Reviews

High quality Czech puzzler from KVL with forty levels. As a logical arcade game, Boovie boasts a broad range of in-game elements such as breakable glass blocks, lifts, teleports, lethal enemy sprites and more besides. A simple gravity model exists so that in-game objects fall downwards although animate objects such as the player character and enemy sprites don't.

The goal of each level is to move a white block onto a white platform, designated by an animated up-arrow. Sounds simple enough? Naturally, it isn't as there are some mind-bending screen layouts filled with various contrived obstructions and hinderances. However, each level is confined to a single screen and can be conveniently scrutinised at length if need be. It may take a quite few days to play through all of the levels. In fact it is even possible to get stuck on a single Boovie level for some hours until getting that "Eureka!" moment. Certainly a few of the levels require some "sideways" thinking.

A distinguishing feature of the Boovie games is that the player character and in-game objects can be moved half a sprite width (i.e. half a "grid square") at a time. This is crucial to the unique type of puzzles found in the game. The game features several decent AY chip tunes playing throughout and also appropriately simple sound effects. Graphics are nicely done and the sprite animation is suitably smooth. The game has a thoroughly professional feel to it.

Each level has a unique access password. However, if using emulation like I did then you may just prefer to use user-saved snapshots instead. Players of this game (including myself) have been temporarily fooled into thinking level fourteen is impossible. Having now completed the game I can assure readers that all levels are indeed possible. Just be sure to load the second program off the tape, as the first one is just an intro that for some reason does not apparently provide access to the main game. There is also a PC version of this game.

As this is the sequel to the Czech logical arcade game "Boovie", I can only suggest that you read my review of that game first and also prefereably play that game before Boovie 2 is attempted, although this is by no means a requirement. Most of my earlier "Boovie" review also applies to "Boovie 2", with these exceptions:-

This one is by "E.S.A. productions" rather than KVL. I am unsure if any of the original Boovie developers were on board for the sequel - although it sure retains the same look and feel. The lethal enemy "guardian" sprites are no longer found in Boovie 2 and neither are the little yellow pellets used to stun or kill them. The loss of the above in-game elements in the sequel is more than compensated for by the addition of two new "use once per level" player items. These are the bomb and the magnet. The bomb is used to blow up adjacent squares and the magnet can pull a single block one square towards the player. You do not know until you start each level whether or not the bomb and/or magnet are available. In some levels you have both at your disposal. In other levels you may start with only one or the other in your inventory and in yet some further levels, neither are available.

As in the first game, work your way through forty levels of which some are quite tough and yet a few relatively easy ones are thrown into the mix. Some players remark that the addition of the bomb and magnet items make this sequel more challenging than Boovie, yet others (like me) consider these items to make some levels appear a trifle easier than the first game. It's apparently all very subjective. The additional challenge of the sequel appears to come from finding the crucial position on the screen in which to use these two new player items. In any case, unless you are some sort of twisted genius, you'll probably get a few good evenings worth of challenging game play out of this sequel. Coding and presentation standards equal those of the first game as do the in-game graphics and slick background music. Boovie 2 has its own vibrant set of AY tunes, different from the first game.

I found a couple of minor reproducible bugs whilst playing through the sequel, but nothing serious enough to impact the gameplay in any meaningful way. In the first game, the level access passwords appeared to consist of random letters. However, in this second game, some of the later level access passwords seem to be made up of occasionally amusing and sometimes inappropriate English words. (Be advised - there are one or two rude words in the later level passwords). Overall, Boovie 2 is a very welcome and entertaining sequel to a great puzzle game which keeps up the high standards and difficulty level of the original. If you've completed the first game, then you'll absolutely feel compelled to take up the challenge of the sequel too. Again, I can confirm from firsthand experience that all levels of Boovie 2 are completeable.

Originally released in 1994 for the ZX Spectrum by Slovakian publisher Ultrasoft, this is another logical puzzle game which became so successful on the 8-bit platform that it eventually spawned a PC remake. The speccy version of Quadrax happily runs on 48K systems and contains fifty screens of roughly increasing difficulty. Although the initial game menu is in Slovak, there is fortunately an English translation provided in an accompanying documentation file in the World of Spectrum archive. The game itself is entirely graphical so language doesn't come into it once you are underway.

Each screen consists of a 2D-rendered layout of platforms, blocks, walls etc.. Many levels also have switches, slidable doors, floors, teleports and lifts. The goal of each screen is to guide two animated stickmen onto a white platform, marked by moving arrows. Naturally in order to achieve this, the two stickmen under your guidance have to co-operate with each other, not unlike certain segments of "Head over Heels". Also like that game, a user-defined key switches control between the two characters. The characters can walk and climb, but can't jump.

Quadrax also supports two players but I only have experience of playing it in single player mode. I can at least say that the game is ideally suited to single player mode. The graphics give the game something of a subterranean feel, with each level employing one of several colour schemes. Clever selective use of BRIGHT attributes are also used for shading effects. A nice touch is the addition of extra graphics that add to the atmosphere of the game without actually being part of the logic puzzles themselves e.g. ancient Greco-Roman columns and the like. Other levels feature metal chains, adeptly drawn skulls and also a cat appears on more than one occasion. Nice touches that just make playing the game more immersive.

Sound effects are simple yet adequate and well suited to this title. There is no in-game music, as completely expected for a 48K release. I found one or two of the levels to be quite challenging, but many of them I would say are relatively easy, compared to some other puzzle games. Some being a bit of a memory test as to which lever affects which object. Certainly though, once you get into the swing of things you may find that you can storm through a good number of levels without getting hung up too much. Still, I find it right to score Quadrax a four as the game clearly has the player hooked from start to finish and you just can't resist coming back to it until you eventually complete the entire game.

I can only give this game an excellent score since the speccy port is highly impressive given the technical limitations of the platform. Firstly it should be said that this game is firmly of the 16-bit era and it is no surprise that my first contact with it came about via the flawless Atari ST & Amiga versions. So, to put it mildly I did not initially relish the idea of playing this on an 8-bit system. However, at myspeccy.com I decided to give it a whirl and was astounded to find that the playability and the depth of strategy to the game was still completely intact in the speccy port. Furthermore, the graphics can only be described as absolutely correct and it is a joy to see the bright yellow pacman character gobbling up dots around a cyan screen with really minimal colour clash.

The scrolling is expertly implemented showing what the Z80A can really do when pushed. Understandably things can momentarily slow down a little when the full complement of ghosts appear in close pursuit of the player in the higher levels. However, this just goes to show that the full potential of the speccy is being utiltised by the game engine and even these temporary slowdowns are somehow handled in a completely non-annoying way. I've only played the 48K version which has decent enough sound effects and so I cannot comment on the 128K version. All four of the varied in-game worlds from the original are shoe-horned into the 48K release as are the different ghost AI behaviours (jumping ghosts, fast ghosts etc..). Bonus fruit items and the useful speed power ups are also available in this speccy port.

You can certainly get a few days of play out of this one just getting up to the point where you have worked out a successful long-term strategy. Although, you'll still feel afterwards that you can somehow improve your skill at this game up to an even higher, yet unexplored level. Surely these things are the hallmark of a great game. In summary, speccy owners who had remained steadfastly loyal to their system in 1988 were rewarded with this exemplary 8-bit port from the 16-bit world. Unfortunately, some other games from around this time period were not quite so lucky!

The prospect of combining the two great interests of retro-gaming and Tolkien's works was certainly to be relished when this title was released around the beginning of the new millennium. Here, long time Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy expert and artisan Andrew Broad expertly crafted a highly challenging game which manages to flawlessly graft Tolkien's "The Hobbit" into the "Manic Miner" gaming environment.

It is immediately apparent that some considerable genuine enthusiasm has been poured into this game by the author. The nineteen chapters of the book naturally fit well into the twenty screen Manic Miner, allowing room for one bonus screen to be fitted in at the end. The provided instructions are very detailed and you just have to love the line that reads "Miner Willy plays Bilbo Baggins". There are two versions of the game, a "standard" version and a "lite" version.

As someone who has completed the original Manic Miner game a couple of times using between-level snapshots, I will say this of "Manic Miner: The Hobbit":- The "lite" version is reasonably difficult. The "standard" version is incredibly difficult. From my point of view anyway!

In game music has been specially re-written for this game and consists of entirely appropriate Norwegian folk music. The "standard" and "lite" versions of the game feature different tunes. As for the screens, they are wonderfully rendered with the first two being particularly memorable. The use of striking colour really brings out character and a feel of total enthrallment. The "hobbit hole" on the first screen and the roaring fire of "Roast Mutton" make this a lasting triumph of Manic Miner editing.

Overall this is one of the better Manic Miner derived efforts, which I personally find fascinating due to the fact I have never yet seriously dared to attempt the difficult version. Clearly it is also a must for any speccy enthusiasts who also enjoy "The Hobbit" of which I expect there are quite a few.

As there are at least half a dozen speccy games called "Invaders", I'll just clarify that this review is of the 1982 release from "Artic Computing" for the ZX Spectrum 16K. Invaders is of course a port of the arcade game "Space Invaders". Space Invaders is a curious title. As the original arcade version hails from 1978, even 8-bit home computer versions from the early eighties can exceed the arcade version in certain departments. Most notably by the addition of multiple colours to the waves of aliens. "Invaders" does not dissapoint in this area. Coming out in the speccy's maiden year (before advanced techniques and styles were fully developed on the platform) it still manages to act as an impressive showcase of the machine's abilities.

The initial menu screens unmistakably betray the early heritage of this game - seeming almost BASIC like in appearance, but once the main game starts in glorious 100% machine code, there is no doubt that this is one of the better and downright playable Space Invaders clones. There are nine difficulty levels available but quite honestly, there's not that much difference between them. Perhaps merely three levels of difficulty would have been more appropriate here. There are also four variations of the game to choose from. In practice, the selected variation affects the difficulty perhaps even more than the actual difficulty setting. The variations include a top row of aliens requiring two hits to kill and also alien projectiles that can deflect sideways. Just don't rush into this game filled with an all-knowing over-confidence, thinking that because you may have mastered Invaders on another platform that you are going to walk over this one. For if you do, you may be in for something of a shock. This game is really difficult. Firstly, you have to develop tactics that get you through the levels quickly, before the invasion fleet lands. This is certainly more difficult here than in other well known space invaders clones. Secondly you have to master the art of finishing off the last couple of ships in each wave. Believe me, this particular game makes this a real difficult challenge at times. The speeds involved are shockingly fast.

To achieve the multicoloured alien waves and such smooth flicker free animation of them and the frighteningly fast moving projectiles is an absolute tour de force of early speccy programming. Particularly if you consider that it is all running in contended RAM of the 16K system. But more than this, "Invaders" remains an enjoyable, still difficult game today. It certainly provides a real challenge to even the most hardened "Space Invaders" veterans.

This is an interesting budget breakout clone released in 1987 on the Firebird label. Critically savaged at the time of release which is completely understandable as it arrived on the very beginning of the downward slope of the breakout game bell curve. Also when held up to such greats as Arkanoid of the same year, a casual glance reveals Ricochet to appear as quite a pedestrian affair. However, I would like to undo some of the previous negative press this game has had because as a budget title, the game offers considerable depth not immediately apparent to anyone who gives up on it within fifteen minutes.

Firstly, the game was criticised for the bat moving too slowly so that it can't always catch the ball, but seasoned players will already be routinely one step ahead of the ball position after some hours of play. The fact that there is effectively a shield which can take several hits running right across the bottom of the screen means you can deliberately tactically allow the ball to miss the bat on a small number of occasions each level in order to get a more useful power up or even a final brick. Also, the fact that the game starts in a multiball mode is also quite a unique idea as is the power up system giving the skilled player effective control of how many balls are in play a great deal of the time.

The game also allows vertical bat movement which adds another interesting dimension. Again the game was criticised back in the day as moving the bat upwards often causes the player to lose lives. However, in some later levels, moving the bat upwards can allow the user to seal off and trap the ball in the upper part of the screen - often effectively completing a level like this. Again, you can work out various strategies to become better at this game over time. e.g. reduce the number of balls in play to just one as quickly as possible, followed by getting "barrier" power ups which eventually block off the bottom of the screen. Finally you can add "double bat" and then add more balls when the whole lower screen is sealed off. I don't know many other breakout clones where you can think like this.

Finally, the variety of levels is good with some now dated eighties references e.g. to Maggie Thatcher etc.. I just don't know how many levels there are because although I have got quite far in the game on several occasions I have still to master it. So I award a middling score, balancing out the fact that it is a good game if you persist with it for a few hours, but if picked up for mere minutes it seems a poor companion to the faster and graphically superior games of this genre. Also check out the intro music - bizarre yet unique. There's also an intro scroller which should be read if you want to time-warp back to the eighties.

This game like many other breakout clones uses the "floating bus" to synchronise sprite drawing with the raster display for flicker free action. Unlike Arkanoid, I don't think a "patched" version was ever officially released. Therefore this title in its original form probably won't work on a real Spectrum +2A/+3.

Not only have I had a long interest in Sokoban games but I also co-authored quite a few one-liner programs with Einar Saukas. Therefore, I find this title particularly fascinating. (To elucidate, one-liner programs consist of a single line of BASIC and must fit completely on a single Spectrum 48K screen such that they don't "scroll?" when listed). Here we have a set of one-liner programs which I had no involvement in the development of and so hopefully I can write an unbiased review!

Ten small Sokoban levels are provided. The first one was designed by the author of the program, Einar Saukas and the remaining nine were desgined by Yoshio Murase. Whilst these levels are necessarily small due to one-liner limitations, their small size in fact leads to what I shall describe as "the highest form of distilled Sokoban". Some Sokoban levels in other full sized games may consist of a large number of blocks and even when the puzzle has been mentally solved by the player, there may still be several hundred moves remaining in order to physically complete the level. Here though we have no more than four blocks per screen (most have just three), yet the difficulty level is impressively high for such small screens and the highest possible proportion of playing time is spent really "racking your brains" rather than repeatedly pushing a large number of blocks around. You will certainly be thinking whilst playing this "How can such a simple looking layout be so tricky to solve?", "How can I be stuck on this screen for so long?" and things like this.

As someone who completed the "standard 50" Sokoban levels found on UNIX systems and in the Spectrum Holobyte MS-DOS version some time ago, I thought I was a pretty good Sokoban player - smugly knowing all of the common tricks etc.. However, this small set of games provided by "SOKO-BAN LINE" taught me that there are even more difficult Sokoban layouts possible that I'd never encountered before. Admittedly, it took me while to finish the ten levels of this game today. But when I had finished them, it felt like a real sense of achievement.

On the technical side, the one-liner code is flawless. I know from experience that fitting UDGs and even sound into a one-liner program reduces the available number of character positions remaining for game logic. The fact that Sokoban could be implemented at all in a one-liner is impressive enough, but doing it with multicoloured user-defined graphics and sound surely is a most incredible achievement.

So in summary this one-liner puzzle game has everything - it's a genuinley tough logical challenge, which is no pushover to complete. At the same time it must rank as the absolute pinnacle of one-liner coding achievements on the ZX-Spectrum. To award it any less than five would be to sorely underestimate the technical ingenuity and creative flair of this title. Obviously, it won't score a five for people who don't like Sokoban, or maybe even those who do not like "one-liners" but for those who do enjoy these challenging things, this is absolutely top drawer stuff.

The high score I award this game is from the point of view of someone who likes train driving simulation games. So the score is actually "5 - but only if you like train sim games". If trains aren't your thing then this game is probably not going to hold your attention and a lower score would clearly be appropriate. So assuming you do like train simulation games, then read on...

It couldn't have got any better than this on 8-bit platforms. "Evening Star" is the sequel to "Southern Belle" completing this two game series published by Hewson. Quite possibly, Evening Star is the lesser known of the two games, being the sequel and all. However, in 1994 it just happened to be the game I stumbled upon as I downloaded a set of SNA files from the early speccy software FTP archive at ftp.ijs.si. It is fair to say that throughout that year, I became somewhat addicted to this game. Back then there were no other readily available high profile train simulator programs for 16-bit systems or even PCs, so naturally playing this game through emulation filled a gap otherwise present in my game collection of that time. It is imperative that the instructions are read for serious playing of this title. Although I didn't have them back in the '90s I managed to work out most of the keys through trial and error. Only when I read the instructions more recently did I discover that far more keys were available than I ever knew and some of these are very useful whilst playing. But more than that, the instructions for this game are superb and also give a lot of background information on the game's setting.
Kinda makes me feel sorry I was born after the Beeching Axe fell and that the largely rural west country line simulated in this game unsurprisingly no longer exists. (The route ran from Bath to Bournemouth).

The depth of simulation is highly impressive and technically appears accurate. Although I regret I have never been required to drive a steam engine in real life, the attention to detail in this game comes from someone clearly passionate about steam locomotives, seemingly knowing every nut and bolt inside-out. The authenticity of this is unquestionable to anyone who has played the game. To start off with you just want to keep things relatively simple by taking control of the regulator, cut-off and brake controls only. In this mode the computer will handily take control of the injectors, blower and firehole doors and dampers for you.

Eventually you may wish to assume total control of both the driver and fireman's job, but understand that you will really have your hands full if you do this. So make sure you have read the instructions and you really know what you are doing before attempting this, otherwise you may get 100 yards down the track before blowing the engine up. Not only have you got to keep the engine running effeciently and with a suitable head of steam for the upcoming gradients (which requires some element of forward planning), you are also required to strictly follow the rules of the railway including signals, local speed limits and restrictions and even tokens on single track sections. On top of all that of course you are absolutely required to stick to the timetable, stop precisely at the correct stations etc.. making this overall a very challenging yet rewarding title - if quite demanding of the player's time. Fortunately, quieter stretches of the game where not too much input is required can be sped up with careful use of the 'A' key, accelerating time by a factor of 4 or so. The graphics consist of wireframe buildings (with hidden lines not visible) for the scenery, which has a great attention to detail. Everything from gasometers to churches, houses, station buildings, tunnel platforms and the all important railway signals are all here. As are of course any tracks and sidings that happen to be parallel to you during your long journey. The train driver's cab is conversely implemented as a huge "sprite" with a size of about half of the graphics window and with all controls and indicators very clearly visible to the player.

Even the four types of smoke coming from the engine reveal vital clues about how it is currently running, which could possibly necessitate adjustments to the controls. Useful parameters such as coal remaining and distance travelled take up the right hand portion of the screen. Sound is suitable for this game giving an indicator of speed, and the whistle sound is really well done. Finally, remember to run the engine as efficiently as possible, the game demands it of you! Of course we are spoilt for choice with modern day train simulators nowadays, but even some of these do not reach the realism, difficulty or addictiveness of "Evening Star". An absolute classic and along with Southern Belle, a defining era of train driving simulation.

For a 16K effort dating from 1983, this pinball game from Sagittarian Software is pretty playable and addictive.

Whereas many pinball games tend to use a white ball on a dark playfield, this game has it the other way round as you propell a black ball around a very lightly coloured cyan and white play area.

As pinball tables are much taller (longer) than they are wide, they don't naturally fit well on a TV set. Some pinball games get around this by leaving a bit of unused space on either side of the screen and later 16-bit games famously used vertical scrolling.

Here, the chosen solution was to effectively use a double width table which looks rather like two tables joined together, having four flippers in total. In this case, the approach works pleasingly well and at least the entire screen is put to good use.

The animation of the small 8x8 ball sprite is very fast and smooth and the "physics engine" whilst suitably basic appears well implemented.

The game features the usual assortment of bumpers and bonus modes but does seem slightly simplistic when held up against pinball games of later years, certainly it lacks more advanced features and modes.

The power of the plunger is fortunately user controllable, and depends on the duration that the "launch" key is held down. This proves very useful in initially launching the ball to an approximate area of the upper screen.

There is no TILT in this game although it does have a FREEBALL mode that can be activated.

You'll possibly want to play it until the bonus word "SAGITTARIAN" is completely lit up which is quite satisfying to do.

So although we have the choice of far more elaborate and graphically impressive pinball games, even on the speccy, I find this one a quite enjoyable early effort, even today.

The excellent score I award this game is completely in the context of it being a "minigame" of less than 1K in size and also an absorbing if simple-looking logical puzzler. Obviously, it's not a game laden with mindblowing audio-visual effects as it's just not that sort of title. If the accompanying instructions are read and the game is given a chance by the more patient player then you could find yourself wanting to complete the entire 100 levels, which for example took me almost a week of evenings to accomplish.

Each level consists of a 7x7 city grid which you (as a police officer) must patrol by visiting the maximum possible number of visitable squares, using QAOP keys. However, your own path through the city (suitably marked by a thick blue line) and also a small number of obstacles both block your progress onwards. Each level shows a number between 0-4 beneath the city grid. This represents the number of grid squares that are permitted to remain unvisited at the end of the level. Complete a level and it will satisfyingly become marked with a '*' character on the screen and you will automatically enter the next city grid.
What makes your task non-trivial is the fact that when you move in a certain direction, you keep on moving that way until you hit an obstacle or the edge of the city.

You can select any of the 100 levels simply by typing a two-digit level number in directly at any time during play. This is a nice touch meaning you can attempt the levels in any order you please. Again, like many puzzle games the underlying premise sounds simple enough yet can be fiendishly challenging. I don't know why, but some levels seemed relatively easy to me, yet for many of them I just could not see the solution for a long time, often in excess of an hour. I can't even put into words the nature of the skill you need to complete some of the levels, but perhaps a flash of inspiration to try completely new routes out now and again really helps the more determined player along.

Also, it's very easy to remain locked in a "closed mind" attitude, repeatedly retrying failed routes out of frustration. The player should avoid this behaviour whenever possible!

The game also allows (via SYMSHIFT-S) showing of the solution of the currently active level if you are really stuck. However, I personally prefer not to use this feature as I feel it would diminish the achievement of completing the game. Therefore I didn't use it whilst actually playing.

Colour scheme is a pleasingly light yellow and green background. The game is silent but of course this is largely irrelevant in a puzzle game and the code was designed to fit in 1K of code so space is very tight. For me, the impressive aspect of this game is that 100 levels were fitted into it and also the sheer number of entertaining playing-hours I got out of it.

Don't take lightly the task of completing this title though. If you want to complete all 100 levels then you'll be in for a significant mental challenge, quite probably spanning a few days!

This is a two game compilation containing the games "Repton" (I refer to it as "Repton 1") and "Repton 2" which are also available separately. Nowadays, you may find it convenient to just grab the +3 disk version of this compilation although there is also a tape version available.

The Repton games were one of the flagship franchises on the BBC/Electron computers back in the eighties. Several sequels and additional level packs were released on those platforms as were the associated level designers and even a scripting language called "reptol". Overall, sales were very high on the BBC/Electron platforms.

Out of all of these games, only Repton 1 and Repton 2 made it belatedly to the speccy at the end of the decade. This is somewhat unfortunate as arguably some of the later sequels are better games, containing more features and a wider variety of in-game graphics. The overall success of the Repton series on the BBC platforms never did translate too well to other 8-bit platforms.

The Repton games appear superficially similar to Boulderdash, but are quite different in practice. The emphasis is more on puzzle solving than on arcade action, although some arcade element still exists.

Simply put, the objective is to collect all diamonds from a level, moving obstacles such as boulders and earth out of the way as needed. As in Boulderdash, falling boulders kill the player character, which happens to be the eponymous anthropomorphic lizard. Also, the order and route taken in solving the levels is crucial since it is very easy to block off access to later parts of the level, often forcing the player to restart from the beginning.

The speccy implementation is very good with four-way scrolling of the multicoloured playfield without any colour clash, perhaps due to scrolling 8 pixels at a time. Here, this method works fine since scrolling is not continuous, but rather driven by player movements.

Sprites are pleasantly rendered and are all 32x32 pixels in size. Good use of two-tone magenta/red shading is used on boulders for example.

Both games feature music on the intro screens and in-game sound effects. Either can be switched on or off.

Repton 1:- This game consists of a series of twelve levels and a scrollable map of the current level is available via the 'M' key.
Each level has a password and also time limit which is rather generous at least on the earlier levels. You can return back to the intro screen at any time during play to pause and see how much time remains. It is merely enough to collect all diamonds on each level in order to complete it. Although, some diamonds are trapped inside locked safes which must be released by collecting the key item.

Repton 2:- This entire game is effectively one huge level albeit split into different coloured sections accessible via teleport squares. Also, wall-hugging spirits are added which must be carefully guided back to their respective cages, freeing further diamonds. Care must be taken as they kill the player on contact. There's also an "uncovered" section at the very top of the level where lethal meteors rapidly rain down from the sky. Not only must all diamonds and "puzzle pieces" be collected, but also all earth must be cleared by the player and all "monsters" killed too. In total there are well over 6,000 items for the player to collect or clear! All in all, Repton 2 is an exceedingly tough challenge and early BBC versions were impossible to complete due to a bug which meant the player was left one diamond short at the end. This soul-destroying mistake was fixed in later BBC versions and so I'm presuming that it is fixed in this much later speccy version too.

Repton 2 was so difficult and unwieldly to tackle for most players that later sequels (not available on the speccy) reverted back to the clearly more popular level-based/password format of Repton 1.

In summary though we have one excellent game (Repton 1) and one good but overly-difficult game (Repton 2), both of which have a technically superb implementation on the speccy.

The C64 was blessed with Repton 1 and Repton 3 though, all in all a far better combination. If this was also the case on the speccy, I would have awarded 5 here, but the inclusion of Repton 2 instead of Repton 3 makes this compilation one point short of excellent, yet still very good.

On a final note, the speccy was uniquely blessed with a public domain Repton clone called "Riptoff", which is still now considered to be perhaps even better than the orginial Repton game itself!

A simple, small wordsearch puzzle which may keep you occupied for ten minutes or so. I was compelled to try this one out since I like anything with a maritime theme. On loading the program up from the Outlet issue 101 disk menu, it is pleasing to read that this is number five in a series of puzzles. I have not yet hunted down the other titles in this series, but I'm guessing they'd also be found somewhere on the "Outlet" series of MGT +D disks.

Starting the game reveals a nice enough yellow screen with a 10x5 grid of black, bold-typed letters in which are contained 13 maritime words for the player to find. Maritime terminology covers a whole range of obscure jargon and so I was initially concerned that I may not recognise some of the words because of this. However, my fears were quickly allayed on finding most of the words pretty rapidly. In fact, all of the nautical words are in common usage to the layman and would even be immediately recognised by a lifelong landlubber. The puzzle whilst a relaxing diversion, could indeed be completed by a child.

The method of word selection is via arrow keys and space to locate the first letter of the identified word. You then type the word in directly so the program can check your answer. You also must press a number 1-8 to specify the direction of the word you think you have just found. This method works well enough.

As for criticisms, well the keyboard response leaves a bit to be desired and is quite sluggish. Quick keypresses are not always registered, leading the player to adopt the habit of holding keys down for a second when navigating around the puzzle grid. Pressing 'H' for 'H'elp was also a little misleading for me. I thought it would give instructions on how to play the game. Instead it reveals all of the answers which I didn't really want to see. Oops! Perhaps this should have been renamed to "Show word list" or something, instead of "Help".

Also, the message displayed on finding a word that doesn't happen to be in the list can be a bit confusing as it reads "That word cannot be made from that point and in that direction" when clearly it can. I think that the message should really read "Word not found in list" in that particular case. However, these pedantic gripes of the implementation do not overly spoil this quick'n'cheerful wordsearch puzzle. Overall, for me it scores a 3. Maybe on a rainy day I'll complete the other games in the same series albeit with no great sense of urgency.

I got this one on a second-hand magazine covertape back in the early nineties, during the brief spell I had my ZX Spectrum +2 set up with a colour TV oohh! More than anything else I was trying to populate my rather meagre speccy game cupboard. I can't exactly say that in buying this particular Crash mag and cover tape I significantly improved my game collection though. It was a strange time when 8-bit games were already effectively devalued and the magazines had thinned out considerably. In the UK it was cleary a sort of tail end of the original speccy era, yet on the plus side certain coding techniques such as sprite routines, scrolling and sound routines had been more or less perfected.

Zanthrax is arguably the best title on its particular four game cover tape though. It is memorable mainly for its impressive turbo loader, multi-channel BEEPER music on the intro screen (main synth melody plus drums) and absolutely perfect flicker free pixel scrolling and high speed sprite action in the monochrome play area.

You control a small racing spaceship which can scroll both up or down the screen vertically at three different speeds in either direction. The objective is to scour each artificially built space-race-track looking for ten domes which must be destroyed by shooting at them. After destroying all domes, you must fly to the "finish" pad. There are many hazardously placed obstacles in the way such as pillars and walls which you must avoid crashing into by shifting the ship sideways whilst racing about.
In fact there is a quite tricky bit right at the very beginning of the first level which I just kept getting killed on until I got a little more skilled at the game. I could imagine this might put some people off it.

There are also racing opponents which can shoot and kill you, but of course you should shoot back at every opportunity. Each level is against the clock so the faster time you get, the more money you earn which naturally leads to better weapon and ship upgrades before starting the next level. 20,000 credits in particular is a very useful amount to earn since it buys an extra ship. (you start with three and when they are all destroyed, the game is over). On the one hand you want to fly fast to get a good time, but on the other hand avoiding fatal obstacles is virtually impossible on the fastest speeds. It's so much more easier to fly around on the slowest speed but of course you'll then only gain modest ship upgrades due to getting slow finishing times.

Overall the game is expertly coded and a real test of reflex and skill, but just not totally addictive. I can't put my finger on why this is. On the face of it this should be an excellent gaming experience. Perhaps it is the horrendously tricky weaving between the contrived obstacles or getting completely shot out of existence by opponents with about 0.5 seconds notice (as the game is so fast), make it just a bit too hard to get off the ground for a casual player.

