Wings Over Sealand

It’s been almost two years since I wrote the totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100 – also compiled and written by me – was published in 1991.

Obviously stuff has continued to happen on the Speccy scene since then, so it’s now, in some senses, not quite so definitive. Or at least it wasn’t, until I updated it, which I’ve just done, so now it is again. Of it. Or something.

(I appear to have a debilitating compulsion to write top 100s for no very good reason. There’s also this one, and I’m currently working on yet another as a distraction from the wretched state of politics, so fans of subjectively-numbered lists of extremely old videogames should definitely stay tuned.)

I also wanted to have it all in one post rather than five, so now if you want to see the videos of the original arcade games you’ll have to click the titles of each entry – only the Speccy videos are embedded within the article, so the page SHOULD now actually load up without falling over.

There are loads of new entries, a few position adjustments – don’t get TOO excited, Bomb Jack fans – and a bit of general tidying, but I haven’t rewritten the entire thing because it’s 33,000 words and I’m not a lunatic, although those two facts are mostly unrelated. So if you haven’t seen it before, go and get a cup of tea and some biscuits, because this might take a while.

——————————————————

 

100. SPY HUNTER (100)

Arcade: 1983, Bally Midway
Spectrum: 1985, US Gold

You may have expected a much higher placing for this. But in truth it plays almost nothing like the coin-op, which is a skittish, high-speed affair with small vehicles, wide roads and complicated dedicated analogue controls that are hard to replicate even with a six-button arcade stick. (And also, I didn’t want to put a game too high whose C64 counterpart was so manifestly and unarguably better.)

Spy Hunter gets in despite this, because while it’s become very different from its arcade parent in being adapted to the Speccy, in several ways it’s actually a MORE playable game, while still clearly resembling the source material in its essence. The graphics, and in particular the use of colour, are absolutely stellar for a quite early Spectrum title, but the more sedate pace and the reduced manoeuvering space also make it gripping to play, because you feel far more in control than you do trying to keep Coin-Op James Bond’s wildly-slaloming cars and boats in check, but traffic is dense enough to still make it tough.

(It’s quite striking how much better a game it is in almost every way than The Spy Who Loved Me, which is basically a remake of it five years later.)

As a port Spy Hunter on the Speccy is only about a 003/10, but as a Spectrum game based on Spy Hunter it’s a solid 007. (I can’t believe you left that joke in. – All readers)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Action Fighter. Less pretty but more actiony and fighty.

99. RODLAND (REIMAGINED) (74)

Arcade: 1990, Jaleco
 Spectrum: 1991, Storm
Reimagined: 2012, Rafal Miazga

Although there are some in this chart, in principle I have quite a low tolerance for Speccy 128 arcade conversions without music, because there really isn’t any excuse for it. For one thing most of them are multiloads, and if you’ve got a multiload then you’ve almost certainly got space in memory for the music. And it’s not like you even have to write it – it’s been written, all you need to do is copy it.

But even without multiload, I mean, where’s all the memory going in Rodland, a game that was 128K-only? A handful of sprites, no backgrounds, and 35 single-screen level layouts you could describe in code as a single line of numbers each. (Only the bosses add a modicum of complexity.)

That the official release was also totally monochrome, then – and black-and-white monochrome at that – added a whole extra layer of disappointment.

But at least that one got fixed.

The mod (actually one of the LESS impressive pieces of work by the absurdly talented and prolific Rafal Miazga) brightens the game up considerably, as well as adding a sense of progress since each group of levels is a different colourscheme. And in gameplay, speed and graphics terms it was already a phenomenally good port – other than the colour it’s basically identical to the coin-op, right down to the simultaneous two-player mode.

So it’s bordering on tragic that it’s so eerily quiet. Coupled with the gloomy black backdrops of even the mod version (changing the background colours might actually have been a better idea – see mockup below), it makes a cheery, jaunty arcade game feel somewhat downbeat, which is a shame because it’s otherwise so great.

