My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Elite & Atic Atac

So once again lets go back to my Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games list and look at another two from the list, so without further ado here we go.

Elite

So the first ever time I saw Elite it was on the BBC Micro which my older brother owned, I adored it from the first moment and forgive the pun but I thought the game was light years ahead of its time. Now the spectrum had so many games on it that its even harder to pick a top ten for it than it would be for most systems but the reason this one makes the list is that when you consider the hardware its running on and when it was made you simply didnt get games like this back then, the game was  and still is a joy to play and the main reason for this is that its a game which you play however you want to play it.

The graphics the wire-framed ships were just unthinkably brilliant back then they might have aged now but what hasnt aged is the sense of freedom you see in Elite you jump in your space ship the  Cobra Mk III and you explore a large and wonderful universe, you can trade cargo, fight pirates or maybe you want to be a pirate yourself and attack other ships so that when youve destroyed them you can take there cargo for yourself using your tractor beam to steal it.Yes we have all kinds of open world games now days but back then this was pretty much one of a kind. I could talk about this game till the cows come home but I think it is much better to simply say you need to play this game

An intresting and kind of annoying point to note is that Elite was the first game to ever utilise an anti piracy method called the LensLock. The LensLock is basically a special Lens that came with the game, now you look at coloured squares on the screen through this in order to read a code which you need to play the game.

Atic Atac

When I used to play this game back in the day I never knew that it was something I would keep coming back to for my entire life, the very last time I set up my spectrum it was to play this very game and a select few others and now thanks to the Compilation Disc Rare Replay, I can very easily find myself playing this any time I want in seconds. So yeah Basically the name on the box here Ultimate Play The Game is the name Rare went by before they became Rare.

Atic Atac is what would proberbly be described as an Isometric arcade adventure game it was released for the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro. The thing is a lot of people think that Rare and there long stretch of impresive games all started with the NES, well the truth is far from that in fact Ultimate had already been making games on the 16k model of Spectrum but Atic Atac was there second game which required 48K of memory and its an absolute belter of a game, for those that dont know how big a deal Ulitmate was as a developer this game was Ultimate's third consecutive number one in the UK Spectrum sales chart.

Atic Atac plays in a  top-down perspective and is set inside a castle, a castle in which you the player are trapped. You need to find 3 pieces of a golden key in order to escape, something that makes this game all the more intresting is that you have a choice of three diffrent characters a Knight a Wizared or a Serf. There are a number of items which are all around the castle for you to find, some of them are always in the same place others are randomly generated, you can carry 3 of them at a time.
You have diffrent coloured keys which will open doors which are the same colour, then theres items which will kill or repel enemies. All of the enemies essentially attack the player on sight, contact with them drains your life bar. So what makes this a top ten game? It is a great game to just jump in to, the randomness really helps with repeat replays but its mostly just because its so darn playable, wether you play this game on an original spectrum, a modern spectrum recreation or on rare replay I just advice you to give it a crack and see what you think.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Yie Ar Kung Fu and Kickstart 2

 So its back to my list of Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games again, so here is another two games from my top 10. So without further ado here we go.

3: Yie Ar Kung Fu

Yie Ar Kung Fu was a pretty well known arcade gamebut I think it was possibly even more popular as a computer game the original arcade game was by a Japanese gaming company I am sure you will have heard of Konami, and it needs to be said that Imagine did a great job adapting the game to the humble spectrum. I need to admit that there is one thing that really made me keep coming back to this game and its something that people really wouldnt think of nowdays and thats loading time. Some spectrum games could take what seemed like hours to load and could feel like they just were not worth it, Yie Ar Kung Fu not only was great to play it also loaded fast as anything which back in those days was important.

The scenario of the game is a simple one. You take control of a young kung fu fighter called Oolong who wants to follow in the his fathers footsteps honouring his family name by becoming a Kung Fu Grand Master. To do this Oolong must fight and defeat a large mix of diffrent fighters with diffrent styles and in some cases weapons. The story might be simple but it just feels so well so much like a proper Kung Fu film turned into a game, the characters you face all seem to fit in the moulds of characters you would see in one of those old dubbed kung fu movies and well it just makes it feel great, youd think that with just one attack button and one stick your moves would be rather limited but when playing the game it doesnt feel this way at all. You have a roundhouse kick, a leg sweep, a body punch and leaping punches all of which you use to strike your opponent and deplete there energy bar before they can get you. You had 5 lives to try and defeat all of your opponents with and beating each one of them seemed to very much be a case of learning the way they moved and learning stratergies to cope with them. Its a very enjoyable game as you always seem to get a little bit better, the more you play the more you learn and the further you get.

Modern players might find this game a little basic in a post Street Fighter 2 world with combo's and special moves and a large choice of player characters but dont let these things put you off trying the game, it has a great character to it and it a great feel, I would love to see a modern sequel that takes the same sort of characters and feeling as Yie Ar Kung Fu but throws in all of the modern trimmings of the one on one fighter that we have gotten so used to, the combos and special moves

4: KickStart 2

Kickstart 2 is a motorcycle  racing game, it is obviously the sequel to Kikstart but this is where I have to admit that I have never actually seen or played the original Kickstart so I cant say if its a big improvment over the original or not, what I can say is that I really like this game but then I guess thats obvious with this being on this list. The game is very basic you control your bikes braking and acceleration, you also hop and pull wheelies and you do all of this in order  to navigate across a course of various obstacles including ramps, tyres, gates and telephone boxes. You have to learn how to make the best time on courses by knowing how your supposed to deal with diffrent types of obsticals, for example you need to travel slowly across wooden beams, but if you go too slowly over the tyes then you will be thrown off your bike so you need to go over those quickly. I guess this game has two things in common with the above Yie Ar Kung Fu one of them is the fact that you have to learn how to handle things be they opponents or situations and that the more you learn the better you get at the game and the other is that KickStart 2 is a very quick loading game, I used to be putting this game on all of the time because it was good and it took a fraction of the time to load that most of my games did.