There are also a couple of minor other criticisms. If you elect to play with the keyboard, as I usually do then you have to redefine the keys every time you play the game. In the beginning, the game may only last a couple of minutes (until you have built up more skill). On dying, you just want to press a key and regain immediate entry back into the game, but alas you have to go through the "define key" screen again. So, it's arguably more sensible to select a joystick option instead, even when using an emulator.

Also, the player name has to be entered before each game starts. This is for the highscore table. It's one of those ones where you move a cursor along a list of letters using left and right controls - again I appreciate the arcade feel of this, but why can't we just use the keyboard to type the name directly? You'll probably just end up pressing "FIRE" 12 times before playing the game on each occasion, so that the highscore table will read AAAAAAAAAAAA throughout. Whilst supporting a keyboard option this game really is crying out to be used with a joystick.

In summary, a technically excellent and ultra smooth vertical shooter with memorable effects that somehow just doesn't seem to draw in the casual player. The playability is slighty diminished by rather inconveniently placed monochrome obstacles that are easily crashed into, outrageously fast lethal opponents and over-cumbersome pre-game menu screens.

This is a review of "The Penetrator" by "Mark Foley Productions". The release year is currently unknown to me, but it was written in 1987. This title is not to be confused with the better known "Scramble" clone, simply called "Penetrator".

In "The Penetrator", you must carefully pilot a spaceship through a series of line drawn mazes. The backstory suggests that these mazes are inside a huge enemy spaceship. Contact with the walls of the mazes is fatal to your ship although you do get three ships in total. Your ship is described as "the second largest spaceship ever built" however on the screen it looks relatively small and rather like the head-on view of a shuttlecraft from the USS Enterprise.

There is a constant tug downwards, described as "gravity" in the instructions, although this effect just nudges the ship downwards every few iterations rather than act as a true accelerating force. i.e. Your ship just falls at a slow constant rate in practice.

Navigating through the mazes is quite tricky and the default key setup is W,E,I,J which seems almost a reflection to the more familiar Q,A,O,P layout. This led me to ponder if the game may have been designed by someone left-handed. Fortunately the keys can be redefined to the more familiar layout which I'm personally used to. You'll quite possibly never need to use the "DOWN" key though.

The first level is reasonably difficult, but nothing compared to the subsequent levels which are to put it mildly, very tough to follow. The maze layouts get succesively more complex with increasingly randomly aligned lines to avoid and ever increasing narrow gaps. One narrow gap on level two is particularly difficult to pass through, requiring pixel-perfect precision and timing. Luckily though you can exploit some deficiencies in the collision detection (which is done using the BASIC "POINT" function) by passing right through some small lines unscathed, as long as they do not touch the corners of your craft. What makes the game even more difficult is that the only passable route through each maze is usually the most circuitous one and you have to plan ahead lest you inadvertently float into in a dead-end. On a real speccy, you would plan your route whilst having to maintain the ship's position against gravity, avoiding a crash. Of course, on an emulator, the temptation to pause the game whilst initially studying the maze is somewhat irresistable. I got as far as level four as I write this, so not I'm sure how many levels there are in total.

On the technical side, The game is written almost entirely in BASIC. There are some USR statements in the code but it appears that they are used mainly to set the game up. The main game loop is implemented in standard interpreted BASIC and uses PLOT and DRAW commands to animate your moving spacecraft. However, speed is adequate in this BASIC title because your ship is the only thing on the screen that moves.

In summary, this is quite an entertaining title to start off with that gets pretty difficult once you get past the first level and get a feel for how long the game really is. You need extreme patience and uniterrupted concentration to exit each maze succesfully. Also, later levels could possibly be described as not only "challenging", but also "fiddly" too, particularly as multiple simultaneous keypresses are not detected.

"Muncher" is the first game to be found on side A of the now legendary and infamous "Cassette 50" tape from Cascade. This one is written in 100% pure BASIC and (as its title would inevitably suggest) inspired by Pacman. This is just one of a practically uncountable number of games of its type written for the speccy.

Most of the games on the Cascade tape are below average, as is this one. No doubt if all speccy Pacman-derived games were lined up according to quality and enjoyment, then this one would find itself somewhere near the tail-end.

Bad points:-
The initial instructions are gradually emitted across the screen in the clichéd mock-typerwriter style with one beeper click per character. Alas, this can't be skipped. No doubt after loading the game up more than once this would become somewhat tedious. All that is really essential are the in-game keys (Q,Z,I,P).

The Pacman character is shown from a top-down perspective as if looking downwards from above its head. Hence, it has two eyes instead of the more usual single-eyed side-on depiction. I don't object to the idea itself, but since the ghosts are shown side-on as usual this looks a bit inconsistent here.

Gameplay is slow even though there are only two ghosts and one pacman character moving about the screen. I feel that even in BASIC it could have been at least slightly faster than this. Naturally all movements are locked to the 8x8 character grid, although I can't criticise anything written in BASIC for that.

The ghost "AI" is very simple, utilising the straightforward, predictable method of always moving one step towards the player. Also, since the maze has lots of open spaces that are two characters wide, the ghosts can very often move diagonally in a single move although the player generally can't. The ghosts can of course be outwitted by moving back and forth through the "warp" tunnel that connects the left and right edges of the maze and it's a safe bet that a ghost will never follow you through this. There is only one maze layout in the game.

Although there are a generous eight power pills laid out for the player, the four near the centre can be tricky to get to without getting caught. This is due to the aforementioned ghost "AI" coupled with the rather open layout at the center of the maze. Ghosts turn from their usual magenta to green when a power pill is active but they'll still chase you anyway and there is no warning that a pill is about to wear off.

The maze is quite possibly oversized with too many dots and given the slowness of the game it can take a while to finish a level. Also, only one keypress at a time is detected. INKEY$ is used here, but using IN would have possibly improved things quite a bit.

When you lose a life, the pacman character is transported back to the centre of the maze. However, the ghosts remain where they were before. So if you were unfortunate to get eaten near the centre then you could lose all three lives in one go. Nasty!

There also appears to be an equals sign missing in the "status line" at the bottom right of the screen (play the game to see what I mean). Perhaps it's a bit petty to point this out, but it does give the impression that the game development may have been a little rushed.

Good points:-
Despite the previously mentioned problems, I actually quite like the elementary UDGs and the game is at least colourful and makes good use of simple sound effects.

The game is also a bit of a challenge. It's no mean feat to complete a level, made difficult perhaps for all the wrong reasons but still manages to feel like a minor achievement on completion.

So overall, the bad points somewhat outnumber the good but this is not the absolute worst of the genre.

It was once stated somewhere that all "bedroom coders" who implemented their own pacman games should be forced to play them as punishment. In this case it'd hardly be "hard labour" but certainly a minor deterrent!

This is quite possibly the best game on the entire Cascade "Cassette 50" compilation, although admittedly that isn't saying a great deal. Here we genuinely have quite a reasonable port of the Frogger genre.

Before the game is even played, two things make this one stand out above most of the others found in the Cassette 50 compilation. (1) It is apparent that this program uses a fast machine code routine to horizontally scroll the road and river hazards. This makes it far better than it would have been if it were written entirely in BASIC and really saves the game. (2) "Frogger" made it into at least two other compilations besides "Cassette 50", whereas most of the other games on the tape never were re-used elsewhere.

As for playing the game itself, "Frogger" features highly detailed intricate UDG graphics making good use of the speccy's available range of colours and runs at a quite reasonable pace. It really is a game that looks good.

The difficulty is reasonably well balanced being quite difficult in a challenging rather than frustrating way.

Sound is certainly OK, consisting of a simple BEEP when the frog is moved and a sequence of BEEPs when you get killed, for example. These are very much the type of sounds expected in a BASIC arcade game.

For those accustomed to jumping on the backs of turtles and crocodiles in the more traditional Frogger games (e.g. on the Atari 2600), you must bear in mind that this game instead works the opposite way to that during the "river section". Here you must instead avoid the crocs and cargo ships and "swim" across the river.

Something that looks a bit like a giant spider patrols the central grass verge between road and river, rather than the more commonly seen grass snake. This is quite a nice touch.

On the negative side, the keyboard repeat can cause the player to unwittingly move two squares instead of one, usually resulting in instant death. This becomes less problematic as you get a feel for the "timing" of the game. There is also no key available to move the frog back down one row. I am very used to this feature in other Frogger games and so really do miss it in this one. Lack of this key can make the game seem tougher than some other versions. There's also a slight delay on initially running the game while the masses of DATA statements are read in, but this isn't overly long.

Overall this one is memorable for the decent graphics and respectable playability making it head and shoulders above most other titles on the "Cassette 50" tape. Although, it scores a three as it doesn't really reach the theoretical dizzy heights of a pure machine-code commercial single-game offering.

As bad games go, this is something of a classic. Certainly it is one of the many "filler" games found on the Cascade Cassette 50 compilation. Fishing games are never popular at the best of times, as evidenced by the ceiling-high stack of unsold Dreamcast Fishing Rods I saw in "Poundland" a few years back. Of course, it's not that fishing itself is boring in real life, just that it never seems to translate well into computer games. And so, this title starts by "tackling" an unpopular, dreary genre and somehow sucks out any tiny remnant of fun that could have possibly been present given the scope of such a game.

The first part consists of a text based shopping trip where you must use multiple numbered selections to purchase an assortment of equipment including rod, line, reel, bait, hooks etc. This is really quite drawn out and cumbersome and you wonder how much the combination of the various items can seriously affect the outcome of the game.

After you eventually leave the shop you may well be very happy that you made some good purchasing choices but you will invariablly "fall over" and randomly drop some of your equipment (namely some fishing hooks).

On my first attempt, I bought 20 fishing hooks, left the shop, tripped over and dropped exactly 20 fishing hooks. As I'd instantly ran out of hooks, the game immediately quit even before I'd had a chance to cast off. So I'd failed the game, presumably right on the pavement just outside the fishing shop door, at no fault of my own.

Second attempt, I was more fortunate (only dropped 3 hooks this time), actually getting into the fishing part of the game which consists of the player initially having to type in the full exact name of the bait you want to use (oops I forgot the name of the bait I just bought - must start again). Why doesn't the game just use the number of the bait here, after all I had at least managed to remember that I had bought "bait number 1".

Third attempt, finally I did some "fishing", yippee. There are no fish graphics at all and it looks like you are some long-armed midget who casts his rod into the high sky above rather than into a lake. It appears that the only thing you would likely catch is a 400kV power transmission line.

The main game loop consists of a countdown clock with erratic BEEP sounds continually playing whilst the occasional "bite" will appear, flagged by your fishing reel twitching for a split second. You have to be very quick on the '0' key to catch the bite, i.e. considerably quicker than if it was a real fish actually stuck on a baited hook.

I did eventually get a reasonable score which resulted in quite bizzare inappropriate almost sci-fi sounding sound effects, but in summary this game is pretty dreadful in all departments and I can't honestly see how anyone could extract any genuine enjoyment out of it.

P.S. I think this one also breaks the record for the most "PAUSE 0" statements in a single BASIC listing.

A breakout clone from 2007 with the added "bonus" of colourful screens at the end of each level depicting scantily clad women in a variety of erotic poses. The pictures are drawn rather than scanned and tend to vary in artistic quality from slightly wonky and cartoonish to reasonably detailed, given the obvious limitations of the speccy resolution and palette. Irrespective of this, the subject matter imposes assumptions about the target audience of the game and to me, there'll always be something fundamentally mismatched about including "lad mag" type pictures in an 8-bit retro bat'n' ball game, but "each to his own" of course!

Torn as I was between giving this game a score of one or two, I finally decided to be a little generous here because whatever you may think of the game, at least a reasonable amount of effort went into it, although sadly it appears only the tiniest proportion of it on the actual gameplay.

As for the game itself, it effectively turns the clock back three decades by ignoring all great improvements and additions that were collectively incorporated into the Breakout genre over the years. It is indeed difficult now not to miss these enhancements in a modern game if they are not there. Unlike Arkanoid or Krakout for example, this game seemingly has no features of note above those found in the 1976 original. For example, I've only played the first two levels but as far as I can tell, Chicks'n'Bricks has no power-ups whatsoever. Also, each level (on looking at the maps) looks pretty much the same with a solid rectangular array of wall-to-wall bricks and absolutely no variation apart from colour. There are also just too many rows of bricks on each level, taking ages to complete.

The bat has two speeds, slow and fast but unlike Krakout (and even my own one-liner Breakout clone) there is no key that the player can press to invoke the higher bat speed. Here, the bat just starts off slow and then after a second or so jolts to the fast speed automatically. You may well find that this method results in lives being lost at an alarming rate as the bat seems to annoyingly overshoot the ball a great deal of the time. But the biggest sin is that the ball can go right through the bat because of a familiar bug in the bat-ball collision detection. This is almost guaranteed to happen if the ball is moving at a shallow angle and your bat is moving in the opposite direction. There's nothing the unwitting player can do about this but sigh.

There's also another bug that I've seen before in the ball-brick collision, where the ball can penetrate and knock out an entire double row of bricks even though there is no gap between the two rows. But thankfully I'm glad this bug was left in because it actually helps the player complete the level more quickly. Overall it's quite an ordeal to actually finish a level due to the above problems and one that will usually end in failure and frustration at the awkwardness of the bat and unfair collision detection of the game.

So in summary this is a poor game-playing experience, married to a questionable concept. Just complete level six if you have a few hours to spare for you will be rewarded with some red nipple pixels, if that's your thing. (Or look at all of the pics via the "maps" in the worldofspectrum archives and save yourself the hassle).

This is a review of the 1982 game by Bruce Rutherford. It was one the few games that were bundled with the "Spectrum Emulator Games Pack" on the Atari ST and so I used to play this one under emulation back in the early '90s. It's fair to say that because I initially had less than a dozen speccy games available at the time, I spent far more time playing this than I would nowadays. "I'm not a number - I'm a free sprite" is what you may be thinking whilst playing as you are chased around Pacman type mazes whilst being pursued by man-sized bubbles, quite reminiscent of cult TV show "The Prisoner".

In this game however, there are no dots in the maze, instead there are various items which must be picked up whilst being chased by the bubbles. Your character is meant to be a burglar "on the rob". Each level is on a timer, lasting about a minute during which time the in-maze items should be collected as quickly as possible. When all items have been collected, bonus points of increasing value will start to appear in the maze, and after you have eventually grabbed the two "1000 point" bonuses, a question mark bonus will appear, allowing immediate progression to the next level even if there is still time remaining. Although to grab all of the bonuses within the allowed time isn't always easy to do.

There are three levels of difficulty, corresponding to having one, two or three bubbles chasing the player, although enabling more bubbles really slows the game down by a surprising amount. There are fifty levels in total and any of them can be selected as the starting level. Some maze layouts are difficult with dangerous dead ends some are more easy and open. INK/PAPER colours and maze wall sprites change from one level to the next. The maze wall sprites consist of trees, houses, pyramids and a variety of block shapes. The mazes made of houses look particularly good, although laughably out of scale with the player character. Many of the mazes have warp tunnels connecting the left edge of the screen to the right and some have top to bottom connections. The bubbles can follow the player through the warp tunnels in this game.

Controls are via the CURSOR key layout but Kempston joystick is also supported. Personally I find it easier to use joystick emulation than the fiddly CURSOR layout when playing arcade games like this. The game makes good use of colour with each bubble and maze item being separately coloured. Sprite animation is smooth as expected for a machine code game and sound is quite good. Although it could be said that the tune played when a life is lost is just a few notes too long.

Playability is good and certainly fun, but the game is very much of its time. After a while, it starts to seem a bit aimless and open-ended and modern day players may start to wonder if there isn't more to the game than picking items up whilst avoiding bubbles. There isn't, well apart from the challenge of attempting to complete all fifty levels in one gaming session.

So this would have been a game I'd have loved back in 1982 with a real arcade feel and reasonably well implemented, but with hindsight it lacks depth and seems the sort of game you play when you have half an hour to spare. Nice early speccy arcade title of casual interest, but not with a huge replayability factor.

This one was released as a "ZX Computing" magazine type-in back in 1983. It can be seen from the user votes that it universally gets a very low score. I tend to agree that this is a poor game, but by no means the worst. Given the scope and context of this title, it was never meant to be mindblowingly amazing but I quite enjoyed playing it for a few minutes.

The game is written entirely in BASIC and simply uses the trick of printing onto row 21 of the screen in order to vertically scroll an asteroid field. Your spaceship must be moved left and right in order to avoid crashing into asteroids. Naturally, we find the POKE that avoids the scroll? message appearing in the main game loop. I don't know how many games of this type were written in BASIC for the speccy over the years, but we all know that it's no small number.

Good points:-
The game is quite tricky and reasonably fast for BASIC. It provides a challenge for a short while. You have five lives and you lose one if you hit an asteroid with one of your wings, or lose two if you hit one slap bang in the middle.

You also have five "energy screens" which can be used to destroy unavoidable asteroids that are immediately below your craft, if there's insufficient time to move out of the way.

Bad points:-
Outer space should be black, not blue.

Some of the asteroids do not look like asteroids, although I can understand the difficulty in making many differently shaped asteroids in tiny 8x8 pixel UDGs. The asteroids would have looked a lot better if they were larger and made up of blocks of 2x2 UDGs joined together. As they are, some of them are too small to have realistic detail.

The biggest flaw is that there will be times when you will definitely collide with asteroids no matter how skilful you are. This no-win situation really spoils the game meaning that it will always end in destruction of your ship, having used up all of your "energy screens". It may take thirty seconds or it may take ten minutes of play, but this unavoidable situation will always happen eventually because there are too many asteroids on screen. The asteroids often cluster together making an effectively impenetrable wide barrier.

When the game suddenly ends you will typically be holding down a key. This means you can often inadvertently skip the high score table and menu screen, or accidentally enter your name as "88" or "00" etc.. The keyboard logic should really check for this.

At the end of each game, the menu screen asks if you want to (p)lay again, (s)ave the game or (f)inish. I just think its a bit over the top having an option to save a copy of this (not very good) game out onto tape when the end user can type in a SAVE command themselves on the rare occasion they may want to back the game up or copy it for someone.

There is no sound. It would have been an improvement just to put a simple BEEP in when you crash, IMHO.

So overall, this was the sort of listing accepted for publication in speccy magazines back in 1983 and no doubt provided a few minutes of fun at the time. After all if you'd spent an hour or so typing it in, you'd make completely sure you were going to get some "fun" out of it. At least as listings go, it's not that long! In 2009, it'd sit very comfortably as a crap game entry.

I only like it because I enjoy investigating and playing obscure type-ins and esoteric games, but the mainstream concensus seems to be that this is one to avoid. And truthfully, it is "poor" in the great scheme of things, not just because of the above flaws but because with 21st century hindsight, this type of game has since been done to death.

This straightforward Russian puzzle game is an entertaining diversion and one I haven't yet completed.

Although listed in the WoS archive as being a "48K" game, it will play AY chip music if the hardware is available. For example it plays fine on a "Pentagon 128" with the chip music blaring out. The game is in the TRD disk image format, as is common for Russian titles.

As with many Russian games, copious use of the English language is seen on the various intro screens. So much so that you may be momentarily fooled into thinking that you are playing an English language game. However, on selecting the option to view the instructions, they inevitably appear in Russian.

In any case, the simple instructions roughly translate as:- "You must fill all empty cells with numbers up to 100, but it is only possible to move like a knight in chess". The game supports Kempston joystick to move around the board and the fire button or SPACE key places the current number in the selected cell, providing the move is valid. The puzzle starts to become difficult as the 10x10 board begins to fill up, leading to the situation where there may be no valid moves from your current position. In that case, the game ends.

Overall, the game shows the usual high quality sound and vibrant graphics found in even the simplest of the many Russian puzzle games. This typically gives them a sort of demo-style "sheen" and is certainly a far better presentation than a few BASIC print statements would allow, for example.

I like the game as it is a bit of a challenge, but can't really give it more than a three due to the fact that it is really just a one-off single level puzzle, which once solved would probably not be revisited. Of course, I still have to solve it yet!

This game is actually good rather than average, however a major flaw in the input system forces me to knock a point off.

ZZZZ is a graphical text adventure coming from a time when pure text adventures were losing popularity to more grapically orientated games. I can quite imagine back in those days, many software houses were dreaming up new ideas of how to make adventure games more competitive again. Generally, I prefer text adventures wholly devoid of graphics, sound and colour as I like to instead rely on imagination to formulate my own mental imagery of scenery and characters.

However, ZZZZ makes really good use of graphics which are bright, colourful and generally cheerful in this game which takes place in a bizarre dreamworld. The fact that the game takes place inside a dream allows all sorts of liberties to be taken with geography, setting & consistency etc.. This is not a bad thing as it allows all manner of imaginative and diverse elements to come into play during your quest. The loading screen whilst mainly monochrome gives a suitable overview of the in-dream chaos.

The basic premise is that you are really asleep in your bed and whilst dreaming you have to complete the adventure in order to ultimately exit the dream and wake up again.

During the adventure, you can enter text commands traditionally like "get bucket" and so on or you can use a joystick controlled icon driven system which allows automatic input of the most common adventuring commands (like "inventory", "examine", "use" etc..). This icon driven system supports Kempston and Sinclair joysticks. But therein lies the major problem with the game. Unfortunately, the "delete" key is overloaded with the Sinclair fire button function, presumably because it is on the "0" key. For those traditionalists like me who prefer to play the game purley by typing commands in directly, the input system is very difficult to work with. In fact all players must use direct text input mode for some commands to complete the game.

You'll often make a mistake whilst typing and want to delete some characters, but instead you will end up activating the currently selected icon and executing a command you did not intend (like "LOOK" for example). This is made even worse by the fact the keyboard repeat is too quick and it's all too easy to type a letter twice when you only pressed a key once. At least a brief sound is played on every keypress.

I'm sure these issues would've been quite easy to fix, making this £1.99 game truly great for the price, but for some reason this glaring problem slipped thorugh the "quality control net" and remains a highly off-putting flaw.

In summary this is by far one of the better and imaginative graphical text adventures that's unfortunately let down by a serious text inputting problem. This makes it somewhat frustrating to play, yet despite this I continue to find it an intriguing title.

This game is a BASIC arcade effort from one of the Spanish Microhobby compilations and is quite a unique title, although truthully it's not exactly a game that you'd spend a long time playing.

I make the title to roughly translate as "Of (drinking) glasses in New York", which makes some sense since the game involves a UFO like object constantly flying from left to right across a Manhattan type skyline. The skyscrapers have drinking glasses on top of them, which must be collected. You control the up and down movement of the craft and can also make some sort of skydiver descend from it. Either the skydiver or the UFO directly can be used to be used to collect the glasses. You should avoid colliding with buildings or stars.

You just can't fault this game for imagination. However, to me the setting looks more like "New New york", perhaps a future Martian colony, since we have a bright red sky with plenty of stars visible and of course I don't think that spacecraft or anti-UFO projectiles are that common in the present day metropolis. Also, the top floors of the skyscraper on the right hand side of the screen can only be described as having an "unorthodox", perhaps futuristic design.

The game has three levels:- easy, difficult or very difficult, although really the screen seems a bit of a jumbled mess during play. It's easy to momentarily lose track of your yellow on red flickery UFO, particularly after a collision. Therefore I would describe all three options as "difficult", or at least "fiddly".

The mock-3D effect of the skyscrapers is quite well done and short-duration BEEPs certainly provide sound that is suitable for the game. Keys are fixed, being mapped as the not too common 0,O,Z combination.

There are a few unfinished aspects of the program. For example press a letter instead of a number on the main menu screen - you may find that it causes an error that could have been trapped. Playability isn't exactly great but I happened to find this game memorable due to the loud, vivid graphics and unconventional setting and objectives.

It is a curiosity for a few minutes, but probably no more than that.

Again I find myself reviewing a game that if given a chance by the more patient player is actually quite good, but has a major flaw relegating it back to an average overall score.

Beyond that, this a reasonably competent Pacman clone from Croatia. (Press 'I' to start the game). The game uses CURSOR key layout. Of course I'd recommend using a "keystick" emulation mode in most emulators. The game is written mostly in BASIC but does use some machine code routines. It is apparent that the system variable CHARS is POKEd on the main menu screen, so don't break out of the program at that point. (It is restored during the main game loop however).

The major problem with this game is the stilted, discrete movement of Pacman and the ghost sprites, such that it looks like you are watching a 1-frame per second CCTV footage of the game being played. All sprites move in jumps of 16 pixels at a time - this is too much. How unfortunate it is that this wasn't improved. An upgrade of this game to pixel-based movements would've made it great, although no doubt would cause it to suffer from some colour clash. It seems to me though that casual players could be put off by the "stop-frame" sprite motion.

Anyway, once you get beyond this major issue, everything else about the game is correct. The size of the maze is about right, not too big. The sprites are colourful and of the right size. The eyes on the ghosts move around with them, although to me they look like they are asleep.

The mazes have the usual bonus items such as fruit etc.. which pleasingly stack up along the bottom left of the screen as you progress from one level to the next. The ghost AI is suitable, and it's quite amusing to see the ghosts cowering in the bottom corners of the maze when a power pill is eaten. They really do look like they are trying to avoid the Pacman.

The first couple of levels start off trivially easy, but don't be fooled as later levels are more difficult due to speeding up of the ghosts, making them much more lethal later on. The difficulty curve seems pretty much spot on. I'm guessing there's an optimal route around the maze for the later levels. Sound effects are good and exactly as expected for a Pacman clone.

So, this one is a challenge for die-hard Pacman fans only. The discrete movement of the ghosts reminds me very much of the 1980's handheld LCD game "Mini Munchman". It could have been so much better though with a more advanced sprite routine.

Catch falling drips from a row of taps in this Lithuanian title that wouldn't be out of place on a handheld electronic game. No instructions are provided and indeed none are needed. Just use keys 1-5 to position your bucket under the corresponding tap in order to catch the dripping water.

If you miss a drip, then it will drain away into a container on the left of the screen, filling it a bit further. When that container eventually overflows, the game is lost. To start off with there are just two taps turned on and game is easily manageable at the slow "level 0". However, the level increases after every ten drips succesfully collected, speeding the game up a little more each time. By the time you get to level 9, it's running pretty fast.

After completing all 10 levels, another tap opens, and so on. It gets quite difficult just with four taps open, so I'd imagine with all five eventually open it must be a real challenge. It's an enjoyable if simple fast-action arcade game to keep you on your toes for a few minutes. It is written in complied BASIC.

This in-depth arcade game with some puzzle elements is great fun to play. It stands out because of the humourous plot, the "Beano" style comic characters and the technically excellent sprite routines. Playing the part of the eponymous Nipper, you must generally explore around your local town, creating all sorts of mischief, whilst avoiding contact with the town's inhabitants. Bumping into adults, pets or ghosts causes Jack's nappy rash to worsen, eventually losing a life when the rash meter fills up, although you start with a generous five nappies to get through.

It's not immediately obvious how to carry out some of the mischieveous tasks, which makes the game so much fun finding out. The first room of the game, Jack's bedroom sets the "naughty" tone quite well as you attempt to retrieve your peashooter, which has deliberately been placed out of your reach. It's also hilarious to see that ghosts and strange creatures infest the family home, but no-one really minds this. You also have to chuckle at the comical gait of the resident pet dog as he scurries around upright.

You'll never see smoother or as flicker-free sprite animation in a speccy game which really is perfect here. The locations whilst being predominantly monochrome do often have objects like posters and signs with different colours. These are often placed higher up than Jack can jump, presumably to avoid parts of Jack from changing colour.

If there is any minor criticism then it is that occasionally you can be very unlucky and lose a life due to Jack being awkwardly stuck right on another moving sprite for a few seconds. This can happen in certain rooms where Jack can get partially obstructed by objects. But, as you become better at the game, you get more adept at avoiding this, or at least escaping it quickly.

Overall, a classic and absorbing speccy game with a good sense of humour that's always fun to spend some time playing. It also spawned an equally enjoyable sequel.

This one was a free bonus game that came with the Zenobi Software text adventure "Behind Closed Doors 2: The Sequel". I don't know the story behind how this arrangement came about, but I can see that this game probably was not deemed quite good enough to be sold as a separate title. Also, with Zenobi being better known as purveyors of text adventures, people might have mistakenly thought that this is a text game also. It isn't.

This game apparently was constructed using "3D Game Maker" from CRL. Indeed, it looks like the sort of effort that would typically be made with that system and I can tell by observing the inner workings that the usual 3D Game Maker datafiles are indeed present here. What I can't fully understand is how this was produced, given that the vanilla 3D Game Maker system never let the end user create standalone game titles. Usually, the creator's sprite data and room layouts had to be loaded into the system manually to play the games, making their efforts generally impossible to distribute. So then, like many of the other similar titles out there, I can only speculate that the "3D Game Maker" system was somehow modifed to make a standalone "runtime" that autoloads and plays the designed game without any user intervention. (If only CRL had done this in the first place, their system may have been far more popular!).

The game itself is not very good. Coming after so many far better classic isometric games, this one pales in comparison. My main criticisms are that the game uses rotational controls rather than directional ones, which I personally find less natural to use. You only get one single life which is very harsh. You can sometimes get trapped by moving sprites that hem you in, but do not kill you. The instructions don't mention that you have to press 'A' to quit the game when this happens. The intro screen unfortunately looks better than the game itself, being multicoloured although the game itself is monochrome.

