It’s not quite on the same difficult level as the infamous Airwolf Spectrum game, but it’s not far off. The driving and boating elements were great fun, but The Hill proved to be a real shit. RUN THE GAUNTLETīased on the television show of the same name, Run The Gauntlet’s laborious loading system may have made it all a bit unbearable at times, but fortunately, it proved to be worth the wait. Featuring big, bold graphics, it was all a bit of a hoot. The basic idea was that The Muncher, a monster from Chewits television adverts, was on the rampage. However, Gremlin Graphics teamed up with, er Chewits sweets (an aside: Fizzy Chewits, along with Roy Of The Rovers Pineapple Flavoured Chewbars, are the best confectionery of the 80s) to basically out- Rampage Rampage. The ZX Spectrum version of the coin-op Rampage left a little bit to be desired. And while I can’t say that Overlander was necessarily a better game than Road Blasters, it did have enough to it to make it an equal. The driving bit, at heart, was never particularly demanding, but the opposition you meet? Different story. Set in the year 2025, Overlander sees you driving cargo across vast deserts, in a world that’s been ravaged by the long-gone Ozone layer. It too involved cars, and it too crucially involved cars with weapons. It got easy by the time you’d built your team up, but the journey there was excellent.Īs the world got ready for a home computer version of the arcade machine Road Blasters, Elite stole just a little of its thunder with Overlander. But it still found space to fuse in enough strategic elements to make it feel as though you could make a difference. It showed the races from a fixed position, so basically you got to see the cars as they whizzed past the lap marker. CRL’s 1985 game Formula One got surprisingly close. FORMULA ONEįormula One management titles generally miss the balance between detail and accessibility, in the way that the best Football Manager releases have managed. Little Computer People, which was only available for the 128k Spectrum, was the same, albeit tonally a lot, lot different. While the underlying adventure itself was never particularly strong, Valhalla was, even though you may not believe it now, a game that was simply good fun to sit and watch. The crude graphics may kid you otherwise, but in 1983, a game where characters seemed to walk in and out on a whim was something really quite different. VALHALLAĪn adventure game that time is threatening to forget, what made Valhalla so interesting was the visual element to it. Trantor turned out to be a hollow shell of a game really, but as a showcase for what the Spectrum could do? It was a big step forward… 47. Said argument lasted up until the release date of the game which was where the happiness ended. Trantor boasted visuals that the Spectrum wasn’t supposed to be capable of, and for a while, there was a riposte to the graphics argument whenever the playground battle of the 8-bit computers took hold.
It rose to prominence after being included on a demo tape stuck to the front of Crash magazine, back when such demo tapes were a real novelty. Not a great game this, in truth, but it makes it here for a slightly different reason. But still, it was a lot more fun than it’s generally been given credit for. It certainly wasn’t easy (that’s an understatement), and it never captured any sense of pace. Grand National, though, showed that there was something in the idea of letting you ride a horse in the infamous race of the game’s name. Horse racing has never been served particularly well by computer games (D&H’s strategy title The National was worth a try, even if you missed three birthdays by the time it had done all its calculations). The low development cost of Spectrum games meant niches could be easily explored. And yet, there was something really quite compelling about it all… 49. Sadly, your rock band would always prove to be a cursed venture, given the number of times members of your group would do.
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Rock Star Ate My Hamster was only the second full price release for Codemasters, and the idea was to put together a successful rock band, and take them to the top of the charts. Let’s start with a game that, in truth, I knew wasn’t much cop at the time I forked out nine quid for it.
These, then, are the games I rarely hear about, but that robbed me of too much of my youth than I’d ever care to admit… 50.
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