Speccy's fault that it's version is actually also quite dull?

Dizzy (Or to a lesser degree Seymour) lite.

Little Puff was pretty much obviously aimed at little kids in 1990, and released on the Codies "Cartoon Time" label, rather than the gamers of the 80's beforehand. I understand Little Puff as a name as in "Puff the Magic Dragon" or so forth, but how many people didn't get a giggle out of that name at the time?

Either way it's a pretty fun digest level arcade adventure, and it's not particularly hard apart from a few really unfair leaps of faith, and a couple of points in the game.....and I say a couple of points by which I mean both after earlier plays will be destroyed, and force a restart.


I'm sure if the Codies intentions were to make a moderately easy arcade adventure with a trap or two right where it would make the younger gamers cry then they succeeded......Evil bastards!

But anyway Little Puff is a good entry level arcade adventure for a generation of gamers who inherited their older brothers, sisters, cousins, or fun childless uncles computer from them.

Not bad, just not groundbreaking.

Call me a hater, but this entire series was a load of crap!

Iso-3D graphics and fighting works about as well as putting Chocolate coated prawns, asparagus, mint choc chip ice cream, and BBQ beans on a plate and calling it a trip into culinary existentialism.


Wrong that's called being a pretentious wanker, and no amount of buzz words will make it a good meal. Sadly this game pretty much fits into the same catergory, why it was so highly praised when it's so fucking bad is beyond me?

A really good, and quite well thought out arcade adventure starring the mischievous "Jack".

Jack was a bit of a mascot for Gremlin for a while in the mid-late 80's after Monty Mole and enjoyed quite a bit of success, for a couple of years.

This game is played in a 2.5D kind of perspective (Although at certain points of the game secret passages can be discovered which are of a platform nature), and basically stars the borderline evil toddler Jack, on his mission to basically cause as much chaos as possible round his home town. This was really an early sandbox game to a certain extent, if you failed to use an object correctly you'd often end up dropping it, if it fell a certain distance it would often break, and you'd lose it forever. Not to worry though that Naughty-o-meter is all that matters, and you'd always have your trusty pea shooter to spit at people with.

There are some typical Beano Comic style humour elements to this game, beep a horn to scare a cat, glue all the false teeth in a factory closed with super glue. The naughtier you are the more people come raging after you as well, contact with any members of your family will increase your "Nappy-Rash", no doubt implying that your shenanigans have earned you a damn good spanking, and rightly so....Little sod!


Great game, but can get a bit bland, and although many people would not strictly agree with me it was far surpassed by it's sequel a year later.

Mario style gameplay, crossed with Sonic style graphics, and stuffed into a budget game featuring a tortoise.

Sad that this was Hi-Tec's Swan Song, and they bowed out on an original title that was considerably better than some of the rushed out Hanna/Barbera licensed drivel they shoved out over the years.

Don't get me wrong some of their licensed stuff was OK, some of it was pretty good, it's just a shame that when they created a decent, although somewhat trivial original IP they were on the way out.

Sadly it probably would've been Turbo's first and last outing even if Hi-Tec hadn't have folded. After all the movie go to is if they shoot it into space, or it travels through time they've ran out of ideas. This started at the end of that stereotype, but man it was good.

Shame....

Everything about this game just screams shit from the rooftops!

Yet even for it's very basic, and simple style is an amazingly fun game that just seems like it almost oozes an innocent charm. Why I feel that way is beyond me as pretty much everyone is out to get you....There's no innocence here at all.

Basically you're being persued by "The Pinkerton Agent" for a murder you didn't commit, and you have to clear your name by travelling around 5 stereotypical Wild Western towns with names like "Dodge City", and "Dry Gulch", to find the actual culprit. If you do find him or any of the notorious Wild Bunch, one of which is responsible for the murder you're being blamed for, you can "Bring em' in", or choose to have a quick draw style shoot out with them.


The quick draw when I was younger seemed really unfair, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what key to press to shoot, then when I did press something I'd always draw too early and get done for murder, or I'd draw too late and get shot. Turns out it doesn't really matter what key you press you just mash the keyboard when they reach for it!...."Mister!".

Great game although everything about it screams crap, but I'd like to say for how simple this game is it's actually very inventive, and a bit of a diamond in the rough as far as adventure games go, especially for 1984.

An exercise in memorization, so much so independent researchers have tagged this game as a possible preventative stimulative method of slowing the progression of dementia.

Gronf! Gronf! Gronf!

Insane difficulty makes an otherwise average game even less enjoyable.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you can last more than 3 minutes....

....That's what she said!

Never have been a huge fan of the Iso-3D genre as it were, but you know what? I have a massive soft spot for this game.

I got this right around the time it came out, and it's actually a decent attempt at the by 1987 already flooded angular plod fest market, that everybody seemed to think was the be all and end all of games.

Rentakill Rita's puzzles were decent, not too stupid or annoyingly obscured by scenery, like some of these games, played at a decent pace, didn't suffer from the usual massive amounts of slowdown.....Sounding familiar?

Hello Ultimate!

