Sir Clive’s In There (that coffin)

[The Culture Bunker]

Parkwood or Temple Meads?

Turns out I was totally wrong and that game was based on London to Brighton, though it seems there was a Bath-to-Bournemouth based sequel ('Evening Star') that may have also been on a YS tape.

[beanheadmcginty]

ZX Spectre

[ElTwopo]

Apparently they realised he was dead when his lips turned cyan.

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Trans Am, mate. Drive the whole of America. First time I saw the word Albuquerque.

Similarly - Wichita

[Sebastian Cobb]

There's something I really despise about early '80s home computing and the scum who were involved in promoting it. Lacking the charming dedicated enthusiasm and commitment of self-built microcomputer kits of the late '70s, without having yet reached the point of being semi-intuitive semi-transparent tools and toys as they did by the end of the decade.

Well, either he's paid for his doings at this point or he never will - so I should probably let go and leave his crimes in the past.

Acorn followed the kit-computer curve thing nicely and offered nice expansion options to the DIY market after (Commodore also had the latter), and they offered a nice floating point add-on.

The fact that BBC/Acorn largely made no room in the consumer space was probably because Chris Currie and Sophie Wilson wanted their machines to work to a spec rather than a price. When they tried that they made a cheap 'games machine' version of the BBC micro and cut off its useful 2d scrolling.

[ImmaculateClump]

(hijack) Yes, you beauty! Thank you!

Haha, I got that for my birthday one year!
I think my buying decisions were mostly informed by how good the graphics looked or how big the sprites were in those days. I couldn't work out what the hell I was meant to be doing either.

RIP Clive, the good bits of my childhood was mainly speccy based joy.

[SweetPomPom]

Cunt ruined my life with his "computers".

Mary is not amused.

[Sebastian Cobb]

As he is lowered into the ground, I hope they play the Spectrum 48k loading noise.

They should arrange it so everyone watches it start then goes for tea and biscuits and then when they come back the get in grave people go 'sorry there was an error' and they start again and everyone watches them then do it without error.

[Norton Canes]

Trans Am, mate. Drive the whole of America. First time I saw the word Albuquerque

Oh yes, kicks Jet Pac into a trash compactor.

[Pinball]

Happy memories. And let's not forget hardware such as the Kempston joystick :-)  Luxury...

[nugget]

Honestly thought the title said "Sir Cliff" rather than Clive. That's a relief, my nan would be distraught. I was more of a Commodore kid anyway.

[Pinball]

There is a current magazine dedicated to the Speccy. Some others too, that I confess I have bought :-)

https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/crash-magazine

[Mr_Simnock]

[Mr_Simnock]

For those that get a bit nostalgic for the old speccy there is this very nice book - https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/sinclair-zx-spectrum-a-visual-compendium

[idunnosomename]

Honestly thought the title said "Sir Cliff" rather than Clive. That's a relief, my nan would be distraught. I was more of a Commodore kid anyway.

sircliff is like three months younger. godspeed sircliff. I like to move it move it!

[madhair60]

Nice. Mine came with the Light Gun Action Pack:

Operation Wolf
Probably technically impressive, but I was absolutely shit at it. Don't think I made it off the first level.

Robot Attack
I remember really liking the robots that stood on the side of the screen, but being confused as to what I was supposed to do.

Bullseye
Loved the picture of Bully the cartoon bull, but thought the game was a boring old load of shite. So quite an accurate recreation of the show.

Solar Invasion
Played this one quite a bit. Found the weird, undulating spherical alien things disgusting, and therefore satisfying to destroy.

Missile Ground Zero and Rookie
I have no memories of these. Maybe they were the last games on the tape.

we had the exact same! this is wild

[JesusAndYourBush]

Had a ZX81 in 1982, with the 16k ram pack which wobbled and crashed if you looked at it the wrong way.  When I loaded games (using a ghetto blaster) I didn't know how to silence the sound that was also blasting from the speakers very loudly, so I'd put a pillow against the speakers and leave the room until it'd loaded!  3D Monster Maze seemed amazing in it's time, you'd wander around a maze - you were supposed to escape from the dinosaur but that was the best bit so you'd wait until you found it and let it walk towards you just to see it get closer.  Whenever I saved a game to cassette it would never load back in, dunno why I never had any luck with that.  Had the ZX printer which printed on a roll of silver bogroll.

Got a 48k Spectrum in 1983/84.  (I read the manual and that and typing in listings from magazines made it very easy to learn basic.)  Later got a microdrive, tiny little cartridges which you could save up to 100k on which seemed massive.  The Spectrum broke down often.  One common fault was several keys on the keyboard failing due to the ribbon cable melting because it was too near the heat sink.  Luckily you could take it back to Boots and they'd swap it there and then for a new model as long as it was under guarantee.  I took it back 7 times in all.  Later I got one of those upgraded Spectrums with the built-in tape deck but I discovered the tape deck was shit, and Id grown out of it anyway, so got a refund and bought a hifi instead.

A few weeks ago watching the Paralympics the commentator announced they were going over to the velodrome for the Women's C5, which instantly conjured up the image of everyone racing in C5's.