The moral of this story: put the music in you lazy tools.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Similarly, only the absence of music kept Speccy Bros – a homebrew take on Toaplan’s Snow Bros – out of our revised chart. The coin-op got rather lost in the huge morass of similar Bubble Bobble derivatives (of which the most successful and closely-related to Snow Bros was probably the excellent Tumble Pop), but this just about the only one of them, apart from Bubble Bobble itself, that made it across to the Speccy.

The Spanish/Russian effort is an exceptional replica, capturing all 50 arcade levels (albeit with some layout tweaks) in an impressive blaze of clash-free colour and speed.

This would have been a highly impressive commercial release, and the fact it’s been squeezed out here is a testament to the exceptional standard this list showcases.

98. SHADOW WARRIORS (NE)

Arcade: 1988, Tecmo
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

There are a few respectable contenders in the walky-walky-punchy-punchy genre that dominated arcades in the Speccy’s heyday. US Gold’s port of Vigilante looks excellent and has all the arcade’s features, but is a bit spoiled by sluggish speed and enemies so constantly in your face that you can’t take two steps without getting caught up in another assault, while Virgin’s ambitious take on Taito’s widescreen Ninja Warriors is smooth and clean but ultimately just too hard to avoid taking hits in.

Shadow Warriors suffers from both of those problems to some degree, and it takes a bit of time to figure out how to play it with any degree of success, but it captures the character of the coin-op in that respect, and its speed and visuals lift it above its rivals.

In truth Shadow Warriors isn’t the greatest arcade game – a problem which also counted against Ocean’s very respectable conversion of the heavily mediocre Bad Dudes Vs Dragon Ninja – and dozens of other titles do much the same thing better, but on the Speccy there’s a lot less competition, and while some of the levels are dumbed down a bit it’s arguably more fun to play than its parent, as well as being head and shoulders above most other home versions.

(Semi-fun trivia fact! Under its alternative name of Ninja Gaiden, Shadow Warriors is inexplicably popular in the US, largely due to its radically-altered NES and Game Boy incarnations. The Speccy also got a rather fine conversion of the latter.)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Midnight Resistance also isn’t really that good an arcade game – despite fine graphics and imaginative, atmospheric level design the controls are horribly overcomplicated and it has some awful slowdown and glitching – but lots of people think well of it due to some splendid home ports, especially the Amiga/ST ones, which don’t look quite as pretty but play better due to simplified controls and having less of an urge to suck money out of your pocket every 90 seconds.

The C64 game is perhaps actually the most impressive of all relative to the power of the host platform, but the Speccy release is just as eye-catching as Shadow Warriors.

Everything’s in there and it looks and sounds fantastic, but the cost of the colourful graphics is character-block movement (bearable) and a serious amount of push-scrolling (disastrous). It ends up playing like Rick Dangerous in parts: the push-scroll dumps you straight on top of a baddy who kills you instantly, and next time you have to remember they’re coming and shoot ahead of yourself.

Luckily it’s not ALL like that, but it’s a game where you earn progress by inches, and the mind-boggling absence of any continues makes it an absurdly fierce challenge. The sheer joy of the constant exploding mayhem does almost enough to overcome the epic amounts of frustration, but in 2023, not quite.

 

97. ALTAIR (92)

Arcade: 1981, Cidelsa
Spectrum: 2014, Inmensa Bola de Manteca

Altair is a Spanish coin-op I’d never heard of until IBdM ported it to the Spectrum as part of a games competition seven years ago.

It turns out it’s a simple but fast and fun multi-stage single-screen shooter in the vein of Gorf, Phoenix, Uni WarS and the like, and the Speccy port is an excellent recreation with loads of colour and sound (even in 48K mode) and arcadey presentation.

But its inclusion is likely to result in surprise for some readers as this chart unfolds, because I can’t justify making room for both this and Moon Cresta.

Moon Cresta was actually one of my biggest disappointments on the Speccy. When I heard it was coming as an official port, relatively far into the machine’s life (1985), and especially after Crash’s rave review, I was super-excited.

The game that actually appeared was startlingly below what I was hoping for. Even the 48K Speccy could do better than that harsh warbly rendition of the intro fanfare and those too-much-curry-last-night sound effects. But far worse than that was getting the most fundamental basics of Moon Cresta’s gameplay wrong.

