Top 10 ZX Spectrum Games
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- The ZX Spectrum a popular 8-bit computer throughout the 80s and early 90s featured some amazing games including Bubble Bobble, Chuckie Egg, Gauntlet and many more more. Why not tell me your favourite ZX Spectrum games in the comments section below and please like and subscribe as there will be plenty more gaming countdowns on the way.
- Игры
I like old school games. Sometimes, less is more
For me, less is ALWAYS more. The Speccy is my favourite games machine.
Yes, I like games that are simple but not easy.
International karate + yie ar kung fu loved these most
Very true sir👌🏾👍🏾🙏🏾
Bombjack is great on the Speccy. Better than the C64 version. Also I recommend Moon Cresta, Spiky Harold (rock hard and infuriating) Scooby Doo, Exolon (criminally hard) Green Beret, Barbarian (Palace) and the Monty mole games. Of course if you want better sound try the 128k versions or bite the bullet (sacrilege 😊) --------get out the C64!🎉you know you cannot resist that SiD chip sound.
30 years since i was playing renegate with my brother in 2 players mode... I cant belive that many years have passed...
@Mihai M. "I cant belive that many years have passed..." - Yup. I suppose it really is true: Time does fly when you're having fun!...
Imagine playing a ZX Spectrum for that long that when you have finished 30 years have passed. Serving a sentence for armed robbery would pass quicker. 😂😂
I think the games are still great today because so much was put into them at the time!
I had Target Renegade on my Spectrum +2 back in 1988,one of my Favourite games 🙂
No "Head Over Heels" ??
Knight Lore & Jet Set Willy were my favourites. Loved JSW despite the bugs. Fairlight was the most technically accomplished visually. Chronos - Tapestry of time had the best music. Way of the Exploding Fist & Trashman are worthy of a mention too. (I know it's all opinion). Overall there are too many great games to mention - it was a great time creatively.
JSW was brilliant. Did you ever play Uridium? That was another classic!
@@The_Professor26 Yeah I remember playing Uridium. I played both C64 original round at a mates and the spectrum conversion. Both were great to play! I love a good Shoot-em-up. Moon Cresta was another good one - faithfull conversion from the arcade game.
JSW was fantastic. Never understood why so many favoured Manic Miner over it. Knight Lore was nice and all but Head Over Heels was a better game IMO.
Bionic commando deserves a spot. Awesome arcade port.
If you restrict yourself to only 10 games you are doomed to miss out on many an excellent game on the Speccy for sure.
The ones I miss most on this list are: Elite, Starstrike 2 (impossible stuff for a C64), Starglider, Carrier Command, Midnight Resistance, Lords of Midnight, almost any of the Freescape games like Driller, Fairlight, Avalon and Dragontorc and I did not even start with adventures...
Hello ! if you enjoy original classic gaming machines join to this Facebook group : facebook.com/groups/original.gaming.machines.40s.to.90
You have just put me in a DeLorean and sent me 30+ years in beautiful innocent time. Great list, there are of course other top titles but You've done this 1st class. Actually, my older brother has finished as I recall 21(!) times in a row the Manic Miner game, crazy and mind blowing (consider that then You couldn't save your position)! Anyway, thanks so much for bringing warm memories on the beginning of my gameplay, keep up the great work :)
ja smo snemali igrice na radijo študent hahahaha
@@delorean5490 Vjerujem da znaš hrvatski, ipak smo nekad živjeli pod istim nebom :) Da, meni su igre dolazile dijelom iz Ljubljane a dijelom iz Beograda i to su stvarno bili kvalitetne kasete i snimci. Katalog ispisan na tipkačoj mašini, pa narudžba pismom... i uvijek sretan kao dijete kad dode za 7 dana! Lijepa vremena zaista, veliki pozdrav Sloveniji iz Splita (i moja djedovina je od tu - pogledaj prezime, tata mi je tečno pričao slovenski) i držite se u ova teška vremena.
