Reviews of ZX Spectrum games old and new — from the golden-era classics of the 1980s to the thriving modern homebrew scene.
Eight mercenaries, eight full personnel dossiers, and a roster-building screen with more narrative ambition than most of its budget-shelf contemporaries bothered with. Whether there's a mission behind it is a question this review, in good conscience, cannot answer.
A caped, superhero dog battles his way across a city skyline, with a soundtrack that borrows shamelessly from Rossini.
Humpty Dumpty, reimagined as an arcade engineer — one of three Artic Computing games built around the nursery rhyme character in 1984.
Dan lands his airship on Dr. Blitzen's hideout to steal the plans for a Death Ray — eight sticks of dynamite, a lot of falling, and Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca standing in for a soundtrack.
A clever little copying utility whose biggest technical achievement — copying software far larger than itself — may also have been its most awkward business feature: it could copy itself.
An egg with boxing gloves washes up on a cursed island — the game that turned Dizzy into British budget software's best-loved mascot, and arguably the best entry in his own series.
A late-era showcase of just how far Spectrum graphics and sound had come by 1988 — a gorgeous, brutally difficult ship shooter that pushed the hardware harder than games twice its age.
Ten thousand locations and an entire fantasy war, fit inside a 48K machine that had no business holding a tenth of it. Mike Singleton's "Landscaping" engine remains one of the most audacious feats of Spectrum programming.
Steal your own school report before it reaches your parents — a bizarrely ahead-of-its-time simulation full of teachers with their own individual routines, moods and weaknesses.
Henhouse Harry climbs ladders and dodges hens to collect eggs against the clock. Deceptively simple, ferociously addictive, and blessed with some of the tightest controls of the early Spectrum era.
An enormous, hallucinogenically colourful jungle maze stalked by the eponymous Wulf — Ultimate's take on wide-open exploration, arriving well before the genre had a name.
Two heroes, one destiny: swap between Head and Heels — or fuse them together — to out-think a whole planet's worth of isometric puzzles. Widely regarded as one of the finest games the Spectrum ever ran.
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