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Top 5 ZX Spectrum games


StewartyMac

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Michael Portillo's latest series kicked off in Scotland and he stopped off at the place that makes Minecraft in Dundee. It's CEO was explaining that one of the reasons the games industry kicked off in Dundee was down to the ZX Spectrum being made at the Timex factory, and any computers that failed the quality control checks were sold off cheap to the staff. A lot of folk who were in at the start of the games industry in the city had learned how to programme on a Spectrum, probably typing in those programmes from input that took about 3 days to get done all for a ball to bounce across the screen or something.

1. Manic Miner

2. Football Manager ( Bizarrely I can still remember transfer bids were only accepted if they ended in 89)

3. Operation Wolf

4. Saboteur

5. The Biz ( Managed a band and tried to make a number one hit)

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Looking back on the Torinak website, 1984 for peak Speccy imo

Jet Set Willy, Skool Daze, Match Day, Match Point, Full Throttle, DT Decathlon, Beach Head, TLL, Trashman.

What a time to be alive and 12.  The bairn is 12 now and I doubt she’ll experience the elation of loading any of these fuckers and spending an evening playing them.

Edited by Melanius Mullarkay
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Elite was a truly superb game.  Far better on the vector graphics than the C64 stuff.  As mentioned earlier, you got lost playing that one.  Got an emulation on an XP machine a few years back and got sucked in again.

Lords of Midnight, just totally awesome.  I used to deliberately kill that wee fanny Morkin just to make Luxor suffer.  The horror when dawn arose to find your main player had been slaughterd by wolves was dreadful.  Got an emulation on an XP machine a few years back and got sucked in again.  Doomdark's Revenge was impressively bigger but I felt it missed a trick.  It could have been so much better.

Skool Daze was mentioned at my work yesterday, great game and gameplay was excellent.

JetPac had the lasers off of the arcade game Defender, why no other speccy game used this is beyond understanding.  Gameplay was a bit meh though.

Jet Set Willy was an improvement on Manic Minor (both tremendous games), I can still hear If I were a Rich Man in those dreadful speccy tones.

Previously mentioned Atic Atic...what a game, just brilliant. 

Underwurlde I loved but its sequel, Knight Lore was just brilliant, always had an affinity to werewolves (probably Jenny Agutter's fault tbf), often went on rampages as one on Elder Scrolls.

Edited by Loonytoons
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21 hours ago, Loonytoons said:

 Underwurlde I loved but its sequel, Knight Lore was just brilliant, always had an affinity to werewolves (probably Jenny Agutter's fault tbf), often went on rampages as one on Elder Scrolls.

Knight Lore was the prequel, not the sequel.

Look at the plots of the games:

Sabre Wulf -> Sabreman fights a big fuckoff wolf

Knight Lore -> Sabreman is a werewolf (bitten by the wolf, presumably) and goes into a big castle to get the cure

Underwurlde -> Sabreman is in the depths of the caves under a big castle and has to escape.

The main reason that they released the games in the wrong order was that Knight Lore was so technically ahead of it's time they realised they wouldn't sell Underwurlde if they put out Knight Lore first, so they sat on Knight Lore for six months until about a week after Underwurlde's release.

 

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Knight Lore was the prequel, not the sequel.
Look at the plots of the games:
Sabre Wulf -> Sabreman fights a big fuckoff wolf
Knight Lore -> Sabreman is a werewolf (bitten by the wolf, presumably) and goes into a big castle to get the cure
Underwurlde -> Sabreman is in the depths of the caves under a big castle and has to escape.
The main reason that they released the games in the wrong order was that Knight Lore was so technically ahead of it's time they realised they wouldn't sell Underwurlde if they put out Knight Lore first, so they sat on Knight Lore for six months until about a week after Underwurlde's release.
 
So we're both right [emoji23].

What an age to be a young teenager though. Graphics were generally pretty poor, it had to be all about gameplay.

So many current games are visually unbelievable but so shallow in experience.

Another game that springs to mind...Eureka.
My mate and I were a bawhair of finishing that game 6 months before the guy that won it.
Another excellent game that made you think about what you were doing.
We always got stuck on the last "James Bond" level on the plane at the end. Never found out how to finish it.
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Probably not my definitive top 5 but games that have always stuck with me 

 

Football manager 

Skool daze 

Spy hunter

Raid over Moscow

Match point 

 

(Barry mcguigan world championship boxing, Bruce lee, paper boy, saboteur all interchangeable) 

 

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