@@dejanmedvesek3399 jeste kupovali kasete na bolšjaku u ljubljani:) bilo i prošlo ali bilo super:) pozdrav u Split,i ostanite zdravi!
@@delorean5490 Volio bih da se mogu sjetiti, davno davno je to bilo! Ja bih to poštom naručivao, i dan danas imam ispravan ZX48 i oko 80 kaseta za njega (10-12 igara na kaseti). Jednom za rodendan sam zazelio kasetofon sa brojčanikom; od tada je puuunooo lakše bilo naći igru :) Čak negdje imam i kućište sa kliker tastaturom (svijetlo-tamne smeđe boje) u kojeg se ubaci elektronika iz originalnog. Stvarno stvarno je bio ispred svog vremena, čak imam i jednu original jugoslavensku tekstualnu avanturu "Vruće letovanje"! Lipi pozdrav "Spektrumovče" :)
@@dejanmedvesek3399 sad imaš playstation,malo bolja grafika haha
Pretty solid list, all great games for sure. It's hard to make a top 10 for the ZX Spectrum, so many great games! My personal ZX highlights were: Manic Miner, Highway Encounter, Dizzy, and Knight Tyme to name a few. Thanks for the video!
I loved Knight Tyme. Loved it so much that I finished it (which wasn’t a given with old games).
Highway encounter - yes! And what about Rick Dangerous? Absolutely classic! I still have working Timex 2048 and a lot of games on magnetic tapes :D
Had most of these games. Loved Target Renegade also Chase HQ 2. New Zealand Story was another good platformer and Rebelstar 2 was a great turn based action strategy basically doing Aliens
Renegade was my favourite as a child on my 48K Speccy and by Jove, it got hard as nails on later levels. I remember playing for days until I was able to complete it. An amazing game.
Anyone remeber Sabotage? As a 7 year old kid that game did something to my imagination. Don't need huge open worlds to feel like in something big.
Sabotage or Saboteur?
Everyone’s entitled to their choice. 🤷🏼♂️
These certainly aren’t mine.
I couldn’t pick just ten.
Here’s some I’ve added.they’re not my ten but some of my favourite 😉
Saboteur
Airwolf
Commando.
Way of the exploding fist
Booty
All Horace games
Wild bunch
Planet of death
Maze runner
Jet pack
Ark of yesod
Tir na nog
Bosconian
Xylon
Green beret
And most of all shooting games 😁
Hope this jogged your memory. If your 49 give me a shout out 👍🏻🏴
.
So glad r-Type is on here, we loved going back to it in our review, thanks for the video.
Skool Daze was probably 1 for me. I also loved the Bruce Lee game.
Bruce Lee was only 1 of a very select few that I could actually complete, without cheating.
@@Dannysince1985 Same here. Bruce Lee was one of those games I wished was a lot longer. I'd love some kind of modern version.
@@Dannysince1985
Yup. Me too.
Love the good old Speccy, so many classic games to play, got some speccy reviews on on channel if your interested, thanks for this mate
How to be a complete and utter bastard was one if my faves, but I totally agree with your selection. I had totally forgotten about Rainbow island 🥺 such a classic!
Emlyn Hughes soccer, matchday II, bomjack, r-type, myth, robocop, booty, chuckie egg and target renegade, ahh those were the days 😁
Thanks for this :) My favourite list: FA Cup Football, Football Manager 1 & 2, Enduro Racer, High noon, Bomb Jack, Pssst, Scuba Dive, Ms. Pac-Man, Sabre Wolf,
That manic miner
screen brings back memories from when we realised, "The game worked ! "
Great Video! Thanks for that!
Just blew my mind with nostalgia. no jetset willly? Feelsbadman
Me personally. I thought there were far better original speccy games than arcade ports.Glad you made a list though.
Boulder Dash was unplayable. Just compare to the Commodore 64 version and you'll immediately notice the difference. The problem is in the background scrolling.