If I was to try and explain to a more modern gamer what KickStart 2 is like I would say imagine an older more primative version of Trials HD, you can actually see how simmilar they are Trials is just sort of the same idea taken to its natural point of progression.What can I say though I love Trials now and I loved KickStart back then, and heck for all of the time that has passed I still think the gamkes not too shabby.

The console wars were not the first great geek civil war.

People talk about the great Console Wars Nintendo Versus Sega, Super Nintendo versus Megadrive (Genesis) but here in the UK there was a great nerd Civil war before most of us had really even woken up to the idea of cartridge based gaming, what was was this you ask? It was Spectrum versus Commodore. Wits, statistics and even fists were some times thrown trying to defend ones side, it was like politics before we were old enough to understand who Labour and the conservatives were, and if you carry on the analogy then that would mean that the BBC was the home computer version of the liberal democrats, third place without much of a chance or many people giving a toss really.

The BBC's biggest disadvantage as an item of coolness was the fact that it was in our classrooms. I can remember classes of thirty children all sat on some god awful itchy carpet our heads almost touching as we all leaned left and right to get a view of the screen. In truth I don't know why we bothered, most of the time all that was on the screen was a bunch of words that our teacher would proceed to read out to us anyway. It would always be something like this ''You are in a large dark cave, the air smells, the ground beneath your feet feels slimy, the witch is coming for you, what do you want to do.'' We would all then shout out stuff to the teacher who would tend to do what the majority said which would be something like ''go north'' and you would be met with either ''you can not go north'' ''you have gone north what now'' or every now and then someone would get the bright idea to shout something along the lines of ''turn around and fuck her to death''. The whole class would laugh even though only a certain percentage of us even had any idea what that meant, the bright spark would be sent out of the room along with anyone who couldn't stop themselves from laughing and the BBC would be turned of and we would go back to book learning. thinking back on it I really should have done that kind of thing less often. Even though the BBC had its own killer title that most of us would have pulled our own teeth out to play (Elite) most of us in my day and age didn't know about that as it wasn't the kind of thing schools would get in. I was lucky as my brother who is about 10 years older than me decided to buy a BBC and Elite and I got to play it, but the BBC was never my machine. Consequently as most of us had only seen text based titles in a school environment the BBC Micro had a real image problem as the sort of grey boring middle class home computer aimed at intellectuals and people who wanted to learn and what we really wanted to do was have lots of fun.

In nearly all my friends either bedrooms or backroom's there was  a Commodore 64 or  a 48k Spectrum. So was I team Commodore or team Clive Sinclair? I was Team Spectrum and you know why? Basically because at the age of two or so I was slapped in front of my brothers with bright characters flashing, encouraged to slap on the buttons. Was this because my parents were awful terrible people looking to have some form of computerised overlord babysit for them? No. The reason was much more mundane and well nice than this. My parents basically figured that the way things were going with technology one day if you couldn't use a computer you would basically be unemployable. They figured if I grew up with computers being an every day thing I had seen and touched more or less from the very moment my memories started then I would be ahead of the pack in some way. They wanted the best for me, they didn't slap me in front of my brothers games and let me shoot things just to keep me quiet no they went out of there way and spent a healthy amount on educational software the one I remember the most stared the Mr Men, it tried to teach you basic things like how to count and how to recognise colours. Eventually when my brothers who were both older than me moved on to other things the spectrum became mine and it was my primary games machine. I also through basically being the biggest gamer in the family also inherited the family Atari 2600 my first cart based machine. While the Atari might have been instant though the spectrum had much more advanced games, they were also much easier to find and cheaper to buy. I was basically lovingly indoctrinated in to the family of the Sinclair Spectrum. I liked it because it was made by a British man who seemed like a bit of a cool mad scientist, I liked it because not only did I get all my brothers games but our local news agent and even our local boots the chemist sold games very cheaply for it, there was also the fact that my very very closest friend had one and this tied us even deeper together as friends with a common cause but the main reason I liked it was because it was all I had, all I could afford and I just plain did not want to believe that something out there I couldn't have was or could be better than what was sat in my bedroom on my glorious black and white 8 inch TV.

I was very young when I had the spectrum, I didn't have the skills at that point and time to sit back and look at the big picture or even to have a rational argument, my fist arguments about the machine were in infant school age 5 after all, an infant school in a small mining town where the language was as dark as the pits. So when a 5 year old boy would tell me that I was scum because I had a Spectrum which was rubbish compared to his Commodore my only real recourse of action was to call him a poof or a spastic with no knowledge of what these words meant only knowing I had heard older people say them and that they were in some way offensive.The playground was often a battlefield with a Spectrum lad kicking a commodore lover and then the resulting retaliation, this was long before comprehensive and the thankfully far more peaceful console wars, back in those days hearts were broken and lunch boxes shattered over kids heads and all in the name of one computer or another which is now painfully underpowered compared to the most basic of phones now days and yet in amongst all of the violence and the arguments there was always a bleeping screaming cassette tape playing computer to go home to.