So i will point out before i start that this will only include platforms i have owned. There aren't many missing but full disclosure i have never owned a Sega Saturn or Dreamcast so please don't ask why i haven't included them.
Ok lets start at the beginning.
ZX Spectrum +3:
For those too young or too american to remember or know what the hell a Spectrum was, it was a home computer that ran games from a tape deck that took weeks to load and thats pretty much all you could say about them. That is until the super awesome +3 model came out boasting a 'floppy' disc drive and 128kb of RAM. As a 7 year old this basically meant nothing but numbers were impressive in the playground so it was important to know these stats to get one up on the commodore c64 kids. The games were by todays standards bad beyond belief but back then one could only dream of arcade perfect ports in the home so we made do.
The ultimate Spectrum game for me was Head Over Heels, published by Ocean Software and developed by John Ritman who also worked on Batman (not Arkham Asylum but the almost as good spectrum movie tie in from the 80's).
The game itself made almost no sense to me whatsoever as a child and probably still doesn't today but the hours i put into that game would certainly match the time put into Fallout 3 or Oblivion today. The basic premise was that the player controlled two seperate characters each with different abilities one could jump higher and one could run faster. It was viewed from an isometric perspective and was basically a puzzle solving game that involved getting from one side of the room to the other. The inclusion of a robot that looked like Prince Charles in a Dalek costume is what made this game a life long classic.

Nice blog.
ReplyDeleteNever owned a Spectrum but my Amstrad CPC played an awesome version of Dragon Ninja! Definitely the best title on that machine.
Also loving the High Fidelity reference in your intro - oddly enough, I wrote a blog about that film myself a while ago:
http://top33films.blogspot.com/2009/06/high-fidelity-2000-dir-stephen-frears.html
There is a great article about Head Over Heels and Isometric games in general, in this month's Retro Gamer.
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