They chosed to scroll 1 character wide (8x8 pixels) rows or columns at a time, where Rockford moves 2 characters wide (16x16) pixels at a time. It's the same on the Commodore version, but the scrolling routine is called twice as often as the character movements, where on the Spectrum version, it's called at the same pace.
As a result, your characters quickly gets out of the screen (where on the Commodore version, the scrolling catches up), and you inevitably get killed while not in sight.
It doesn't look like a problem on this short demo because the player stops before getting out of the screen, but in some levels (since the 2nd one already), you really have to rush all the way from the left to the right side, as stopping inbetween inevitably gets your crushed by falling rocks, meaning you quickly end up a whole screen width ahead of the display, playing completely blind...
At the time I had tried to debug it, but couldn't find a way to speed up the background scrolling frequency nor double the scrolling rate (it would have been a bit jerky, but at least playable)... When I say I couldn't find a way, it just mean I could't find where in the code it was made. I'd have to spend more time on it, because it's actually a good game, but I dont have that time currently...
Now about this top : R-Type is wonderfully adaptated, Renegade is very pleasant to play, with very responsive controls, and Bomb jack is really the best one in that regard... But the ultimate best game is absent from your ranking : Elite.
I also note at the time they did little efforts to add color where it would have been easily possible without attributes clashing, especially on the larger sprites, and even more especially when they're centered on the screen, thus not risking any conflict with other objects, such as the car in chase HQ... Later released games such as Karnov, Castlevania, etc. didn't hesitate to add more color everywhere for great effects and readability, at the cost of some minor color clashes problems, kept low enough thanks to animated characters large enough to fit complete attribute bytes and a bit of cheating such as using a unique color background (usually black) with textured foreground colors to successfully hide the color limitations.
As an example, as I explained above, Boulder Dash was always scrolling by 8x8 pixels at a time, so they could have easily used more colored tiles... But, oh, well, the result is still visually OK, the big problem being the lazy scrolling...
Yes, the scrolling wasn't great but it was something you adapted to and got used to. I played through most of the spectrum game and the scrolling didn't stop you doing the puzzles.
Boulder Dash was complete rubbish compared to the vastly superior Earth Shaker and Riptoff
@@Scripture-Man Thanks for the hints. It's been such a long time I hadn't kept track of how many new titles came up after the 80s, so I've completely missed this one (I had to switch to a PC starting from 1990 for professional reasons, though I still had the Speccy handy then).
I've browsed through the many clones of Boulder Dash from the YS list and I'll give Earth Shaker a serious try, though it feels a bit sluggish.
Apparently some other clones featured a better responsivity, but I still miss the frames from the original title I had the occasion to play on a C64 in the 80s.
It's too bad Riptoff has been designed on a far too large 3x3 characters pattern as the controls responsiveness seems OK, but the game screen feels too cramped.
I see there are also some 1x1 character pattern clones but the feeling is off as well.
Anyway, there seem to be some decent 2x2 clones I'm going to try.
Too bad the official adaptation has this major problem with the backgound scrolling being half the speed of the character, making it completely unplayable.
@@martinj.fowler6262 The problem this Boulder Dash is it contains vast rows of diamonds and boulders you have to run through horizontally for a long time and you die if you stop.
So you end up running past the side of the screen, not knowing at all where you are... And die as well. Extremely frustrating.
All they had to do was scrolling the screen 2 bytes horizontally, and 16 bytes vertically, exactly like the charater, instead of 1 byte horizontally and 8 bytes vertically... It would even have improved the game speed. But no, these idiots had to repeat two single length scrollings instead of one double length scrolling, and it totally ruined the game.
Actually, it was probably done that way on the C64 in order to give the background scrolling a smoother feeling, but the C64 had hardware scrolling and sprites, and all of them were correctly synchronized...
How to ruin an adaptation with lazy programming.
