Reviews

There's not much to say about this game that hasn't been said before. It's huge, it looks and sounds beautiful and it's the pinnacle of isometric 8-bit arcade-adventure gaming.

A reasonable conversion of the Capcom coin-op game. It's all rather plain-looking (more the fault of the original than anything else) but it plays well.

Superlative platform game, not only one of the best of its genre on the Spectrum but the best on any 8-bit platform.

One of my favourite text adventures, Rigel's Revenge makes then-innovative use of graphics as a "description" in their own right and draws the player in meaning plenty of hours will be spent solving the various puzzles in an attempt to prevent the "revenge" of the title.

Large, entertaining and humourous text adventure from the exceptional Smart Egg Software. Whilst at least one of the puzzles needed to complete the game struck me as a little obscure, this is nonetheless a fascinating and funny journey into a well-realised fantasy world full of atmospheric locations and enjoyably-silly characters. My only real criticism is the graphics which seem to use some sort of "tile" system which means that they are only effective in a few places and actually reduce the impact of the text in others.

Sequel to "Sweevo's World" that is superior to the original. The graphics are much-improved with the underwater feel of the environment being well-conveyed and the various puzzles being less irritatingly tricky than in its prequel.

Although it's undeniably simplistic and the gameplay is a bit "dead end" in that there comes a point where maintaining a hold on the Presidential throne becomes next to impossible, it is nonetheless the case that this game with its cynical view of cold war politics and black humour remains fun and playable after all these years.

'Mad Mix' is, essentially, a homage to 'Pacman' (or rip-off if you're feeling unkind) and so contains the frantic gameplay of that title whilst adding new features such as a hippo that squashes the monsters and even a laser-firing spaceship. It's not superb, and it's inevitably repetitive, but if you like 'Pacman' then this is more than worth discovering.

'Maze Mania' owes more than a little to 'Pacman' although the 'tile-turning' dynamic it uses is rather more satisfying than dot-munching and allows for more variety as some tiles need to be turned more than once to obtain the correct colour whilst others can see their turning reversed by wandering monsters. The graphics are generally clear and colourful and the gameplay is enjoyably hectic.

At the time of its release, the big "ooh" with this game was the full colour graphics with no colour clash, something achieved by moving everything eight character blocks at a time. Despite this rather jerky movement, the large sprites, reasonable challenge, fast gameplay and varied levels manage to combine to make this an enjoyable shooter.

At the time of release there was much made of the fact that this had little to do with the comic/TV license and instead was just an isometric arcade-adventure with a (rather pudgy) Batman sprite dropped into it. Well, it is; and it's no worse for it. In the days before save slots having to collect all Batman's equipment each load was annoying but this was still an important development on the template Ultimate had created with 'Knight Lore' and it now looks like something of a dry-run for the superb 'Head over Heels'.

Originally, this game was supposed to be an 'interactive cartoon' in the style of 'Dragon's Lair' but this idea was eventually considered too ambitious for the Spectrum's hardware and dropped (probably for the best, to be honest). The game that was finally released using the Scooby Doo license was a scrolling action-platformer and is actually pretty good. It's very simple gameplay, largely running up and down stairs, jumping gaps and attacking baddies with an attack that makes Scooby look like an extra from the Bangles' 'Walk Like An Egyptian' video; but it's challenging and fun to play and it's never boring.

Despite being a shameless copy of Capcom's "Commando" (in the main at least) this game nonetheless manages to be challenging and fun in its own right. The flick-screen method of advancement (different from the scrolling of the original C64 version) makes for a progression which feels less frantic and the programmers have thrown in some extra features and dangers that weren't in "Commando". This isn't as hectic, fast or fun as the Capcom game but it's a bandwagon jumper that's worth seeking-out and spending some time on.

It might be lacking in levels a bit (only three) but Jonathan Smith's fast-moving action game remains the best home computer interpretation of the now-forgotten Stallone vehicle and a terrific game in its own right. Gameplay is hectic and imaginative and beating a level feels like a real achievement.

A surprisingly good little title written for the 2007 Minigame Competition. At heart, this is a variation on 'Frogger' with the player having to dash back and forth across a busy Amsterdam street fulfilling their 'urges' for sex and ganja whilst making sure they get enough rest at the hotel and obtain enough money from the bank. There's little depth to this game and it'll hardly keep you entertained for hours but this achieves what it set out to do admirably.

