ARCADIA
47
:
When this game was launched, it was noted as most addictive shootem up ever written. For the graphic was told that reached new limits in arcade games for Spectrum. Comparation of the game with current standards can not explain where this storm came from. The graphic today seems scarce, and the game is "Space invaders" variant with twelve alien speces. In spite bad points, the game is addictive and very fast. It had big success which set Imagine to top of software industry and then to the fall.
COOKIE
9
:
In this game with lateral view we act as a little cook that must fight hard against the ingredients of his cakes that try to kill him. The only weapons available are his little meal sacks with which he must try to push the jumping ingredients towards the big cup. To make life harder there is, moreover, a spiteful cat that throws bolts at him, cans and various sorts of trash that our cook must absolutely prevent from falling into the dough.
CYBERNOID
36
:
Remember what I said about Costa Panayi? Well, forget it, because Raffelle Cecco was an even bigger cult. (Cult figures, eh? Here one minute, gone the next. Ed). The difference is that poor Raf only ever wrote one really good game, and this is it. It has to be said that flip-screen shoot-'em-ups with add-on weaponry aren't the stuff which legends are usually made of. But the imagination, playability and attention to detail of this one lifted it way above its origins and into the realms of the unforgettable. It's worth getting for the huge maces which swing around your ship and pulverise everything, but it's a fab game too.
DARK STAR
81
:
Every picture I paint with a screenshot fails to capture the nature of Dark Star. Arguably the biggest cult game ever, the staggering speed of the game was what lifted it out of the mire and into the stratosphere (where only the best games can breathe the air). Like the arcade's Star Wars in many ways, Dark Star also boasted the best named starship of all time (the Liar), the most redefinable of all time, the best high-score tables of all time, and the best giveaway Teletext spoof of all time. Er, okay the only giveaway Teletext spoof of all time. (Nearly.) Trop belle pour toi.
FLYING SHARK
78
:
This came out just around the time when software houses started releasing games on the 16-bit machines only, and it proved (if proof was needed) that the 8-bits were more than up to anything their big brothers could manage. In terms of gameplay this is a near perfect copy of the coin-op original, and the graphics are as good as any you could ask for. Not many players ever finished it, but if you fancy trying to join the elite you couldn't ask for a better vertical shoot-'em-up to test your skills against.
G-FORCE
70
:
Of all the Tempest games available for the Speccy, official version or clones, G-Force is almost certainly the most obscure. This is a bit of a shame 'cos (as you've probably guessed) it's easily the best. Forsaking the tricky geometric shapes of the original for straight rectangular screens, Euro-Byte used the extra freedom this gave them to produce a game that looked like no other on the Speccy. It had big chunky graphics zipping around the screen in huge numbers and a level of speed that refused to let up no matter how much was happening on screen. This is a brilliantly frantic shoot-'em-up which recreates the spirit of the coin-op better than everything I've seen. Ever.
GREEN BERET
92
9
:
A pretty low-key realease on the resurrected Imagine label, Green Beret nevertheless quickly became one of the Speccy's most-played games. It's hard to put your finger on quite why it works so well. You could certainly never accuse it of being too involved, but the utter simplicity defies you to accept that you've been killed yet again, and makes you start another games before you've realised the last one was finished. I still play this game, and I've never been to Level Four. 'Nuff said.
GUARDIAN 2
85
:
Or Stargate by any other name. Willaims' monster classic arcade games have been oft imitated on the Speccy (most notably by Interstella's Defenda and Softek's Starblitz), but this angry giant of a game is the first one to truely capture that 'locked in a cupboard with a swarm of psychotic hornets' feel. Tough enough for all but the most dedicated zapper, this game will have you punching the keys off your Spectrum in frustrated rage. And then having another game. Unputdownable.
H.A.T.E
10
:
The graphic polishness and smoothness of this side scrolling game are quite exceptional. We are driving, alternatively, a small airplane and a little tank traveling on an irregular shaped platform. We must reach the change point before the odd wandering alien objects could destroy us. Taking the cylinders that appear after destroying the fuel tanks, we obtain more resistance against the enemies shots. Very well made is the shadow of our airplane on the wavy surface of the platform.
HUNDRA THE AMAZON WOMEN
10
:
The graphics of this side view game are pretty wonderful: detailed, colourful and very clean. Our heroine, a proud amazon, gets ashore with her ship in a wild land of a thousand surprises. First she crosses fields, rocks and ruins, then a river, jumping on the stones, and at last, after a series of suspension bridges, reaches a grim castle. Her exploration is continually hampered by odd and troublesome flying little animals. The controls' responsiveness is simply exceptional.