It's just not very enjoyable to play, because you have a feeling that the odds are stacked rather too much against the player. Although the sprites are really well drawn, the setting is a bit of a "mashup" of strange concepts. There's something odd really about playing a upright bear walking past TV cameras and lethal toy tanks. I'm also not used to having to press joystick-down to fire a projectile (in this case, a bubble).

On the plus side, the sprite animations are very well done and there are quite a large number of rooms to explore, but overall this game falls short of most isometric offerings.

This is in fact an excellent Breakout clone, rotated on its side. In this one, your vertical bat moves up and down the side of the screen, instead the more usual configuration of moving a horizontal bat along the bottom.

I only award it four points instead of five though, because the speccy version whilst pretty good, is truthfully not quite as good as the C64 version. The additions in the C64 version of in-game music and scrolling background layers really do enhance the game and the in-game sprites truthfully look better on that system too. There's also a couple of rare bugs in the speccy version where the ball can get trapped indefinitely, overlapping the edge of a brick and another one where the ball can get stuck in an infinite loop. Other ports don't seem to suffer from this occasional problem. (EDIT 23/03/2012: apparently other ports do sometimes show this problem) I'm happy to say though that generally, the playability of the game is just as good on the speccy as on other platforms.

The ball is pleasingly large and although you start off with a tiny bat, the "bat extension" power-up should be grabbed ASAP, particularly on level one. There are a good variety of power-ups and "enemy" sprites. These include floating faces, and wasps that paralyse your bat.

Each level has a different layout and acts as an incentive to keep playing. It always feels compelling to see what the next one looks like. The dual-speed bat mechanism is also a good idea as is the ability to set both bat and ball speed via an options screen. As you get better at the game, it may be to your advantage to start playing with a faster bat, for example.

So, overall a highly recommended, fun and addictive game. The speccy port is not the very best version though, IMHO.

Perhaps a score of two for this one is a little harsh, as there's nothing really "poor" about it. But I can't really say it lives up to the expectation of an "Average" game either. The reason is that this is not so much as a full-sized game. It is rather more like a sort of "sub-game" or "mini-game" that I could quite imagine being incorporated inside a larger game. So on it's own, it doesn't quite make it up to average.

The game involves you moving a craft along the bottom of the screen, from which a letter of the alphabet is fired upwards. The object is to get this letter to bounce off the top of the screen and land downwards in a sort of moving "basketball ring". (This is the topmost sprite, which can only be described as looking like a car wheel on its side, without a tyre). Once a letter has succesfully been landed in the ring, you get to try again with the next letter of the alphabet. There is a time limit, so your final score is dictated by how many letters you managed to score.

The game is made difficult by moving platforms and stationary obstacles that must be avoided, particularly so on the most difficult level 3. If obstacles are hit then your remaining time will be drained and your craft will be reset back to the left of the screen. The game is pretty frustrating to play - it wouldn't be so bad if the position of your craft did not get reset every time an obstacle is hit.

Despite this, the sprite animation is very smooth and the sound effects are decent. Just overall I can't recommend this game for relaxation although it may be worth a quick glance out of curiosity. More correctly I'd call it a minigame than a full game - the sort of thing you might expect in the minigame compo in fact. At least the game's name is apt. Also, the keys are T,Y,M (or any on the same half-rows) but it doesn't seem to mention that anywhere.

This game belongs in a crap game compo , but as it was apparently released in 1984 it's well ahead of its time! After fourteen years of crap game competitions at the time of writing, we feel we know this sort of game all too well.

Featuring a single gag, this game is at least a smidgen enjoyable as deploying nuclear weapons is just as much fun here as it is in "Civ 2" for example. However, the game really can only score one as it's not really a game but a joke. Great for its time, but twenty-five years later simply a middling crap game effort.

The game is made even worse by comfortably fitting into a 16K speccy, yet uses hard-coded UDG addresses. So, it must in fact be played on a 48K system to see the graphics as intended. I have to ask, what is wrong with using the ' USR "a" ' method to set up UDGs? Surely remembering the address is more difficult and it breaks compatibility!

Play it once if you must and then you'll never need to again. Although if nothing else, it could be used as a "stressbuster".

It was only relatively recently that I learnt the word "Oriental" has negative, offensive connotations in North America. In British English, the word has only ever meant "of the East" and nothing more. Phew, glad I know that one now, lest I inadvertantly cause offense. But it does explain to American readers why a game title like this could be put on British shelves and no-one would ever bat an eyelid. Anyway, without getting into that can of worms, the game itself is pretty awful.

As a sequel to the pretty bad "Ninja Master", this side-scrolling beat'em'up manages to be even worse. Firstly, it is just way, way too fast. If you so much as blink, you are dead and probably haven't even realised it.

As you walk towards the right, your character stays in a fixed position near the left of the screen as the game scrolls past you, but enemies can come at you from the left edge of the screen with no warning whatsoever. I can't see how you can realistically do much about that. Even when you move to the left, your character walks backwards, because there doesn't seem to be a flipped copy of the player sprite available. The game is also pretty boring, offering nothing new over other ninja games, as you repeatedly kick your way through a number of enemies. Although truth be told I didn't get too far in the game and I doubt if many players would.

Mis-time your kicks by a fraction of a second and you are immediately brown bread, either stabbed, throttled, or hit in the head by a high speed bird. At least I think it was a bird, but it moved so fast I couldn't honestly tell what it was, it could have been a weapon for all I know. And it's not as if the keyboard controls are responsive, they most certainly aren't.

The game does sport a beautiful backdrop of a peaceful sunset over an age-old Japanese harbour. So perhaps if the player character admired the view instead of walking around the promenade like a fully kitted-out ninja maniac looking for a fight then he wouldn't keep getting attacked and slaughtered by his fellow countrymen.

Seriously, this is one to avoid and I think the original YS review was a tad too generous in this case.

One of the authors of this title is listed as "Stupidius", which if nothing else, alerts us to the whimsical approach taken by the developers. I couldn't find anything else by the same author, so perhaps that pseudonym was only used for this single title. On loading the game up, you may be forgiven for thinking you are viewing a non-interactive demo rather than starting a game. Well, that's effectively what the first part of this game is - a demo. It shows some amusing screens like a fake Windows 3.1 splash screen (A joke that was possibly current back when the game was released - but now looks retro). There are quite a few of these "demo" screens to get through before the game starts, so if you want to play this game more than once, then you'll be soon be reaching for the "save snapshot" option if playing via emulation.

When you finally get into the game proper, you'll see that it isn't by any means terrible, however it is certainly one point short of "average" for two good reasons. This is a clone of the popular "Bomberman" game, where the goal is to race around a paritally destructible grid trying to blow up your opponent by dropping bombs. Hopefully, you can do this without blowing yourself up in the process. The first problem in this version is that there is no single player option and there is no computer opponent available. So you need two human players, or you can't play this. I concede that Bomberman is a multi-player game at heart, but many other versions still do have a single player option available.

So, assuming you have two willing human players available, the next problem is the movement of the player sprites. The characters can be moved just a pixel or two at a time which is nice and smooth. However, you have to align your character exactly pixel-perfect with the gap between two bricks in order to walk between them. This can be quite fiddly as you attempt to line-up correctly, whilst wondering why your character won't walk through the gap even though the sprite looks in a physically possible position to walk through. (oops - must have been one pixel out, you may eventually realise). This problem somewhat spoils the game as the most likely way of getting killed is to get blown up whilst trying to align your sprite exactly with a gap, often getting killed by one of your own bombs.

So overall, I wouldn't really recommend this one. There are other better implementations out there that don't have these problems. This one seems like a bit of a casual, ad-hoc implementation of the popular game.

I tried this one out of curiosity, thinking it may somehow be an official tie-in of Cronenberg's surreal 1983 horror/thriller movie of the same name. Alas, I can't quite tell what this game is - other than to say that it doesn't really bear any resemblance to that movie. Admittedly it was a few years since I last saw the flick, however I don't remember any scene where a row of men stand lined up against a brick wall under a starry sky whilst getting zapped by some sort of targeted "zapping" weapon (controlled by the player).

I only award a score of one to this title, not so much to describe it as "awful" (although it is by no means good). More so because it's not a completed game as far as I can tell. It just looks like a bundle of routines, thrown together - almost a demo of a game, or perhaps a game that was started and then later abandoned. For example there's no loading screen, intro screen, instructions, score, lives or anything like that. No completed game should make you have to read the BASIC source in order to work out the key mappings. In any case, they are 1 - up, Q - down, G - left, H - right, V - zap, or any on the same half rows.

So it seems pretty purposless from the viewpoint of entertainment, but I guess I just don't understand what this one is meant to represent, since it is devoid of any accompanying or in-game documentation. A most peculiar find in the archive for sure, but the low score is indicative of the amount of enjoyment you'd likely get out of it.

Nice zapping sound on the laser weapon though and the in-game characters are quirkily drawn, being the opposite of "bow legged", which made me reailse I don't think there is a word meaning "opposite of bow-legged".

Pretty good multi-event olympics type game for 128K systems. The fact that each event takes place in a different country gives it a bit of added interest too. Thankfully, the instructions are available for this one and they are certainly needed since some of the events have a bit more depth to them than simple joystick waggling. Some events here are joyfully unconventional, so even the most experienced computer-olympian will hopefully find something original and refreshing. The game uses a multi-load system, loading each event separately, eventually using both sides of the tape. This works well enough under emulation with flash-loading, but how unfortunate there was never a +3 disk version released. This game was really crying out for a disk version and it would've also allowed for permanent saving of records too.

At the start of the game, there's some sort of inevitable "fanfare" type tune playing. Actually, the less said about that the better, you'll probably want to skip straight to the main menu. It's by no means awful, but perhaps a tad too cliched. I used a Kempston joystick to navigate around the top-level menu, where various options can be changed. You can enter up to four player names at the beginning of the game, but if you want to just enter one then just press ENTER after entering a single name and the game will start in single player mode. As is usual in these types of games, you get three attempts in most events.

Summary of the events:-

Weighlifting: You must use skilful timing of your joystick movements in order to lift increasingly heavy weights in the "snatch" and the "clean and jerk". It's implemented well and challenging to get right.

Barrel Jumping: Skate along the ice and then leap across a user selectable number of barrels. Good fun, but quite honestly looks like the sort of thing you could break a leg attempting.

Cliff Diving: There's no way this event would find its way into a computer game in the UK in 2009! This is what the media nowadays call "tombstoning". The potentially fatal art of jumping off the edge of a coastal cliff where you must reach a minimum horizontal distance or you will crash to your death on the rocks. Fun in a computer game of course, just ill-adivsed in real life! My head kept hitting the rocks underneath the water. Ouch! Nice cliff graphics though.

Slalom Skiing: This one takes us onto side 2 of the cassette. This is very well implemented. Relatively simple to play after the previous events, this one has good graphics and excellent, ultra-smooth vertical scrolling. It's one of the best skiing events I've seen on the speccy.

Log Rolling: This is quite well done as you attempt to stay on the rolling log for as long as possible without falling in the lake. Nice humourous shark effect when you finally do fall off.

Bull Riding: Keep your wits about you as you attempt to match your movements with those of the bull, lest you get violently thrown off. Nice American desert/rodeo setting for this one too, even including some cactus in the distance. A thoughtful touch! The game itself is rather tricky.

Caber Toss: Welcome to the Scottish Highlands and be careful not to drop that caber on your toe. Those things weigh quite a bit! Pleasant simple backdrop with medieval tents and rolling hills. The game itself is all about speed and timing. Be careful though as I came across a bug where I got distracted from the computer for a couple of minutes and when I came back, the caber had been dropped next to my legs and it was stopping me from completing the event.

Sumo Wrestling: This one has a graphically detailed ring and suitably sized wrestlers. It's a bit sluggish, but I'm guessing that's intentional since sumo wrestlers don't exactly move like lightning. The key is to grab your opponent's belt and effectively grapple him out of the ring.

So overall, this game contains a lot in a single title, with most of the events being great fun. Back in the day, it would've been regarded as good value for money. The graphics in some of the events use a "stippling" checkerboard effect to increase the effective number of colours. This doesn't always look great on a modern LCD screen although I'm sure it would've looked suitably softened on a RF TV set.

Certainly I can recommend this one as one of the better "olympic" type multi-event games, with good scope for player improvement over a variety of diverse skills. Just make sure you also grab the instructions which are not only essential, but also interesting to read and full of useful tips and hints.

Complete this game and become a member of the revered "Elite order of XOR". Not too many people have achieved this mentally taxing feat over the years. In this tile based puzzle game, you move two shields around a succession of individual maze-like levels and the goal is to collect all masks and escape the level with at least one of the two shields intact. The two shields must effectively co-operate with each other in order to complete each level.

You'll be hindered by a variety of obstacles such as walls, chicken, fish, dolls etc.. Chicken and fish are used to explode so-called "horizontal bombs" and "vertical bombs" in order to blow through walls etc.. gaining access to further parts of the level.

The first level serves as an introduction to the game and is very simple to complete. In-game elements are succesively introduced during the first few levels. However, some of the later levels take a great deal of careful thought to work out a solution, sometimes necessitating the sacrifice of one of the two shields. There is no arcade or timing element to the game. There's also no time limit, with all the time in the world to work out a solution. Some of the levels have some quite diabolical puzzles, but the satisfaction on completion makes it all worthwhile.

XOR is one of the very best puzzle/logic games available on the speccy platform. Highly recommended for fans of the genre. (This one is very similar to the curses-based "Enigma" game as found on the "Monochrome" BBS system, for anyone who has ever seen that).

Pure 100% BASIC implementation of the popular Milton Bradley game "Yahtzee". This one drops the "h" presumably to avoid either legal action or at least confusion with the several other speccy Yahtzee games out there.

Yahtzee is one of those games you either love or hate, being based on throwing five dice and then trying to maximise scores on your scoresheet by getting three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind, a "long run" and so on. The game isn't just down to chance as players can hold certain dice and re-throw and elect which pattern to go for on each round. It can be quite an absorbing game.

I was drawn to this one by the no-nonsense interface giving a nice clear row of large dice and a functional scoresheet in sensible colours. You can also play against the computer's AI and the game supports 1 to 3 human players. The input method is also pretty sensible. So, top marks for all that.

Only one thing lets the game down though and it's quite a major problem - the dice throwing is just too slow. It's about four times slower than it should be. This is not a limitation of BASIC however, rather it's because of the "changing dice" animations, which are unnecessary. This slows the game down rather too much. Luckily the code is very easily moddable to overcome this, but the fact that "out of the box" the software has this issue and there is no in-game option to fix it, makes this simply an average game rather than good. After all, the end user can't be expected to modify a game they bought just to improve it! In summary, "yatzee" is a game that gets almost everything right, but is marred by just one unfortunate issue.

This is one of several high quality, professional looking mini-games to have come out of the cross-platform competition during recent years. This 4K entry requires a 128K system and according to the documentation, many hours were spent on its development. On playing the game it is easy to see that this is a well optimised machine code racing title.

The gameplay is superb and very smooth as you drive your racing car at high speeds along the weaving track, taking care to avoid time-consuming crashes with the slower moving opponent cars. The instructions mention this game is similar to OutRun and Super Hang-On. The playing experience also vaguely reminiscent of Pole Position or even the Lotus racing games on the ST/Amiga.

Sound and graphics are very good, with realistic engine sound (for an 8-bit game). There are hi-res road-side sprites of signs and small trees. Also the sideways scolling distant mountains look well drawn and add two extra much needed colours to the game.

I found I had to be careful not to attempt to sneak through narrow gaps between opponent cars and the edge of the road. Driving even partially over the road edge really slows your car down, making overtaking difficult and a collision likely, particularly if on a bend in the road. It's a game where you can build up quite a bit of skill over time and the difficulty level seems to be well balanced.

Possibly, I could give the game a score of five, but there's just two minor issues I noticed. Firstly, when you lose the game, the speccy just hangs and so you have to reload it from tape in order to play again. Perhaps this is a limitation of squeezing the entire game code and data into 4K? Secondly, this "Refueled" release of game is based on an earlier version and the "perspective" of the road was made a lot better here. However, to me it still feels like the car is driving slightly uphill all of the time. Perhaps the road needs to be made even slightly flatter again than it is in this version.

These are very minor criticisms though and overall this is a very good game and amazing that it was fitted into 4K. In summary it's a technically brilliant effort, resulting in a rather enjoyable gaming experience.

Very slick, well implemented vertically scrolling platform game where you play a bouncing ball in space - known as Astroball. The game consists of a set of self-contained levels of roughly increasing difficulty. Alhough, even the first level may take a few attempts before the uninitiated player finds success.

On loading the game, you are treated to a snappy upbeat AY sunth/drum tune and a choice of game controls. I just pressed '1' to start the game in keyboard mode where I was able to play using the familiar QAOP layout (also BREAK aborts the game). Before starting each level, the player is presented with a useful map, which can be studied and then used in advance to plan an approximate route. At least in the early levels, you start near the bottom of the level and must ascend to the exit near the top. When compared with the scale of the game objects, the height of each level is surprisingly great. You will learn pretty quickly that jumping down onto lower platforms is more risky than jumping up onto higher platforms.

Not only do you have to leap from platform to platform (and they are typically quite narrow) whilst the ball is bouncing, but you also need to avoid falling to the solid brick floor at the bottom of each level and also avoid some in-game lethal objects. That's two ways to lose a life. A third is to run out of time, as you are against the clock and the allocated time is not overly generous. If that's not difficult enough, then there are also platforms which flash in and out of existence, requiring some accurate jump timing. It should also be noted that each level contains several spinning coin-like objects and all of them must be collected before the level can be exited.

To help the player, there are fast-changing bonuses which for example grant additional time, an extra life, or even can propel the astroball a long way up the screen saving valuable time. In some levels it is vital that the correct bonus is collected or the level can't be completed. Again, this requires precise timing to get right.

The game also features a bonus sub-game appearing at the end of the level which is a bit like the Galaxian/Galaga genre. This plays equally as smooth as the main game itself.

My overall opinion of this game is that is very responsive, fast and enjoyable to play, with pleasing graphics and sound. It's also reasonably difficult to master. I can't see how a game of this type could ever be implemented much better on the speccy. Full marks indeed!

This game is a bit like a cross between "Thrust" and "Moonlander" and it is the first Icelandic speccy title I have ever played. Like both of those games, you control a spacecraft which is gradually being accelerated downwards by gravity. You counter this by firing the main thruster. Keys are CAPS-SHIFT=Thrust, N=left, M=right.

In this game, the craft cannot be rotated, only translated left or right and its orientation on the screen remains fixed, pointing directly upwards at all times. The goal is to collect all on-screen flashing objects without crashing into any obstacles, walls or the border area. Each level consists of a self-contained single screen. As expected, the levels get trickier as the game progresses.

I quite like this title, but can't truthfully award it more than a three. If you are a fan of "Thrust" or "Moonlander" then you'll be sure to enjoy this one and also appreciate the challenging levels.

My main criticisms of the game are that only one keypress at a time is detected, so you can't thrust and translate the craft at the same time. It's initially very difficult to resist the temptation to press two keys at once. Also, the gravity seems a touch strong, sometimes you can crash into the bottom of the screen just after a split-second distraction. Furthermore, the attribute file can become temporarily corrupted if you crash into the bottom of the screen really quickly, not that this matters at all - the screen gets redrawn on each life.

On the plus side, the in-game "white noise" sound effect is suitable for the spacecraft engine and the BORDER effect when you die is a nice touch. Also, each level is a pleasingly different colour and layout than the last.

Overall, it's a game of passing interest to most people or alternatively an obscure challenge for the dedicated player of the genre. The game does have the novelty that if you want to do a "Speccy world tour" of gameplaying, then you should certainly play it. If you stop off at Iceland, then this is currently your only choice in the WoS archive. (There is another Icelandic title listed, but it is MIA at the time of writing).

A simple "matching pairs" game where you use QAOP & to pick out pairs from a 8x4 grid of hidden items. Time limit is something around eight minutes which is insanely generous for a grid of this small size.

The grid of items appears nice and colourful but unfortunately doesn't quite make up for the fact the hidden items themselves are in black and white. If you play this, you may well wish (like I did) that the items themselves had some colour in them. This is particularly because a few of the finely detailed black and white objects are difficult to identify.

The game lacks either a CPU opponent or a limited number of lives (which I'd much prefer) and these things tend to make games of this genre more challenging (c.f. a certain matching pairs One-Liner game :) ).

So, this one could have been much better, but is marred mainly by being rather too easy making the replay value quite low, despite the fact that it is presented well overall.

7th June 2009 - Update to this review (My original review is preserved below the dashed line, but is now out of date). With the help and encouragement of other "World of Spectrum" forum members, I was eventually able to create an English hack of the game, currently available on my website here:-

http://reptonix.awardspace.co.uk/sinclair/dizzyu.htm

During translation and testing of the game, I had to play it through to completion four times. I could only do this thanks to an earlier RZX of the Russian version, made by Viktor Drozd. Overall impressions seem to be that this is indeed a fun Dizzy game with some really cool effects and features and some interesting puzzles.

However, the difficulty of the game, ranks as "hard" and there are perhaps too many overly difficult puzzles right at the beginning, which could result in some players never gaining access to the bulk of the game. Once opened up though the game is really fun to explore, featuring lots of tricky jumps. Most players may well need one or two hints to complete it, though. I know I couldn't have done it without the RZX!

Lots of jokes and general humour also pervade throughout the game, as well as the full ensemble cast of Dizzy characters, each one having their own puzzle to be solved - as expected.

Overall, very much worth playing - but the difficulty level firmly pitches this one in the domain of "experienced Dizzy players", rather than an introduction into the Dizzy genre.

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I'm sorry to write that there's apparently no known English language version of this Russian Dizzy game available at the time of writing. I've scoured Dizzy fansites in addition to the WoS archive, but to no avail. I sincerely hope that this situation will change at some future point so that the game will also be available to English speakers. After all, most of the other Russian Dizzy games have been translated to date.

Unlike some other Russian non-Dizzy games, a translation is really desirable in this case since all of the room descriptions, object descriptions and character interactions are in Russian. Some of the characters are quite loquacious too, a trait I've certainly noticed in a few of the other Russian Dizzy games.

As unofficial Dizzy games go, this is certainly one of the better efforts. The sound is vibrant and enjoyable to listen to and the graphics are even better. The game itself is quite imaginative, as Dizzy lands in a conventional cigar-shaped rocket on a distant planet. I could almost see this as a natural branching out of the official Dizzy saga.

I haven't completed the game yet, although I've played it a bit over the years and a while back, I got reasonably far in it. So, I'm not quite in a position to say if it is truly excellent. Certainly, it is at least good, of course assuming that you like Dizzy games and it is well known that not everyone does!

An above-average Breakout/Arkanoid clone from the very tail-end of the '80s. This one goes to prove that even if you think all possible ideas had been exhausted by then - they certainly hadn't.

This game sports the usual power ups, like multi-ball mode and brick-destroying missiles, not to mention a quite excellent super-missile type power up, which rips right through an entire column of bricks. Nice.

Add to that a background starfield with parallax scrolling and destroyable patrolling droids which reverse the direction of the ball when hit, and you already have a game which is arguably above average within the genre.

But what really sets this game apart from similar titles is the elongated playfield. The actual play area is something like three times wider than the visible screen and scrolls horizontally. On first play, you may think "Where the heck has the ball gone?". The answer is "off the edge of the screen". Moving your bat left or right eventually causes the screen to scroll horizontally across the entire wide play area. I've not played a bat'n'ball game like this before. On the one hand it can make the game difficult, but on the other hand, the single-speed player bat moves faster than the ball and so you shouldn't get too far out of reach of the ball in the first place. A great feature is a small zoomed out real-time pixel-based representation of the entire level at the bottom right of the screen.

Playability is good and the game is clearly expertly programmed. Despite the fact that the game is very colourful, the horizontal scrolling is relatively smooth. Perhaps this is facilitated by the fact that each brick in a given row has the same colour scheme, although the rows themselves have different colours. Sound is adequate for a 48K title. Each level has a refreshingly different layout of bricks.

The player's bat consists of a green central segment capped by rounded cyan corners. I found I had to be careful in that the ball usually only bounces off the bat if it comes into contact with the middle green bit. If the cyan corners are hit, the ball often goes right through them, but at least this is consistent and no doubt intentional as the game could otherwise be too easy.

Overall, this bat'n'ball game stands out above others of the time mainly due to its horizontal scrolling feature and superior implementation. Not bad at all for a game which appears to have been released as a budget title.

Released in 1983 on a Spectrum Computing covertape, this title has absolutely nothing to do with the rather more well known (in the UK at least) presenter Jeremy Paxman.

It's an average game, but only in the context of it being at the level of most BASIC type-ins. Obviously it does not come close to the quality of commercial m/c games. A cynic might surmise that the author had UDGs of Pacman and ghosts already typed in and avaiable, but couldn't quite decide how to use them. For here we have a game featuring Pacman "sprites", but is not in any way a Pacman clone.

Your job as Pacman (err.. I mean Paxman) is to defend Pax-city (located in Paxland) from flooding from a nearby huge dam. The dam would would be quite safe, were it not for the steady stream of flying ghosts that keep attacking it, taking out a sizeable chunk on each attack. When the dam is completely breached, the game is over. However, if you manage to catch ten ghosts, then you have won and the breach was averted.

Pax-city itself looks rather like part of the industrialised Ruhr valley, and it even has a small church (thanks to a strategically placed '+' sign). You only need to press one key to play this game, the '0' key. This fires Paxman vertically in front of the dam, hopefully intercepting a ghost attacker. Be warned, your timing has to be perfect within one iteration of the main game loop. This game is harder than it looks and can take a while to successfully complete - the difficulty level is reasonably tough.

An amusing thing is when you lose the game, the floodwaters only fill up to the level of the breach, even though the water level remains much higher on the dam side. Surely, the water levels should equalise on both sides?

Anyhow, overall I found it entertaining for a little while. Not bad for a relatively short BASIC listing. But, if these are the "further" adventures of Paxman, then what ever happened to Paxman's original adventures? Alas, I can't find them anywhere!

Giliszta (Eng: "Worm") is just another one of those worm games where you direct a worm around the screen collecting items which increases its length. The goal as always is to achieve the maximum score whilst avoiding crashing into the screen edges, obstacles or yourself.

The main menu presents various options in Hungarian, which in English are S-Speed, F-Difficulty (Easy,Hard), I-Redefine keys (Default=NMAZ), 6&7 - Level Selection. Speed setting 1 is beginner level whereas speed setting 5 is impressively fast and a real challenge for anyone. The easy difficulty setting means you cannot die by accidentally turning backwards on yourself by pressing the opposite direction to which you are travelling, otherwise the game is the same as "difficult" from what I can gather. The level selection allows one of 50 preset patterns of background obstacles to be overlaid on the screen, the default level of 0 has no obstacles. Some of these levels are particularly difficult to navigate around. It is this feature that makes this particular game stand out a bit from the hundreds of other implementations out there.

The objects to be collected by the worm are simply numeric characters which represent the score and number of segments to add to the worm. Perhaps some coloured UDG objects might have been a nice touch here.

My main criticism of the game is really just that the worm is made up of arrow symbols, when it is more usual (and looks better IMHO) to have rounded worm segements and a worm head. Also, diagonal directions of travel are not permitted. However, these are only minor points and do not detract from the gameplay of this simple title.

I also like the two-tone green colour scheme. Even if it does look more at home in a poker game - it's miles better than just leaving it black on white.

Verdict: It's a pretty good "worm" game for those who enjoy them, but since worm games are relatively simple, it is outranked by games of greater depth. Therefore my score is 3.

This game's title is clearly a play on "Hampton Court Palace" and its famous hedge maze. The aim of the game is to guide the eponymous main character out of the maze exit. This is a relatively early speccy title from 1984, coming from a time when someone could have a simple idea like "You just have to escape from a maze" and publish it as a commercial title. In later years, perhaps more would be expected of a retail game by the majority of the game-buying public.

At the time of the game's release it was given an overall poor review and it's easy to see why. The scrolling is painfully slow and once completed, the game does not inspire a whole lot of subsequent replay. Also, the game's official blurb with its mention of "lots of animated sprites" and "3D maze" is a gross exaggeration. In reality, there is one animated sprite (the player character) and four non-animated sprites (in-game objects) and the maze is purely pseudo-3D of the simplest type with a "faux-perspective" looking down from above. Still, these simple renderings look quite good and particularly striking is the fact that the player character is in three different colours. Although, colour clash dictates that his arm often changes to the wrong colour when walking.

The game is just elevated above "poor" though by the sheer size of the maze and the in-game objects and the fact it is a challenge due to the time limit.
You start off with something like 22 minutes of time to complete the game. Firstly you'll hopefully locate the map which is typically not too far from the player's starting position. On viewing the map, you will be horrified (and impressed) at the sheer size of the maze which apparently covers 50 speccy screens. Looking at the map for a few seconds will also cost you a minute of time, but is essential to do at least two or three times during play.

Subsequently, you must find the glasses, after which the key will become visible on subsequent viewings of the map. This is typically contrived such that you usually have to double-back on yourself for a significant distance in order to get from glasses back to the previously invisible key. Finally, you may want to pick up the clock item which adds three minutes of time onto the limit.

On escaping (I happened to do it in 12m 32s), you will feel a real sense of achievement that you completed the game and you'll be encouraged by an on-screen message to play it again, getting an even quicker time. Whether you will immediately feel like taking on another huge maze right at this point is another matter!

