The 16K ZX Spectrum was only around for a year, but it got a surprisingly large library of games. We count down the 100 best – and here’s part one…
The 16K ZX Spectrum was definitely the odd one out in a family of micros that defined UK home computing in the 1980s. With far less memory available to coders (just 9 kilobytes) than a 16K ZX81, the £125 the entry-level model cost – shockingly the equivalent of £416 now – didn’t get you much in 1982, let alone today.
The vast majority of purchasers wisely choose to save up the extra £50 for the 48K version (£175, or a hefty £582 in 2023 money, although still peanuts compared to the Commodore 64’s launch price of £1,327 equivalent), and the 16K Speccy very quickly fell out of favour. In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.
(We haven’t been able to establish how many of the 5 million Spectrums sold were 16Ks, but we’d be surprised if it was more than 5%.)
But even in its brief life (the vast bulk of the titles below were released in 1983), the 16K machine amassed a library of fun games that left the catalogues of many better-specced computers in the dust. And for no particular reason other than that 40 years have passed since it abruptly met its fate, we’re here to celebrate them.
TECHNICAL NOTE: This chart was a real pain to compile due to the generally very poor documentation of all aspects of the 16K Speccy, not just its sales figures. The ZX Database – the foundation of archive sites like World Of Spectrum and Spectrum Computing – is all over the place when it comes to the baby machine.
Lots of games which would likely have made the list were billed as 16K-compatible but aren’t (eg Push Off, Road Racers, Thrusta and Magic Carpet). We’re not sure why this is the case – most of them claimed on their boxes to run on any Spectrum, but they all crash on emulated 16K machines. (Sadly we don’t have an actual 16K Spectrum with which to definitively establish the truth.)
Bizarrely, some great games actually written in just 1K of memory also don’t run on the 16K because of the memory location that their coders chose to put them in. Many more, conversely, are listed as 48K titles but actually run perfectly happily in 16K, and you’ll read about some of them below (because hey, no spoilers). Every game in this list is verified as genuinely 16K-friendly.
EDITOR’S NOTE: this list is so huge, we’ve decided to break it into two parts. So here’s part one, counting down from 100 down to 51…
100. METEOR STORM
(Quicksilva, 1982)
Despite it being well within the hardware’s capabilities, the Speccy oddly didn’t have a really good Asteroids until 2021, which alert readers will realise means that Meteor Storm isn’t a really good Asteroids.
(You should see how staggeringly terrible most of the other versions are. Planetoids is smoother but less Asteroidsy, and Artic’s semi-decent Cosmic Debris is another game that runs in 16K according to the ZX Database, but not according to reality. Everything else is garbage.)Meteor Storm does look the part, however, and it even managed to squeeze in what was very likely the machine’s first speech synthesis. It’s fast and manic and noisy, and it lets you interrupt the highscore sequence to start another game instantly if you want to, and for that (and for managing to come out in 1982) it squeezes in.
99. SHADOWFAX
(Postern, 1983)
Mike “Lords Of Midnight” Singleton’s early Speccy games didn’t have to worry about squeezing into 9K of memory, because most of them were originally written for the unexpanded VIC-20, which had an even teenier 3.5K of RAM available. Even on the relatively roomy Speccy they stayed hyper-minimalist, with a front end that consisted of pressing S to start.
Shadowfax only does one thing – you tackle an endless charge of beautifully-animated demon riders with a lightning bolt you have to detonate manually at the right moment – and it seems like you should be able to beat it indefinitely, but its genius is that it gives you just one life, so you’re always just a moment’s loss of concentration away from a game-ending disaster.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! The Spectrum and C64 versions put your horse on the right of the screen galloping left, while the BBC and VIC versions do the opposite.
98. OH MUMMY!
(Gem, 1984)
This unassuming Amidar ripoff has been oddly enduring, still being released on new platforms like the Mega Drive well into the 21st century, as well as getting a Spectrum Next port in 2020 and a Speccy remake in 2021. Gem’s 1984 version for the Spectrum is simple even when compared to the smoother and prettier Amstrad original, but it still captures all the action.
97. SIEGE
(Postern, 1983)
Now, in truth this is barely above the level of a magazine type-in game. It made it in mainly for the sheer and persistent satisfaction of causing chain reactions, where you drop a rock on one invader’s head and he takes out others as he plummets to his flailing death.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! Unlike the original on the Commodore PET, at least by the time it got to the Speccy version Singleton had managed to spell the name right.