@@Z80Man Re: Riptoff graphics size - Yeah, it's a valid criticism of Riptoff, and one I hadn't actually thought of before. To be honest, the graphic size was determined by the fact that I'd written a wee graphics editor that was based around 24x24 pixels (or 3x3 characters) and knocked up some graphics on there, realising that I could make the guy 3 colours like the guy from Repton, if I made them that size. Maybe if I'd got somebody to playtest it, rather than just my friend Craig and I swapping level designs, that would have turned up as a suggestion. Perhaps I'll do a Riptoff++ with 16x16 graphics to see how it looks. 🙂
For me the best ZX Spectrum game of all time is Myth. One of the few games I completed on the system, it was a perfect game. Gotta agree with most of this list though.
This is my top ten from my childhood. Not the best games maybe but the ones I enjoyed more, alone and with my brothers =D
1 - Target Renegade
2 - Jack the Nipper 2
3 - R-Type
4 - Cobra
5 - Boulder Dash
6 - Mission Impossible
7 - Green Beret
8 - Renegade
9 - Ghost 'n Goblins
10 - Arkanoid
Another great games I keep fondly in my mind
Bruce Lee
Skool Daze
Flying Shark
Gryzor
Bomb Jack
Arkanoid II
Dan Dare
Exolon
THX
I played them all..
Except Maybe 'Gryzor' and 'Exolon'?
ZX Forever!
fairlight and spindizzy , played them for ages lol
Used to love match day 2 and also loved dynamite Dan, brilliant game
Boulder Dash was Rock Hard lol
love the video mate :)
PS I think Enduro racer was a fantastic conversion !
Nightmare Rally and Enduro Racer were brilliant too 😆
Good list but it's a crime to miss out on The Great Escape, amazing game.
Exactly
Best game on it . Still love it now
So much respect from an MSX guy
Thanks for the video!
Good to see bomb jack, a family favourite. And chase h.q 1 of my all time favourites.
Head Over Heels is and always will be No. 1.
My other favourites include: Dark Side, Where Time Stood Still, Renegade, Operation Wolf, Gauntlet 2, Green Beret, Bugaboo The Flea, Dizzy (all of em), Feud, Jack The Nipper 2, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, Movie, Ollie & Lisa, Universal Hero, Deflektor, Arkanoid, Elite, The Sentinel, Captain Blood, Driller, Jet Set Willy, Booty, Rex, Chuckie Egg 2, Horace Goes Skiing, Nebulus, Cybernoid II and Jet Pac. To name a few...
One game I loved was Everyone's A Wally! I remember writing code in manually from a Spectrum book of games to create a game. It would take hours writing it in and if there was any tiny mistake of course it wouldn't work :(
That's why learning about the instructions (I assume you mean BASIC code?) is a skill.
If you understand the code, then it's easier to fix the problems.
The Spectrum itself (if it's a particular type of error) will tell you - line number and statement along that line number.
@@letsdiscussitoversometea8479 Yes it was basic code If a=3 then goto 100 something like that. I was 10 years old and didn't understand. But I still tried many times to write out games and save them on a cassette tape. I can still hear that noise when loading up :D
@@letsdiscussitoversometea8479 usually the errors came about when you had to type loads of DATA strings, just endless numbers separated by commas. The magazines would inevitably misprint one of them and then give corrections the following month
@@mr.y.mysterious.video1 oh that's MUCH more arduous!
I suppose it's _possible_ to create a BINary to (whatever a 0 to 255 number DATA statement is) converter.
Although, I really hated inputting DATA BIN lines - they both wore me out in their own ways.
Best just writing a custom program for the purpose with a graphics-type plotter.
@@letsdiscussitoversometea8479 Horrible machines.
Top 10 on speccy is a very personal thing. World of spectrum top 100, crash top 100 etc is very different to what I would consider as spectrums best games. Likewise your list, but that’s the beauty of the spectrum. There were literally thousands of decent games that bring back so many memories of a simpler time. Thanks for sharing your top 10.
Thousands of games yes. Decent ones though? No, you can count them on both hands and have some fingers to spare.