The mazes are pseudo-randomly generated and different each time, although they are not "perfect" mazes which means there are often thankfully multiple valid routes through many parts of the maze. Wall-hugging would not be only a too time-consuming strategy here due to the slow scrolling, but it wouldn't actually work in many parts of the maze.

Sound is very basic, but graphics are pleasant even if they were oversold by the publisher. Seemed poor at the time of release but with hindsight a quite unique and enjoyable title to complete at least once.

Gravity and pressure levels on Jupiter are very high so I imagine any invaders from that planet would be rather like this game - i.e. very flat! Perhaps they are merely from a Galilean moon, but I digress. Actually the appearance of the game isn't too bad, despite the fact the default non-BRIGHT white was kept as the in-game background. At least the alien invaders look imaginative and non-standard to say the least.

The game looks like an inverted Space Invaders clone (with your ship at the top instead of at the bottom), but it isn't. The fluid gameplay of the standard arcade clones is completely absent here, for we have an INPUT statement in the main game loop. The idea is that you type in a number between 1 and 99, and this then manually aims a laser beam at the invaders. Well it looks like a laser beam, but it's actually referred to as a "shell" in the game itself.

Problem 1: You only have fifteen shells but there are typically between 18 and 24 invaders (it varies) in the invasion fleet. So you never have enough shells to win the game outright. All you can achieve is a "very good shooting" message if you manage to take ten or more of them down, however even this will not have stopped the entire fleet. Sometimes more than half of the fleet still remains. Not very satisfying. I feel most players usually want to see total destruction of the invading fleet.

Problem 2: A random factor is added to your horizontal range so that even if you keep typing the same targeting number in, the weapon will in fact hit a different, unpredictable area on any given row each time. That's the skill factor removed then!

Problem 3: If you use any targeting value in the range 73-99 you get no firing at all with the message "faulty shell". This is hard coded into the game, but the instructions don't mention this feature.

Problem 4: Having a game that looks very much like a fast action arcade game but really isn't can only lead to a frustrating playing experince.

Verdict: Should have been called Invaders from Uranus.

Pretty uninspiring type-in which gets repetitive to play very quickly. You must move a small teaspoon left and right to catch falling globules of jam, placing them on a sandwich. When the sandwich is filled with jam, you get a congratulatory message and move onto the next harder (faster) skill level.

The game is nice and colourful but the teaspoon is so out of proportion with the sandwich that it feels like you are working with a teaspoon from a doll's house. Sound is minimal. The challenge of the game is provided by the fact that the jam falls quite quickly and is easy to miss with your tiny spoon. Also, there are mysterious small blue "jam snatchers" which fall down the screen attempting to steal your jam. You only have one life so if you drop any jam or it is stolen then it's game over.

The game as in the archive does contain a couple of minor bugs. One is an error in the keyboard/movement logic which means that your spoon bounces off the left edge of the screen by one position making it really difficult but not impossible to catch jam falling in the leftmost column providing timing is precise. Second problem seems to be that the "jam catchers" only catch the jam when they are actually one position to the right of it rather than directly on it. Both issues could easily be remedied by patching the existing listing. Also, the skill indicator looks like it is showing negative numbers which is unintentional. Interesting to note that this is another early title which use H (for Hold) to pause the game, rather than the far more prevalent P for pause of later years. I've noticed a few games like that from the early days.

Overall, the game is a simplistic if original BASIC type-in effort that fails to keep the player hooked for more than a few minutes.

Substandard game from 1984 where you drive a buggie along the ground whilst simultaneously shooting projectiles both upwards and forwards at successive waves of aliens. The game is meant to give the illusion of forward motion of your vehicle, but unfortunately this doesn't work too well, especially since the aliens continuously wrap around the screen as they travel in the opposite direction. You may be forgiven for thinking that your buggie is stationary and it is only the aliens that are moving, despite the inadequate "moving road" effect. The keyboard option uses a single half-row of keys for all controls, so if you don't like that set-up then Kempston is thankfully available as an alternative.

Your buggy can be moved forward or backwards (relative to the implied constant forward motion), but is always constrained to the lefthand side of the screen. Also you can perform an implausably high jump to avoid landed aliens that skirt along the ground, although jumping in itself often results in losing a life as you may well collide with one of the many skyborne aliens.

The movement of the alien sprites is very jittery and chaotic. The aliens are multicoloured and indeed their movement appears to be locked to the character grid. Sometimes your missile will appear to have connected with an alien, but the collision detection doesn't always seem to trigger, making it quite frustrating at times. Also, your missile projectile sometimes is drawn on a totally wrong area of the screen for a split second (Look out for it intermittently appearing at the bottom left of the screen).

The continuous rough, grating in-game sound gets quite intrusive after a while and the game doesn't exactly inspire further replays. A quirk is that you start the game on level zero, rather than lavel one. When all aliens have been destroyed, you move onto the next level. The aliens just move so fast though. This coupled with the fact that you can only fire one horizontal and one vertical projectile at a time means the most likely cause of death will be your inability to defend yourself with a second bullet, because the one you fired two seconds ago still hasn't left the screen.

Overall, not a good one - more buggy than buggie!

A lightcycles game that surprisingly came out as a commercial title in 1990. I say surprising as we all know that these games were ten-a-penny by that late stage and this to my mind would have been more understandable as a PD title or even on a magazine cover tape. The fact that there are more than a dozen games in the archive called "Tron" or "Tronn" alone suggests that this genre is an easy target for developers to aim at.

In any case, I do have a sneaking admiration for the game which is cheap'n'cheerful. The border around the screen is nice and colourful, but not the lightcycles themselves which are monochrome presumably due to potential colour clash issues. The game supports one or two players. What this one offers above and beyond most lightcycle games is the ability to introduce obstacles in the form of crates and also for the player(s) to manually place any number of them on the screen wherever they want, before the game begins. Truthfully though, you may spend more time placing the crates than actually playing the game, which doesn't really last too long.

The game falls short of average for several reasons. Firstly, in single player mode, the CPU AI is just too dumb. It is trivially easy to defeat. Causing it to get trapped in an ever-decreasing rectangle of its own making shouldn't be quite as easy as it is here. Alternative routes which would have avoided this fate of the CPU player are seemingly never chosen by the AI. Even adding a small random element to the CPU AI behaviour would (I have no doubt) drastically improve the game. Once you have learnt how to defeat it, you can just take exactly the same route four times in a row, winning the game in a rather predictable and boring way. This all sort of undermines the need for the aforementioned crates. You can just as easily win without any crates, although you may still wish to use them in order to make the game more difficult for yourself, or to make a two player game more interesting.

Second problem is that although you may well select Kempston joystick to play the game, you still have to use QAOP keys to place the crates at the beginning. Why not Kempston here too if the player is using a joystick? That would have made much more sense I think.

There are two options available at the beginning of each game, one to allow obstacles and the other to position obstacles. Each option is answered with (Y/N), but the keyboard handling is such that you may inadvertantly answer Y or N to both questions with a single key press. Should have really been fixed by making sure the player actually pressed the key twice IMHO.

In-game sound is a bit like a demo sound routine from an appendix of a type-in book and the in-menu sound is a bit of an assault on the hearing.

On the plus side the game offers a plethora of options - speed settings, screen size options, and the evil "Magic Line" which flashes a vertical line obstacle on and off down the middle of the screen. So, well done to the developers for adding these additional things. You can also change the start position of each player. No doubt there's an exploit in there somewhere making the CPU player crash even quicker than usual although I did not pursue this avenue of investigation any further.

Overall though it is a flawed game that seemed perhaps anachronistic even at the time of its release. Although maybe you can't resist playing it like I did? A guilty pleasure.

Of the plethora of Manic Miner clones and derivatives out there, I would rate Maglaxians as rather good. OK, so it appears to be lacking the outright creative rush that became what we know and admire as the peerless original, but it gets one thing right - playability.

As in the original, here the gameplay is good with smooth animation and pleasingly responsive controls. The level layout is suitably clever, meaning you have to be careful where you are jumping from (or to), lest you fall foul of landing on the wrong part of a one way conveyer belt, or stuck underneath a solid, impenetrable platform with a guardian sprite closing in on you.

On loading the game, you will be greeted with a "Maglaxians 128" message which may potentially be confusing since as far as I know this is purely a 48K game. When you learn however that this game has 128 rooms, then it makes sense that the "128" is almost certainly referring to this fact. Consequently, you start the game with what might first appear to be an overly-generous 23 lives but makes perfect sense, given the size of the game. Also, the player character can fall from a great height here and will surprisingly survive, unlike in MM.

The version currently in the WoS archive may be hacked, as it offers a "Trainer mode" on loading. I really don't know if the original version had this feature, but normally this is the sort of thing found in hacked titles in my experience. Naturally, the trainer mode is optional.

This game lacks a few things that Manic Miner has. Notably, the Maglaxians levels are not shown in a revealing "slide show" whilst the game is not being played. Also, the individual rooms have no names, only a number. Even though this game is Czech, I would still have liked to see some humourous room names (after all they could always be translated). With 128 rooms to name though, it would no doubt have eaten a bit of RAM! Finally, looking at the Maglaxians map of all levels, I can't see any sort of equivalent to the unique "Eugene's Lair" or "Solar Power Generator" rooms, which added extra variety to the original MM game.

My final gripe is the keyboard layout, Q=left, W=right and CAPS-SHIFT=jump. This wouldn't be my first choice (as I'm not left-handed). There's also no apparent define keys option and Kempston doesn't work either. So I'd have to get some sort of keystick option going, or POKE the game if I started a serious campaign to complete it.

Despite the various issues, it is a good Manic Miner type effort and has to be commended for crucially getting the playability right and for the large number of rooms. Clearly a lot of work must have gone into the development of the game itself and the level design.

There's a whole series of these very similar "Train Management" games currently in the WoS archive and the vast majority of them routinely score around 1 out of 10 or thereabouts. To be fair I think one of the games does score just above 5 and a couple score above 4, but those particular occasional "medium scoring" titles all have some form of rudimentary graphics. "North Wales 47 Fleet Manager" is however one of the many "low scoring" ones that appears to be purely a text-only affair, lacking any sort of graphics whatsoever and quite honestly is a complete bore-athon. (Even for someone who has some interest in trains).

If there is anything to be learnt from these games, it is that if you are going to have a train-based game, at the very least, graphics are absolutely required! Otherwise, the game is in real danger of seeming like just another lazily implemented effort. A game like this could in theory be created just by taking an existing BASIC listing and simply modding the station names, timetable and train number data and then passing it off as yet another unique title. I myself could take the BASIC listing of this game and make a new game tomorrow, detailing another route, and release it as "Transpennine Express" for example.

Perhaps that suggestion is totally unfair and it's quite probable that the data contained within this program pertaining to train routes, timetables of the early eighties and the status of the "Class 47" diesel-electric fleet was painstakingly entered with unflinching accuracy. But therein lies another problem. The program is so obsessed with petty details and endless columns of numbers that it's inpenetrable to anyone who hasn't actually worked for British Rail and even a hardened life-long trainspotter would probably be frightened off by it.

So dust off your flat-topped BR cap and grab your stale, tin-foil wrapped egg butties and step aboard the 08:30 to pillock central, calling at tedium, pointlessness and despair. Of course, if you have a few years experience of using the old British Rail TOPS mainframe-based terminals to manage trains, then I'm sure you'll do well with this one. (Although you may as well be paid to do the job on a real TOPS terminal - they are apparently still in use to this day). If however, it's all a bit too much then instead head down to your nearest mainline station and stare at the arrivals board for a few hours. The experience is exactly the same, but you won't be able to mess it up as you can here.

Overall I'd suggest avoiding this one (and that goes for all of the similar titles in this series). I mean, if anyone is seriously playing this game nowadays I'd be very surprised, but you never know - maybe I just failed to "get it"!

I just expected a graphically impressive 3D-journey alongside the sunlit, sandy beaches of the North Wales Coast, did I perhaps demand too much from this one? :)

For those who like solitaire card games, this is one of the better and more challenging ones. Based on an original Danish game, this one was translated into English and released as freeware on the "Outlet" disk-based magazine.

Briefly, the game consists of a jokerless pack of cards randomly dealt into four rows of thirteen. The aces are then removed, leaving four random gaps. Cards are then moved one at a time by the player, into the gaps with the restriction that a card can only be moved into a gap if it is of the same suit and of a value one higher than the card that is immediately to the left of the gap. The goal is to end up with four rows or perfectly ordered suits from deuces (twos) to kings.

Sounds easy? Well, it certainly isn't. It's very easy to get a "gridlock" of cards that can't be shifted due to locked, circular dependencies. Really, the challenge of the game is looking quite a few moves ahead and with the aid of a good memory, avoiding these situations.

Card games are something that can generally be implemented just as well on 8-bit systems as on more powerful computers. Here, the card graphics whilst neccesarily low-res are more detailed than on many games of the time, with the faces on the "face cards" actually visible for example. The game has a simple introductory tutorial mode, which is very well done and effectively explains the rules of the game even better than any instructions can hope to do.

As expected, the game background is the (almost compulsory) "Poker table green", which never fails to give the right sort of look for card games. This is well worth a play, particularly if you've already played (for example) all of the solitaire card games from Amiga PD disks from around the 1990 era. This speccy game has a strikingly similar look and feel of those games from the more advanced machine. Very good effort.

As a 1987 type-in for YS magazine, this one is quite an enjoyable little game. Clearly, the quality of BASIC type-ins had improved since the very early days of the speccy. The game whilst predominantly BASIC is at least embellished with some small machine code fragments.

You play the part of a single pixel. This eponymous player-character at once definitively answered the forum-posed question "Which is the smallest player-character sprite found in a speccy game?". At one pixel by one pixel, I don't think this record is any imminent danger of being beaten. (unless someone was to write a game where you play something of zero pixel dimensions, i.e. invisible - but that would just be plain silly, Right?).

Anyway, the main advantage of the single pixel "Pixy" is of course a reasonably fast game refresh rate, even in a BASIC main loop. Since all that moves in the game is yourself and possibly a guardian sprite or moving barriers, the speed of play is pleasingly swift and responsive and you can quite easliy forget that the game is mainly a BASIC affair.

The goal is to move around the flip-screen rooms, avoiding crashing into walls, guardians and barriers whilst collecting a few items in order to escape. This is made more difficult by the fact you impart a "thrust" onto the microdot via Q=left, W=right, SPACE=up and you are also under the influence of both gravity and a sort of friction, or drag. Some of the screens are very contrived being quite tricky and challenging to navigate around. This is not a game for the impatient. The game map is overall quite small and as it happens, was significantly bettered by the sequel, which was released around five years later, sporting even more varied graphics and a bigger map.

This original game however stands up on its own and is reasonably fun to play. A short tune plays on the intro screen, but the in-game sound consists mainly of clicks and low frequency rasps. Graphics are well drawn and have a professional sheen to them. Overall, an original type-in with a polished feel. The first room can initially appear quite tricky until you get the knack of escaping it, after which it starts to seem relatively easy - don't be put off by this! Pixy the Microdot is certainly worth a look, for some free-flowing single-pixel action. Groovy.

Brightly coloured 3D-Maze effort that completely avoids colour clash between walls, ceiling and floor due to clever use of colour attributes. Really good use of the BRIGHT attribute gives an impressive-looking wall shading effect too. There are also a few additions, above and beyond the bog-standard "escape from maze" game. The backstory, written around the eponymous Aztec diety dictates that the player has to find a certain number of various beads, strewn around the four levels of the maze, which is supposedly inside a Mesoamerican temple.

On each level, you should try to meet a different diety which can assist you by providing a map and giving information that will be needed later etc.. To get from one level to the next you must locate and fall down a shaft. There are quite a few black shafts to fall down, but if you do this you will be quite literally shafted as some of your beads or maybe even your compass will be damaged in the process. The key is to instead fall down blue shafts, but there is apparently only one per level and not easy to find. I did happen to find one (actually I thought it was a pool of water), but magazine reviews would indicate that not everyone who plays this game does manage to find a blue shaft.

Keys are 1=left,2=forward,3=right plus a couple of other keys are used for reading the map and getting help etc.. When you do find some beads lying on the maze floor it would be wise to walk straight onto them to collect them, for if you rotate your view away from them and rotate it back again, they may well have dissappeared which is something of a significant shortcoming of the game.

In summary though, as 3D-maze games go, you're unlikely to find many others as bright and colourful as this. There are also various user-selectable difficulty levels, prolonging the playability somewhat. Just don't press BREAK during play - it needlessly crashes the game.

In this game you play the part of a cyan rectangle as I'm sure you may have already guessed by the game's title! Actually, that's a slight over simplification - you play a small rectangle with a couple of pixels sticking out the back of it. I'm not 100% sure what it is, but it looks like it may be a top down view of some sort of pick-up truck. You have to use QAOP keys to drive the truck around some twisty mountain roads and eventually enter a city in this flip-screen affair.

The game does have one good feature - the background terrain is quite superbly detailed with trees, rivers (even featuring a dam) and also some city roads and buildings, although the entire game is in monochromatic cyan and black with the sole exception of the red status line at the bottom of the screen.

The game is badly let down by the really awkward control system. Q=accelerate, A=decelerate, O=half turn left, P=half turn right. The discrete nature of the steering really hinders efforts to try to keep the truck on the narrow roads. One slip-up and "blam", back to the start of the screen again. But what really kills the game is the unresponsiveness of the keyboard. Only about half of the time will your keypresses be registered, unless you hold the keys down - and if you do that, the truck will steer a full 90 degrees instead of the intended 45 degrees, usually resulting in a crash.

There are thankfully cheat POKEs available for this one (currently at the tipshop) - but here's my cheat. Since the game is written mostly in BASIC, simply BREAK out of the game, delete line 4060 and RUN it again. You can then drive straight up the middle of each screen instead of around the tortuous roads and at least admire the considerable effort and skill that was put into the background graphics. I never normally cheat in any computer game as it undermines the whole point, but if you load this one up I think you'll completely agree why it is worth resorting to in this case. There's also a rather nice end of game sequence (Which can be viewed any time by loading the program called FINISHED off the tape. That does feature a huge sphere (albeit not a red one).

Other than that, I wouldn't recommend this game, without cheating it's a frustrating and overlong experience. Does exactly what it doesn't say on the tin.

This one is notable as it's the only game I've so far knowingly played on the ZX Spectrum that was written in Forth (That is the 1983 release of "Spectrum Forth" from CP software). The game was apparently supplied with the Forth distribution as a demo program. As we all know, Forth never really took off in a big way on home computers in the eighties. One simple reason may have been the dominance and relative ease-of-use of BASIC. The Jupiter ACE, being the sole notable exception did have Forth built in and does in fact have a selection of impressive games showcasing one of the main advantages of Forth over BASIC - speed. Forth may not be as intuitive to many as BASIC is, but it can certainly run faster.

As for "Spectrum Forth Game", the unimaginitive title doesn't really give anything away and so I was hoping in earnest to see something like an arcade game, perhaps demonstrating the advantages of the Forth language over BASIC, however this game unfortunately does dissapoint.

To start the game, type:-

GAME ;

(must be typed in uppercase and there is a compulsory space before the semicolon)

This puzzle game consists of a yellow and blue grid of squares. It appears that the goal is to repeatedly invert overlapping 3x3 blocks of squares until eventually the whole grid is cleared. To select a 3x3 block, type in the co-ordinates of its centre square as prompted.

If anything, the game highlights the deficiencies of Forth on the speccy when compared to BASIC. For example, the need to display two separate prompts just to get the user to enter a two digit number really looks awkward compared to a BASIC INPUT statement and is hardly convenient for the player. The grid is also arguably too big, taking a very long time to complete the game (which I didn't).

So in summary, this title is very much worth a look just to play something written in Forth on the speccy, but beyond that it's a rather poor game that would have certainly failed in its job to stimulate further interest in the Forth language.

Fun 1983 game where you control the routing of trains around a rail network by switching points, making sure to avoid derailments and collisions. You also have to stop the trains at stations before they overfill with passengers (if only that happened in real life). "Thomas the Tank Engine" is quite a similar idea, but perhaps this earlier game is even more enjoyable than that one, if somewhat graphically simpler.

There is no scrolling here as the entire rail map has been adeptly squeezed into a single speccy screen. This is rather reminiscent of a model train set with as much track as possible squeezed onto the board. There are a variety of difficulty levels with the easiest consisting of just a single train, up to three player-controlled trains plus the added hinderance of frieght trains on your network. There's also a turntable subgame.

Sound consists of whistle effects and the white-noise "chug-chugging" of trains. The key controls consist of letters of the alphabet mapped to the various points, labelled on-screen. Keys 1, 2 & 3 command each of the (up to) three trains to stop at the next station. SPACE pauses the action.

Also, the player has the choice of two different track layouts by loading the corresponding program, "tracka" or "trackb". Overall it's a game that whilst fun can get considerably difficult on the higher levels and also has quite a bit of long-term playability.

I find it a non-trivial matter to score this 2D arcade adventure from Ultimate. On the one hand it has the trademark technically excellent sprite routines which are outrageously fast and smooth. There's also imagination by the bucketload and a real sense of immersion, helped by the huge game map.

On the other hand, it's a bit of a bugger to play. The pinball physics mean that very often you'll be bouncing in the exact opposite direction from where you actually intended to jump to. You can quite easily end up even in the wrong screen and falling down a great distance, just by ricocheting off another sprite. Overall I'd say the pros and cons pretty much cancel each other out, but of course the game has more depth than simply being labelled as "average" which would be a little unfair without some explanation. It's more like a game of extremes (both good and bad).

The game stands out not only because it has that memorable "Ultimate" feel, but also because of plenty of extra nice touches like bubbles floating upwards that you can jump on and ropes that extend downwards from the cave ceiling which the player can swing on in order to make a (sometimes) controlled downwards decent. The player must collect gems and also a small selection of weapons must be found to defeat various in-game antagonists. If you can keep plugging away at it, depsite the barely-controllable (sometimes almost random), chaotic trajectory of the player character then there is plenty to discover here.

Verdict: A memorable, bright and colourful game with plenty of action and quality graphics, but it could really drive someone insane.

I do wonder if anyone else remembers the electronic game released in 1980 by Bandai, called "Gunfighter"? This speccy game, Vaquero (Eng: Cowboy) is immediately reminiscent of that. It consists of a human player and a CPU player, each playing a gunfighter in a duel to the death. Wagons move up and down the screen, often blocking the line of sight between the two players. (don't they know there's a duel on here?). You get several lives and the aim of the game is simple:- kill or be killed.

This is a BASIC implementation of the game with keys Q=up, Z=down, 0=fire. It certainly runs fast enough, but for me the playability is undermined somewhat by the fact that instead of shooting a bullet of finite speed across the screen, the weapon instead appears like an instantaneous laser beam and the CPU player is just too darn quick. He'll shoot your feet off in about 0.2 seconds and even if you get shot in the feet you are still dead. You can outwit the CPU though if you shoot rapidly enough, but not seemingly all of the time (or perhaps I haven't played it enough just yet). If this game just had conventional bullets then it'd be much better IMHO and more faithful to the intended setting which presumably is the Old West and not Star Wars. Another weird thing is that the game looks like a TV studio testcard when you die. Overall though, it is good to see this game which is indeed like my aforementioned (better) "Gunfighter" game (that I misplaced years ago) and I think there was also an Atari 2600 version very much like this too.

Like most other titles which are listed as "Distribution Denied" at the time of writing, this is another one blindly included on the "Speccy '99" CD-ROM that was openly on sale in the high street store "HMV" a decade ago. I'm sure many other spec-chums like myself bought this disk for £10 or less back then, in good faith. Alas, many of the "Distribution Denied" titles do tend to be amongst the better games.

Not in this case though, I don't think anyone is missing anything particularly good here. For starters, the game doesn't really feel like a CodeMasters release. Perhaps I say this because I've played too many Dizzy games. This one is a shoot-'em up where you have to shoot erratically moving aliens before they shoot you. In this game though the aliens can mutate into more deadly forms if you hesitate too long before shooting them.

You control a "laser base" rather then a spaceship and so you can only move left and right but not up and down, being fixed to the bottom of the screen (A bit like in space invaders). You get three lives. Although described as a laser base, it really only fires a small pellet upwards, and there is a limitation of one player pellet on the screen at a time, which to me seems like a needless limitation since multiple pellets are so easy to code, surely?

Overall, apart from the "aliens mutate" angle, it's a pretty unoriginal game, which admittedly plays very smoothly and has quite adequate sound and graphics. However, it is unlikely to keep most people entertained for more than a few minutes. All things being equal - give me a standard "Space Invaders" game any day!

It is worth trying the 128K version of this excellent shoot-'em up. Originally developed by the Bitmap Brothers as a 16-bit Amiga title, the speccy port is commendable in that the core playability and look and feel of the game have been largely preserved. The main sacrifice is that the vertically scrolling playfield is completely monochromatic, but could it have been done any other way? The sound, thanks to the AY chip is virtually indistiguishable from the Atari ST version that I used to play a lot, back in the day.

The game is notable for having two player vehicles available during play, a space-plane and an armoured tank that can be switched between via the M key. The tank has full eight-way movement and the vertical scrolling stops when it is in use. The plane can only fly forwards (upwards) whilst the game relentlessly scrolls, which is exactly like a "standard" vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. Choice of vehicle is often dictated by what you are shooting at. As you fly over the huge alien construction, you will find that some enemies are one a low level (use the tank) and some are on a raised level (use the plane).

Like many shoot-em ups you have to work out a pattern, via repeated play in order to learn the layout of each level so you can be in the right place at the right time, to wipe out the waves of enemy crafts, guns and bosses, whilst hopefully avoing getting blown to bits yourself.

The powerups are really excellent and are frankly needed to survive, since this game has a well deserved reputation for being very tough. There are also two bosses per level, a mid-level boss and an end-of-level boss. Stick at the game though and eventually it is a rewarding playing experience. Although getting put back to the beginning of the level on losing a life can be a bit exasperating at times. Also, on the 16-bit version you could flick between craft by waggling the joystick really rapidly, but I think on the speccy it is 'M' key only - but that's no great loss.

Overall though it's a clever game with a technically flawless port that is still very enjoyable to play today. It has a tough learning curve that can keep a determined player occupied for a long time.

No prizes for guessing that this game was released in the wake of the Falklands conflict, as at the time, the word "yomp" gained some prominence. Here you play a group of paratroopers who have to first cross a tremendously busy road, one a time in true "Frogger" style. Secondly you have to get as many as possible through a minefield where upon succeeding, they will each be handed a Victoria Cross medal.

So, it's basically "Horace Goes Skiing" but with the skiing replaced with the minefield sub-game. This one is nowhere near as good as the Horace game though. Firstly, the road crossing bit is so extremely difficult even on the easiest level that it's bound to put many players off. Finally after you do get enough men across the road to form a "Radar team", getting them across the minefield is outrageously easy, since a map revealing the position of each mine is shown at the bottom right of the screen. So simply don't walk on the mines and you are home and dry! I don't think I've ever seen a more unbalanced game, difficulty wise.

Graphics are passable and sound is arcadey. Not bad for a BASIC game, but overall the playability just isn't right. Should have been "fine tuned" more before release IMHO.

It is commendable to see speccy titles released under the GPL, which makes them available as truly free software with no restrictions as to their use. This is one of the very few that has this distinction, meaning we could freely upload screenshots to Wikimedia Commons etc.. The GPL declaration is embedded in BASIC REM statements although technically, I think that this means the game should only be distributed with a copy of the full text of the GPL 2.0 license.

In any case, it's not a very good game. Just a standard "Worm" affair, but with no variation in play or selectable options. Also it's slow, plain-coloured and lacking any sort of flair. At least, there could have been some variation in the objects you collect?
Here, the slow speed makes the game way too easy, meaning you can effectively play it for a very long time with consummate ease.
Controls are QAOP and directional rather than rotational. As worm games go, I wouldn't recommend this one, there are better ones out there. Still it was only intended for the 2003 Bytemaniacos BASIC competition and taken in that context, it's a run of the mill affair, by no means intended to be at the level of commercial software.

Let's be honest, 1983 BASIC type-ins of less than 2K are seldom given much thought nowadays. But as these sorts of games go, this one is pretty good even if terribly simple. You use "cursor" keys (or in my case the PC arrow keys via emulated keystick) to move a stick-man UDG around an enclosed orchard, picking up as many oversized apples as possible within a strict thirty second limit. The stick man looks so thin, that you can probably forgive him the minor crime of apple theft in this case.

The time limit and number of apples is well balanced making this game quite difficult on the first few plays. You'll soon learn to avoid the dreadful annoyance of running right around an apple instead of picking it up, losing vital seconds. This is due to the fact that the keyboard repeat is active and the main game loop is pretty fast. You'll also soon learn to work out a reasonably efficient route to pick all of the apples up, as if you don't then you just won't have enough time to win the game.

Win the game once and you'll feel pretty pleased with yourself. I eventually did it in 26 seconds. It's good to see that someone can make a pleasing game from such a short listing.

This one is another type-in listing from the book "Games for your ZX Spectrum" by Peter Shaw in 1983. Children in the 1980s may well have used this program listing to learn some BASIC skills, but I hope no-one ever used it to learn about road safety! Use CURSOR keys/joystick to dash across the M4 motorway during rush hour whilst avoiding getting hit by cars. I don't have the book and so I'm unaware what contrived backstory may explain the protagonist illegally and dangerously trying to cross a motorway on foot, but no doubt it would be something mildly amusing. I also can't help wonder if the 'M4' motorway was chosen for this game because (a) the author is familiar with that particular road or (b) when viewed on a standard road map, the M4 runs largely horizontally across the page. Perhaps if the author had instead chosen the M1 then we would have had a frogger game rotated 90 degrees on its side?