What to say about this game that hasn't been said before? Published in 1983 at a time when most home computer 'action' titles were shameless rip-offs of popular arcade machines (with titles like "Muncher-Man" and "Centipod") Ulimate released this original shooter which not only matched popular arcade machines for looks and speed but beat many of them in gameplay. Even now, over a quarter of a century since its release, this game remains thoroughly playable and incredibly addictive. Not just a Spectrum great but one of the best videogames in the history of the medium on any platform.

Despite all the pretences this game has of being a proto-Metal Gear stealth game it's really just a flick-screen arcade adventure featuring a bloke in ninja kit. Despite that, it's also extremely atmospheric, the graphics are great and allowing the player to progress through the difficulty levels at will is a nice touch. However, many of the excellent and innovative ideas this game had don't quite work. The dogs are difficult to attack, the guards are far too easy and present precious little challenge and the most likely thing to stop our hero is the clock or a bad fall.

None of this stops 'Saboteur' from being a great game that's still fun to play but the sequel built on the original admirably.

Superb presentation, but the years haven't been all that kind to Joe's first outing. The way the gun was implemented was terrible and the lack of an onscreen ammo counter was a major ommission. Having "unlocked" doors "lock" again when the player passed back through them was also a major irritation. It's still not too bad, and it looks and sounds nice even today (and it's better than the naked emperor that was 'Joe Blade II'), but if you only play one Joe Blade game best stick to the third in the series.

The received wisdom on this game these days is that it pales next to its illustrious prequel but this attitude misses the point. 'Coconut Capers' is nothing like the original 'Jack the Nipper', nor was it intended to be. Whilst the original was an arcade-adventure which relied heavily on take-this-drop-it-here gameplay the sequel is a platformer in the Monty Mole mode with the arcade-adventure aspect significantly reduced. As such, it's a very different game to play and the environment (an Australian jungle rather than the urban Britain of the first game) gives it a whole new feel. Jack's sprite is full of character, the "everyone in sunglasses" shtick is fun, the graphics are superb (the Spectrum version beats the C64 and CPC versions visually by a country mile) and the 48K sound is great.

It retains some of the problems of the original (it can be a little tricky and some of the puzzles are a little obscure) but this is by no means an inferior sequel.

A mixture of one-on-one fighting and a simple maze-game. Ultimately, there's not all that much to 'Dungeon of Drax' but the different levels and variety of opponents is nice. Drax himself, once reached, is rather too easy though.

An interesting idea for a game - the player controls an oh-so-80s 'Gigeresque' alien and has to explore a spaceship (divided into corridors, ventilation ducts and platformer-style rooms) looking for pods to save their near-extinct race. Having the player control the sort of critter they'd usually be fighting-off with heavy weapons (the advertising alluded to this), complete with acid spit and ability to snack on "technicians" to replenish energy, was novel but the game didn't really come together all that well. It had the common 8-bit problem of many enemies being too difficult to avoid, the colour clash was horrendous, and play was frequently more frustrating than fun.

Probably the quintessential 8-bit maze-game, and that's not really a recommendation. 'Noterraqueous' is absolutely huge but the rooms are samey, difficult to map manually (as is required with most maze-games of the era) and the instant deaths from the "mouldy psyche" or whatever it was are daft.

Despite all that, there's still some limited fun to be had, just not all that much.

Terrible 'platform game' barely fitting-into the genre with a massive massive main sprite for no good reason.

System 3's arcade-adventure cum beat-em-up was incredible for its day with superbly-detailed graphics and a terrific atmosphere. It still provides some fun although can be quite unforgiving and the sound is pretty terrible.

On paper this doesn't sound all that promising - put-together pictures of a bunch of '80s politicians and celebrities jigsaw-style against a timer. But it works - the gameplay is fast and challenging, the various "odd" blocks that need to be destroyed by combining them with a specific other "odd" block add challenge and the result is a fun action-puzzler that proved surprisingly uninfluential.

Nice idea, and finding bits of the robot of the title feels satisying, but overall this is a very average maze-game.

A superior arcade-adventure, even if it's a little slow. The player takes control of a samurai rabbit (tsk, those Japanese comics, eh?) and has to explore a scrolling environment fighting-off troublesome ninjas and footpads, showing respect to other samurai encountered on the road and being kind to peasants (even giving them a little money if you have it to increase karma). This all works quite well, although some of the jumps over chasms are tricky to pull off and the lack of a save option seems a bit off.

'Transformers' isn't actually as bad as its reputation but it's still rather average. Cybertron looks rather bland and samey but the Autobots and Decepticons are well-drawn and recognisable and the transforming is excellent. Giving all the Autobots different abilities, strengths and weaknesses was also a good move.