96. GALACTIC JAIL BREAK/COSMIC GUERILLA
(Apocalypse/Crystal, 1983)
Ultimately, it would have been churlish to include one of these but exclude the other. Both are ports of the obscure 1979 Universal coin-op Cosmic Guerilla, both are fast and smooth and challenging, and both have different pros and cons.
The Apocalypse version is prettier and simpler – and simplifying Cosmic Guerilla is no small achievement – while Crystal’s take is closer to the arcade and offers more gameplay options, but can be a bit easy when you’re down to your last life. Both are actually livelier than the original, though, which is nice.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! The original draft of this chart had Galactic Abductors by Anirog – a clone of another obscure coin-op called Stratovox – in this slot, but after some reflection it got subbed off for having annoyingly unreliable hit detection.
95. HAUNTED HEDGES
(Micromega, 1983)
A nice-looking straight-up Pac-Man, with variable ghost intelligence, that gets up to a pretty zippy speed after a level or two. You can’t turn your back on the classics.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! Atarisoft’s official release of Pac-Man also ran in 16K, but we included Haunted Hedges instead because it’s got a bit more variation and it’s prettier. The spot WOULD have gone to Pac-Hack, a 2021 mod of the Atarisoft release which squishes the maze horizontally until it’s much more like the coin-op and results in a much more fun and exciting game, but because it was only released as an SZX file (a 48K snapshot) we can’t be sure it works on a 16K machine.
94. SPACE ZOMBIES
(Mikro-Gen, 1983)
A simple but pleasingly-executed space shooter with nice chunky graphics, good control (machine-gunning a column of alien marauders with autofire is very satisfying) and echoes of Space Firebird in the arcades and Megamania on the Atari VCS.
93. MONSTERS IN HELL
(Softek, 1983)
The Spectrum got loads of versions of the arcade game Space Panic, but this is one of the most creative and challenging variants on any platform, and also by far the most actually panicky. Unusually, once you’ve dug a hole for the titular Monsters to fall through there’s no way to fill it back in, so you have to be careful not to box yourself into a dead end.
You have to constantly run around hell-for-leather luring the beasties into the flames (which is eventually the only way to kill them) while collecting crosses to keep up your fast-diminishing energy, but like life itself, you’ll always fail in the end.
92. THE MINE/LA MINA
(Ventamatic, 1983)
Want to play Bagman on the Spectrum, but you can’t because Ocean’s fine port (as Gilligan’s Gold) needs 48K? Ventamatic have you covered with this crude but very playable version that’s every bit as tough as the coin-op and GG, but at least isn’t as finicky about letting you drop the sacks of gold into your wheelbarrow as the latter.
91. LUNA CRABS
(Micromega, 1983)
Almost worth inclusion just for the sheer audacity of calling itself ‘3D’, Luna Crabs is also a super-slight but slick sniping game in which you have to carefully pick off a swarm of sinister space crustaceans by isolating one or two from the herd at a time, because if you blunder straight into the pack you’ll be met with a spectacular barrage of phlegmy and deadly crab gob.
90. FROGGY
(DJL, 1983)
The Speccy was (and remains) poorly-served for conversions of Konami’s amphibian arcade hit, Frogger, with the best port weirdly being a 2021 homebrew effort written in BASIC. But despite being a bit uggo, DJL’s recreation of its successful ZX81 release gets most of the coin-op features in and does a good job of capturing the general vibe, complete with the crucial intro jingle.
89. CRAZY CAVERNS
(Firebird, 1984)
Sokoban is one of the most boring video games ever invented, but it turns out that you can make it a lot more fun by throwing a few fast, randomly-moving baddies into the mix and letting you shove whole rows of crates (or in this case sugarcubes) at once. One of the early games from Firebird’s £2.50 budget range and one of the best.
88. APPLE JAM
(DK’Tronics, 1984)
The list of Health & Safety infractions at the DK’Tronics jam factory is a deeply concerning one. Staff are forced to consume large amounts of excess product from poorly-maintained machinery and then sweat it off in an overworked sauna. A stock of pills is on hand in the case of frequent heart attacks. A broken lift sits in a pool of blood and rat corpses, while poison litters the work area and deadly giant killer hornets encroach through the open windows.
Still, the employees always have a smile on their faces. Either they enjoy the simplistic two-button excitement of their non-stop all-action lifestyle, or it’s the drugs.