As frogger games go, this one plays OK, but lacks any sort of creative flair. All of the cars are identical. We don't even have any HGVs. I always think this type of game is better served by having a river or any other (non-road) type of challenge after the halfway point - just to make things a bit more interesting. Alas all we get is two carriageways, so at least it is an accurate representaion of the M4 I suppose. This one is for "road spotters" only (yes they do exist) otherwise it's not likely to hold anyone's attention for more than a couple of minutes.

Wasn't it once said that if you start playing well into side B of the Cascade Cassette 50 tape then you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul? In any case, this game is listed everywhere as "MUNCH", even in the "Cassette 50" instructions. However when actually loaded up, the game displays its own name as "MUNCHER". The ZX filename is of course "MUN". Just goes to show how much erm.. playesting was carried out on this compilation!

Here's the shock revelation though- "MUNCH" is not (repeat not) a Pac-Man rip-off! Instead, you play the part of a mouth (actually a pair of lips), using QZIP keys to guide your way around an open green field. You (the lips) must eat all strawberries whilst avoiding increasing numbers of deadly nightshade berries. The game is not unlike another BASIC speccy title, "Orchard Thief" and actually plays very similar in terms of keyboard response and speed of the game. i.e. it's also very easy in this one to accidentally move one square too far due to the keyboard repeat. The biggest difference is that here, your enemy is the deadly nightshade hazards as opposed to a strict time limit.

There are three player-selectable difficulty levels. Levels 1 and 2 are quite easy. Level 3 is a genuine challenge, but shouldn't prove too difficult to most players after a few attempts. This game has that hallmark gratuitously beeping "GAME or QUIT" intro screen, shared by quite a few other cassette 50 titles. Verdict: For cassette 50 fans only, but it's certainly one of the better ones on the tape.

Unquestionably, this is by far the best "Yahtzee" type game I've played on the speccy to date. Although, admittedly I've probably still played less than half of them. A long time ago I really got into a very similar Atari ST game called "Triyahoo". This is the speccy equivalent of that popular title.

This game supports one to nine human players. The implementation is good, given that this is apparently a pure BASIC effort. The rolling of the dice is suitably fast and the user interface employs a rather common-sense usage of numeric and alphabetic keys. What really makes this game so much fun though is the "Triple" aspect. This refers to the fact that each player has three yatzhee scoring columns. Each column is subject to final score multipliers of 1,2 & 3 respectively. This affects the strategy of the game greatly, as you try to work out how to get the highest possible scores in the 3x multiplier column. This isn't always possible of course, particularly as the game forces the player to fill each row in left-to-right order of columns. You could just play the game to see what I mean as it's not something that can be visualised too well by text alone.

Sound and graphics are basic yet adequate. The BRIGHT red dice are clearly rendered. The game is in Dutch, but seasoned Yatzhee players will recognise the yatzhee scorecard layout anyway, making this something of a non-issue for many English-speaking users. Written in BASIC, theoretically it would be very easy for someone to produce a translated version if desired.

A BASIC type-in found in an early eighties speccy programming book, this one apparently uses the same graphics initialisation routine as "Orchard Thief" by the same author. Both games clearly have the same style about them. This one was obviously inspired by the infamous movie "Death Race 2000" as were the far more famous and more advanced Carmageddon series of games for the PC.

In this one, you have a top-down third-person viewpoint over a rectangular arena as you use the QAOP directional controls to attempt to mow down a randomly moving pedestrian with your UDG racing car. You have a fixed time limit and the goal is to kill as many pedestrians as possible within it. Naturally, there's only ever one pedestrian on the screen at a time.

This game has a very noticable bug where the player's car graphic only points in the correct direction one iteration after it has already started moving in that direction. This causes the car to be very often moving sideways. Really, I can't imagine that this would've been incredibly difficult to fix and it does rather make the game feel a tad rushed, which could possibly be explained by the large number of listings by the same author sharing the same book.

The best thing about the game is the tombstone graphic, which appears everytime a "ped" is killed. Sound is typical BASIC listing affair, but at least the game does have sound (and colour for that matter) elevating it just above terrible.

Overall though, it is not good - you'd be forgiven for sticking strictly with Carmageddon on the PC!

Poor effort, even by the low standards of the Cassette 50 tape. Press any key to jump over one barrel, then two barrels, then three.. and so on as your UDG man runs along the bottom of each successive screen. I strongly recommend that you in fact use the 'G' key to jump for the simple reason that it also starts a new game and quite honestly a game could only last two seconds if you are unlucky.

As you struggle with this game and ponder to yourself "Just why did I totally cock up that jump, when the previous three were perfect?" Well, ponder no more as I reveal that (as any player may well suspect), the height and therefore the distance jumped is determined purely by the RND function. Yep, press "jump" and your man will either clear all barrels, or land pathetically on only the second barrel. Your skill as a player has no bearing on this whatsoever. That's why I award this game only one point. That and the fact that the UDG of the jumping man looks like he his frozen whilst sprinting since only ever one frame of this fast running character was desgined and made available as a UDG. But let's face it, not even an animated UDG would make this one an enjoyable playing experience. Verdict: You'll have more fun setting the time on a calculator watch than playing this!

Tango is the better of the two games in this small compilation. Both games use some sort of turbo loader, so flash loading may not work on some emulators.

In "Tango", you play a round face sprite on a tiled grid and must use QAOP keys to navigate your way back to a house one square at a time. Each tile can only be walked on once after which it gets destroyed. Thus you have to plan your route carefully or it's very easy to get trapped in on yourself. Pressing M when trapped resets the level at the cost of one life. All tiles must be visited before you can enter the house, wherupon you will progress to the next level. Each level has a different outline shape and selection of tree obstacles, making the game generally progressively harder as you play on. There's also a time limit. Nice vibrant graphics are rendered with use of dithering. The first level in fact has orange tiles. Good use of sound. As simple puzzle games go, I'd give this one four out of five. It can be deceptively challenging on some of the levels.

Side B of the tape contains "Magic Dice" which like "Klax" and similar titles, falls into the category of "Games derived loosely from Tetris, but are not as good as Tetris". Isometric dice fall from the top of the screen as you use keys O,P,A (in keyboard mode at least) to attempt to create horizontal rows of either "Three of a kind" or "A straight run of three". Valid examples would be "1,1,1" or "3,3,3" or "2,3,4" or "4,5,6" etc.. Surprisingly, diagonal and vertical rows do not count, although they would probably make the game too easy if they did. The dice have only one face presented to the player during play. On getting a valid row of three, all three dice disappear causing any higher dice to immediately fall down into the resultant space. As in Tetris, if any column reaches the top of the screen it's game over. The game has a nice vertically scrolling background. This is slightly spoiled though by the fact that the isometric dice sprites are not masked and therefore betray their true "squareness" over the background. Undoubtedly, transparency would have looked far neater here. Also, each die falls from whichever column the previous die was placed at. Sometimes this can unfairly trap the falling dice on the wrong side of the screen if a central column of dice is really high.

On playing this several times I consistently seemed to get more dice showing the number "5" than any other number, but I'm guessing the probabilities would even out after about a thousand plays of the game or something! I give this one two out of five as whilst it looks reasonably OK and is smooth to play, I just don't think it would keep most players hooked for very long and it could have been slightly improved before releasing IMHO.

Verdict: One game is good and one not so good - overall that makes three out of five for the compilation.

This is the eighth game in a series of classic home computer text adventures from American author Scott Adams via his company Adventure International. These adventures were ubiquitous across many popular 8-bit platforms due to being written in a completely portable machine-independent format, running under the "Scott Adams virtual machine". The advantage of this system was that once the virtual machine was implemented on any particular platform, all Scott Adams games were then theoretically available on that platform with no further porting to be done. The main disadvantage was that the in-game parser and engine had limits to their flexibility and expandabilty and could not realistically be upgraded without breaking compatibilty with the established VM. The whole story of this system and the subsequent games produced for it by various authors is beyond the scope of this review but is elsewhere on the web and is very interesting. (well to some of us anyway!)

A number of the Scott Adams titles were released on the ZX Spectrum by a variety of UK publishers, often using the speccy's extended capabilities to various extents. Some of them had no graphics, whereas some later ones have quite impressive half-screen graphics, it really depended on the publisher.

What interests me about "Pyramid of Doom" (apart from the fact that I have just completed it) is that to my knowledge it was never officially commercially released by any UK publisher for the ZX Spectrum. The entry for this title in the WoS archive reflects this fact. (Therefore I think this may be the first review I've seen on here that isn't actually linked from the WoS archive at the time of writing.) A few of the other Scott Adams games similarly were never commercially exploited on the speccy.

So, I have been playing an unofficial release of the game converted from the original Scott Adams format to the Infocom "Z-machine" format. (another virtual machine environment for text adventures) This version auto-runs under a pre-packaged copy of John Elliot's excellent Z-Machine interpreter for the Spectrum +3, ZXZVM.
You can obtain this version of the game in +3 DSK format from the WoS archive here:- ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/disks-inform/ScottAdamsAdventures2.dsk.zip

It seems that most, if not all of the original series of Scott Adams games are availble in the same format via similar disks on WoS.

Pyramid of Doom was co-authored by Scott Adams and Alvin Files and was originally released in 1979 for the AppleII and TRS-80 systems. As it apparently bypassed the speccy market in the '80s, it then only became available for the Spectrum +3 in the late '90s via the rather circuitous route outlined above.

It goes without saying that on the speccy, a native Scott Adams VM version of the game would have been preferable to this conversion. Since the memory requirements would be much less than that of the Z-machine, such a native port could have theoretically ran on any speccy from 48K up, with or without graphics and without needing a floppy drive. Also, a native port would probably run faster than this Z-machine conversion which is a tad sluggish no doubt due to the added complexity of the Z-machine itself. Not to take anything away from the immensely superb technical achievement of this Z-machine implementation.

Having said that, it's just impressive that this strictly text-only version of the game eventually became available on the speccy at all. The font on this version is too small for my liking but I believe there's a way to switch ZXZVM back into the native, larger 32-column speccy font, which I never investigated.

As for the gameplay, you'd really want to have played a significant number of the preceding seven games in the series before tackling this one. This would allow the player to become familiar with various idiosyncrasies of the Scott Adams parser (No "examine" command, use "look" or "search" instead). In fact only the first three letters of any inputted word are significant. Also the previous games have similar goals (collect and store treasure) and similar types of puzzles.

The difficulty is really ramped up in Pyramid of Doom and the player will find that they have to work the grey cells a little bit harder than previously in order to find most of the 13 treasures stashed in the ancient Egyptian pyramid. A couple of the puzzles are downright illogical IMHO, but luckily we have the full range of hints and even the complete solution for this game available on the excellent TipShop website. I'd suggest there are at least two places where many players, like myself might become stumped for a long time due to needing to enter a somewhat esoteric command sequence.

However, despite the limitiations and shortcomings of a 1979 game, the feeling of the desert pyramid scenario is still absorbing for those who enjoy text adventuring and the vast majority of the puzzles are reasonably fair and logical and quite satisfying to solve.
In-game antagonists include starving rats, a desert nomad, a giant oyster and a mysterious purple worm. Treasures to be plundered consist of the usual assortment of gold and precious stones etc..

In summary, this one is well worth a go for text adventure fans, particularly for fans of the earlier games that kick-started the whole popularity of text adventuring on home computers. Games such as this have many rough edges and with hindsight can seem very primitive almost to the point of frustration, but still they remain very enjoyable and captivating. Perhaps a couple of weeks of enjoyment can be found from this game. The exact duration would depend on the level of player willpower to refrain looking at the hint sheet.

I would have given it a score of 4, but one point deducted because of a lack of a potentially better official commercial release which would have been compatible with the standard 48K speccy. You may wish to play this game on a different platform than the +3. I completed parts of it under a native UNIX Scott Adams interpreter for example. Nevertheless it's undoubtedly a novel experience to see it running in a Spectrum +3 environment.

Excellent mix of puzzle and arcade action in this 1987 game from renowned spectrum programmer Costa Panayi. Very enjoyable to play and very original concept too. Superbly implemented.

For those who don't know, each level is self-contained and consists of a series of mirrors and a laser beam that must be directed onto targets (called nodes) in order to destroy them all. Once this is accomplished, a barrier is removed and the laser beam must be directed back into a laser-sensing receptacle in order to complete the level. The player cannot control the laser directly, only indirectly by reflecting it off rotatable mirrors in its path. This is achieved by moving a cursor around the screen using QAKLM keys or a joystick. Holding down fire on top of a mirror whilst moving left or right causes a mirror to rotate by 45 degrees. Personally, I like to break out my USB Competition Pro joystick for this one, as its one of those games which just naturally seems designed for use with a digital joystick and works really well with it. It plays fine using keys too however.

The difficulty of the game is provided by in-level obstacles such as mines, barriers and also the possibility of overloading the laser by reflecting light back into itself. Each level also has a time limit making things quite tricky. If any mines or the laser blows up or you run out of time, you lose a life. You start with three lives. Even the first level isn't exactly a pushover on the first attempt. You have to learn the levels so that on successive attempts they can be done more quickly. I've been playing this game very sporadically for nearly two decades and I still haven't completed it. I do use end-of-level snapshots as I think it is VERY challenging otherwise, but I just have a habit of losing my saves over the years, so always find that I have to start from the beginning again.

Graphics are superb with the magenta colour of the levels really seeming just right, and also use of orange for barrier objects (well red and yellow dithering anyway). It's nice and colourful, certainly. m/c sound effects also suit the game really well.

I've just added this one to my list of games to definitely be completed. You should do the same (if you like this sort of game), I can't recommend it enough! Surely this one is one of the core classics of the speccy, up there with the other most popular games? I was a little surprised to find it hadn't yet been reviewed at the time of writing so perhaps it is often overlooked.

I understand from the Deflektor Wikipedia article that there was a sequel called Mindbender. (not to be confused with another unrelated speccy game called Mindbender) I've not yet had a chance to check it out.

There was also a PC remake from Retrospec. Again, I've not seen it, but personally I've grown to like the speccy version so much I think I'll be sticking with it.

First of all let me say that this game should be commended as the efforts of a lone 16-year old bedroom coder in 1983. For that era, the graphics are what you'd expect with use of the DRAW command, UDGs and liberal amounts of colour. There's even a simple implementation of parallax scrolling. Whilst this is essentially a BASIC game, the sound effects are at least written in machine code and sound pretty good too. Clearly the programmer/designer was talented and whilst this may not be the most original game ever written - it does at least show that a potentially impressive BASIC game could be developed by a single coder on an 8-bit system. Presumably the author went on to better things in the future, but I'm purely speculating.

So, why the low score? Well, I just can't actually play it. It could be that I'm doing something wrong, but having the keys displayed on the intro screen would have really helped, as I spent some time fumbling around just guessing what the keys are. Alas, the only way I could infer the needed keys was by looking at the BASIC source, and even then I'm not sure I'm 100% right as the IN command is used, rather than INKEY$. That of course is a good thing, as it allows multiple simultaneous keypresses, however, the program compares the values of the IN function with the literal value of 255.

As we know nowadays with later speccy models etc.. (perhaps not so in 1983), this method of keyboard reading is likely to be problematic since the EAR bit has not been masked off from the read port value, meaning the keys could be unresponsive or behave erratically. Admittedly, I've no real right to complain myself since I've used similar code in one-liner programs where space is really tight (with a disclaimer and instructions of how to fix it). But in the case of BoH, I think it has rendered the game unplayable and I can't be bothered going through the code locating and changing instances of '255' to '191' which could possibly fix it. So on starting a new game, I just see a jumbled mess of UDG explosions, line-drawn laser beams and my craft moving left and right seemingly randomly. Actually I can't quite tell if I'm controlling the craft or not. I think I'm partially controlling it, but usually end up dead after a little while. Same thing happens if I use issue 2 or issue 3 keyboard emulation.

My other slight gripe is that the game asks a couple of INPUT questions at the beginning like difficulty level and "TIME (100^)". Not sure what it means exactly, but I'd rather bypass them and just play with the defaults. As the game doesn't (for me anyway) last that long, it would have been better to have had an optional menu instead if needed, rather than having to keep entering values each time a new game is started.

Since the game only seems to load 168 bytes into the top 32K of RAM and the remaining 99% of it is in lower RAM, I also have to ponder if this really shouldn't be a 16K release, rather than needing 48K? Unless there's a huge DIM statement in there that I've missed or something, it should be runnable on a 16K system with some minor changes I would have thought? The main BASIC listing is only approx 7K and even the sound effects run in contended RAM in this version and it sounds fine. In 1983 I would suggest that squeezing the game into a 16K system would have been beneficial to some people, but perhaps I have overlooked a possible reason why this wasn't done.

Despite all this though, if you do manage to see the UDG-based AT-AT walk onto the screen, then that's mildly impressive for a BASIC game. If nothing else, this type-in may have shifted a few magazines back in '83 thanks to all the Star Wars related mania of the time.

But trufthully, you'll be yearning for sheer speed and smoothness of "The Empire Strikes Back" on the Atari 2600, which is directly equivalent to this game although machine-coded and was presumably an official tie-in. Not that it matters, I don't think the word "Hoth" could ever be copyrighted anyway, being a German surname and all.

Excellent pub darts game with a quite bizarre off-the wall sense of humour where you play against opponents such as an axe-throwing barbarian and a laser-zapping alien to name but two. Quite hilarious too when projectiles get launched into innocent pub customers rather than the dart board.

Some people would probably disagree with me here, but for my money, this one is even better than '180'. For starters it is much more difficult when playing against the tougher opponents but the extra level of irreverent fun here just makes this one more appealing to me personally. I mean who could forget playing against the inebriated Jockey Pilsner? Graphics are excellent too, just very skilfully drawn. Can't believe it was only £2.99 at time of release, excellent value IMHO.

It's memorable for me also because when played under the primitive Atari ST emulator of the early nineties, the Z80 'H' flag wasn't emulated for speed reasons and so the finishing score you needed was always 6 more than it should've been due to use of BCD subtraction in calculating the scoreboard. That added an extra bit of difficulty and surrealism too!

Overall though the game is just great, and whilst nothing like playing real darts, the system of an awkwardly accelerating hand which the player has to wrestle control of is somehow completely playable. (Or perhaps that is exactly like darts, particularly if drunk). But it is a skill which can be really improved with plenty of practice and you'll find yourself eventually getting really into the championship mode. It can actually be quite tense and exciting to play when you get really far in the game, quite agonising when you miss a finishing double. These things certainly make a rather enjoyable and challenging game.

Unfortunately, being a Codemasters title, it's status denied at the time of writing.

Very good version of the puzzle game where you move atoms around a board in order to construct a variety of organic molecules. This task would be easy were it not for the fact when an atom is moved, it carries on moving in the same direction until an obstacle is encountered at which point it stops. There are a whole class of puzzle games exhibiting this behaviour and they range from reasonably easy to really quite difficult.

Atomix has the additional educational benefit in that it allows the player to brush up on basic structure of organic molecules, ooh what fun! The game starts off with the primitive water and methane molecules, but soon gets onto slightly more tricky ones such as our perennial friend ethanol.

The official "Grandslam" then "US Gold" UK ZX Spectrum releases of this game apparently never saw the light of day in 1990, as speccy releases in the UK were certainly in decline at that time, as magazine articles of the time will attest to. However, things were really happening in Central Europe at that point so we instead have this now freeware version in Czech from Slovakian outfit Ultrasoft.

This version has the hallmark features we have become accustomed to in many releases from Central & Eastern Europe. There's the bouncy AY music on the intro screen in this otherwise 48K mode game. Also, we have an in-game text scroller in Czech which emits occasionally a few English words when you are least expecting it.

In-game keys are QAOP to move a "boney hand" cursor around the play area, whilst holding down M or fire allows dragging of an atom in any of the four directions. Naturally, joysticks are supported too. If you happened to skip chemistry classes then you can at any time press 'H' to show what the molecule in question should look like.

Certain things exist that can make levels tougher to play. For example there are obstacles which disintigrate after being hit by a certain number of atoms. A lot of difficulty in the game also comes from deciding where exactly on the board you should construct the molecule. You can be quite easily fooled. You may be able to get 7 out of 8 atoms say correctly constructed, but then realise that you can't get the final one in without moving the entire molecule to another place, because it wasn't in the right place to begin with.
It's a real mindbender at times and certainly quite a test of a certain skill. Sometimes, when you've learnt a bit more about the game dynamics, you'll instinctively know where to build a molecule, but may not be able to explain why it is right! Overall a very fun puzzler, with some considerable playing time in it.

I'm not sure how many levels this release has, but IIRC the Amiga version had 30 levels, so this one may be the same. I've only completed the first few so far. There's also a speccy sequel, Atomix II: Hexagonia, which looks to be indentical in gameplay, looking at the screenshot, but presumably containing more advanced levels.

I could quite easily award this game a 5, but just note a few minor things which I think could have been done differently or possibly improved. The letters on the atoms are not too easy on the eyes to read. Partly because of the choice of a white background colour (perhaps a dark colour would've been better here). Also because of choice of an unusual font and a shading on each atom, I probably would have used a more standard font and dispense with the shading, making the atoms look flat, but more legible. (Not unlike the C64 version looks). Second issue is that the AY music stops when the game starts. Maybe there is a key to re-activate the interrupt routine? But in game sound effects are pretty good and can presumably be heard more clearly without chip music playing. Still I would have liked a key available to toggle in-game sound FX & music on/off. Another minor issue is lack of time limit. Whilst I actually prefer playing the game much more without a time limit, it would be nice to have this as a menu-selectable option, since most other ports apparently implement a time limit. Apologies to the authors if these features do exist in the game. As I can't read the Czech language, it is quite possible I may have missed them.
I also personally prefer the discrete cursor control method used in "Deflektor" to this accelerating cursor method used here. This method may be faster and more efficient, but I just like to have the cursor locked into the same grid as the in-game elements.

Overall though, the above are only minor quibbles and do not take away from the fact that this is a very good and highly enjoyable speccy port of Atomix, which we would have otherwise been deprived of since the UK versions never made it out onto the shelves. Highly recommended for fans of the so-called "transport puzzle" genre.

Enjoyable arcade game from Mastertronic where you use QOAPM keys to move the Rockman spirte around a series of single-screen levels collecting all mushrooms as you go. You have a rather large hammer and in typical rockman behaviour, you like to hit things with it, namely blocks which could obstruct your access to mushrooms. Be careful with the hammer though, because you are also being chased by really quite wicked smiling faces that mean to devour you on sight and it's often probable that you will unleash the wrath of one if you hammer a nearby brick, opening a gap.

Levels are password based, making it nice for those who lack a snapshot capability.

The intro screen admittedly doesn't bode too well, looking like some cack-handed teenage attempt to impress mum with a beeper rendition of a rather irrelevant movement of Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" accompanied by a rather headache-inducing flashing magenta on red chequerboard background. Personally I would've used something like Wagner on this one! Still I can't help but admire it for some reason.

Then we enter the entirely functional menu screen with a quite nice custom font and this bit is implemented just correctly. On entering the game you can't help but initially be impressed with the lovingly 8-bit feel in the colour and detail of the mushrooms, fatal skulls and other in game elements. It just looks great. The playability is also really good once you get the hang of it and stop accidentally running into skulls. The enemy sprite AI is seemingly very simple with a tendency to creep up on the player, with a good dollop of randomness thrown in for good measure.

Sometimes you can get a little exasperated at repeatedly getting caught by a smiling/chomping sprites, but if you allow yourself to rethink the route you are taking in the level you will see that you can be a little clever and often make things much easier for yourself. But, bear in mind there is a time limit.

Well, I just like this game as is obvious. I'm not a huge fan of many of the Mastertronic budget titles, but now and again they did come up with something a bit special and memorable like Rockman.

There's a YS review linked from the WoS infoseek entry, but I find myself disagreeing with it on a couple of counts. Firstly where it is stated this game is a "Manic Miner" clone. I don't think that is quite correct, I'd suggest it only has a very tenuous connection to that genre (collecting objects on each level), but Rockman is certainly no Technician Ted, the hammer implement and the fixed-grid movement make this a really different playing experience. Besides, Rockman can't jump. Secondly, the reviewer describes the game's graphics as "lousy". Clearly tastes differ, but I think the graphics are really good. Not technically brilliant, but enthusiastically drawn, surely. I like the attention to detail very much. I say give Mastertronic credit where it is due, this is a good one! But where the reviewer and I do agree is that this is an addictive title. It's very often tempting to keep coming back just to see "one more screen".

Very good Marble Madness rip-off, which in my opinion at least equals its progenitor. After releasing this one, Melbourne House would actually go on to release official ports of Marble Madness itself. No small wonder, as the dynamics were spot on with Gyroscope.

The speccy was blessed with one of the best implementations, compared to say the notoriously buggy version suffered by Acorn Electron users.

The game dynamics are just so fluid and instantly responsive as you use QZIP keys or joystick to try to adeptly control the gyroscope as it is influenced by the contours and features of each level. It's really optimised for speed and with the gyroscope often (but not always) being the only thing moving on the screen, the speeds involved can be quite fast, for example the amount of speed you need to get up a very steep ramp is pretty high. The game also sports a very realistic if simple physics engine with seemingly constant high framerate, regardless of speed. Levels are bigger than the screen area and it's very sensible that vertical scrolling effectively pauses the game for a second or two, before returning control to the player as you move downwards through the level.

Again, it's another game where skill can be improved after a bit of play, and its certainly needed to be improved for the later levels. There are various hazards such as fatal enemy sprites and other mechanisms that can throw you off the path to success.

Intro music and level completion music are quite snappy and in game sound is of the typical machine code affair, suitable enough for the game, if a little "rough sounding" and grating at times.

If I have any gripe it is that occasionally you can be really unlucky by losing a life in certain places, causing multiple lives to be lost due to the fact the position of the gyroscope is restored near a problematic area. I think this is generally known as "infinite death syndrome" or something. For example it's very bad to die in an area where you'll be repositioned in front of a force-imparting arrow near a hole in the floor as you'll keep getting pushed down the hole.

Also, I noticed that the game can scroll downwards but not upwards. Not that it matters, as you wouldn't want to be going back on yourself anyway, but I was a little surprised on finding I would bounce off the top of the screen instead of going back up the level.

Overall though, very good game demanding some nifty quick reactions and skillful control from the player.

Let's face it, 8-bit hardware is really stretched when it comes to providing decent and realistic combat flight simulators. It would be insane to deny that later advances in 16-bit and 32-bit computer hardware have allowed a for a generally far superior playing experience in this particular genre.

However, Spitfire 40 is amongst the absolute best of combat flight simulators on an 8-bit system. I don't think I could ever award such an 8-bit game a score of 5 due to hardware limitiations which severly impact the realism of this genre, so a score of 4 here implies this game is amongst the very best of its generation.

What is offered is a true 3D flying environment with solid green ground and solid blue sky with a responsive horizon and rendition of runways (wire frame) and enemy aircraft and projectile bullets. There's a full array of cockpit instrumentation in 2D and the display can be flicked between this and the window view. Looking on the zoomed map view, you can even see the Spitfire parked on the runway. The theatre of combat is limited to the famous battle of Britain, taking place over south-east England in 1940.

The simulation of aircraft performance is really impressive with the usual things found in a simulation (as opposed to an arcade game) such as rudder control, flaps, landing gear etc.. Just learning to land the aircraft is a real challenge in itself, as in any good flight simulator, landing is typically the most difficult part.

Once you have mastered control of the aircraft, then come the dogfights with intelligent enemy AI, but what makes this game really good is the player log-book features meaning you can rack up an impressive wartime career in terms of flying hours and kills.

The 128K version is supposedly improved over the 48K version, but I just can't remember in what way. IIRC both versions looked pretty much the same when actually playing the game, which was slightly dissapointing for me when I saw the 128K version loaded up for the first time ever on a +2.

I can't see many people preferring this over newer games to be honest and I haven't played it that much recently myself, but I do occasionally fire it up and it still can be surprisingly engrossing. Back in the day, we used to play it quite a lot though on a friend's speccy. We thought we were real aces back then! Then we got our hands on Gunship and became totally hooked on that instead.

Excellent and absorbing RPG, played from a first person perspective in an immersive 3D multi-level dungeon environment. You control a team of up to four members selected from an initial pool of champions. There are the usual fighters, mages, adventurers and archers available and you'll probably want to construct a well balanced team. In fact the game is so addictive, whilst brushing up on it for this review, I just lost nearly two hours totally engrossed in it again!

The game sports single player mode and split-screen two player mode and is also well known for its primitive conversational system where you can charm or insult NPCs, barter with them and so on. You can even recruit new members to your party provided it isn't already full. It's hilarious when you try to sell something and a character says something like "Wilt thou rip me off?", that's medieval realism for you!

The game supports the usual varieties of weapons, foods, spells, skills and enemies as expected in an RPG and it's also very large. I don't know how long it would take to complete, but I imagine it is measured in weeks.

The game is essentially of the 16-bit era and usually when such games have been ported to 8-bit systems, I will typically ignore the 8-bit version and instead play the Amiga/ST/PC version. Here though, I am very interested in the ZX Spectrum version as it has a different level set than the 16-bit versions. My understanding is that the 8-bit versions all share this set of levels and the 16-bit versions all use another (even larger) set of levels. So, even if you have played the 16-bit versions as I have, the 8-bit versions still hold a lot of interest in exploring the levels.

Technically the game is an amazing feat, I have read that on the 48K version, some of the larger levels were squeezed in so tightly that merely 7 bytes of memory were remaining. So, this game really pushes the speccy to its limits.