At heart, though, this is just an explore-the-screens-and-find-the-objects game with some shooting thrown-in. It's not actually bad and is fun for a while but there are better games in this genre out there.

Ingenious stuff which, surprisingly, didn't lead to any imitators. 'Stifflip...' is basically a graphic-adventure with all of the commands selected using a mixture of icons and text but the clever thing is the actions being played out in the form of a cartoon strip complete with speech-bubbles. An additional fighting element requiring mild arcade skills adds a little spice to a rather tasty game.

The setting is also brilliant. During the inter-war years, four clichéd Brits find themselves in South America on the trail of the villainous Count Chameleon. There are a lot of pokes at the attitudes of late-imperial Britain and it's all jolly good fun; reminiscent of a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs or, more accurately, the Sexton Blake stories.

My only real criticism is that there was no sequel.

Inferior 'Gauntlet'-type game with flick-screen gameplay, ugly graphics and pretentious scrolling room descriptions. For some batshit reason the player controls a wizard in one-player mode (and you will be playing in one-player mode because none of your mates are likely to be itching to join-in) rather than the Storm of the title.

The cover art is amusing, though. Storm's expression is more camp indignation than barbarian fury.

One of the best presented Spectrum games ever released, 'Trantor' has an animated opening-sequence, digitised four-channel title music and excellent in-game graphics. Unfortunately, all of these draw attention away from quite a poor game. Because Trantor can't jump and fire attacking some enemies is difficult or even impossible; some of the spikes in the floor and roof cannot be passed without losing some energy (a common fault in lifeforce-based games like this) and because the power-ups found in the lockers seem to be random how far a player gets is largely arbitrary - sometimes you'll get that crucial extra time or energy boost, sometimes you won't. This isn't a terrible game, it's fun for a while and it looks nice, but the flaws become apparent all too quickly.

Groundbreaking when it came out, Ultimate's 'Knight Lore' is still a pretty good game, more than two decades later. Compared to later titles like 'Head over Heels' which built-on the genre the Stampers pioneered here this game's flaws are fairly obvious but its impressive that it still holds-up when it didn't even really have to *try* that hard in 1984 .

One of those games that surely has everyone wondering what the hell they were feeding CRASH journalists in the Thatcher Years. The usually-reliable gaming magazine gave this game 90%, enouraging scores of impressionable kids to go out and spend their pocket money on it. Yes, the "not officially Pac-Man" playable game whilst loading was a lovely touch, but that's hardly enough to hand out a CRASH Smash for, is it? Although, to be fair, we all thought it was great back then.

But we were wrong. Because Joe Blade II is a poor mixture of maze-game, collect-em-up and repetitive puzzler hidden underneath some, admittedly lovely, graphics and sound.

The plot is that, in the then-future year of 1995, London has been overrun by "punks". Joe Blade, the 8-bit gaming hero with an uncanny resemblance to Freddie Mercury cira 1986 (and, by extension, the "clone look" popularised in the American gay community of the time which Mercury based his look on), has to clear the city of punks. But this time they've taken his gun away. Yes, for some reason Joe isn't able to enter punk-filled London with a gun and so has to dispatch the bad guys with jumping kicks instead. Once you get rid of 100 of them they'll "get the message" and clear off completely. Along with this, Blade has to rescue civillians (who, for some reason, can only be saved once the player completes tedious puzzle sub-games) and collect bouncing dustbins (?!).

The first problem is the enemies - there aren't really any. The punks run and jump around but can't hurt our hero so they are essentially a kind of human cattle for Blade to "collect" by jump-kicking them. And, apart from that, all our hero has to do is rescue the civilians; failing in a sub-game means Game Over and this seems to be the only way Blade can "die".

So, as I said before, Joe Blade II is basically a tedious maze-based collect-em-up with excellent presentation. It can only really be the latter that explains why both CRASH and ver kids loved it so much back in the Autumn of '88. Thankfully, Joe had one more game to come and it's the one that gives some justification to the affection with which the trilogy is held in.

A terrific conversion of a great arcade game. The scrolling was a bit juddery and there wasn't much colour but then this was the Spectrum after all. What mattered was that this played pretty-much as well as the original arcade game, and that's very well indeed.

At the time of release this game was lauded but now it seems slightly inferior to the original ZX Spectrum version of 'Renegage'. It's relatively slow and, for a beat-em-up, feels remarkably sedate, especially when compared to its spiritual successors such as 'Streets of Rage' and 'Final Fight'.