87. POOL
(CDS Microsystems, 1983)
This isn’t much of a simulation of pool, but what it is is a pretty good port of Konami’s ultra-minimalist 1981 arcade game, Video Hustler. It’s simple but far from easy, and you’ll need some real skill to ‘rack up’ a decent score here!
86. MOLAR MAUL
(Imagine)
A detailed and accurate simulation of the endless battle against the dastardly and all too real evil of caries, Molar Maul is a game played in almost total silence, which at first seems like a major drawback until you think about how traumatising it would be if it was accompanied by dental-surgery noises. And when you consider how tiny that airline toothpaste tube is, it’s no wonder it’s so hard to amass a decent score before you end up like Shane MacGowan.
85. A WORLD OF ONE WAY
(Serdjuk, 2021)
As far as we know there’s no generic name for the quite common type of game where you’re apparently standing on a surface of waxed Teflon and can only stop moving, once you start, by smacking into a wall.
So we’re going to call them “slippy-slidey maze puzzlers”, and this is a pretty and very tricky one. It’s also a bit meta, in that you have to use the money you earn from beating levels to buy extra lives or passwords, a slightly odd design choice in a 2021 release that’s mostly going to be played on emulators with savestates, but there you go.
84. GULPMAN
(Campbell Systems, 1982)
Gulpman might look like a basic Pac-Man knock-off, and at the most fundamental level it is, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here and a lot of game packed into 9K. You get 15 mazes (although you only play one of them per game), nine speeds from ponderous to turbo, nine enemy levels and you can even watch it demo its way through every stage in sequence at whatever settings you choose.
83. ARMAGEDDON aka TERRA FORCE
(Fashionsoft/Firebird, 1983)
A speedy and hard Centipede derivative in which you also have to stop space demons from eating the Moon. Like, what more do you want? (Difficulty is a feature that will crop up a lot in this chart, because when you didn’t have enough memory to write a lot of game, you had to give it a lifespan by at least making it tough to beat.)
Gridrunner by Jeff Minter is worthy of an honourable mention here as another 16K Centipede-with-a-twist, but Armageddon is just a bit more interesting, plus it’s kind of embarrassing when the Speccy version of something is inferior to the VIC-20 one.
82. MORRIS MEETS THE BIKERS
(Automata)
Not enough games are based in multi-storey car parks. With all those levels and stairways and lifts and ramps and barriers and rules, and their grim urban settings, they ought to be a gift to platformers and arcade adventures in particular, but they always get overlooked.
With its psychedelic pulsating floors MMTB looks unlike almost any other Speccy game too, and while a couple of questionable/lazy design choices let it down – it could easily have been 20 places higher otherwise – it’s still clever and fast and tense.
81. GALAXY WARS
(Dancresp, 2013)
Visually one of the most accurate arcade-to-Spectrum ports ever, and the gameplay is as close to perfect a replication as you could hope for on a landscape-format screen too. Even the BASIC version is highly playable, but the significantly faster compiled version is the one we’re listing here.
80. CRAZY BUGS aka BEETLEMANIA
(AWA Software/MC Lothlorien, 1983)
Although it looks at first like it’s going to be really boring, this super-basic maze-chaser really livens up fast, as the speed increases, the maze itself evolves and new types of baddy appear. It’s really smooth and slick too, and with no offensive or defensive weaponry it’s tense and perilous and way more fun than you expect. Escaping a stage really feels like a victory.
79. SHARK ATTACK
(Romik, 1983)
This is notable just for being a 16K Speccy game with continuous music (an almost unique trait), although the word ‘music’ is working very hard there. But it’s also a frantic and addictive arcade game pitched somewhere between Qix and Crush Roller, as you bid to protect vulnerable, immobile octopi from what the game calls “sharks” but are clearly ravenous piranha.
You do this by surrounding them with an “atomic net” then filling as much of the sea with it as possible, like a deranged Greenpeace activist who’s lost the plot and turned into a coked-up marine version of The Punisher. Most of the action happens in the first five seconds of a level and it’s such a mad buzz you can’t wait for the next one.
78. IT’S THE WOOLUF!
(Crystal Computing, 1984)
You can always tell when a coder really, really hates their customers, and one of the big giveaways is having 40 keys available on a keyboard for four movement directions but putting them all on the same row and not even including a Kempston joystick option. ZXNM? Ugh.
But once you fix that problem with a programmable stick or emulator remap, It’s The Wooluf! werewolfs from tediously frustrating to entertainingly frustrating as you try to quite literally shepherd your idiotic and suicidal charges through a hazardous landscape populated by a weirdly-teleporting predator.