Anyway to cut it short Rentakill Rita was actually fun to play, and I'd go as far as to say I'd rather play this than fucking Knightlore any day, and that nonsensical Batman shite!

£1.99 as well, it's sad when a Mastertronic imitator is better than the supposed lead runners in the genre. There were some decent high end Iso's that pissed all over this game from a great height, like Head over Heels, and Movie to mention a couple, but as it stands this game gave some of the forerunners a damn good run for their money, and cost a fraction of the price! Well done Mastertronic, you're not as shit as everybody said you were....

A classic example of one game too far.

This diabolical crapfest should never have happened...

But at least Daley was the right colour this time around...

I always wanted to like this game, but it's so annoying with the character switching, and the laggy bollocks controls that it made what could have been a very original and interesting game just unbearable.

Here is a platform switch, OK on the platform, must vandalise a TV switch, OK broke the TV need to jump again, switch, OK jumped need to punch an enemy, switch.

Yeah it's pretty crap really, although I wish it wasn't, this game had so much potential, and I mean so much potential, and it looks fantastic as well. It's just a shame it's as much fun as being stung in the scrotum by an entire hive of wasps.

Any game that is based around a time alchohol was illegal gets a 0 from me, absolute sacrelidge!


No actually in all seriousness it's a shit game. Move a crosshair around, and get fired at before you can find the hostile that's aiming at you, maybe you can shoot one of two of them, or maybe you'll die in 30 seconds.

Glad I got this game as part of a compilation that had much better games on it.

Nemesis is OK I suppose, wish it had a little more substance though. I like that the corpses of the vanquished remain onscreen, but it's a single screen game, not like it would take too much memory, infact it's part of the gameplay on later levels.

After decades I'm left wondering will there ever be an above average game based on something from 2000AD?


Let's look at that anyway...

Judge Dredd....Crap!

Strontium Dog....Crap!

Slaine….Could've been great, but ended up crap!

Rogue Trooper, average at best and really easy, so let's say it's crap!

Shame it's a cursed IP I think? Even years later the Rogue Trooper game on PS2 was average, and a little bit, well....Erm…..Crap to be honest.

I'll be 100% honest, as a massive fan of 80's platformers I should have liked this game a lot more than I actually did!

There's some great humour in there, some of the sprites are really well drawn, but let's face it they flicker like a boring relatives slideshow of a holiday you're not interested in, the animation is choppy as fuck, and that 10 second loop of the Monty Python theme makes you want to smash your own face into a wall repeatedly after about 30 seconds.


I never got on with this game as much as I thought I should have, and I always thought I was missing something, but really after about 30 years I've decided nah! its a bit crap really innit!

Soylent Greeeeeeeeen!!!! There's people in the soylent Greeeeeen!

There's shit in this gaaaaaame! I'm telling you now there's shit in this gaaaaaame!

Also stupid name for a game, if the cannibals are from outer space then they're not humans, therefore eating humans isn't cannibalism at all.

Shite game even at the time of release, although to be fair I found it a little more playable than the official Hunchback release.

…..But after all these years I'm still wondering what that digitized speech is telling you to do to the baby.....

It sounds more like.....Well let's just say it doesn't sound like "rock" to me.

Sinister indeed!

I remember seeing this game years and years ago. I don't think I ever actually bought it, because the alarm bells kind of went off when I looked at the back of the box a bit.

But this game looks absolutely amazing...…..On the back of the box!

Fast forward a few years later and I actually play this travesty, it's complete bollocks, there's absolutely no other way to describe this awful, awful, mess. Shambling, bumbling colour clashing misfit hobbles around onscreen, as you attempt to avoid tiny enemies, that in the real world you could simply ignore.

You'd think as well from how crap it actually is, and how badly received it was the author would've learned his lesson, and not had the sheer nerve to reskin this unplayable spunk stain 2 more times!

£1.99 was still a rip off for this, I wouldn't have gave them 25p!

One day I knew I would eventually be reviewing this game! I always knew I would have to eventually, if anything just to put some ghosts of the past to rest. Also possibly to reiterate pretty much the same thing as everybody else who played this around about it's actual release time. Needless to say underwhelming is an understatement.

OK so here we go you're the pilot of the Starship Blind Optimism, and you've just crash landed hard in the Insufferable Shite Sector of Planet Disappointment!!!

There are no survivors of this mass tragedy including yourself!



So Double Dragon on the Speccy, yeah it's not good, it's not good at all. But I will be 100% honest my 10 year old self bugged the living shit out of my mother to buy it for me, and I actually got it pretty much at release time, and I'll also be honest upon loading it up I wasn't totally devastated at the first moment. I already knew what I was looking at, and what I was playing was piss weak compared to the arcade game I'd been shoving coins into for years before now, but I persevered, as it was Double Dragon! I finally had fucking Double Dragon at home, something everybody wanted, and never thought would happen, but here it was. Sadness unfortunately started to set in quite quickly. Playing the first level when I first loaded it up I was like OK it's not completely terrible, the enemies sort of look like they're supposed to, the graphics are serviceable, and the moves all seem to be there...….What could go wrong?


Everything that's what! Everything!!! EVERYTHING!!!!!!!