LUNAR JETMAN
17
31
10
:
"We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger", said the French dramatist Pierre Corneille in 1636 and you know, I like to think that when he said it he was thinking about Lunar Jetman. (Don't be such a swot. Ed). Ultimate's incredibly tough moon-based alien-stomper was their first attempt at a game using the Speccy's expanded 48K (wow!) memory, and what a stonker it was too. Hugely clever and funny, it was also the game which you simply had to be able to play if you wanted to have any peer status at all in 1985. funny how things turn out isn't it?
JET PAC
15
9
:
Historical videogame that in spite of its venerable age remains fascinating due to its simple effectiveness. We are on an hostile planet and must mount the three parts of our little space ship. Then we must fill up the rocket with fuel using the boxes that go down from the top, perhaps sent by the mother starship. All this work must be done continually moving to avoid the contact with the unfriendly creatures that live on the planets we explore, which become more hostile as game goes on.
LIGHT FORCE
26
:
Lightforce boasts the best use of colour in a Spedctrum game there's ever likely to be. FTL managed to pack this brilliant vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up with more colour than is actually physically possible on the machine, and made it one of the very few Speccy games ever to truely have the feel of an arcade game. Lightforce plays as good as it looks. Lots of games can claim such an accolade, but this is one of the few where it's actually a compliment.
MIDNIGHT RESISTANCE
43
:
These days coin-op conversions on the Spectrum tend to be production-line churn-'em-outs that are nothing but pale-faced mumbling shadows of their ST an Amiga counterparts. What a rare pleasure then, to see one turn out as good as this. Programmers Special FX refused to take the easy way out and do yet another monochrome yawnerama. Instead, they gave us an action-packed blaster which positively glowed with 8-bit pride, not to mention lovely colourful graphics stuffed with life and character. This is the game that proves the Speccy can still compete with anything.
NEBULUS
30
10
:
Here's another game which (with versions newly out for the NES and Game Boy) looks like transcending machine boundaries for years to come. John Phillips' beautiful tower-ascending game featured amazing rotational scrolling, but the truely staggering thing was that it was overshadowed by the overwhelming addictiveness of the absurdly addictive gameplay. Climb up, fall down, climb back up again and that was about it. It just goes to prove (if there's still anyone out there who doesn't believe it) that the simpliest ideas are always the best.
OPERATION WOLF
58
:
More than anything else, Operation Wolf is a triumph of 8-bit practicality over 16-bit aesthetics. On the big machines, this is a great-looking copy of the arcade game made unplayable by disk swapping. But the Speccy version packs in all the arcade thrills in a fast-moving game of massive slaughter where the action never lets up. A mindlessly violent game, Op Wolf spawned a hundred clone, but none of them matched it for sheer brutality, speed and slickness. This is such a good game that you won't even miss the plastic machine gun.
PENETRATOR
40
:
One of the most successful arcade games was "Scramble" where you pilot the plane through caves and above mountains to big bomb magazine. "Penetrator" is great variant of this game. It amazed the critics beginning 1983. The graphic is huge and equal and action fast and addictive. What leaves this game above similar games is the revolutionar capability of the complete landscape change. Combined with trainig mode on every level, this makes it one of the most complete games up today.
PHEENIX
98
:
There are people who would have you believe that Pang, or Toki, or even Midnight Resistance represents the pinnacle of the art of Speccy coin-op conversion. Not so. The true zenith was reached as far back as 1983 with this flawless copy of the arcade game Phoenix (forerunner of this year's [1991] Megaphoenix from Dimanic). It's sill the zappiest Space Invaders-type shoot-'em-up there is, and you don't need five O-Levels (or even more than three fingers) to play it!
PSST
9
:
A simple but well made little game in which we act as a sort of small gardener owl which has the task to attend a big growing plant. Unfortunately there are several parasites that would want to eat the leaves of our plant, caterpillars, spiders and wasps, and the only way to stop them is to use the right kind of poison that is contained in a special tank. If we kill all the parasites without coming in contact with them we see the plant grow and to the end it'll produce a beautiful flower.