It goes without question, for those who really love large and complex RPGs in the "Dungeon Master" mould, you couldn't ask for much better than this on the speccy. In fact when I first heard that 8-bit versions of the game existed I was completely surprised, yet it has somehow been achieved and despite the somewhat inferior graphics, there's absolutely no loss of playability whatsoever.

Only minor criticism is the control system. It's really based around use of a mouse driven pointer, hardware lacking on the standard speccy. By default the game will user Sinclair 2 joystick Port 2, or you can define keys to move the mouse-like cursor around. It would have been really good though if time-saving keyboard shortcuts to move the party around forwards,backwards,left,right had been implemented as its a little clumsy using a keyboard-driven mouse pointer to click on the movement icons, but I guess there really was no extra RAM to play with.

So overall, just a magnificent achievement to have shoe-horned such an ambitious game into the humble speccy, but most of all it's recklessly addictive once a new game is started. Really gives the player the experience of exploration and adventure. Brilliant.

Breakout clone with a vertical bat moving up and down the left-hand side of the screen. Levels are varied as you keep the ball (or rather snoball) in play whilst making your way towards "hell". Your single-speed "bat" is actually a "snoball battle tractor" which looks like a sort of tank or mobile gun turret. It can fire missiles which are needed to repel advancing waves of various enemy sprites.

Graphics are actually pretty good and colourful and each level has an interesting if blocky design.

The game features the usual power-ups, such as those affecting ball speeds and one that immediately kills you (ta very much). But on seeing the small size of the numerous bricks on the first level and realising the potentially long playing time, you'll really be looking out for the crucial "Go to next sector" bonus.

I kinda like this game as I originally got it from a second-hand shop for about 20p (Atari ST version). But on playing the speccy version, the 8-bit port seems virtually identical. After all, it's an 8-bit game at heart.

The whole playing experience is a bit clunky and for a budget title it almost has a shareware or PD feel about it, although I have fond memories of playing this game and really getting into it for a while.

Overall, worth a look for fans of the Breakout genre as it's a bit of a quirky title, but certainly bettered by Krakout & Arkanoid etc..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curious puzzler where you move a disk-like object around a 10x10 square grid, sliding the rows and columns around as you do so. An assortment of white blocks and metal boxes with a tiny letter 'T' on them are placed in preset positions on each level.

The blocks cannot wrap around the edges of the grid, which effectively limits the player's movement. The T-boxes however can wrap around the grid and the goal is to slide all T-boxes off edge of the grid at a location marked by a white arrow.

It's actually quite a bit of fun to play. There is a time limit on each level, but since there is a pause feature which does not hide the grid, you could keep pausing the game whilst studying it, making the limit somewhat redundant.

You do have a limited number of tries per level and each level is password protected and gets succesively more difficult.

Overall, this YS covertape game is quite good fun for a while.

Nifty multi-part scene demo from Amiga-loving Belarusian coding outfit, Dream Makers Software.

Gape in awe at the rotating halo of wireframe stars, the smoothly animated XOR-ed solid disc sprites, the chaotic psychedelic fractal effects and finally an oscillating view of a lunar-like landscape under a starry sky. Vibrant stereo AY chip music runs throughout.

It's not the absolute best demo I've ever seen, but pretty impressive nevertheless. It scores 10 in the WoS archive at the time of writing. I'm more inclined to give it 4 out of 5 to at least leave some room for the occasional outstanding demo which dare I suggest could exceed this one.

The demo requires a 128K system or better, but the ending (perhaps unintentionally) varies depending on hardware. Under emulation at least, the end-credits sequence crashes on a standard ZX Spectrum 128K system. It works fine on a Pentagon 128K or Scorpion ZS 256, revealing the fact that ELF and IMP are responsible for the demo GFX. That is at least in FUSE. In Spin 0.666/Pentagon 128K mode it ends with "Mental Masturbation ends here" screen and you don't see the credits. I can't pretend to understand why the ending is so dependant on the hardware config.

In any case, it's worth a quick look for people who have a passing interest in demos. Certainly impressive, but not quite going to blow your mind.

To be Frank, Field isn't very good. :)

But then that's hardly surprising since it lurks down the "really bad end" of the Cassette 50 tape, strictly B-side material. It's such a simple listing that anyone could knock up a similar game in a matter of minutes, although you may not manage to design it quite as bizarrely as this one.

You play the part of a hat-wearing broad-shouldered flower thief, bane of the local farmer. The poor farmer has enough problems, what with a stiff-legged guard dog that's lost all ability to follow trespassers, apparently hindered by a tiny piece of crud stuck near its backside. It just runs straight across the field in a seemingly confused state. The woeful collision detection actually allows you to ride the supposedly lethal guard dog's back avoiding capture.

Not only that, the oft-tormented farmer has planted an invisible minefield. You are instructed to avoid this invisible minefield at all costs. Under no circumstances should you walk on the invisible minefield. OK, so I'll try to avoid that completely invisible minefield then. erm, right. Do you know what, the thought occured that I don't think it's worth risking life and limb just to steal a solitary flower.

Anyway it's probably for the best not to attempt to make any sense of this game whatsoever. Just be grateful that you can enter your name into the high-score status line at the top of the screen, a true privilege.

Verdict: Atrocious

Kljuc (English: Key) is a Croatian platformer where you must escape a mansion of 80 flip-screen rooms. Keys are O,P,V (S=Pause).

Instructions are only currently available in Croatian and Slovene, but from what I can gather from a rough translation, you start off near the front door and you must find an axe. Once you have the axe, you must locate the cellar door and smash it. In the cellar you can find the front door key. You must then make your way back to the front door and open it.

Unlike Jet Set Willy and similar games, in Kljuc, you can only move between adjacent screens at points indicated by small arrows. This takes a bit of getting used to and the game seems to contain quite a few dead ends and pits that you will easily fall or jump into before you realise that the room interconnections are indeed quite limited.

From the rooms I have played so far, it appears that all in-game guardians are identical, consisting of a walking Pac-man type head on a long pair of legs. Your health is represented by a candle on the right of the screen and naturally coming into contact with the guardian sprites causes it to burn down. The game has a really minimalist feel almost to the point of making you think it could be unfinished.

Each room is entirely monochrome (well technically two-colour), yet the palette seems to be randomly generated so that if you restart the game you will notice that the rooms have different colours than before although the layout stays exactly the same.

Sprite animation is really smooth, and the game is responsive although the tendency of the player-character to get stuck against walls can be a bit frustrating at times.

Overall a very simplistic platformer with no variation in any of the rooms apart from layout, but I did get some enjoyment out of it. Probably overlooked due to its simple design and current lack of English instructions.

Pure BASIC type-in from "Your Spectrum" that's quite fun to play. You have to admire the professionally rendered, colourful UDGs that make up the kitchen, utensils and not least the anthropomorthised sausage, egg and chips.

In this arcade game, you control a frying pan, which in true "Game & Watch" style can only occupy three discrete positions on the kitchen floor. Use keys Z&X to move it left and right in order to catch the falling breakfast items until they eventually bounce along into the pan on the stove top.

Very simple premise and quite well suited to BASIC, the game runs at a reasonable speed and manages to be fiendishly difficult when all three food items appear at once.

Intro and endgame music consists of the children's rhyme "This Old Man". In-game sound is good for BASIC, with appropriate BEEPs and clicks.

No doubt the game would be improved quite a bit further if it was compiled, as occasionally it can seem a little unresponsive but all in all it's certainly one of the better type-in efforts, with a bit of character. So three out of five.

Interesting twist on Galaxians where the invaders are actually vegetables. I'm sure it is scientifically sound too. I mean who's to say there aren't intelligent vegetable-based lifeforms somewhere in the galaxy? Tomatoes, carrots and something else (radishes, potatoes, turnips or aubergines? - the jury's still out!) swoop down from space with great ferocity. It's OK though, the boffins on Earth are obviously prepared as we have the ultimate anti-vegetable weaponry - a set of three gun turrets which can fire gold-plated dinner forks.

The game's a bit of fun for a few minutes. No long term replayability, and apart from the vegetable theme, it's really just a standard Galaxians affair. Not the fastest or most difficult and ultimately quite repetitive.

Excellent sprite animations though as the vegetables have faces and can spin around as they fire a volley of seeds. The scrolling starfield background consists of multicoloured stars which is a nice touch compared to the more usual monochrome starfield. Sound is adequate. Game is 100% machine code. The scores are in a typeface similar to the "Data 70" style, nice retro touch.

How should it be played? Under SPUD of course!!

To appreciate this game, you'd probably have to be a fan of both Manic Miner and the ZX81. If you are, then this really is quite impressive.

Some time ago, Czech programmer Ales Martinik performed the almost unthinkable by porting Manic Miner to the vanilla 16K ZX81. This is really something quite special in itself. The most amazing thing is that it was managed at all given that the native, software-driven display of the ZX81 is strictly character mapped. The way around this limitiation is to replace the standard interrupt service routine of the ZX81 with a custom one which allows bitmapped screen bytes to be fetched from different locations of the ROM on a per-scanline basis. There is another limitation though, only about half of the possible 256 byte values happen to be available at relevant places in the ROM, meaning you have to just use a byte with a bit-pattern nearest the one you actually want. This means you may have a pixel or two in the wrong place. So this is not completely true freedom of pixel setting in the horizontal resolution. However it is true high-res in the vertical direction. Overall, this ZX81 screen mode is sometimes known as "pseudo hi-res" and is the only "hi-res" mode available on the standard machine without expanding it with additional graphics hardware. Other ZX81 games such as "Rock Crush" also use this mode.

Ultimately, nine of the original Manic Miner screens had to be dropped in the ZX81 port, leaving eleven screens to play through, but it seems the most familiar ones have been retained including at least "Central Cavern" and "Eugene's Lair". The room names have been translated into Czech in this version. I have no doubt that if this port were thought possible back in the day, the ZX81 could have enjoyed a commercial release, but it seems to me that the pseudo hi-res mode of the ZX81 was not fully exploited until a few years after the ZX Spectrum had already taken off, unfortunately limiting its utilisation to relatively small number of titles.

Fast-forward to 2003 and ZX81 and Speccy public domain developer Russell Marks takes the ZX81 version and ports it to the ZX Spectrum 128K. The impressive thing here is apart from some (non-intrusive) increased jerkyness due to staggered screen updates, it's pretty much indistinguishable from the ZX81 port. Russell notes in the embedded game FAQ that this port could be considered "pointless" but on the contrary I find it a worthwhile effort that as many as possible Manic Miner variants should be made available on the speccy platform. I'm sure Manic Miner fans who use a real 128K system could make use of this title. My limited understanding of how this version works is that it natively executes a patched copy of the ZX81 version on the Speccy's Z80. i.e. it doesn't actually emulate an entire ZX81 with CPU and all. However, the pseudo hi-res screen mode is emulated and this requires a significant proportion of the Speccy's CPU cycles, hence the need for staggered display updates. A 128K system is needed to run this according to the docs, as the 128K-only alternate screen is made use of while the ZX81 program code executes in the standard ZX Spectrum screen area.

As for the gameplay itself, the collision detection is a bit hairy to say the least, no doubt a limitation of ZX81 pseudo hi-res mode. This however makes the game pleasingly more difficult than the original speccy version, as at least it is consistently less forgiving. So for those of you who can do the original "Central Cavern" blindfolded, you'll find this version to be quite a bit more challenging than you are accustomed to. The game is based on the "Software Projects" re-release as apparently can be seen by the sprites in "The Warehouse" level, so Russell embedded a scanned copy of the Software Projects release tape inlay on the intro screen which is a really nice touch. The ZX81 version implements the "air indicator" as a numeric digit display rather than a decreasing horizontal bar which would be impossible to implement smoothly in pseudo hi-res mode. You'll also notice that as Miner Willy walks right and then left, the sprites are not an exact mirror image of each other. e.g. in one frame he has a "fat leg", again quirks of the pseudo hi-res mode. In the absence of a cycling colour palette, the keys which must be collected stand out instead by virtue of having flickering pixels. Despite all this though, the game incredibly manages to retain the look and feel of the original (within the obvious limitations that it is monochrome and silent), including very much the playability.

So overall, this title may not particularly appeal to those who aren't really interested in the technical details or those who don't wish to complete as many Manic Miner variants as is humanly possible. But if either of the above do apply, then definitely check this one out, above all else (given the limitations) it's good fun to play too!

Possibly I could give this game a score of 3, but it uses the rotational control method which I personally find is not that well suited to an isometric arcade game. I therefore find that the playability is hampered somewhat.

In this fast-action game you play a ball-like spacecraft which continually bounces along the surface of an alien planet. You can move the ball in eight directions at several different speeds and even come to a stop. Despite your Terrorball name, you actually have good intentions. Your mission is to collect parts of a crashed spacraft, assemble it and then rescue stranded spacemen, returning them to the craft. You use a mini-radar display at the bottom of the screen to locate the currently needed object. Some objects like "detectors" are quite easy to grab as they just remain stationary on the ground, but parts of the craft itself have been picked up by enemy droids which must destroyed, causing them to drop the needed item. Luckily you can fire an unlimited number of missiles (well, more like pellets really). The game is made very difficult by various antagonists all serving to drain your energy bar or deflect you off course and there are even holes in the ground that cause you to instantly die should you have the misfortune to fall in.

The game does have quite a decent selection of isometric sprites and the scrolling and sprite routines are well implemented. The whole game runs very smoothly.

Negative points for me though are the fact that there's often so much going on in the play area it looks very cluttered. The game's also very difficult. Even on "Novice" level, it tends towards somewhat frustrating, particularly when tracking down an opponent droid. There are just so many obstacles in the way, you'll just keep getting knocked back off course as you attempt to catch up at breakneck speed. The fact that you can't see all that far ahead in your direction of travel doesn't exactly help here. Like many other games, you also move at effectively 1.4 times normal speed in the diagonal directions, which is a natural consequence of the scrolling routines. I can't help but wonder if this could not have been slightly corrected in this case though, given that the game does already implement variable scrolling speeds.

Overall though, I just don't think the playability is that good, despite being a potentially involving and impressive-looking title, it's just on the side of frustratingly difficult and awkward for me. Of course, I'm sure there's people out there who are actually good at it!

Interesting Pacman variation from 1982.

Whilst the game is clearly influenced by Pacman it's not an exact clone. OK, so you have to eat food from a maze to clear it and you are pursued by four "chasers". In this version however, your character is a stickman rather than a pacman-like sprite. The stickman doesn't move continually in one direction until hitting an obsatcle, like Pacman does. Instead, he is moved one square at a time, but at least auto-repeat is enabled so you just hold the key down to keep him moving. Although, this makes it a bit fiddly to turn corners on the higher speed settings (or "tempo" as the game calls it). There are no power pills, but you do have a limited if generous number of "lasers" available that simultaneously fire in all four directions from the player until hitting a chaser or a wall. The laser causes a chaser to move back to its home corner. So the usefulness of the laser is severely limited when hitting a chaser which is already near its own corner as it will hardly move it, if at all.

The game is implemented in machine code allowing it to run at a high speed, although screenshots of it would make it superficially appear as if it was a BASIC effort. The game does look nice with a pleasing and varied colour scheme though. Sound effects, being in machine code are arcadey and quite good. There's also a funky rainbow BORDER effect when the game ends on achieving a new high score.

There are 15 user-selectable mazes available adding to the replayability value. Some of them are quite a bit more difficult than the default starting maze. There's a plethora of game options that can be selected before playing, but the game states you must POKE it if you wish to redefine the keys. So it's a little surprising there is no redefine-keys option in a game with so many other options. I'm not mad on the default cursor key setup but at least I can get around it with keystick emulation.

Overall, it's a reasonably good game from the early days of the speccy and the style shows it. Like many games of the time, machine code is used to speed things up and to add a couple of snazzy effects, but by keeping the character grid limitations and employing UDG-like graphics, it still seems like it's developed with a BASIC mindset.

Not the most original concept, but at least the variation of having a "laser" weapon and the potentially high playing speeds makes it worth a look.

Zaraks. By the name alone we know they must be evil. I should point out that this game is completely unaffiliated with "Zaraks Fibreglass", "Zaraks Recruitment" or the famed village of Zarak in Afghanistan for that matter.

This is another one of those simplistic arcade games from the early days which uses machine code to allow frighteningly fast speeds, yet retains UDG-like graphics locked into the standard character grid.

In Zaraks, you start near the top-left of a maze and must make your way towards the centre by shooting randomly appearing blockages and lethal Zarak guards. The guards are called "Monsters" in the instructions and "Zarak Guards" in the game itself, so take your pick! The guards shoot missiles at you so it's kill or be killed. When you die, the word "PLAY" appears over your corpse - I can't work out why this is. CURSOR keys are used to move around, with SHIFTed-CURSOR keys used to fire a missile in any of the four directions. You have a limited number of missiles, the total amount depending on the difficulty level selected. There's also a strict time limit, but you get essential extra time by picking up "Power pills" which look like small green disks scattered throughout the maze. The game is reasonably fast even on the slowest setting and on the highest setting (called "impossible") it pretty much is impossibly fast.

The design of the game seems not to be thought out too well. The Zarak guards erase the power pills as they move around. So that by the time you get halfway around the maze, there are typically no power pills remaining at all - meaning you can very often run out of time. There's just very little point having power pills placed near the centre of the maze in the first place - they invariably get erased before the player gets near them. The random element means that you can immediately get shot dead by a Zarak guard before you've even had your first keypress. I may be quick, but on the fastest setting I can't really beat getting shot dead on the very first iteration of the main game loop! Sometimes there'll be virtually no power pills available near the start meaning certain failure, whereas you can play again and there'll be about ten power pills laid out for you - making the time limit largely irrelevant when that happens.

So, due to the randomness and the speed at which you can get killed (due in no small part to the character mapped graphics) it's not a very fair playing experience. I have completed it once, but only due to a particularly fortunate distribution of power pills. You still need some skill to win, but quite a bit of luck too.

Another one from the twilight zone that is the B side of the cassette 50 compilation. Coded by M.Lewis with character design by E.Lewis we can see that as usual, the most sought-after jobs are awarded to family members in the hotbed of nepotism that is the Cassette 50 tape! But seriously, on seeing the rather good UDGs, the (stationary) starfield, the two-tone mother ship and the curved space-station defence shield, I wanted to award this game a 2 and was even thinking of a 3 because compared to other files on the tape, this was looking rather good. It even gets a high score in the WoS archive, so I'm thinking "Hey, maybe like Frogger, there's actually another reasonably good game on the tape?".

However, I then actually attempted to play it and I can confirm it really is a "1" and not just because it is on the Cassette 50 tape, no this title can fall flat strictly on it's own two feet. So, what's wrong with it then?

Well, on starting a new game you are asked via an INPUT statement "Skill level?" but there's no indication of the meaning or range of this value. What do I type? 1? 77? I have no idea. So I have to BREAK into the program and examine the code. I'm now pretty sure that the valid range of skill levels is in fact 0-29 inclusive. Anything higher than 29 will cause a subscript error and whatever you type in, 1 is added to the value thus entering 0 is also valid. However, entering skill levels in the higher end of the range seems to make the game really hang, so I recommend typing 0 at this point.

On playing the game, use keys Z,X to move your missile base left and right and P to fire a missile. To be fair, your missile is impressively fast for a BASIC game. FLASHing Invaders trickle down the screen so you know what to do, hit them hard. Don't let any of them penetrate the baseline of the spacestation because you will lose energy, ultimately losing the game. You regain energy by shooting invaders.

Sounds simple enough, but I'm sure there are quite a few bugs here. Like why sometimes when I clearly hit an invader, does it not disappear? Conversely, why do some invaders which I never even remotely hit disappear of their own accord? Why do some invaders just permanently get stuck in mid-air, never moving again for the duration of the game? It's bad enough that you may lose energy when an invader slips through the net, but does it really have to totally corrupt the scoreline too? Why does the first invader which slips through cause the player to unexpectedly gain energy and then the second one cause you to lose it again? Why does an invader sometimes run down column zero of the screen which is out of range for the player and fails to follow the usual formation pattern? Should moving invaders really cause distant stars to permanently disappear? But worst of all is the huge delay in each iteration of the main game loop meaning that if you try to move continually left or right say, your craft moves in fits and starts. It's terribly unresponsive. Try playing on skill level 29 and hold the 'Z' key down to try move your craft to the left edge of the screen to see what I mean. It's really unplayable.

We don't expect commercial-quality games on this compilation, but come on this could have been improved a bit, I'm sure. Perhaps there was a tight deadline to get this one out or something.

Verdict: Nice looking game and would provide an attractive screenshot for the Cassette 50 tape, but don't believe anyone who tells you they actually enjoy playing it!

Simplistic game where you use keys O & P to navigate a spacecraft through a rather dense 2-D scrolling asteroid belt. The object is simply to survive for as long as possible. You have three lives.

The game is written partially in BASIC, but rather than taking the easy option of using the built-in ROM scroll routine, this game instead opts for the rather more tricky to implement horizontal scrolling, which is achieved by some small custom machine code routines, loaded into RAM at the start of the game.

Your spacecraft flies through the asteroid field, effectively travelling towards the left. I know this is completely irrational of me but it just seems that this is the wrong direction. I think it should travel to the right! I just find this a bit disorientating, but maybe it's just me. After all, there are many games where you can travel in both directions. I've probably played too many where you can only travel towards the right.

On the positive side, the machine code routines make the game possible to run at a fast rate and the asteroid and ship "sprites" are very well done given the limitations of working with UDGs. The game is genuinely challenging and a fair test of player reaction times.

On the negative side, you cannot achieve a score higher than 1279 as once the score reaches 1280 it generates error "B Integer out of range". I suspect the game was meant to be open-ended with no reasonable limits on the score. However I would say once you get the above error message you may consider yourself to have completed "mission". It's no easy task to get that far in the game.

Also, you can erase the asteroids by moving your ship sideways into them, when I would have thought that doing this should really cause you to lose a life. The ship sprite flickers quite badly, but I guess it can't be helped due to the continuous scrolling.

The game's OK for a quick session of a few minutes or so, but there are dozens of similar titles on the speccy and this one is essentially a minimalist version in a crowded sub-genre. Other versions tend to sport things like limited-use defence shields and so on. But certainly, mission would have benefitted from slightly more rigourous playtesting.

Welcome to the world of Flappy and prepare yourself for long nights in front of the computer screen scratching your head in this level based transport puzzler.

The game was released in 1990 by Czech publisher KVL, four years before they released the brilliant "Boovie".

Flappy is logically equivalent to Boovie in that you must push an item across the level onto a location marked by an arrow, overcoming various obstacles and antagonists. The difference is that the item is a white egg instead of a white block.

Being an earlier game, Flappy also lacks the vibrant colourful graphics and AY music of Boovie and is frankly a little sluggish and unresponsive compared to the later games. It's strangely lacking in colour altogether and has infrequent, primitive sound efffects. The loading screen is also worth a mention as IMHO it's so amateur it's endearingly funny. The game also takes a few seconds of initialisation for each screen to appear. However, these things won't matter one jot to puzzle fans as it's the actual puzzles themsleves that matter here.

Use WZIP keys to move Flappy around the level. Push the white egg onto the location marked by the arrow (actually a small black triangle) to complete the level. Grey eggs can be either moved around or crushed and can support other eggs (grey or white) on top of them. Enemy sprites can be defeated by either dropping eggs on them or by picking up and then firing small projectiles. I found that the enemy sprites will merely be stunned by one or two projectiles whereas three will kill them. (In Boovie I think only two were needed). Press SPACE to fire a projectile. Like in Boovie, objects can be positioned at half grid-square resolution, which is crucial to solving the puzzles.

If you mistakenly make the level unsolvable (which happens frequently) then press 'T' followed by 'A' in order to reset the level and start again, at the cost of one life. The game has a password system allowing skipping to higher levels, but from what I can gather there isn't a password for every single level. You also start with five lives (since falling objects can crush you and enemy sprites can kill you), but perhaps if you use end-of-level snapshots, then this may not be too relevant.

Overall, if you've completed Boovie and Boovie 2, or even if you just love these "transport puzzle" games and are looking for something a bit different than Sokoban then you must absolutely play this one. The primitive sound and graphics will be largely irrelevant when it comes to the sheer enjoyment of puzzle-solving. Of course the early levels are trivially easy, but they get much harder as you progress through the game.

The copy of the game I have is called "Arrow Escape". It's on a Dutch compilation tape. Looks to be exactly the same as the screenshot in the archive except the word "ESCAPE!" at the bottom of the play area has been replaced by "Arrow Escape".

This pure-BASIC game is pretty good fun for a few minutes. You play the part of a stickman trapped in a room rather like in that Indiana Jones movie where both the ceiling and floor are spiked and moving in on you at an alarming rate. You must use QAOP keys in order to move around, first picking up at least one key to unlock the door and secondly as many white sprites as you can for extra points. Don't overdo it though as you must get to the doors marked "out" before you get crushed or impaled. You must also avoid the green objects at all costs since they are fatal.

Basically you should try to ensure you get the key as quickly as possible as if the spikes cover all keys, you are royally screwed, and will definitely perish. Later levels get fiendishly difficult as the spikes close in ever faster and the fatal green sprites almost overwhelm the play area, it's real brown-trouser time as you quickly attempt to grab the nearest available key with about a second remaining.

Despite being a BASIC game, it'd be fun to see this on a site like myspeccy.com for online play. I'd be interested to see what scores other players could achieve. Of course there's no real long term appeal for this game as it's quite simple, but for a BASIC arcade game, it's pretty fast and quite a unique title.

Surely this is one of the ultimate tests of dexterity on the speccy? Spindizzy takes the Marble Madness/Gyroscope idea to the next level as you control a probe craft around a newly-discovered dimension in space. Well that's the backstory, but essentially this "new dimension" really looks like a standard isometric Marble Madness screen apart from the fact that this game is one huge flip-screen level consisting of over 380 interconnected rooms and you have to collect gems, of which there are a few hundred in total.

The nod to the previous games couldn't be more blatant as you can press a key to toggle between three different player sprites. The default is an upside-down pyramid which presumably is the probe ship in it's "native" form. There's also (funnily enough) a marble and gyroscope available. Choice of sprite does not affect the gameplay in any way whatsoever but I think it is great that the player can choose one depending on which previous game they may feel attached to. Personally I prefer to play as the marble as I just find it easier. It isn't really easier, but I'll happily take the "placebo effect" of it seeming easier.

Originally I played this game a lot on the C64, as I happened to own the tape (yep, from the second hand shop again!). So naturally, I visited the Lemon 64 site and noted that the reviewer there awarded this game 6/10 which would equate to 3/5 on this website. I agree with the reason the reviewer uses to award the game a middling score - namely that it is cruelly difficult. It's beyond debate I think that Spindizzy is a very difficult game on all platforms. I mean some of the rooms very near to the starting place are exceptionally difficult. So, this is not the sort of game you can just casually fire up in an emulator, check it out for five minutes, as certainly you won't really get very far. However, after some hours of play, you will start to get the knack and be able to cope with ramps and lifts etc.. a little better. You'll get a feel for the controls. So, overal I think given enough time by the tenacious player, the game deserves a four. I think the most difficult thing is stopping the craft, particularly on sloping surfaces. There is a "freeze key" which nicely instantaneously halts your craft for you, but be careful to only ever use it on flat surfaces as if you use it on a slope, your time will drain at a frighteningly fast rate.

The time limit is enough to keep you on your toes, so much so that when you first start to play the game, you may only complete around 4% of the game or so due to running out of time. Apart from misuse of the freeze key, time is also lost for falling off the edge of the world. Time is regained by collecting the gems. Apart from the definable keys you can also use keys 1,2,3,4 to rotate the room viewpoint. There's also a key to show you your current score and one to show you the entire map and how much of it you have discovered. Actually, looking at the map near the beginning of the game makes you realise just how huge this game is, but can also be a little demoralising if you haven't got very far.

One peculiarity of the game is the need to press "Extended Mode" i.e. CAPS-SHIFT and SYM-SHIFT together to exit the score menu and to end the game. So far, I've not seen that in any other speccy game that I can think of!

Overall, the game features very smooth sprite animation, realistic physics, a vast world to explore and ultra-responsive gameplay. Yes it is too hard, but back in the day if you'd gone out and bought it, you'd probably spend more time on it than just a quick look amongst 20,000 games on your HDD. This popular game spawned a 16-bit sequel "Spindizzy Worlds".

Verdict: Well implemented game for patient players who like an insanely tough test of aptitude, with a steep learning curve.

The game is denied at the time of writing.

The HiSoft BASIC compiler may have been around £25 when it came out, but I have no doubt that for regular BASIC programmers it was worth it. So far, I've only used the 48K version, which I'm reviewing here although I believe the 128K versions are even better.

Integrating seemlessly with the native BASIC development environment, during regular programming, you can quite easily forget that the compiler is even loaded at all. All usual BASIC operations like editing your code and RUNing it in interpreted mode in the usual way are almost completely unaffected by the presence of the compiler. The only differences of note are that there's slightly less RAM available and there's a new interrupt handler running in IM2 mode, but these things generally don't make any difference to everyday BASIC programming.

The compiler commands are very simple and entered in immediate mode such as *c (compile your program), *r (run your compiled program) and *x (clear out previous compilations from memory). As with other compilers on the Spectrum, the screen area is used as the working area when compiling your code, so as to preserve memory. Compilation is surprisingly quick. It's also really handy how both your interpreted and compiled program versions can reside in RAM at the same time and be RUN independently of each other. Compiler directives are implemented in REM statements in the BASIC program with most important one being "REM: OPEN #' which means "start compiling from here". But an overwhelming advantage of the directives is the use of datatype declarations. You can now use 16-bit signed or unsigned integers from BASIC and also specify the lengths of un-DIMMED strings.

