knock
Bluelighter
These are my favourite ZX Spectrum games from when I was a wee nipper. I'm ignoring the really famous ones, like Jet Set Willy, or Spy Hunter. Those are your cocaines and your weeds of the speccy game scene, everyone's played them, everyone knows them. I'm talking about the PIHKAL and TIHKAL of speccy games here, the obscure but fascinating platform games and text adventures that pushed the boundaries of 8-colour graphics and 1-channel sound. I'm sure there is a link between exposure to the bright-coloured, pixelated graphics of retro games and a taste for psychedelics; similarly losing yourself in a text adventure is a bit like losing yourself in a dissociative trip. And the link between EDM and BEEP commands is obvious.
Brian Bloodaxe
This was my favourite platform game. You played a viking and had to solve little puzzles involving different coloured keys and had to avoid man-eating toilets, but the best thing about it was you could use bombs and detonators to blow walls away and get into hidden rooms. Great fun. After you had waited five minutes for it to load, it simulated the computer crashing, so you thought your tape was fucked and started crying until the little message came up on the screen to tell you it was joke. Bastards! Then it played the Monty Python theme throughout which was another great touch.
Death Chase
This was a motorcycle game where you had to avoid trees by going left or right. No brakes or throttle. The trees look more like brown pens with green caps. The longer you avoided the trees, the more trees appeared. It was pretty mindless but kept me amused for hours.
3D Space Wars
The first "shoot-em-up" I played. The enemy were called the Sideabs, which I'm sure the imaginative programmer got from side A and side B of the tape it came on. The alien craft started as a blob in the centre of the screen and got bigger and bigger and you could move your "cross-hairs" only painfully slowly. You got more points if you shot them before they got to full size, I think there were only three or four steps from blob to full size. For some reason my brother made me eat dry spaghetti while playing this.
Red Moon
Not my first text adventure, but my first Level 9 adventure. I loved text adventures, and Level 9 ones were amazing, the descriptions were atmospheric, but left enough to the imagination that I created my own version of the world inside my head as I was playing, like a good read should do. I usually took advantage of the option to turn the graphics off in these games so my imagination had free reign, I never solved any text adventures, but I did spend hours drawing maps of how the rooms interlinked, which could sometimes be quite complicated as going west then immediately east did not always leave you where you started. I can't actually remember what you were supposed to do in Red Moon but it was fun.
Avalon
This was touted as a breakthrough in gameplay, full 3D animation (yeah right). You were some kind of wizard who did that yogic flying thing, floating about in the lotus position, and you wandered around a maze of rooms, floating away from baddies, finding different objects and stuff. I played it for ages but I never really knew what I was doing. The instructions were pages long, and I think they left a few things out just to piss me off. You can see in the screen-shot that the Spectrum suffered from something called "colour clash" which meant that the colours of different characters on the screen kept fucking up. That's why the baddie is half green half blue, and the wand in the wizard's hand has gone green because the wall in the background is green.
Lord of the Rings
Another text adventure. I hadn't read Lord of the Rings before I got this, but it actually came with the book which was really cool. It had a few quite novel features, you could switch between controlling the four Hobbits (Frodo, Pippin, Sam and Merry), so they could all be in different places doing different things making for quite an involved game. It only covered Fellowship of the Ring. I actually completed this one (I lied earlier)! I spent WEEKS on it and loved it. Again, you could turn the graphics off (you can see why...).
I could go on, but I would love to know what your favourite 80s home computer games were! I'm hoping there are enough oldies out there to get a thread going...
By the way I was a Crash reader, Zapp! readers are dicks.
Brian Bloodaxe
This was my favourite platform game. You played a viking and had to solve little puzzles involving different coloured keys and had to avoid man-eating toilets, but the best thing about it was you could use bombs and detonators to blow walls away and get into hidden rooms. Great fun. After you had waited five minutes for it to load, it simulated the computer crashing, so you thought your tape was fucked and started crying until the little message came up on the screen to tell you it was joke. Bastards! Then it played the Monty Python theme throughout which was another great touch.
Death Chase
This was a motorcycle game where you had to avoid trees by going left or right. No brakes or throttle. The trees look more like brown pens with green caps. The longer you avoided the trees, the more trees appeared. It was pretty mindless but kept me amused for hours.
3D Space Wars
The first "shoot-em-up" I played. The enemy were called the Sideabs, which I'm sure the imaginative programmer got from side A and side B of the tape it came on. The alien craft started as a blob in the centre of the screen and got bigger and bigger and you could move your "cross-hairs" only painfully slowly. You got more points if you shot them before they got to full size, I think there were only three or four steps from blob to full size. For some reason my brother made me eat dry spaghetti while playing this.
Red Moon
Not my first text adventure, but my first Level 9 adventure. I loved text adventures, and Level 9 ones were amazing, the descriptions were atmospheric, but left enough to the imagination that I created my own version of the world inside my head as I was playing, like a good read should do. I usually took advantage of the option to turn the graphics off in these games so my imagination had free reign, I never solved any text adventures, but I did spend hours drawing maps of how the rooms interlinked, which could sometimes be quite complicated as going west then immediately east did not always leave you where you started. I can't actually remember what you were supposed to do in Red Moon but it was fun.
Avalon
This was touted as a breakthrough in gameplay, full 3D animation (yeah right). You were some kind of wizard who did that yogic flying thing, floating about in the lotus position, and you wandered around a maze of rooms, floating away from baddies, finding different objects and stuff. I played it for ages but I never really knew what I was doing. The instructions were pages long, and I think they left a few things out just to piss me off. You can see in the screen-shot that the Spectrum suffered from something called "colour clash" which meant that the colours of different characters on the screen kept fucking up. That's why the baddie is half green half blue, and the wand in the wizard's hand has gone green because the wall in the background is green.
Lord of the Rings
Another text adventure. I hadn't read Lord of the Rings before I got this, but it actually came with the book which was really cool. It had a few quite novel features, you could switch between controlling the four Hobbits (Frodo, Pippin, Sam and Merry), so they could all be in different places doing different things making for quite an involved game. It only covered Fellowship of the Ring. I actually completed this one (I lied earlier)! I spent WEEKS on it and loved it. Again, you could turn the graphics off (you can see why...).
I could go on, but I would love to know what your favourite 80s home computer games were! I'm hoping there are enough oldies out there to get a thread going...
By the way I was a Crash reader, Zapp! readers are dicks.
Last edited:
), but green screen monitor?? What kind of evil parents did you have? And could you not plug it into a TV?