77. STAR WARRIOR
(Visions, 1983)
It’s always nice to mix things up a bit, and this three-stage space odyssey (shoot the aliens, make a landing through a meteor shower and loot a diamond from a maze) fits the bill nicely. Like going to a dim sum restaurant, each part is pretty slight in itself but by the time you’ve been round them all a few times you’ll be full up and burping little bits of game flavour all night.
76. COSMIC RAIDERS
(Mikro-Gen, 1983)
Absolutely comically unplayable with the demented control layout that Mikro-Gen were unaccountably obsessed with in 1983 (all number keys, but not the cursor or Sinclair keys, spaced out all across the top row from 2 to 0, with the bottom row split into two halves for extra functions), but magically transformed by emulator remapping into an actually pretty spiffy – if not exactly silky – Defender knockoff.
75. STYX
(Bug-Byte, 1983)
The debut game of Matthew “Manic Miner” Smith, this cunning single-screen multi-stage shooter presents you with an interesting dilemma – blast your way through the enemies with a laser that gets less powerful the more you use it, or try to dodge your way to the end preserving your firepower for when you really need it? Your laser recharges for every loop, but the numbers of baddies multiply too, and as their slow-decaying, still-deadly corpses litter the battlefield the decision gets harder and harder.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! It’s hard to be certain, but Styx may well have been the first Speccy game to use the iconic QAOPM/Space keyboard layout as its default.
74. COLOUR CLASH
(Romik, 1983)
While it’s quite simplistic in its execution (mainly the sloppy cornering), Colour Clash isn’t a half-bad replication of the arcade classic Amidar, including all three of the coin-op’s level types. What’s weird is that it also adds a fourth, which for no good reason at all is a variant of the “light cycles” battle from TRON.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! There’s a much prettier, slicker take on Amidar in the form of a Spanish magazine type-in called Striker (which also has continuous music, rather nicer than Shark Attack’s, although weirdly it doesn’t colour in grid squares when you surround them), but despite only being 5K in size it doesn’t work on a 16K machine.
73. GALAXIANS
(Artic, 1982)
Well, it’s Galaxian, innit? Probably still the Speccy’s best version, which is a bit of an indictment on those that have followed it, including the 48K official Atarisoft release and a 2021 remake.
72. LORD HARRY
(Lotus Soft, 1983)
This is basically a superior version of Hungry Horace in which you run around the extensive gardens of your mansion, avoiding deadly ponds and some sort of mutated angry pink dogs. You can move freely through the wraparound grid of stages, but you better know where you’re going or you’ll blunder into the drink before you know what’s happening, and the extra space and freedom feels fluid and liberating compared to Horace’s super-restrictive mazes.
71. MISSILE DEFENCE
(Anirog, 1983)
This shouldn’t really be good. An early release from Keith ‘Space Harrier’ Burkhill, it has an awkward handful of control keys, you can only fire one defence missile at a time, and your aiming cursor only moves in four directions. Yet despite all that (and an ugly score-display bug that kicks in after the 5th stage) it’s by far the Speccy’s most compelling port of Missile Command, with well-judged difficulty and pleasingly lingery explosions that trigger plenty of chain reactions.
70. ZX PARACHUTE
(Carles Oriol, 2020)
The Speccy’s two-colour graphics are incredibly well-suited to reproducing Game & Watch games, and there have been several ported to the machine. This is probably the pick of the bunch, which is handy as it’s the only one that runs in 16K.
(The main contenders, if you’re interested, are Oil Panic, the splendid recent port of Mario Bros and Diver: Mystery Of The Deep, which is a beautifully-presented version of Octopus but needs 128K if you want any sound.)
Game & Watch games obviously have quite limited replay value, but it’s really cute to have a blast on one now and again for a meta-nostalgia trip within the nostalgia trip of playing Spectrum games in 2023 in the first place.
69. MAGIC MEANIES
(CDS Microsystems, 1983)
It might have the user-defined graphics of a magazine type-in, but crank up the speed and ignore the extra-specially ugly first level and this uber-basic knock-off of Mr Do! has plenty going for it. It’s got jaunty music, constantly introduces new enemy types and if nothing else you’ll keep playing it just to see the new background tile in each new level. It gets less and less like Mr Do! as it goes on, but you’ll need to be good to find that out.