[Sherman Krank]

See, I was from the rough side of the tracks. I had a Spectrum 16k which I improved with the Cheetah 32k ram pack.

I had something that looked exactly like that but instead of being more RAM it's was a rudimentary drum machine.
A quick google suggests it was a 'SpecDrum' also made by Cheetah but it had no branding on it whatsoever just a thin black cable coming out of the back that ended with a 1/4" phono jack and I got it like I got most things back then by swapping it for something with some kid (I'm fairly sure the kid told me his dad had made it and I had no reason to doubt him at the time). It came with some equally rudimentary software and I eventually worked out how to make it go PLONK PLINK PLONK PLONK PLINK a bunch of times and would  then plug the jack into one of channels on my marshall stack and jam along with it until the police came.
(I eventually got an Alesis SR16 and a much smaller amp).

[Pranet]

Also had a Specdrum. I used to play along with it pretending I was in Big Black.

Games I played most were probably Julian Gollop's Chaos, Rebelstar Raiders and Lasersquad, the latter two would eventually become the X Com games. Once I found some weird Russian modification of Lasersquad, lost several computers ago. Spectrum clones had a long run in Russia, there were upgraded versions released.

[seepage]

Yes, Chaos & Laser Squad were fab.

Wasted far too much time on Annals of Rome and Encyclopaedia Of War: Ancient Battles

[Cuntbeaks]

Julian Gollop's Chaos

8 player madness, revolutionary for the time and hugely replayable. One of my all time favourite games.

[Small Man Big Horse]

One of my first memories is of a friend owning a ZX81, a group of us were quietly ushered in to his front room to be shown a game that his older brother had supposedly made (though I suspect it was probably just typing in a listing from a magazine) where you could move a dot around a maze, but the walls moved at random and you might be squashed by one at any point. Despite the random and unfair nature of the game I was blown away by the fact that you could control something on the tv, and couldn't wait to get my own computer, though my parents held out for a good couple of years before I wore them down.

[Norton Canes]

One of my first memories is of a friend owning a ZX81, a group of us were quietly ushered in to his front room to be shown a game that his older brother had supposedly made (though I suspect it was probably just typing in a listing from a magazine) where you could move a dot around a maze, but the walls moved at random and you might be squashed by one at any point

Sounds like a precursor to Splat! on the Spectrum. A decent little game actually, gets pretty frenetic on the later levels. And it speaks!

Play it on QAOP

[Norton Canes]

Actually I think one thing that stymied the development of ZX Spectrum games even from the early days was the obsession with making them bigger rather then better. So before long games were promoted with the promise of 'More screens!' or 'Bigger maps!'. Of course the drawback was that no matter how cunning the programmers were at compressing their code, a larger playing area inevitably meant less detail. So whereas Manic Miner's twenty levels were intricately planned and included surprise bonus features like the wayward heat ray in the Solar Power Generator, Jet Set Willy's sixty screens are mostly wide open spaces. This obsession with upscaling the playable area made even less sense with most games not offering players the chance to save their progress (as if many people would want to contend with the Spectrum's erratic tape saving ability anyway). Perhaps worse than the slew of huge but often featureless games that resulted, though, were the missed opportunities - looking at something like Spelunky, with its sixteen programmatically generated levels packed to the rafters with an assortment of monsters, traps and weapons (and its relatively short playing time), it seems ideal for the Spectrum's tiny memory. 

[peteprodge]

8 player madness, revolutionary for the time and hugely replayable. One of my all time favourite games.

Chaos is the greatest computer game of all time, on any platform. I still play it, on an emulator on my PC. It's never been bettered. Sure, there was a sequel which was better looking and had its own quirky landscape, but that took away the "everything is on the screen" quality (as seen in yer Pac Man and Space Invaders) that Chaos had. And there's Chaos Reborn on Steam, if you fancy trying Chaos here in the PC gaming era, and it does look really impressive, but that too is rather linear.

So, yeah, Chaos, every time for me. Better than Populous 2, Mario Kart, Target Renegade, Double Dragon, Bubble Bobble, Golden Axe, Streets Of Rage 2... and I don't say that lightly.

[JesusAndYourBush]

(as if many people would want to contend with the Spectrum's erratic tape saving ability anyway)

Unlike my experience with the ZX81, I never had a problem saving and loading on the Spectrum.  I used a ghetto blaster and was even able to load quite dismal copies that'd been done tape to tape a couple of generations.  I understand that those who had that later Spectrum with the built-in tape deck might have had problems though as for the week I had one I discovered the tape deck was utter shite and there seemed no way of bypassing it and using your own.

[Tony Tony Tony]

Is it wrong to find the come hither pose of this nurse a tad sexy?

[shiftwork2]

Is it wrong to find the come hither pose of this nurse a tad sexy?

There's no attribute clash so it's fine.

[boki]

There's no attribute clash so it's fine.

I'd clash her attributes[nb]somebody kill me[/nb]!

[Blumf]

Fave Speccy game: Starion



3D space shooter with added puzzle game. Surprisingly responsive for the graphics.

Would also like to add my admiration to Chaos, one of the best multi-player games on any platform.

Has she still not got that dog dirt off her shoe?