I even watched a loading screen recently and watched all 4 minutes of it for that hit even though crashes whilst loading were my number one frustration.
Gaming highlights include The Great Escape (screen shot), Lords of Midnight, Underwurlde, Knight Lore, Pajamarama, Leaderboard and Match Day
by Exchangenudes_4_Joke
44 comments
Chuckie Egg.
The emulators and roms are widely available online, you can play them all for free..
No more buying them from boots or w h Smith’s for five pound a pop these days.
https://worldofspectrum.org/
That computer is why I have a career in IT.
10 Print “I am ace”
20 Goto 10
Copying that multicoloured sheet so you could copy jet set willy.
We had a spectrum 48k and I used to play Horace and the Spiders on it. That must’ve been late 80s.
Check out Kim Justice on youtube, tons of great Speccy & British gaming history content.
I have never gotten past the first screen of Manic Miner
Ade Edmondsons How to be a Complete Ba$tard.
Lords of Chaos.
Double Dragon.
Dragon Ninja.
Exelon.
Movie.
Head over Heels.
4×4 Off Road Racing.
Bubble Bobble.
Renegade.
Saboteur.
Silkworm.
Golden Axe.
Altered Beast.
Fond memories of these and many more on my 128k with my Cheetah joystick! 😁
Back 2 Skool, the game that came with an option to do yourself in jumping out of a bloody window.
Manic Miner, Atic Attack, Chuckie Egg, Jet Set Willy, Repton. Speccy had some classics.
So many…
Loading games in from cassette only to have it crash on the final diiillllliiilllllilliillliiillll….
Having a cousin bootleg games by playing them on a tape player and manually adjusting the volume as they record on another.
Having to manually adjust tape volumes to get them to load at all.
Never getting Bug-a-boo to run.
Attic-attack. Jet set Willie. Ghostbusters! (Which always made us laugh hysterically because it always played the tune all out of time). Chuckie Egg (naturally. Still play it on Steam Deck). Star Glider. Driller. So many more.
I used to spend hours coding games from those books, then more hours re-reading it all because it didn’t work.
The Hobbit. “”E”. You cannot go that way. “W”. You go west. You see a door.
Tomahawk helicopter sim with the weird plastic prism box for copy protection.
Gunship is still why I long for decent helicopter Sims.
So many. Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg 1 and 2, Finders Keepers, Spellbound, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Gregory Loses His Clock, Jack the Nipper…the list is endless.
I used to work for Psion (nearly 30 years ago), who made a lot of the really early games for the Spectrum. I remember being shown a big box of original game tapes in the store cupboard.
To my everlasting regret, I didn’t steal any of them 😑
Seabase Delta, our whole family played it and we never did get into that bastard train carriage.
Being a socially awkward loner at High School I spent many of my lunch times designing screens, fonts & UDGs on graph paper for a mate’s game which did eventually get released… on a budget label :).
Like many, my evenings & weekends in our wee Highland village were spent playing games, learning to code, reading & digesting Speccy mags, & gnashing teeth at failed loadings.
Never getting anywhere in fantastic dizzy
I started on the ZX Spectrum, although I had been on my mates wooden Atari well prior to that.
Jet Set Willie, Bruce Lee, Robocop – which I played to death, Bubble Bobble, Ghostbusters, Gauntlet, Spy Hunter, Rebelstar 1 and 2….
Fucking awesome time to be alive.
Whole family sat around excitedly watching our very first game, Hungry Horace, load. The loading screen graphic of Horace eventually appears and my dad stops the tape. We all watch with slowly fading smiles waiting for the game to start for about five minutes before we realise he stopped it halfway through the loading process.
Also Lords of bastard Midnight with its cardboard keyboard overlay because the controls were so fucking complicated.
I can still hear the satisfying STOMP noise from Horace and the Spiders though. Eventually got a 128k but it just wasn’t the same without the rubber keyboard.
Anyone remember A Rockstar Ate My Hamster?
Always made me laugh seeing my band ‘The Wankers’ get to numbers 1.