68. HAWKS
(Lotus Soft, 1983)
It’s not much of a looker, but there’s so much going on in this game. It borrows elements from arcade games Phoenix and UniWar S in an incredibly frantic shooter where you have to marshal three separate weapons against two waves of attack, the strength of the second depending on how well you do in the first. Give it a shot and you’ll soon stop noticing the graphics.
67. OSSUARY
(Cyningstan, 2013)
This list has been very action-oriented so far, but now for something completely different – a pretty 2013 Roguelike with lots of monster-and-treasure-stuffed dungeons crammed into the tiny memory space. The randomisation of your character at the start forces you to play differently every time – sometimes a wizard, sometimes a brute – and there’s limitless entertainment for Rogue fans here.
66. PINBALL WIZARD
(Sagittarian Software, 1983)
It might not look much, but this is a deceptively engrossing 1950s-style table with challenging tasks to complete and arguably still the best physics of any pinball game on the Speccy (which is admittedly quite a low bar).
65. RUN BABY RUN
(Micro Gold/Firebird, 1983)
Another game popularised by Firebird’s £2.50 Silver budget label, Run Baby Run is one of the strangest and most original games ever to grace the rubber-keyed king of micros. You lead a bunch of cop cars on a merry chase around various seedy parts of an unnamed town, trying to induce them to crash into each other by blindly following your trail as you loop round and round the maze. It takes strategy and memory and dexterity to clear even a single stage, and it’s typical of the untrammelled inventiveness that characterised the 8-bit era of home computing in general and the Spectrum in particular.
64. HORACE GOES SKIING
(Psion/Melbourne House, 1983)
It’s a game that asks a lot of questions, like who decided to put a ski-hire shop on the opposite side of a busy road to the slopes, what such a major and insanely congested highway is doing at the top of a mountain in the first place, why you get teleported back from the finish line to the shop and have to cross the road again even though you’ve still got your skis, and whether it’s ethical for a speeding ambulance to run you down and then charge you $10 to take you to the hospital.
Sadly none of those questions are going to be answered in this chart because we’re too busy, but it’s still a fun game.
63. INVADERS
(Artic, 1982)
Artic’s version was the most authentic-looking of the Spectrum’s rash of early ports of the classic coin-op, and played well with nine speed settings and four Atari VCS-style game variations combining “mutant invaders” and diagonal enemy shots that rebound off the sides. It remained the best Speccy version of Space Invaders right up to a few years ago when the emulated version and Space Invaders ZX showed up.
62. JUNGLE TROUBLE
(Durell, 1983)
This single-screen adventure is a real performance game. It’s so hard that at first you think it’s broken, so impossible does it seem to be to even make it past the first stepping stone on a crocodile-infested Amazonian river. But eventually you get a handle on the super-precision timing, and thanks to the exquisite animation of your stickman explorer, bystanders will quickly gather to marvel at the fluid, poetic beauty of your play.
It does let you play at various degrees of slow-mo for training purposes, but a true artist tackles Jungle Trouble at Level 1 all the way, and the satisfaction of finally beating it and enjoying that home stretch (watch out for the surprise!) as all around you cheer and applaud is hard to match.
61. TURBO DRIVER
(B.O.S. Software, 1983)
This is an odd little racer that starts out as an obstacle course and then abruptly turns into a joust with four other cars as you try to preserve enough fuel to reach the finish line at 5120m and then take the chequered flag before any of the others can hit it.
There’s no advantage to driving fast at any point, the maximum length of a game is just over two minutes, and it’s basically not like any racing game you’ve ever played. What really makes it are the bright cartoony graphics and clever use of sound – you’ll HATE collisions so much that those two minutes are a high-tension rollercoaster every time.
60. PSSST!
(Ultimate, 1983)
Generally held by right-thinking people to be the least compelling of Ultimate’s original batch of four Speccy titles – there’s a little bit too much of Diner Dash’s constant-faffing-around energy here, and not enough time spent doing the actual bug-zapping that’s ostensibly the heart of the game. But the execution and presentation of Pssst! still stood head and shoulders above almost everything else in the early Speccy catalogue, and the payoff of your giant Thyrgodian Megga Crisanthodil bursting into beautiful bloom never gets old.
59. HARD CHEESE
(DK’Tronics, 1983)
Like Magic Meanies, this is a game that tries to give the impression of being Mr Do!, isn’t much like Mr Do! at all, but is actually still quite good fun in its own right. Unlike its arcade parent, there’s only one way to beat a level in Hard Cheese – killing off all the blue meanies. Since there are lots of them, they’re very fast, the levels are quite small and your weapon (some sort of pesticide cloud?) takes a while to charge, the only sensible tactic is to dig yourself a long tunnel (ideally with the entrance blocked by an apple) and try to hide at the end of it, firing whenever you can.