The lack of integer datatypes is something which unfortunately causes all operations in Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum to be performed with floating point arithmetic, via the calculator stack and although there are internal shorthand notations for 16-bit integers, the system would never be as quick as having a native 16-bit datatype within the BASIC language itself. It's really good then to see this issue addressed here. Two 16-bit numbers can be added on the Z80 CPU in a single instruction, vastly outperforming the addition of two 5-byte floating point numbers. But of course the other main advantage of having integer dataypes is the space saved in arrays. In your complied code, an array of a thousand integers would only occupy a little under 2kB, wheras stored as floating-point values would occupy almost 5kB and so on. So the enabling of these more efficient datatypes from BASIC makes the compiler useful in itself.

Then of course we come to the main objective of the compiler, to increase speed of BASIC programs. Here, the speed really can become several times faster than the original program (or even more when declaring integers), making sluggish games playable, or the impractical practial, without having to resort to manual programming in assembler. Of course the compiler does have limitations. If the source program is badly programmed, having flickery or jerky graphics then that will obviously persist in the compiled code too. There are also certain limitations and unsupported commands and tricks, mostly due to the fact that all compiled program data is statically allocated at compile time and there is no mechanism to allocate/deallocate memory dynamically. Also, things such as computed GO SUBs have to be manually set up for compilation using compiler directives. However, most programs can be converted to be compatible and if compilation is borne in mind from the beginning, then it's easy to write a 100% compatible program from the off without sacrificing any flexibility in what you can achieve.

Another impressive touch is that you can BREAK out of even your compiled program as long as the compiler is resident, thanks to the custom IM2 routine.

So overall, it's just an excellent product for BASIC coders and really well implemented.

Pretty good flip-screen arcade adventure game that's not a million miles away from the Dizzy series of adventures. The main difference being that you play Puff the dragon rather than Dizzy the egg. Apart from that, this could well be a Dizzy game and fans of Dizzy may well want to also check this one out. This game features the same high standards of graphics, gameplay and imaginative locations as seen in the Dizzy games.

Little Puff was originally a budget release, but this merely reflects the fact that it was released around 1990 and was in fact an absolute bargain for a game of this high standard. I have no doubt if it had been released a few years earlier it could've easily sold as a full price title.

The game itself is enjoyable to play with responsive controls and smooth sprite action, although it can seem a little harsh that you only start with one life and many rooms are effectively booby-trapped so you'll be thinking, "if only I knew spikes were down that hole" or "if only I knew that coconut would fall on my head" etc... So, you need to repeatedly play it in order to benefit from prior knowledge gained in previous attempts and hopefully get a little bit further on your next go.

Good machine code beeper routine on the main menu screen and good sound effects too help to make this seem a quite polished game (that is on the 48K version at least which is the one I've played). Even the mountainous background of the initial locations looks nicely drawn and adds atmosphere to the game.

Overall, worth a look, but like other rather good games, it is currently status denied.

Second of the two "Fido" games that appeared on Firebird's amusingly bad "Don't buy this!" compilation tape of 1985.

The game is very wrong in most respects and probably deserves a score of 1, but I'm being very generous in that (a) the game at least has colourful graphics, (b) contains multiple differently-themed levels and (c) the Fido games have a somewhat "original" gameplay. So, at least some effort was put in making things a little bit better than the very worst titles out there.

Overall though it's frustratingly poor and the gameplay is pretty terrible, with wildly inaccurate collision detection, bad key layout, and really just a feeling of awkwardness on playing.

You play the part of the pup named Fido, who indeed looks like a puppy, that is until he sits down at which point his sprite expands to a larger size and his tail grows to about three times it's normal length and he just looks like some sort of giant mutated adult dog.

Use keys WSNM to move around the play area and Q to fire a sort of laser beam from the pup's mouth. Shoot the enemy sprite to gain "food", whilst avoiding direct contact with it. (Where "direct contact is roughly defined as being within 16 pixels of the sprite) I don't even know what the magenta enemy sprite is on the first screen, but it sure has a disproportionately large wobbly nose! The main purpose of the game is to sit over garden moles which keep appearing at the bottom of the screen, such that your wagging tail hits them on the head, killing them. I don't know what's more surreal, a mole-killing pup which tail-wags its prey to death, the purple-nosed antagonist or the laser-beam coming out of a dog's mouth. Anyway, kill enough moles and you will at least progress onto the next exciting screen.

There are also large doors at the top of the play area, but despite your inevitable efforts to try to walk through them, they are in fact completely non-functional.

So, overall quite a bizzare concept of a game that's bound to make you ponder just how could such an idea come about. It's certainly no fun to play either, (especially as you repeatedly die after two seconds of play on your first attempt), but somehow it's a little intriguing due to the bizarreness of the whole concept. Anyone who has played through the Cassette 50 compilation will also know, this is not the absolute worst, but bad enough.

Intriguing Polish-language text-only game where you have to buy and sell used cars at a profit, using various nefarious methods like "clocking" in order to increase profits.

It has what I take to be the Polish sense of humour in bucketloads, with some hilarious outcomes like ending up in court due to fraudulent business practices with a "judge that looks like Dracula" or vandals attacking your business or burning it down.

You can even choose where to set up your business, like in a dodgy side-street or an industrial area. The cars can have all sorts of problems like the exhaust pipe falling off, or a missing engine.

Technically, the game is written entirely in BASIC, yet uses a turbo loader that somehow manages (psychologically at least) to seem slower than a normal load. Also, it's tricky to hack as the variables are loaded separately from the main program. so RUN or CLEAR wipes everything. The computed control statements make the code almost impossible to follow and on top of that there's only about 1K of RAM remaining.

But from a player's viewpoint, you just have to find a game slightly zany when it initially asks you if you are married and then calls you an idiot if you say you are.

Another peculiarity is that the game uses British Pounds for currency even though it is presumably set in Poland.

I just give it 4 out of 5 for pure quirkiness though!

Simple Spanish "worm" game, written in BASIC.

4-way directional (CURSOR) controls. Single-digit random-value, randomly-positioned, recurring reward, increases score, but not worm length.

Initial worm-length determined by distance to first-placed object.

No UDGs, but uses solid block and "checkerboard" from basic graphics character set. Black worm, yellow background, slightly sluggish. Can effectively play game indefinitely without dying, racking up points due to slow speed and non-increasing worm length. Superflous "GO TO 125" on line 121. I don't know why it's there, it can just be removed. Also I found it useful to change the keys to my preferred QAOP layout.

Amazingly fails to run on a 16K model, even though it's a small program due to overlarge array allocations ("Out of Memory").

I'm a sucker for worm games and I like to note differences between various versions. So it's a bit of fun for me, but incredibly boring for most sane gamers I'd imagine, so 2 out of 5.

Spanish Chuckie Egg/Lode Runner type "platorm 'n' ladders" game, except far more primitive.

UDG graphics with character based movement although the game is a mix of BASIC and machine code routines, which speed it up a bit. The main game loop is essentially implemented in BASIC though.

The game scored 3 out of 10 in the WoS archive from one voter, which is perhaps a little harsh. The levels vary in layout and in number of enemies

The player UDG consists of a face, not completely unlike a face-on Pacman-type character. In line with a long tradition, various objects must be collected and then the exit reached whilst avoiding contact with the enemies.

Short beeps play throughout and the game does support QAOP keys in addition to Kempston.

Overall an amateur type-in style game, but I've seen far worse. It kept me mildly entertained for a few minutes.

Highly eccentric graphical arcade game from "THORN-EMI computer software" where you play a patient trying to escape from a hospital.

The intro text sets the tone in a hilarious manner as it claims St. Crippens is a really bad hospital. You know this because you used to work as a porter there and realised just how bad it was, so you had to get out. Sounds exactly like the sort of gossip that people come out with all of the time!

Indeed the hospital is bad, as nurses will injure you upon contact (which would not normally be considered a good standard of care) and there's also some sort of on-site highly dubious experimental genetic engineering lab.

Worth playing just to see something a bit different, although personally I find the controls a bit awkward.

Not bad for a game that fits inside 1K.

Pobble is a falling block puzzle game, in a similar vein to tetris/colorix/klax/columns (too many to name) etc..

In this one you drop one coloured boulder at a time. There are seven possible boulder colours, i.e. the standard eight Spectrum colours, minus black which is the background colour.

The player must get a row of three-of-a-kind to make the boulders disappear and do this quickly enough in order to fight against the upward rising tide of water-bound arrows that are pushing the boulders upwards towards the top of the screen.

All well and good, except that it's a little too easy because there are 8 columns available, so you can just use the simplest strategy of always dropping boulders of the same colour into the same column. Keep doing this fast enough and you can maximise your score.

Also, despite the instructions file mentioning 16K support, the game in fact doesn't work properly on a 16K system. A look at the source reveals that the higher 32K of memory is indeed used to store program data.

Still, perhaps worth a quick go for a few minutes. The game is entirely implemented in machine code, embedded in the BASIC program area.

A simple 2D game where you pilot a helicopter in order to pick up sheep from a rapidly flooding field and drop them off at the top or bottom of the screen.

Or, at least I think that's what's happening. The game looks very much like it's written in BASIC with its character-based movement and UDG style graphics, except it's actually implemented in machine code and so zips along at a fast rate. Perhaps too fast.

Your helicopter seems to have about three seconds of fuel before it runs out and to make matters worse, the keyboard controls are not revealed in the game itself. This leaves the player rapidly dying several times before the combo is worked out.

I found that 5=right, 6=left, 7=down, 8=up seems to work, but that is neither a CURSOR arrangement nor a Sinclair joystick arrangement. The keys are for some reason swapped around in an awkward non-standard mapping.

Even when you do get the hang of flying the chopper and manage to avoid running out of fuel for a few seconds, the field floods so rapidly that the game is over within just a few further seconds anyway.

There are some interesting tougher levels available, featuring additional hazards such as fog, lightning and diseased sheep, but the thought of this game being made even more difficult than the first level is enough to dissuade me from seriously trying them out.

Of course it's entirely possible that it's just me, that I'm not very good at this game and others out there have mastered it, so try it out and see how long you can last without the game ending. You may well do better than me, with some perseverence.

The game does feature a superfluous stripey-border effect on the intro screen, thanks to use of machine code, but that doesn't make up for the fact that this is one poorly implemented title. Perhaps with some player feedback, the problems could have been fixed and the game made much better, after all I quite like the underlying premise.

Bit of a peculiar game where you must guide the eponymous Bear George around an orchard, eating as many falling apples as possible, whilst avoiding nuts deliberately thrown at his head by squirrels.

The next stage sees George negotiating a piste in order to enter his mountainside cave. In this game, if a skier hits George, then he seems to come away in a better condition than the bear. I suspect in real life that the skier may not be quite so lucky.

Once in the cave, George must finally negotiate some lethal spiders before hibernating for the winter. If George doesn't have enough fat left at this point, then he won't make it through the hibernation period, dying of starvation.

It's got to be the only game I've ever played featuring a simulation of hibernation!

The game is not great to be honest and the movement of the bear is slow and clunky (particularly on the piste where you can't move vertically without moving horizontally at the same time), but I still give it three as its uniqueness is probably just enough to elevate it above "poor".

I love the railways, I really do, but these pure-BASIC text-only games where you issue instructions to move a pre-coded selection of locomotives around the various sidings of a maintainence depot just leave me cold.

The location for this game is the Finsbury Park Traction Maintainence Depot (TMD), North London, but for all I care it might as well be Ipswich Engine Shed.

To be fair, some people somewhere might've burned the midnight oil playing this one and had a whale of a time, in the same way that I can never go to bed once I've started a game of Civilization 2. If that's true then I salute whoever you are and invite you to create a good review of this title, to counterbalance my negative review!

Alas, Finsbury Park TMD is no more. The site was closed in 1983, then demolished, the tracks lifted and apartments now cover the area, just to the south-west of present-day Finsbury Park station.

On a personal level, as much as I lament the loss of railway infrastructure, I understand this was done for a good reason in this case - to stop more games like this from being produced. ;)

Anyway the game does contain one fatal bug. After all of the player's efforts in shunting the locomotives around the depot, the score they get awarded on the screen at the end of the game can be completely incorrect. And I quote:-

2607 LET z$="DISASTROUS": IF sc>95 THEN LET z$="Poor": IF sc>60 THEN LET z$="Average": IF sc>70 THEN LET z$="Good"

For those who realy want to play this game, "IF sc>95" should be replaced with "IF sc>50" or you will never be able to obtain a score of "Poor" (which at least is one level above "Disastrous").

I'm not aware of too many sailboat racing games currently available on the speccy. (There are at least two others that are MIA and one that is "distribution denied") so I guess fans of the genre don't have a whole lot of choice. In this one, you do have to sit through the rather tedious BEEP-command intro-tune (at least on a real Spectrum). On an emulator, I'm always tempted to switch to "full speed" mode until the tune is completed, or create a snapshot.

However, once the game starts it's a simple case of selecting either 2-player mode, player vs CPU or player vs player vs CPU. In fact the word "man" is used in the game, rather than player, so apparently female racers are out in this one! (How times have changed, they wouldn't get away with that nowadays! - ed) When playing against the computer you can be up against such characters as "Reg Wino" or "Phil Cretin".

The game itself offers primitive graphics, showing a zoomed-out, top-down view of the aquatic racing course, such that the sailboats actually constist of a trail of a few pixels moving across the screen. (saves having to draw an actual sailboat I guess!)

The player has some rudimentary control over the sailboat, via the keys A,Z,L,M. I find I can eventually sail to any desired position on the screen, but I've still not yet worked out the finer points of how the control system works, or if I'm still missing some vital key (again, I can't see any hint of the required keys within the game itself.)

Overall though, despite my minor quibbles, the game is actually OK. It looks like some effort went into it at least and it can be a little bit of fun to sail around the markers. Just one thing though, who on Earth is John Caig? (Amusingly, a Google search on the name will send you back to the WoS infoseek page on this game - could it be connected to the game author, J.C.Smith's initials?).

I've played some pretty awful homebrew BASIC pacman clones in my time, not least the ones I wrote as a child when I was only a novice coder. Pak-Men 2 by 'unknown' is certainly amongst the worst that I've played.

It features ghosts which just relentlessly pass straight through the maze walls, diagonally towards the player. The sole AI algorithm just seems to be "move towards the player". It's also a completely monochrome play area and has eye-less ghosts the same colour as the maze. The ghosts don't change colour when you eat a "power pill" either.

The power pill is just a percent (%) sign. Although, there are UDGs for the pacman, ghosts and maze walls. But for some reason, these overwrite the standard graphics set (i.e. CHARS has been altered) rather than using the normal UDG area, so the BASIC listing looks screwed up. I can only guess this was done so that the SCREEN$() function could be used, as that doesn't work with "normal" UDGs.

A common problem with BASIC pacman games is also found here, in that the maze has far too many dots for the slow gameplay. Additionally, in this game there's even a timer which runs out before you can realistically finish the level. When it runs out, all of the dots are recreated and you have to start all over again. The game contains only a single maze which repeats ad-infinitum.

There's also a wrong "dot" on the bottom row of the maze (it's mistakenly a full-stop instead of a maze dot). Even the scoreline flickers.

I can only conclude that this game is rushed/unfinished. I can't believe this was the intended final version. We don't expect pacman clones in BASIC to be great, but this could have been vastly improved before release IMHO. (Preferably by starting all over again with a new game).

If this is Pak-men 2, then what was "Pak-men 1" like?! I fear the answer may lie in this "second" game having pretentions as an unofficial sequel to the original authentic Pacman game?

For what it's worth, the controls are CURSOR keys (5,6,7,8), but my recommendation is to avoid like the plague!

Backgammon (1983, Sinclair Research) is an excellent implementation of the ancient board game. There are thirteen distinct titles currently in the WoS archive simply called "Backgammon" but you need look no further than this version, which understandably also gets the highest voted score of all of them in the archive.

Everything is right about this game, the excellent and simplistic user interface, the perfect graphics, the animated rolling dice and the simulated "doubling cube". The CPU has four skill levels providing some varying levels of challenge to the casual player. According to the instructions, the "AI" algorithm is implemented in machine code and indeed it does seem instantaneously fast.

Being a Sinclair title, the standard ROM font is naturally used, which I find suits board games very well (perhaps better than it suits some arcade games) and of course there's the obligatory green BORDER, a hallmark of absorbing tabletop board games. I'm glad they got that right!

So is a modern Windows/MacOS/Linux version of Backgammon needed when you have this version? Well perhaps so for world-class masters of the game, but for the rest of us this 8-bit offering is ideal. Also it's nice to have the advantage of using between-game snapshots to save out a long protracted match-play battle with the speccy. If you like backgammon, then this game can steal a few hours before you even notice how much time has passed. Highly absorbing and flawlessly implemented. Even more impressive then that it's a 16K release.

Excellent single-player version of the card game "Eights" where you compete against the speccy to be the first to discard all of your cards, thus winning some points. The amount of points won depending on the value of your opponent's non-discarded cards.

A series of games is played until the first player to reach a score of 100 or above wins the entire series. A series may take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour or so to play right through. This format allows the tension to ratchet up quite a bit when you get near to the winning post and have invested quite a bit of time playing.

The CPU AI is good and there are a selection of five difficulty levels to choose from. The Z80 can be a tricky opponent to beat.

The sound effects are numerous for a card game, down to a periodic low-frequency beep which repeatedly reminds the player it is their turn to play. Personally I tend to mute the sound effects after a while as I find them a bit intrusive during play, although it's nice to hear the congratulatory tune on winning a series. As for the graphics, they can't be faulted. Both the layout and user interface are spot-on (yes - the playing table is green :) ). The playing cards also look great. The provided instructions file also explains the rules of the game perfectly.

Overall a highly absorbing, polished card game and well worth playing. Can't believe it was a £1.99 release!

Poker (De Barron Software Ltd, 1984) is a very good version of the five card draw variant of the eponymous card game. As a silly aside, I can't help but think it would've been great if the full name of the publisher was "De Barron of Beef software Ltd", but alas this does not seem to be the case!

As for the game, like most speccy card/board game efforts, once you start playing, it can seriously draw you in and hours will pass as your fortunes swing from good to bad and back again. With some persistent playing, the computerised opponents eventually "bust out" and you will then be even more compelled to try and finish the rest of them off.

The computer does limit your bets to quite sensible amounts, guaranteeing a rather long gaming session - e.g. typically lasting an entire evening in real time - but the long haul aspect really appeals to me so I agree with that design decision. In fact after the two rounds of betting with repeated raises, the stakes can accumulate to pretty high amounts anyway.

I'd have rated this game a 5, and for playability it probably is a 5 (assuming you like poker), but I do have some minor criticisms of the implementation. The keyboard can be a little unresponsive at times. (edit - I later found this to be down to the fact that my emulator was muted and I was trying to press keys as sounds were playing). Also the computer players are completely anonymous (they don't even have names - just numbers). Biggest problem though is that the game runs just slightly too slow. Not apparently due to any limitation of the speccy, but the deliberate delay whilst the computer player's decisions are FLASHed onto the screen (e.g. see/raise/fold etc..) is just about twice as long as it should be. This delay I feel should be adjustable, but it isn't (perhaps there is a POKE for this). Finally, poker probably has more variants than any other card game out there, so this game should really be called "five card draw poker" or something similar rather than just "poker", but this is just a minor quibble. All other similar games of the time also seemed to just be called "poker" and there are many of them. This one's quite possibly the best of the bunch and the card graphics are top-notch.

Overall though, another highly engrossing card game for the speccy and something that the 48K machine still does well in 2011. Well worth checking out and would be great for a long train journey or something similar.

Poker (M.E.Yates, 1985) is a good version of five card draw. Personally, I slightly prefer "Poker" by "De Barron Software Ltd" as that's a bit more polished than this one with better card graphics. Overall though, there's not much between the two and they certainly both deserve a rating of 4.

The two games are very similar in that a single human player plays against four computer-controlled players. However, this version has no-limits betting (edit - in fact there is a huge limit of £9999 per bet) and it also reveals the cards of your losing opponents (who didn't fold) after you win a round, which is an interesting feature.

The effectively no-limits betting means that a skilled player can win the game much quicker then the "De Barron" version, so this one's better for a quicker game. Of course if playing recklessly then it's much quicker to lose too!

Despite the overall typical shorter game duration, this version is a little bit sluggish in general play, with a more BASIC feel about it. So modern gamers will need a bit of patience to persevere with it. Particularly, waiting for shuffling, dealing and card sorting seems to take an age by modern standards even though it's only a few seconds. Incidentally, the BREAK key and "STOP in INPUT" tricks are both trapped with an amusing message.

In summary one of the better draw poker implementations on the speccy.

Poker (J.R. Hollingbery, 1983) initially appears quite promising on reading the in-game intro screen, as it states "The game is 5 card stud POKER". I was certainly excited by this as I shortly expected to be playing the poker variant long favoured by Commanders Riker & Data et al. aboard the Starship Enterprise!

You can imagine then my complete disappointment on starting the game for the first time, as I could plainly see that this game is in fact yet another implementation of five card draw poker.

Given then that it's actually five card draw and not at all stud poker, this title written almost entirely in BASIC with some small machine code routines is adequate. The graphics are nothing special, but do the job. There's a nice animated shuffling sequence, reminiscent of something out of the Paul Daniels Magic show. Game speed is reasonable and betting limits are generous.

But I can't award anything more than a three for a game which describes itself as "stud poker" (you know, up-facing cards, betting rounds interspersed with dealing etc.. etc..) yet is clearly just yet another implementation of draw poker.

The truth is, draw poker is by far the simplest variant to implement on account of its simpler playing procedures compared to most other variants. Still, I would very much like to see a stud poker title on the speccy. Whilst surely there is such a game out there somewhere, personally, I've yet to find one. (edit - I've since discovered the speccy game "7 card stud")

Overall this game is a reasonably good draw poker implementation, but with better ones available (e.g. De Barron), it's not top of my recommended list. If it really had lived up to the "stud poker" blurb on the intro screen, then perhaps instead it would have been awarded a five, as that's what the speccy really needs!

ZX Poker (David Lamb, 1982) is the lowest common denominator of speccy "Five card draw" poker games. It plays a simplified version of the game as follows:- £100 stack, £10 maximum bet. Only one single bet per round on seeing initial hand - no further betting on final hand after cards discarded. You can't fold or raise. There's no ante. You can bet 0 credits though, but even then, you still have to play through to the conclusion of the round.

Based on an original ZX81 listing, the game is slow and purely a text-only affair, devoid of any card graphics. Personally, I find card games more natural to play when I can see the cards in front of me and instantaneously compare them visually. When instead provided with a textual description of the cards, I find I have to think a lot more and try to visualise the cards which makes the game a bit more of an effort to play.

The problem is that it's a straight-forward port from the ZX81 and the opportunity to add card graphics via simple UDGs was missed. The game is also 100% BASIC and very slow at dealing the cards, mainly due to some unnecessary space-laser type sound effect on the dealing of each card. Furthermore, the sound effects at the conclusion of a round are over-long and intrusive. So the extra features of the speccy unfortunately resulted in the game being worse than the ZX81 version IMHO.

On a more positive note, the game was released in 1982 so at least provided a simplified form of Poker on the speccy platform before the more advanced graphical versions came out. The listing is so short that it runs fine on a 16K system, also there has been a modicum of colour added to the text.

Overall though, you'd probably only play this if it was the only Poker game you had available. There are so many better versions to choose from, crucially featuring card graphics and the ability to raise/fold etc...

Even the humble ZX81 has since surpassed this version with "Poker HR" which has full hi-res card graphics. In summary, ZX Poker is an interesting curiosity from the very early days of the ZX Spectrum, but has since been surpassed by many other 8-bit poker games which are far more fun to play.

Brag (T.Lebon, 1983)

Unfortunately, for card-playing spec-chums there are at least another two potentially good versions of Brag out there which are currently "Missing in action". Fortunately, the one we do have - "Computer Brag" is a pretty good implementation of Three Card Brag. Full instructions of the game are provided within the program and there's even a demo mode so you can get a feel for the game before you play.

Three skill levels are available and the instructions do mention how good the AI of the computer players is. I tend to agree, in that the CPU opponents certainly aren't stupid and provide a rather challenging game. An interesting aspect is that the CPU players adapt to the human player's style of play. For example I played ultra-cautiously in one game, where I would always immediately fold unless I had a really good hand. I never bluffed. The CPU players apparently adapted to this strategy such that when I placed a high bet, they always (rightly) assumed that I had a potentially winning hand and folded, severely limiting my winnings.

The only minor criticism I have is that the shuffling and drawing of the cards is a bit slow, but again this is because the game is implemented in BASIC. (incidentally, I don't think the deck is meant to be re-shuffled unless a prial is seen? but on a casual level, it's pretty irrelevant) The game can't otherwise be faulted, however I reserve the score of 5 for any decent Three Card Brag game which may surface in the future, implementing any kind of machine code (or even compiled BASIC) routines which would therefore play faster than this otherwise excellent game.

Again, hours of fun can be had with this one, if you love card games that is. Highly recommended.

7 Card Stud (Martech Games Ltd, 1986)

After finding several versions of "Draw Poker" in the WoS archives, I was very happy to finally find a true "Stud Poker" variant. This one is tucked away on side-B of the more widely known Sam Fox Strip Poker tape. However "7 Card Stud" is strictly a "normal" poker game (i.e. non-adult) and it's a available as a standalone TAP file, separate from the Sam Fox game. This is quite handy when playing during a workplace lunch-break or in a family environment. :) As I write this, it is also the only true stud poker game I have found on the speccy so far. (There is another game which claims to be stud poker but is in fact draw poker. Also, I'm not counting strip poker variants).

This game is a massive departure from other poker games of the early 1982-84 period. Its black background, custom font and presumably machine code implementation with slick, fast-moving playing cards sets it apart from previous games, betraying the fact it is of the later 1986 era. Even the machine-coded BEEPER intro-tune and in-game sound-fx are a welcome departure from the generally square tone BEEPs of early-era card games.

Likewise, the user interface is of a more simplified, "arcade-like" design. Here we don't manually type playing decisions or amounts to bet into clunky INPUT fields, but instead we cycle through a preset menu with the SPACE bar and activate our choices with ENTER. The betting structure is also fixed, meaning there is no need to directly enter numeric values anyway.

Of course, I like this game because 7 card stud offers an extra level of strategy and drama above and beyond that of 5 card draw. All we need now is "Texas hold 'em" on the speccy. :)

I'd have given this a five, but I have a few minor criticisms. Despite the blindingly fast card graphics, it can still be a long wait before the computer players conclude a round, particularly if you fold early. Also, the game seemingly lacks an intro screen. You just get a blank black screen and it's not obvious that you may have to hold a key down in order to start the game (since a tune is playing). Initially, I thought the speccy had crashed, since my emulator was muted. Also when you come back to a session after being distracted away from the computer, it's not always immediately obvious whose turn it is to play, particularly if the game was paused. These are just minor issues though and the enjoyment of the game itself is undoubtedly great.

In summary, it's a good implementation of an exciting poker variant, and for "stud poker" on the speccy, perhaps it is the only game in town. (I will keep searching for others) In any case, "7 Card Stud" is recommended for card players.

I'm so bad at this game, I'm probably barely qualified to review it!

Collision detection is indeed awful and makes the game seem terminally unfair.

The path up the beanstalk seems to be so unforgiving in that if you deviate a pixel off it, you fall to your death. Problem is that the actual safe path is only loosely correlated with the beanstalk graphic on the screen. As a result, you may find that you begin to remember the real invisible path after you have fallen to your death about twenty times. And does it take a long time to fall? It wouldn't be so bad if losing a life didn't take an eternity.

I score this a two though, in recognition that it does have some pleasing graphics and potentially it could have been quite a good game, were it not for the poor implementation.

Also, the XOR sprite drawing mode seems to work well when climbing up the beanstalk, well if we can't have masked sprites that is.

But the fact that you can even die on the ground, just by walking towards the distant mountains - unforgivable. :)

What can I say apart from the fact that bizarrely I'd never actually played this game until around 1993, and even then it was on the (by today's standards) primitive yet technically superb speccy emulator for the Atari ST. I'm surprised that almost twenty years have somehow elapsed between me actually playing this on an emulator and writing this review. The game is three times older now than it was when I played it then!

Anyway, completing the game for the first time seemed like a real achievement. Admittedly, I could never have done it without snapshots. But even then, some levels still remained frightfully tricky. Even the first level is initially a conundrum for the uninitiated as most players appear to get stranded on their first attempts.

Playability, excellent. Atmosphere, absorbing. Graphics, legendary. Animation, fluid. Controls, responsive.

All round brilliant fun, and no doubt ground-breaking at the time of its release.

In the early 1980s all I had was "The Perils of Willy" on the VIC-20 which was at that point the greatest game I'd ever played and technically miraculous on that system (with essentially a character-mapped video mode). I remain a fan of it to this day.

But for me, Manic Miner is a whole level above that, with the quirky custom levels like Eugene's Lair, or the Skylab one.. and the greater variety of antagonists. Thanks to the relatively copious RAM of the speccy, just that extra bit of effort was put in to elevate this game to all-time classic status.

By far my favourite isometric game on the speccy. Excellent "themed" areas with distinctive styles and intricate graphics. For me, oddly reminiscent of the zones of "The Crystal Maze" or some similar TV show.

Certainly the game can be difficult, but in a good way and by no means impossible.