No one has mentioned Elite!
The Monty Mole games and the Dizzy games were the tits
Rick dangerous on the specy was decent. Batman was late and great.
Paperboy!
Edited.
Dizzy. I still think about the work I put in to find the last coin in Treasure Island Dizzy. The map I drew for the long warehouse. I love the sparse graphics on the speccy.
Laser Squad! I have fond memories of playing that with my mate after school. Cup of tea, Penguin bar and maybe a Wagon Wheel to snack on. The feeling of laying a trap and getting Opportunity Fire was a massive rush. Then missing every single shot with my MARSEC Auto Gun…
I still own 2 mostly given to me my mum one with rubber keys other with hard keys 2 different versions my mum mostly keeps going on about “Horace Goes Skiing” TBH Quite Classic once find the right volume on cosset player XD I do also have Auto tune one saves lot time but still funny to try spend 1 hour to 30 mins trying get a game running.
Atic Atac
Sabre Wulf
Knight Lore
Alien 8
Fairlight
Elite
Lords Of Midnight
Tir Na Nog
Avalon
Turbo Esprit
and will somebody PLEASE JUST GET THORIN TO LIFT ME OUT OF THE FUCKING WINDOW
JetPac! Jumping Jack! The hours I wasted playing these and Manic Miner/JSW.
Happy times. Speccy also the reason I can program now.
Back in the day when Boots the chemist were one of the main retailers that sold computers and games.
The weird keyboard layout was a nightmare when I was writing(copying from a magazine) programs. I had the ZX80 flat keyboard, not the rubber keys which were even harder.
Elite. Had a weird plastic thing you’d look through as some sort of security device.
A school friend of mine wrote [TasCalc](https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/utilities/tascalc-tasman-software) for the spectrum.
Edit: I lent him a Mac SE with MS Excel 2.2 on it. He cloned it for the Atari ST but never released it.
R tape loading error
Ultimate Play the Game always meant quality..
Obligatory plug for the ZX Spectrum Next, a new model of Speccy with a bunch of additional features inspired by the various ways hobbyists have been hot-rodding theirs over the years, and a slot for a Raspberry Pi Zero to use as a daughterboard for even more enhancements. Also the N-GO, which is the first Next clone.
A generation of kids had that one special tape recorder that had silver pen marking the exact spot for the volume control.
Favourite game? Probably Avalon.
The elation when a copied cassette actually loaded!
there was a simple game called Chaos i used to play ALOT – it was quite often featured as one of the best games on the spectrum.
8 wizards are given around 16 random spells some of them would be basic others would be high level. so the basic job was create a good enough army to kill the other wizards. you could have a high level spell like golden dragon which was one of the toughest creatures but if you cast it early on it would fail.
ironically some of the best spells were stuff like gooey blob which would multiply every turn till it consumed all the map.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvyCI_4CQE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGvyCI_4CQE)
made by Julian Gallop who later did x-com series, ghost recon
Myself and two friends got a game published in the 80’s. I only did the music bit,Neil and Ivan did the real programming. The Mighty Magus!
They also hacked jet set willy 2 and found out it was impossible because nobody could complete it without a hack.
The ZX magazine used to print the code for a game, usually spread over 2 pages. I remember spending hours typing it in and it never worked. Then the next magazine out would have an apology saying they’d forgotten a comma or something.
Karl got the wrong one, and then Tandy’s was shut and he couldn’t even get a ram pack
My user name should be enough.
128k +2 kid here, that’s right, with built in ‘Datacorder.’
Gauntlet, Operation Wolf, Road Rash, Enduro Racer, Matchday 2, Daley Thompson (goes without saying), Target Renegade.
And some stuff that I have fond memories of like Run the Gauntlet which must have been a Code Masters game, Cybernoid, Pentagram, Mikey, Commando. Think I’ll have to get looking for a way to play some of these again!
I was thinking about this the other day and remembered the game Booty. So many hours of fun. Of course the real game was using a different tape player and its counter to find the start of the game!