The good news is that the meanies can’t dig, which means that the main danger at that point becomes your pesky pesticide finding its way fatally back to you, which can lead to some comedy Wile E. Coyote antics as you run away from it in a panic.
What all this means in practice is that as with Shark Attack, most of the key action happens in a frantic 10-second burst at the start of a level, which is pretty exciting. Incidentally, the game comes with no instructions either onscreen or on the cassette inlay, so quite what the jinkies all these monsters, apples, cans of what appear to be Coke and tractor-sized wedges of cheese are doing underground in the first place is a mystery for the ages. Maybe it’s set during the Great Fire Of London or something.
58. TWO-GUN TURTLE
(MC Lothlorien, 1984)
A rip-off of the vector-graphics arcade game Rip-Off, where you defend a crop of vulnerable tomatoes from various pesky critters, with the added difficulty (not present in the coin-op) that your own shots also destroy your precious produce. Seriously tough, TGT would have swallowed 10p pieces at a prodigious rate but you’d have kept coming back.
SEMI-FUN TRIVIA FACT! Your turtle only has one gun.
57. ASTRO BLASTER
(Quicksilva, 1983)
There’s not much to this space shooter, loosely based on the Sega arcade machine of the same name, and which also has some very noticeable echoes of the same author’s Star Warrior from earlier in this chart. But its cycling levels of alien monsters, meteor showers and bosses are intense and relentless and your spaceship is responsive and fast-firing, which makes the quest to see the next enemy species enjoyable and addictive.
56. HARRIER ATTACK
(Durell, 1983)
“Scramble, but in the Falklands War” must have been quite the elevator pitch, but this is still by any reasonable measure the most successful game ever to originate on the Oric-1. A great showcase for how much atmosphere you can create with 8×8 pixel sprites, it’s got a real sense of place and it’s deeply satisfying when you pull off a successful low-level bombing run.
55. RIFLE RANGE
(Mr Chip/Mastertronic, 1984)
This variant on the classic arcade shooting gallery Carnival is a bit more tactical than it looks. To beat a level with your limited ammo supply you’ll have to clear a gap through the three lines of animals, shoot holes in the prize wall, and then wait for it to start spinning before you can safely shoot the prizes that provide you with the crucial extra bullets. As in real life, murdering the stallholder and just nicking the prizes is possible, but a bad idea.
54. GRID-BUG
(Add-On Electronics, 1983)
Initially this looks like a variant of the arcade’s Solar Fox (of which the best Speccy effort – which isn’t saying much – is Transversion by Ocean), but on starting a game you quickly discover that it’s a bit cleverer than that. Your objective is to collect all the hearts, but if you cross an empty box you’ll restore a heart to it, so you have to use the rails in between the boxes, while avoiding a problematically-increasing number of unpredictable and deadly spiders.
It’s one of those games where you can rapidly become your own worst enemy, and it’s always nice to have a worthy opponent.
53. MAZE DEATH RACE (fixed version)
(PSS, 1983/2019)
For 36 years this game just flat-out didn’t work. The unofficial conversion of Namco’s classic Rally-X was afflicted with a disastrous graphical bug that rendered the game unplayable. But a couple of years ago a Hungarian coder finally found and fixed the problem, turning it into the stripped-down but speedy and addictive street chaser it was supposed to be.
52. FIREBIRDS
(Softek, 1983)
In the Speccy’s early days, merely being written in machine code rather than BASIC was regarded as impressive enough to count as a selling point, and Firebirds was one of the titles that liked to draw attention to the fact by loading with LOAD “” CODE rather than the standard command.
It was a good enough game not to need the gimmick, though – a zippy and zappy blend of Phoenix and GORF encompassing three rounds of alien-blasting followed by an impressive mothership which arrived on screen with a suitable amount of drama, if also an awkward amount of clumsy and unnecessary colour clash.
51. ISHIDO: THE WAY OF STONES
(m/ZX, 2015)
A good-looking port of a Macintosh game with lots of customisation options. It’s a pseudo-puzzler, in that you get dealt tiles randomly and then have to react to whatever comes out, rather than a true puzzle where it’s 100% skill and logic, but the same is true of Tetris and that seemed to do okay.
Head back to whynow Gaming next week, where we’ll publish part two of Stuart’s list, counting down from 50 to the number one spot.