Having said all that, this is still fun to play and has plenty of nice features like the bikers on stage one, the gun-toting pimp on stage two and the excellent music.

When this game was released, it was seen as a pointless, pound-shop rip-off of 'Head over Heels', the game which had made any further isometric arcade-adventures a waste of everyone's time. This was, and is, a little unfair. Yes, 'Rentakill Rita' owes something to Ritman and Drummond's masterpiece and, yes, it's "just another" isometric arcade-adventure but this doesn't deserve to be consigned to the big dustbin labelled "also-rans".

'Rentakill Rita' plays like a mixture of the aforementioned 'Head over Heels' and 'Sweevo's World'. It has the slick, detailed look and feel of the Ritman/Drummond stuff but the gameplay puts the player more in mind of the metal Stan Laurel lookalike. Rita must enter a mansion house (made up of numerous isometric rooms, naturally) and kill a variety of creepy crawlies. Killing the bugs means having to solve clever puzzles and reaching them in the first place requires negotiating simpler puzzles in the different rooms. This all adds up to a challenging game which needs a fair bit of time spent on it. The modern era, with its emulators and save states, means that it's a good time to dig up and replay this forgotten classic.

A rather obscure and under-appreciated little game. Unlike a lot of isometric titles this is split into levels which must be solved, quickly, by crashing the player's robot into unstable nuclear cells. Whereas other isometric room-based games like 'Batman' and 'Rentakill Rita' demand time and patience of the player, 'Nuclear Countdown' is more suited to quick play and whilst not as impressive as the aforementioned titles in a chin-stroking way it's probably more attractive to modern gamers. Advancing past the next screen tends to be case of careful manoeuvring around robots, using the shield to take-out some of the more troublesome droids and solving simple puzzles.

Not all that deep and not, I imagine, all that long but good-looking, fast and fun. Recommended.

People who like their 8-bit games to be multi-screened, varied and with depth aren't going to be impressed by this little 16K effort from 1984. It has a single screen, no high-score table and plays more like a Game & Watch title than anything. And yet, like many of those old liquid crystal display games, it's fun to play with numerous things you need to keep your eye on. The colourful, cartoony graphics simply add to the appeal. It's not all thumbs-aloft, though: it inevitably gets bit repetitive and the jam and apples seem to appear at set, rather than random, intervals which makes it all a bit tedious after a while.

Despite the faults this is still worth wasting some, if not a lot, of time on and trying to beat your high score, even though you'll have to write it on a piece of paper.

One of the strangest and most imaginative games ever, let alone licensed titles. This managed to take the Liverpool band in question's songs, music videos and philosophy and change them into a bizarre mixture of puzzle, action, maze and whodunnit. Everyone should play this, even Mike "the video contained simulated buggery" Reid.

Steve Crow's homage to 'Atic Atac' has aged surprisingly well. The graphics and sound are better than Ultimate's game and it remains challenging with just enough variety in the rooms and floors to keep it interesting. The only real negative is the "keys" system for opening doors which can leave inexperienced players trapped.

'Where Time Stood Still' is one of those games punching way above the weight of the generation of machines it was programmed on, something that the 128K-only nature of the game makes clear. Rather ambitiously, this game throws the player into a large, varied open-world environment with an emphasis on exploring and staying alive; the latter being made more difficult by the fact that there are four members of the players party (with different personalities and skills) only one of whom is controlled at any time.

The emphasis on exploring and allowing the player to discover both the game world and its obstacles, the terrific atmosphere and the constantly-complaining party who need to be looked-after gives a rather cinematic feel to proceedings. This game feels like an adventure in the best sense of the word.

There are problems, though. There's the old-school difficulty level (characters can be killed very suddenly, notably by the infamous flying dinosaurs). There's also the graphics which vary wildly between pretty-good (the characters) and shoddy (the dreadful portraits; the poorly-drawn canyon and valley walls).

In spite of its faults, 'Where Time Stood Still' is a brave and overall successful attempt to push the boundaries of 8-bit software a little and, more importantly, use the abilities of the 128K Spectrum beyond just AY music.

Gargoyle's mixture of dungeon-crawler, RPG and puzzle game holds up very well today despite the blocky graphics. Maybe it's the clever puzzles, maybe it's the intriguing and easy-to-map dungeons or maybe it's the personality that everything from Axil to the monsters have but this remains fun and absorbing when many RPGs of the '80s feel a little dated and clunky.