Horrible era of gaming.
A lot of beautiful games with godly programming technique
I had Lemmings on the spectrum, how they got it all on a cassette I don't know
I remember buying this for 4 k for my kids 30years back.😃they used to enjoy
Match Day 2, Head over heels, Bruce Lee, La abadia del crimen, Saboteur 2, Navy Seals, Match Point...
really the best selection of games!
For someone born in 1997 like me, I really think games like this are very creepy, I remember my uncle playing Prince of Persia on his old NES and getting really scared at that time. But I think in the 80's people have created and started the game industry is a wonderful thing.
Too old games like these were sub par at the time and were indeed a bit creepy. They were like something you'd see playing in the background of some dystopian soviet bloc hell hole while people wait for the end of the world. Horrible machines.
Great vídeo, great Channel.
Canal Win Thanks for the support 😊
@@wizzgamer I admire your very channel my friend
Original renegade was the best, Chase HQ was well up there, one of the few games that didn't feel a massive downgrade.
Awesome video man.
Consoletronix Thanks dude 🙂
Great list, like.
Thanks :)
from memory, most of my time was spent copying games from mates, rather then playing them. ;)
Cool top 10 retro games
Good video! It will need to be updated now that Delta's Shadow has been released! :-) It has to be the best Spectrum game ever.
Tau Ceti was my favourite ZX Spectrum game ever. And Pete Cooke my favourite ZX Spectrum games programmer. I used to keep an eye on new ZX Spectrum games by him, and bought many of them. Room 10 was another game I liked by him.
Loved tau ceti got it free on a magazine great days
Love my ZX still
Thanks lot. Well among my friends it was Dizzy 1-5 and elite
Exolon, Saboteur 1&2, Turtles 1, SimCity, lode runner, megabucks, barbarian 2
was waiting for Atic Atak then i saw Knight Lore an thought fair enough lol
Yes bro, I was thinking the same about head over heels!
Nice video, but you forgot spanish games 😉
They are on the top too, the abbey of crime (the name of the rose), army moves, navy moves, game over, silent shadow, sir fred....
Didn t know that my fav rcop, gaxe, etc. Which I have played at Atari, were originaly Spctrm. 😊
I played versions of these on my ti 83 + graphing calculator about 20 years ago. the English teacher I had at the time saw them and he said he would have loved to have my graphic calculator when he was a kid.
Combat Lynx, Match Point, Match Day, Formula 1, Saboteur, Bomb Jack, Daley Thompsons Supertest, Frank Brunos Boxing, Airwolf, Fighter Pilot....But there were even more great games...
The best version of Ms Pacman I ever played was on the Speccy. Pacmania, Rodland, Astro Marine Corps 1&2, Navy Seals 1, Pang, Kwik Snax, Zybex, Ring Wars, Mad Mix 1, Cabal, Narco Police, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles...
Gauntlet should have been on the top ten imo, loved that. Where's Punchy and Wonder Boy, MIG19 lol, and there was a Dracula hunting (I think it was, or you were Dracula) first person game I never remember the name of, but I loved that game.
A good individual choice that I respect, but I would also choose 3D Death Chase, Dizzy and The Way of the Exploding Fist
Those, and Jetpac
Target: Renegade is clearly what gave origin to Golden Axe trilogy for Mega Drive.
Jet Set Willy by far better than most on your list, not even a mention ? And of course the Flight Simulator should have been mentioned at least.
I loved: Saboteur II, Infiltrator, Gunship, Renegade, Platoon, Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix, Tai Pan, Combat School, Spy Hunter, Exolon, Enduro Racer
I agree with the most of this list, because I proved it with statistical calculations of greatest ZX Spectrum games.
5:00 Manic Miner была одной из моих любимых
My god glad i watched this, was about to buy one but seeing how many of the games run on top of rarity and price im skipping on this for the nearest future for sure.
Here in Sweden the games are quite hard to come by.