The defining feature of this game has to be when you unite Head and Heels and they have to work together to jointly solve some simple puzzles.

It also spawned an excellent Windows-based remake which I also had the pleasure of completing, quite some time ago now. (Think it even appeared on a "Retro Gamer" cover CD back when they had them.)

I've played a few other isometric titles, but none of them could grab me quite in the same way that HoH did.

For me, one of my all-time favourite games on any platform. Quite unexpected too, as when I fired it up for the first time, I had no idea what the game was about or the huge scale of the in-game universe awaiting my explorations. It's just one of those games that sucks you in until you see it through to the very end.

Aaah, Pippo - a memorable game with a memorable name. One of the few games I played to death on real hardware back in the early '90s.

Take Q-Bert, remove the isometric graphics and flatten it down to a strictly 2-dimensional rectangular play area - and you more or less have Pippo.
(OK well it does retain some vestigial pseudo-3D "edges" to the play area - but that's about it!)

In any case, the concept doesn't sound great does it? But somehow, it really works well and Pippo is a remarkably addictive game. Possibly because it is flawlessly implemented. With vibrant, smooth graphics, jolly musical interludes and fluid game-play - it's just an immediately accessible game which anyone can pick up and play.

And then of course is the unholy "scream" sound effect, triggered when Pippo falls off the play area. It still haunts me to this day!

One of Mastertronic's better budget offerings, highly recommended.

Controversially, I think that Jetpac is somewhat overrated. I'd say that it is OK - but in my final analysis, it's nothing special.

Originally, I played it on the VIC-20 (which was the machine I owned back then) and I was at the time incredibly impressed that a blindingly fast-paced, action-packed game of video arcade standard was possible on that rather limited home system. Yes, back in the early '80s it was for a brief moment quite simply breathtaking.

As for the speccy version, it's certainly just as good, but truthfully not really significantly better, thus therein lies the problem. I've always considered the speccy as one level up from the VIC-20, i.e. more in competition with the C-64. So in that respect, the game really is fast-paced but with hindsight essentially mediocre. Undoubtedly, it's notable for a 16K effort.

Yes the implementation is technically superb, but I personally find the game just doesn't hold much replay value for me. Loosely speaking, it's not unlike a mixture between Joust (flying), Bomb Jack (jumping), Burger Time (building) and Asteroids (shooting). Four games which quite honestly I prefer over this one. The reason being - I find those games immediately addictive, but Jetpac to me seems more fiddly and awkward to play.

I doubt if anyone in the known universe will agree with me though, as this game is universally revered.

Any serious retro-gamer must at least play it though. It's a rite of passage!

Football Manager is an excellent game. If it can get someone like me (who's not really a football fan) completely addicted over the course of several weeks, then it's got to be doing something right.

It's just so completely absorbing and back in the day I would be up until the early hours, just having to complete the current "season". I could not go to bed until I'd found out whether my team had managed to get promoted or not, of course making me quite tired the following day.

The only reason I don't give it a five though is that I'm completely partisan. I grew up with Acorn Electron version which I absolutely loved. And now in 2012, I choose the BBC version, and I've got a snapshot of a game I'm playing right now under the BBC emulator.

I just prefer the neat, professional-looking presentation of the textual data on the BBC/Electron versions.

This is not to take anything away from the speccy version which is undoubtedly excellent - it's just a case of whatever version you were brought up on, I'm sure!

No doubt if I'd have had a speccy at the time, I'd have given this one a five. So I have to admit it, I'm slightly biased in this case in favour of the Acorn machine versions.

Brilliant game that's fun to play as a single player, but really comes into its own as a multiplayer game with friends.

Other reviews have covered the details of the gameplay better than I ever could, so I won't repeat that here.

Suffice it to say though that you really do get better at the game over time as you eventually learn the best strategies in order to not die early on and then with some luck become dominant in the later stages.

I only don't give it a five because quite honestly, the Atari ST public domain re-implementation is something of an improvement, with excellent, quite hilarious sampled sound effects and extra spells, whilst losing absolutely nothing of the charm of the speccy original. So that's the version I play every time, rather than the speccy original. But of course, this is the version that made it all possible.

I can only give this game a five as it stole many a weekend in my younger teenage years.

For me it brings back really quite fond memories of visiting my school-friend's house in the leafy suburbs and firing this game up on his grey "+2". With only intermittent breaks to watch "Lost in Space" on Channel 4, we would spend an incredible number of hours really, just getting so much into the flow of the game, we practically lived in it. Of course the two-player mode allowed an effectively infinite playing time. And I think I probably suffered a touch of "bleeping sickness" the following day!

After the "deeper dungeons" tape came out, we must have practically played every level on both sides of the entire tape.

Looking back now, the game seems quite repetitive and predictable, but back when you're about 13 or 14 years old, it's just totally absorbing to the point of an unhealthy obsession. Of course later on we had the 16-bit versions and the sequels etc.. but none of them seemed to result in such mammoth gaming sessions as we had enjoyed with the original speccy tape-based version.

But if there is one remark in gaming I will never forget, surely it is that "Blue Elf just shot a food!"

One of the best arcade conversions I've seen on the speccy. Playability and atmosphere of the arcade original completely intact. I don't see how the port could be any better.

Plus of course, it's a great, fun game to begin with.

I have great memories of playing this in 3-player mode on my friend's "+2". One of us would use keys (usually me as I preferred keyboard for this game). Another player would be on a Sinclair joystick plugged in to the side, and another on a Kempston interface, sticking out of the back.

It's the only game I know where you can punch helicopters out of the sky and pummel skyscrapers to the ground. Also, it's good to play as the "monsters" instead of the "good guys" for a change. Certainly very original and quite effective as a stress-buster too!

Great conversion with the enjoyment certainly retained from the arcade version. Although I'd say it doesn't quite merit a score of 5 because the controls can seem slightly laggy at times. Not surprising though, with so much action going on across the entire screen. Also, ultimately the game is quite shallow with not a huge long-term replay value, but I still rate it as "good" just for the sheer fun of the multiplayer mode.

The zany newspaper headlines which pop up between screens are quite memorable too.

Superb isometric puzzler from 2009. It's a well polished, professional-looking game, coded even to a higher standard than many titles of the speccy's commercial era.

W*H*B sports high-quality sounds and responsive movement, but the justification for giving it a five is simply the enjoyment and satisfaction of solving the increasingly difficult puzzles. Not to mention the fact that the game idea itself is highly original.

A clever idea is the introduction of levels where the player's elongated cuboid sprite can split into two independently-controllable cubes, which can then join back together again.

All I can say is I've really enjoyed playing it and out of all of the "post-commercial era" games it's certainly one of the very best. I'm also grateful that that such a good game is free to play!

There's definitely an initial "barrier" to getting into this game properly. For 20 years or so, I guess just through my own lack of patience, I would occasionally fire up Knight Lore and die repeatedly, never getting too far in it. Eventually out of frustration, I would give up and play something else instead. I never knew of the game at all back when it was originally released, but owing to its status as one of the true classic games of the speccy, I felt there was always more to it than I had previously experienced.

However in 2012 I finally set aside a few hours when I would have a proper go at this game, allowing myself the luxury of snapshots to give me some reasonable chance of making some significant progress, given that I don't have infinite spare time available.

Well all I can say is when I finally started to play Knight Lore seriously, and gave it my 100% attention, I was really incredibly impressed by the game.

Finally I have now made it to the end and completed the game and for such a difficult title, believe me when I say that even using snapshots it still feels like something of an achievement. It certainly isn't an easy game, but I mean that in a good way. It can be succinctly described as an isometric collect 'em up, where you have to find and then add ingredients to a wizard's cauldron in order to cure Sabreman of his werewolf curse. But really the exploration and puzzling rooms in the game make it far more involving and challenging than it may at first seem.

The game really is charming throughout and it's interesting to see an 8-bit title featuring a player-character infected with functioning lycanthropy. I've enjoyed playing the werewolf in Morrowind/Bloodmoon, but it's great to see the same concept here on an isometric speccy title. Albeit simplified, but still effective and with a great transformation sequence and importantly, some in-game elements behave differently depending on whether the player is currently in werewolf form or not.

The randomness which I'd initially found puzzling (random start position, random objects in a given location) became somewhat understandable on repeated plays. The sequence at which the player has to add items to the cauldron is in fact always the same, although the initial point within the sequence is random. Likewise the objects are always found in the same places within the game. It's just that one set of objects is randomly swapped with another set and so on. The end result being that the randomness does not really make the game more difficult or easier on each play - rather just gives it a bit of welcome variation.

I've also learnt that some rooms in the game are much more difficult to get through than others. A wise player can eventually learn to avoid the most awkward areas altogether and go for the items which are in generally easier places to get to. For example, I have completed the game after only visiting 62% of the rooms. The sole criteria for winning is to put all 14 items in to the cauldron in the correct order.

The game map is alluring, with wooded areas as well as the more common indoor areas. Likewise the antagonists are many and varied. The graphics are generally superb, although necessarily monochrome. At least the colours vary from room to room, which sort of became standard for many isometric games on the speccy. Sound effects are good, I particularly like the satisfying special effects when a correct item is dropped in to the cauldron.

I was also glad to find out that the "Directional Control" method is available in the game. This took me a while to figure out as I generally like to play games in keyboard mode. The crucial thing to know about Knight Lore is that the directional control setting has absolutely no effect in keyboard mode. Keyboard mode only supports rotational mode. If like me you prefer directional controls, then you must select a joystick option (I used Kempston) and then ensure directional control is selected on the main menu and you will then get the directional mode controls. In joystick mode, fire is jump and I found that the 'Q' key can be used to pick/drop items. As it happens I still played the game on a keyboard, but just enabled the "keystick emulation" in the ZX-Spin emulator. Also, I've read that that Sabreman can jump further when he's in the werewolf state, although on playing the game I could not find any significant difference. I found I could make all needed jumps in either mode.

So despite the quirks, it's still very much a highly enjoyable game today. Whilst perhaps missing some of the features which made the later Head over Heels great, it makes up for that by having the excellent, magical setting and of course the lycanthropy angle and the wizard/cauldron room. The need to plan ahead with regards to collecting the correct objects is also a must, as it really is quite a race against the clock and time is very tight. This game really does have more depth that I ever thought it did. Add to that the fact it was such a groundbreaking release when it came out, i.e. to be able to manipulate various three-dimensional objects within the primitive physics engine, I can quite understand the amazement at the time, even though I was not a part of it.

For me, easily a 5 out of 5 game, definitely recommended. Not a game for a quick five-minute play though, you've got to seriously commit to a few solid hours, before you can start to enjoy it properly IMHO.

Stupidly, I misplaced my previous review of this game before submitting it.

I'm now glad that happened though as it afforded an opportunity to revisit this splendid card game.

The implementation really is flawless, I can't see how Gin Rummy on the speccy could ever be done any better than it is here.

Featuring nice large cards with excellent graphics, (particularly on the face cards), this game shows you how it's meant to be done.

The user interface is responsive and supports user-defined keys. The game runs quickly, in fact much quicker than most other 8-bit card games. Even the shuffling of the deck is instantaneous.

These are the sorts of games that can still be enjoyed on an 8-bit system even today as they really don't demand any more CPU power. A modern-day Linux or Windows version might arguably have more features and true colour high-res graphics, but I don't see how these things are strictly necessary for card games. There's a lot to be said for having a nice simple 8-bit gaming session, and this game certainly proves the point.

Of course it helps that as a child, I always played rummy, strictly for recreation of course. Although that was the children's simpler 7-card variant. This game is the full 10 card version and if anything it's even more enjoyable.

Quite possibly one of the best implementations of a card game you're likely to see on the speccy.

A true Spectrum classic. An arcade-adventure with the charming graphics typical of an Ultimate title. I love the philosophy of making things as colourful as possible despite the inevitable colour clash. It really works well here. Perhaps it is something to do with the flawless sprite-drawing routines that makes the colour clash seem enjoyably quaint rather than annoying!

Atic Atac features an atmospheric setting with a large area to explore, so for me it's the adventuring/exploration element that really makes this game. Sound really works well too. In fact I can only play this game properly when the sound is enabled, and not when listening to music or anything. I guess I've just become accustomed to picking up on the audio cues of the game.

The loading screen is great too. Can't really fault the game at all - it really captures the essence of imaginative, fun 8-bit gaming.

Also the "roast chicken" health indicator never fails to make me feel hungry when playing.

A real ground-breaking title. One of the first games I ever played which employs a true isometric projection. OK, so I might have played Q-bert on the Atari 2600 before this, but that game sports a much simpler form of isometric graphics and can't really be compared.

In Ant Attack, the 3D viewing direction can be rotated and the sprites (i.e. the player and the ants) can move behind the walls. So it really is a new level of true 3D realism. The stippling effect really works well, effectively providing different levels of grey-scale in order to present a realistic 3D environment. Given that colour is generally unavailable in isometric titles on the speccy because of the obvious need for diagonal edges, this is about a good a job that could reasonably be expected.

Funny thing about this game is the main menu, with use of the default ROM font and simple presentation. Also, the BASIC-like sound effects, like when a new game starts or when you run out of time. These things really show that the game was very much of the early period in the speccy's software history. Yet when the game actually starts, it's amazingly ahead of its time and of course crucially, once you get the hang of the keys, it's very enjoyable to play too.

Well, this is one of my all-time personal favourites. Ten out of ten for originality. It's so much fun to fire the catapult, especially if you can be sneaky enough to cause one of your classmates to take the blame for it. Always satisfyingly hilarious, that is. :)

Good use of BRIGHT attributes to shade the walls and give the background graphics some depth. The in-game characters are memorable and it's good how the "main characters" instantly stand out well from the pack of "generic pupils". It's really quite amazing how many sprites are moving around the screen at the same time.

Only problem for me is that I've spent so much time just randomly larking around in the game, I've never actually completed it. Maybe one day I will achieve this!

Really playable, fast-paced game where you have to fly your Tornado aircraft over various targets without crashing into nearby obstacles such as houses, trees or even power-lines. View is sort of top-down, but really at a 45-degree angle due to the pseudo-3D graphics. The viewing angle (and more importantly altitude) is emphasised by the shadow of the aircraft cast on the ground.

8-way scrolling has to use 8-pixel increments, due to the multi-coloured game world, so it's not exactly smooth by modern standards, but funnily enough it works quite well. Perhaps it's because the game runs at a fair pace, and it's certainly nice to see the green grass, yellow cliffs and cyan sea.

You really have to have your wits about you when you play this one. Good reaction times are essential. The blink of an eye can be catastrophic. Also you can't take too long trying to nab those targets, or the aircraft might run out of fuel.

Overall, it's the playability and spot-on difficulty level that makes this game excellent. Always fun for a quick go, and takes some practice to become an adept pilot.

Have to agree with p13z's review. It's an amazing thing to see essentially the original pacman arcade-cabinet ROMs running on the ZX Spectrum (+2A/+3) platform.

With user-switchable colour emulation available now too, the game as far as playability is concerned is 100% completely intact.

I have played the original game for many years in MAME, but for me there's a lot to be said for having the ability to play this under speccy emulation too. Perhaps it's simply because of my greater familiarity with speccy snapshot formats and use of POKEs etc... This gives me some more scope to mess around with the game, for the sheer fun of it.

Also this really is the final word on how good a pacman game can be on the speccy. Makes me wonder what other Z80-based arcade classics could also be given similar treatment?

Definitely worth checking out, but even if not for the technical admiration, then simply for the timeless, outstanding game-play.

Not bad for a page-and-a-half BASIC type-in, although of course that's not saying much.

Catch the drips falling from the leaky roof by moving your bucket left and right using the 5 and 8 keys. Similar in concept to a "Game and Watch" electronic game except here there are 29 possible positions of the bucket instead of just 3 or 4 as would be found on a typical LCD game.

The problem with this is that the game can be quite unfair with a large element of luck. When your bucket is near one edge of the screen, it is completely impossible to catch a drip falling at the other end of the screen, there's just no way you can move the bucket all the way across in time.

This is why I only rate the game a '2', as your final score will more than likely be down to luck rather than skill, with a good score inevitably being the result of a favourable "run of the drips".

Also, there are always 30 drips before the game ends and no concept of lives, so it's very simple and doesn't have huge replay value.

The UDG graphics are quite well done and thankfully use appropriate colours even if the the size of a drip is out of scale, being about half the diameter of a bucket. Still it looks good like that.

This game is based on those very primitive PONG-type home video consoles of the late 1970s/early 80s. For me it is particularly reminiscent of the standard game cartridge that came with the "Grandstand colour programmable" aka "Grandstand SD070" console endorsed by Kevin Keegan in the UK. This was the first video console I ever owned.

Truthfully these games could keep you occupied for five minutes at most, or perhaps a little bit longer if having a two-player game, but even by ZX Spectrum standards, they are incredibly primitive. It was at the time just amazing though to see an interactive video game actually being played on the home TV set!!

The games available on Video Sport are selectable as follows:-

1: Tennis against the computer
2: Tennis (2-player)
3: Football (2-player)
4: Hockey (2-player)

Although, true to the original consoles, they all look and play pretty much the same. For example don't expect "football" to have any footballers in it, just bats and the ball, exactly like "tennis".

Keys are
P1: Q=up, A=down, Z=left, X=right
P2: P=up, L=down, N=left, M=right

It is unfortunate that the only game available to the single player against the computer is "Tennis" and the others can only be played in two-player mode. As such, I find the single player tennis variant completely unplayable. This is either because I'm not very good it (quite probable) or because the game doesn't work too well with digital inputs such as keys and a really fast ball. The original console version had hard-wired analogue joysticks allowing a variable speed bat and I'm pretty sure the ball was not usually quite as fast as it is in this game.

I score this two though just out of pure nostalgia value. The general disappointingly simplistic feel of the game is quite well done and of course the memorable completely plain green background is present in all game modes.

Although I loaded this game up several times under emulation without problems, I once got a "disk sector read error" which after a "(R)etry" loaded the game fine. How that can seemingly randomly happen using an emulated disk and drive I'll never know.

In summary, I like the game even though it's dreadful. It's just the sort of quirky title I like to faff around with for a few minutes. If nothing else it embodies the spirit of ultimately hollow yet somehow appealing early home video gaming, which predated the home computer revolution of the early 80s by a good few years.

Interesting variation on Breakout where two players try to smash each other's bricks in opposing halves of the screen. The goal being to smash right through to the opponent's far wall in order to win a match, whilst protecting your own bricks and wall as much as possible.

The game supports 1 player mode (against the CPU) or 2 human players. Matches are played in rounds, winning the best of two out of three in order to progress to the next round of the tournament.

This game differs from Breakout in that it has the directly competetive "bat vs bat" element and there are still typically many bricks remaining at the end of each level. For me it seems to lack the satisfaction you would normally get when clearing the entire level of all bricks in a more typical Breakout clone.

Sound effects are quite good and the graphics are OK, although the screen does look a bit cluttered at times. The game requires reasonable skill to win, and the player can be caught out by the ball passing through a diagonal line of gaps in the bricks. To me it appears that the ball shouldn't really be able to fit through such gaps.

Sometimes the ball will get stuck, but the game detects this and a boxing glove will punch the side of the screen, sometimes freeing the ball again. However, sometimes a few of these punches are needed before the ball is actually freed.

Overall it's worth a look, and something slightly different than your usual breakout clone, but it's not great. The AI players and their different stereotypical "personalities" are also a nice touch.

Pretty good racing game for the speccy. Uses QAOP keys and features a selection of three player-drivable vehicles.

I generally find it difficult to give any 3D racing game a score higher than 4 on 8-bit system as I'm completely biased in favour of the far better 16-bit (and above) offerings which certainly do benefit from more powerful processors and superior graphics.

However, this one is pretty impressive given 8-bit limitations. It's in a similar vain to the Lotus turbo esprite games.

It's good because it's actually quite playable and reasonably difficult. It's the old situation where you bump into cars then you slow down whilst they drive off at high speed. They bump into you - you still slow down and they still drive off at high speed! This is what gives the game it's difficulty. Well that and some quite sharp bends and also bumps in the road.

The races do go on for quite a while though, but it's worth a play.

There's only a very small number of 3D racing games I could ever give a 5 to on any 8-bit platform, and this is one of them.

I was brought up on the Atari ST version, and I had no clue that this game would even be possible on the speccy. It was only quite recently when I found out that an 8-bit version existed.

Well, I was amazed that by some miracle the playability of the 16-bit versions is completely intact along with all other aspects of the game, like the course layouts and competition structure.

Truly a remarkable programming achievement to pull this off. Of course I personally prefer the ST/Amiga versions nowadays, but if you only have a speccy set-up to hand, then this is highly recommended and really great fun!

Simple tile-based puzzle game that may keep you occupied for a few minutes.

USE QAOP & keys to rearrange the PINK and BLUE tiles around such that they read BLUE and PINK in order to win the game. Note that the red '#' tile deliberately can only move vertically.

I can see why the game got 2nd prize in the 2005 Bytemaniacos contest (Pure BASIC category). It's actually a good game and quite satisfyingly challenging to complete.

I can also see why it's got a low score on WoS. When you first play it, you might think "man, this is impossible". But persevere for a while and it does become possible to work out.

Recommended for those who like puzzle games!

Puzzle game where you have to guide a man, "Pepik" around a room, visiting every square in order to complete the level. You also have to avoid stationary obstacles and Pepik's previous path. There are several rooms to complete, eventually freeing Pepik and winning the game.

I have played very similar games to this before. I quite like them and so I would like to score this one a 3. However, my main criticisms are that there's a quite strict time limit on each level, which seems a bit unnecessary. In fact it causes you to panic a bit and typically lose a life due to hitting a wall in error. This is because the game controls are not very responsive and occasionally, Pepik will move one square too many due to the keyboard repeat. Usually this will result in messing up the level, one way or another.

Finally, the game's default control option is CURSOR keys. Personally, I find the CURSOR key method counter-intuitive. Thankfully, the Java spectrum emulator on WoS has a CURSOR joystick emulation mode. With that enabled, I found the game much easier to play using the actual cursor keys on my laptop, but this is just a personal preference.

The game premise itself is OK, but the implementation is not too great here, so I give it a 2. It's a bit clunky!

Strictly 2-player-only turn-based space combat strategy game, set in a system of ten planets. It's also a BASIC type-in.

Players must look away from the screen during the opponent's turn, because if secrecy is compromised, then it's a simple matter just to move straight to their home planet and immediately destroy them.

I played it through to completion and can honestly say that this one's a bit boring and the BEEP sound effects are quite irritating. Coupled with the fact it takes ages to draw a planet on the screen and the combat itself is a non-event. Your only real choice is to decide which planet to move your fleet to next and that's about it. I'd strongly suggest to avoid this one and I'd have been disappointed if I'd have typed it in!

Pretty enjoyable game, has some quite good sampled speech "Game Over" and "Great Score" at the end. That's particularly surprising as this title otherwise has the general feel of an early-era Spectrum game.

Plays like a cross between 3D-maze/labyrinth games and Pac-man. Quite a bit different from Pacmania though!

In this one, the player can only see their immediate surroundings and not the entire maze at any one time. Instead, there is a small "radar" display in the bottom left of the screen, showing the positions of Pac-man and the ghosts.

The radar doesn't show walls, dots or power-pills though, so part of the challenge of the game is hunting down the last few dots, by trying to remember where you haven't yet visited. It can take some considerable time to locate the last few dots.

Very sensibly, the first level does not have any ghosts, so at least you can start to learn the maze layout before progressing to the harder levels with increasing numbers of ghosts.

Overall, a surprisingly enjoyable title, with fast graphics. One minor criticism that the key responses seem a little erratic. Seems this one is a bit overlooked, but for me at least it was slightly better than I initially expected. For Pacman genre fans, it's worth a quick look.

(English: The Hunting Game)

Wind your way up a beautiful, picturesque Alpine valley on this hunting trip simulation, along with 2-6 fellow players (CPU or human). Indiscriminately shoot a selection of small furry mammals and birds as you make your way to the icy peak. From squirrels to wild boar, from rabbits to magpies, any that cross your path will be blasted into next week as you try to gain the competitive edge over your companions.

Although, this is not actually a shooting game in the usual sense. It's classified as a board game and it involves precisely the same amount of skill as Snakes & Ladders. i.e. none at all. The entire game is dice-driven, so whoever wins is determined purely by chance. We do not see any of the shots fired either, just textual descriptions of the outcome e.g. "angeschossen" (shot and wounded).

Overall, it makes for a very bizarre and unique speccy title, or so I thought until I realised that it is in fact based on a real board-game of the same name. Originally intended as an educational aid to teach children about animals and their habitats, it clearly attracted enough of a fan-base to spawn this BASIC re-implementation.

Another poor offering from The Power House (they released quite a few bad ones TBH). This one has 1987 written all over it. I can't put my finger on exactly why that is, but it's just got that oft-used general graphical style of the time.

In this platformer, you play what looks to be a tennis ball except that it needs to be kept inflated and has a slow leak. If inflated too much then it will burst. I'll leave the reader to contemplate if it's merely co-incidence that the more famous "Airball" also came out in 1987.

The game's got potential, and I can't claim to completely understand it, but perhaps the crucial thing to know is that by pressing FIRE when over a springboard (a blue section that looks like a "22"), the ball can jump up to a higher platform. Using these springboards and platforms, it's possible to move around the entire level. There's also a small white square object which can be pushed around, and is quite probably important to the game, although in all honesty I didn't get too far in it.

So what's the problem? To be blunt, the movement of the ball is pretty annoying. It moves left or right of its own accord until it either hits something (usually a lethal object), or the player presses a key and changes direction. As such, some rooms involve "waiting" for a platform section to appear whilst flipping awkwardly from left to right whilst trying to avoid going off the edge of the screen (which would reset the screen) or falling down a gap onto a row of spikes. The game might have been a bit better if the game-play had been a bit less fiddly, but alas it's a pretty fatal flaw.

It's perhaps telling that at the time of writing, no apparent map of the game has been made, nor has any RZX of the game been produced by either the RZX archive or users of Youtube, as far as I can ascertain. I would imagine any such efforts would be a case of really taking frustration to a new level. However, there are understandably POKEs available for infinite lives and infinite ball inflation.

Firstly, this game is in no way related to the famous astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan, although after playing it, you'll probably wish that it was.

A quite ambitious game that seems to be long and winding, perhaps one might be tempted to say "epic". With simplified elements of nethack-like action, a major drawback is that the combat system is based on reflexes and keyboard response times, rather than any meaningful stats. To make things worse, there is no graphical representation of the orcs and dragons you are purportedly fighting. It's just a small line of text showing how many hit points were deducted.

If you make it through the over-complicated multi-screen instructions at the beginning of the game without losing concentration, then congratulations, but good luck trying to remember all of those key mappings and game rules! That's not to mention the overlong delay during the game's initialisation phase on the first intro screen, which might prevent some players from getting even that far.

Overall it's just a dull, boring game with a plodding BASIC implementation of UDGs and character-based movement. It could legitimately be entered in to the CGC and it would in no way look out of place. Verdict: Not worth the effort.

Whilst Ikari Warrriors was destined to become a defining classic shoot-em-up of the era, this sequel has never really lived up to expectations.

Whilst the fluid, responsive gameplay of the original game remains completely intact here, it's perhaps the setting which makes this game somewhat inferior to the original.

The sci-fi backdrop, of a starfield, doesn't really seem to work so well as it appears our Rambo-like heroes have acquired the ability to fight their way through the vacuum of space. It's particularly jarring that the wood and rope bridges and rocky dirt-tracks of the original game still permeate the foreground. These re-used graphical elements are presumably native to an Asian jungle, as opposed to interstellar space. My point being if you're going to commit to a sci-fi setting, then at least make it 100% sci-fi and not some uneasy mishmash of jungle and futuristic elements.

It's still a good game though, and for fans of Ikari Warriors, it's well worth playing, but for me that special magic of the original game has somehow been lost in this sequel.

Standard "Sliding Puzzle" game, using lettered tiles, as opposed to a graphical image. Essentially a software implementation of the physical 15-tile game, of which I happened to own a plastic version of, bought from a toyshop as a child.

I am unsure of the provenance of this title, whilst clearly it's a Polish-language version, it's notable that when a non-existent letter is pressed (e.g. 't'), the resulting error message appears in plain English. So is this a translated copy of an original English version? Not that such a question regarding this long forgotten BASIC listing is going to keep many spec-chums awake at night.

I would quite-honestly give this game a score of three, as I personally enjoy such five-minute diversions. However, I had to drop the score to two when I learnt that the program does not check the board for the correct solution. I was expecting at least a "congratulations" message or perhaps the Polish equivalent, but alas nothing, the game does not end until manually quit. I understand that checking the board in BASIC might have slowed the game down a lot, but still it's a pretty essential feature for a computer version IMHO.

This is not a sequel to Gauntlet (That would be Gauntlet II), rather it's a "data tape" add-on for the first, excellent Gauntlet game. Its existence no doubt owed to the runaway success of the original game.

As such, this can only be awarded a score of five too, since the levels are just as imaginative (if not more so) than the originals. Apparently, some of the levels were the result of a competition, where the best user-designed levels were selected for inclusion in this pack. It's also noticeable that the levels are generally more difficult, so it's recommended to have played at least some of the original Gauntlet game first, all though by no means essential.

Not every hardware platform had this expansion ported to it. Luckily we do have it on the speccy though, much to my eternal gratitude. Back in the day, my friends and I probably spent more time on this expansion than on the original game itself.

Not bad as a memory refresher on how to count up to nine. Otherwise, it's probably not the best game you'll ever play. Watch out for the curse of the cursor keys too!