So I throw punches at the first guy its a nice-ish clicky smack noise, nowhere near the impact of the 80's movie style smack, smack, smack of the arcade, but it's OK....Split seconds later as Williams flies up in the air, flips onto his back and lands with the weirdest farty indigestion burpy type noise ever, I'm like....erm? I continue playing til' I get to Linda, she comes out the doors, but she looks like a cross between 80's Kim Wylde, and Bjork. I knock her down and hear the mouse squeak....Oh dear. So by now I've taken down a few thugs and I'm swinging the Turkey Leg like crazy....Oops I mean baseball bat. So I know Bolo is coming next, so I'm ready for the big man to come busting through the wall, and he kind of does in a rather subdued and none-dramatic kind of way. Oh my instead of the intimidating musclebound monster from the arcade I'm greeted with a middle aged queen complete with gay bar moustache, and a giant bubble head, who seems to face sideways at all times. The only thing missing from this ridiculous "Gary the Greatest" stunt double is either a string vest, and a pair of booty shorts, or a leopard skin leotard, and a barbell with 2 round weights on either side of it that each have "1 Tonne" written on them, and a barrel of oil to drown himself in from head to toe. So I carry on to the end of the level and by now I'm a little sad, as I've noticed that most of the graphics from the preview screenshots in the magazines at the time hadn't made it into the finished game, and this is just level one. I beat Abobo at the end of the level, and accidentally restart the level instead of hitting the button to load the next level. So I slog through level one again, and make sure I don't make the same mistake again. I'm curious as to why they gave you the option to replay the level again, instead of just saying "Press Play on Tape" like most multi-load games? I'll be honest I think this is the only game I've seen do this back then?


OK what makes this worse is to cut a long story short I finish the game pretty much on my second or third go. I was not too happy, but I'll not lie I did get some slightly subdued fun from this game. After all I had to it was a full price release I'd actually managed to get right at release, and I don't think it was my birthday, Easter, Christmas, or anything like that, so I had to enjoy it, even if I didn't enjoy it, because I wasn't getting another full price game for a long while.

Anyway let's give some kind of actual verdict instead of the retrospective shattering of a 10 year old's expectations of a shit conversion of one of his favourite arcade games of all time...…

OK I'll be honest the level graphics are actually servicable, level one seems like it had some effort put in there, level two however is lacking a lot of details, level three is OK, pretty much all there in it's own way, level four is OK as well, level five is lacking a lot of detail, but it works. The enemy placement seems quite accurate, and even though they look kind of shit, they're all pretty much where they're supposed to be. The only truly unique enemy Sprite in the game is Willy the final boss, and he's way too big, and looks ridiculous, much like all the enemies in the game his head is just way too big for his body.


One thing that bothers me is that the game has no music during gameplay in 128k mode, and it's still multi-load...No improvements between the 2 machines at all. Level 3 is split into mission 3A, 3B, and Mission 4, these 3 levels are 1 level on the arcade, and Mission 5 even though a short level is Split into 2 loads as well. This could have been handled way better, especially back in 1989 using a 128k machine. I was playing using a 48k+ at the time, so I had already accepted the obligatory shortcomings of my Speccy, but taking my copy of Double Dragon to my friends house to play 2 player yielded the exact same experience with absolutely no sign of any improvement over the systems. This annoyed me ever so slightly. Also playing 2 player, why did the programmers just pallette swap the second players sprite, they could have quite easily made the 2 brothers at least half look similar!



OK so you know I was disappointed, you know I was let down, you know the story in general, I'm not the only one affected by this situation, but here comes the interesting part! After all these years I'm probably willing to say the Speccy version of Double Dragon probably wasn't the worst home conversion at the time. The 16 bit machines could have recreated the arcade experience way closer than the Speccy ever could, yet they didn't at all not even close, and, were equally as shit. Look at the Amiga version, and the ST version, the level graphics are simplified, and the characters all look like Playmobil men, the "IMB PC" version at the time was just a port of these 2 shit fests, but slower running and even worse, the Amstrad CPC version was really, really bad, slow unresponsive, and bordering on inducing seizures with it's grubby pixelated attempt at full colour.........last but not least the most comical version the C64! That version was so shit it had to be done twice.....and both versions were absolutely terrible.

So the Speccy version is a bad game, and a bad conversion, but looking back maybe it wasn't the worst afterall. It's still shite, and could've been much better, along with all the other versions as well....Well actually no I think the Commode version was a complete lost cause, if you can't get it right after 2 attempts you need to quit HAHAHAHA!!!!!

But as it stands this was one of my biggest game disappointments throughout my whole life, I knew it wasnt going to be perfect, but I also hoped for a better version than what we got, and it annoys me that I know it was completely possible. Sad to dust off the old typical comparison, but Target Renegade came a year before this, and was pretty much 100% better than it.

I was toying with the idea of giving this game a 3, but no it's a 2, maybe high end of 2 leaning towards a 3, but it's still a 2. I'm not spiteful enough to give it a 1 even though I really toyed with the idea, but I think after all these years even though it's total crap, it's not a 1/5 game.