Will pursue som other stuff first, then i might actually pick this up only time will tell...
Some of the games looks quite fun tho.
Sabre Wulf, Underwulde, Monty Mole, Match Point (a tennis game), Ad Astra, Saboteur, Full Throtle and many more. I used to like 2d platforms the most. This is 48k Spectrum only.
I wish this Sinclair dude brought the spectrum to the U.S. in a big way. Computers cost so much that I spent most of the 80s without one.
i like the way r-type and gauntlet look
В России тоже любили ZX-Spectrum
Что значит любили? До сих пор любят
spy hunter, rebelstar, jetpak and football manager, these were the days
I absolutely loved my Spectrum 16k, but looking at these now makes me never want to play or see them again :(
Not a bad list at all, however nobody seems to mention in the comments any of the below (in no particular order):
1) The Sentinel
2) Quazatron
3) Loderunner
4) Chronos
5) XOR
6) Thunderbirds
7) Space Raiders 2
8) Death Star
9) Ikari Warriors
10) Netherearth
11) Lazer Squad
12) Serpenti
13) Bloody Eyes
. . .
(There are MANY, MANY more, but, hey, one has to stop someplace... 😋)
Bat man, ninja, saboteur, Abu simbel, great escape to name a few. As for robocop being "better than the arcade", if you don't remember just watch the original version 😂😂
No Head over Heels? 🤯
Great selection regardless. Too many classics to choose from.
one i still love today was solomons key that was great game has to be in this top ten
Funny we're talking about ZX Spectrum, and the music is from Sonic's Labyrinth Zone.
If I remember correctly, Robocop for ZX Spectrum was without music. Version presented here is for Sinclair 128kB. ;-)
Death wish 3 was awesome , Dun Darach, Tir Na Nog and Marsport were a series of adventure type games, stunt car Racer, Combat School...... i'm getting my Speccy head on so i'll shut up. Thanks for the video.
I remember completing Robocop on Christmas day.
It is really difficult and, maybe, unfair, to choose 10 best games. But, of course, it is a personal choice. To me, there are lots of games in the same level or better. Some examples I remember right now are "I, ball", Dan Dare, Kayleth, Alien Syndrome, The Great Escape, Underwurlde and Sabre Wulf. Not to mention the hundreds I've never played!
Odd job Eddy. And I remember skipping school that day to complete it
I was literally watching a video of Sonic just now and then this one has labyrinth zone music.
I truly miss Chaos from this list that is an unbelievable game :)
Some of these, you couldn't tell whether they were 8-bit, or Atari 2600 games.
Boulder Dash and Saboteur! :)
Impossible to whittle down to 10. You’ll just be forever agonising about the games you left out.
Personal choice. None of these bar maybe SkoolDays would be in my list, but as I say, personal view/choice..
Gauntlet was amazing!!
Chuckie egg is my number 1.
I loved Bombjack and played it more than Chuckie Egg, but i have to admit that Bomb Jack was a fancy version of Chuckie Egg.
So chuckie wins by being the original inspiration.
amazing.. for reasons unknown I immediately think of early Macintosh 512k.. if the Mac had at least 4 colors in the early days (mid 1980s) its games must have resembled these speccy games.. 💗🙋♂💗
sadly I never played the speccy as it was not available in my country when I was younger.
KANE was my best game in ZX Spectrum
No Chaos: Battle Of The Wizards
Really a great game, but not also one of my top 10.
both speccy and cpc (the british knights) were famous with isometric arcade/adventures, more than anything else.
Elite, sim city, Heavy on the Magick, nether earth, barbarian, exolon, dizzy, saboteur, chronos, bruce lee It was so long ago. I can barely remeber...
I was ready to have a rant if Target Renegade wasn’t in the top ten, but glad fully rant avoided 😂. I think other notable mentions could be Barbarian, Renegade, Op Wolf, Combat School and Hypersports.
Che ricordi... Target renegade tanta roba hai tempi... Finito più di 1 volta