PYRAMID
23
:
In this action aadventure in computer world is introduced Ziggy that tries ti discover the secret of Life, Universe and Everything else. He esplores the piramid that contains many alien creatures that must be avoided or destroyed. Ziggy must pass through chambres and levels starting at top and finishing at bottom level with final exit. There are 120 chambres and 15 levels, so sucessfull player needs several months to make him perfect. All players can enter the competittion with high scores, with the chances to be awarded in Fantazy land bulettin.
ROBOCOP
94
:
I shouldn't have to blow a trumpet for this game, and I don't need a drum either to beat up support for possibly the longest running title on any computer games chart since the dawn of time. Robocop's mix of perfectly-executed sub-games kept it at No. 1 for almost a whole year after its release, and it's easy to see why. And indeed hear why! It's got some of the loveliest music in Speccy history. Almost certainly the best movie conversion job the Speccy's seen, and probably the best one it's ever likely to.
ROBOTRON
51
:
You might have read that Williams' Smash TV prequel Robotron never made it to the Spectrum, but that's only half true. It was never released, but it was writtenand even reviewed but never saw a shop shelf! A superb conversion, with huge numbers of enemies on screen at a time completely failing to slow down the action. Nothing was missed out except for th chance for zap fans to actually buy the thing, and that's nothing short of criminal.
ROMMEL'S REVENGE
39
:
This is the best version of action game "Battle zone" on spectrum where your tenk must destroy the enemy's. The game differs from Atari original and contains some improvements. You can switch on/off vulcannos fire explosions. Program options also allow weak sound signals when enemy tank is close. Launched at the end of 1983, this game has excelent graphics and it is one of the rare games where 3D perspective is not damaged with fas movements on the screen.
R-TYPE
6
10
:
We're into the realm of the staggering now, and R-Type is a game which certainly fits that description. An impossible conversion, the programmers flicked two fingers at the world and produced a game with non-stop high-speed frenzied blasting, huge graphics exploding (litterally) with colour, and a near-perfect erplication of the arcade ganmeplay. The Speccy's finest shoot-'em-up by a mile, indeed almost certainly the best shoot-'em-up on any 8-bit machine ever. every time I see this, I still refuse to believe it's possible. Amazing.
SILKWORM
10
:
In this horizontal scrolling war-game our task is to shoot all the enemies that come toward us. The amount and speed of the moving objects is really incredible and the graphics are very clean. We drive a helicopter and a jeep at the same time and the enemies are helicopters that fly and jump, tanks, various kinds of rocket throwers, the astonishing goose-neck helicopter and the monstrous giant helicopter that we encounter at the end of every level.
SPACE RAIDERS
9
:
This is the classical space invaders game, a very old but well realized idea. We control a sort of little cannon that can be moved toward left or right and can shelter under some crumbling buildings. From the top, slow but relentless, several alien monsters division advance. Their only task is to destroy us and invade our planet. We must shoot them all if we want to have a future. Sometimes a little spaceship passes high that if shot gives us a bonus.
THRUST
62
:
Another budget-only classic, Thrust borrows heavily from classic arcade games like ASteroid and Gravitar and then adds some serious physics to produce a tense and tricky game of precision manoeuvering and panic-striken blasting. If you've never had the oppertunity to battle against a Level 4 planet with reverse garavity and a heavy pod swinging beneath your spaceship threatening to slam you against a cavern wall in the blinking of an eye, then you just haven't lived, buddy. Can you believe that this lovely was released for just 1.99UKP? I can't, and I've bought it!
TLL
36
10
:
For me, Tornado Low Level (to give it its Sunday name) still represents the most astonishing technical achievement on the Spectrum ever. Solid 3D full-colour graphics, scrolling smoothly and swiftly in eight directions, stunned everyone. Testing gameplay and perfect playability made it a game worth having in its own right over and above the sheer 'Gosh, wow'-ness of it all. If some incompetent tells you your Spec can't handle moe than two colurs at a time, even in some poxy 2D arcade shoot-'em-up conversion, show 'em this and watch them die of shame.
ZZOOM
43
100
:
This was probably the first Speccy game designed with sadists in mind. In itself it was a zappy and challenging shoot-'em-up, but the most fun in Zzoom was to be had by mercilessly slaughtering the refugees you were supposed to be protecting, and watching them spin up in the air in a bloodied mess. If you had the immense self-discipline needed not to do this though, you could console yourself by playing a fast and smooth 3D blaster that was more than a little bit ahead of its time, as well as being probably the original Imagine's finest hour.