Treasure Island Dizzy
AI PlatformerPuzzleClassicAn 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.
Game Reviews
Reviews of ZX Spectrum games old and new — from the golden-era classics of the 1980s to the thriving modern homebrew scene.
Filtered by tag: Classic — Clear filter
Cybernoid
AI Shoot-em-upActionClassicA 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.
Skool Daze
AI SimulationArcade adventureClassicSteal 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.
Chuckie Egg
AI PlatformerClassicHenhouse 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.
Sabre Wulf
AI Arcade adventureMazeClassicAn 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.
Head Over Heels
AI IsometricPuzzle-platformerClassicTwo 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.
Jet Set Willy
AI PlatformerClassicMiner Willy's mansion is even more perilous than his mine: sixty-plus surreal rooms to explore before his housekeeper will finally let him go to bed.
Elite
AI Space simTradingClassicA galaxy of open-ended trading, combat and exploration rendered in real-time wireframe 3D — barely conceivable on an 8-bit machine, yet here it is.
Knight Lore
AI IsometricArcade adventureClassicThe game that invented an entire genre: Sabreman's race against his own lycanthropy, told through Ultimate's revolutionary isometric "Filmation" engine.
Atic Atac
Action-adventureMazeClassicEscape a five-story haunted castle armed with a ranged weapon and a roast chicken for a health bar. Ultimate at their finest.
Green Beret
Arcade conversionActionClassicOne man, one knife, four levels of Cold War mayhem. One of the finest arcade conversions the Spectrum ever received.
Manic Miner
PlatformerClassicMatthew Smith's 48KB masterpiece: twenty caverns of pixel-perfect peril and the Spectrum's first continuous in-game music.