Where were the self-splitting Cold Eyes in waves 1 and 2, for example? And since when could you wipe out every last Super Fly and Four-D in waves 3-6 before they even appeared onscreen by sitting in one spot and shooting up the middle of the screen with Ship 2? All the enemy movement patterns in the Speccy version are predetermined and predictable, with none of the trademark evasive randomness of the arcade baddies. It just doesn’t feel like the same game.

Technical shortcomings in trying to mimic much more powerful arcade hardware can be forgiven, but there are no excuses for getting the core elements so wrong. Altair nails its target and Moon Cresta, for all its slick presentation and official licence, misses by a mile, so Altair is the one that gets in.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Star Firebirds (Insight, 1985) came out the same year as Moon Cresta, also has underwhelming sound and is a tiny bit sluggish, but it still captures the gameplay of its coin-op counterpart (Space Firebird) better than Moon Cresta does.

96. TIME SCANNER (96)

Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1989, Activision

It’s probably worth noting at this point that this is a present-day chart, reflecting things as played on modern hardware. So games get a free pass for terrible multiloads, and for things like not-very-good and non-redefinable key layouts, because you can fix those on emulators.

Time Scanner actually suffers indirectly from those rules, because it significantly (and detrimentally) rearranged the play of the coin-op in order to reduce the pain of multiload, something that isn’t applicable in the 21st century.

The arcade game saw you move regularly between its four different tables during play, which kept things interesting, but to avoid having to reload them from tape constantly the Speccy game took them one at a time in sequence, which is inherently less fun.

It’s a shame because Time Scanner is far and away the Speccy’s best pinball game, as well as an excellent mechanical recreation of the coin-op. The graphics are splendid, the ball physics pretty much as good as the arcade, and it’s even got the music. It’s still a really good port of a fine game. If only they’d written it for 30 years into the future where tape loading wasn’t an issue, eh, Spec-chums?

95. NIBBLER (NE)

Arcade: 1982, Rock-Ola
Spectrum: 1985, Load’n’Run

Our first “novelty” entry (ie not a standard commercial release) actually comes from an Italian tape magazine, and is a port I only discovered this year, having somehow managed to previously overlook it when compiling Nibbler games for my Retropie.

It’s a really speedy and authentic take, even tougher than what was already a pretty fierce coin-op, and you’ll need lightning thinking and reactions to get through more than a couple of screens. I liked it enough that I translated it into English, and you can download that version here. (To save you a lot of painful experimentation, the keys are A, S, R and X.)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: If we’re talking about intense snake-based maze action, Profisoft’s decent 1984 conversion of Konami’s Jungler, Jangler, is worth a tip of the hat. It’s also the missing link between Nibbler and Eyes, whose extraordinary Zaccaria cabinet was a fixture of my local arcade in the early 80s.

Eyes has fantastically atmospheric and weird sound effects and its also a really good game, a sort of cross between Pac-Man and Wizard Of Wor/Berzerk that’s gripping and challenging from the off, and one that went almost totally unnoticed – the only contemporary home port I’m aware of, either official or unofficial, was one for the BBC Micro that was seemingly going to be published by Ocean but never was.

In 2018, though, a Speccy homebrew version, O-Eyes, appeared. It’s far closer to the coin-op than the BBC version, and goes to a lot of trouble in terms of presentation.

It plays very authentically too, and its only real weakness is sound, which is in short supply. (It also has fewer mazes, but the maze layouts are pretty incidental in Eyes so that’s no great loss.)

I’d love to see an updated version of this, especially for 128K to bring back that unearthly audio, but as it stands it’s still a cracking little arcade game that captures the key characteristics of a cult coin-op and only just got edged out of the list by Nibbler.

 

94. ALI BABA (99)

Arcade: 1982, Sega (as Ali Baba And 40 Thieves)
Spectrum: 1985, Suzy Soft

One of Sega’s least-known coin-ops is the frantic single-screen maze chaser Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves. It got a somewhat cut-down Master System and MSX port that hardly anyone has heard of either, but was otherwise left behind by history except for this obscure Slovenian conversion for the Speccy.

(Again translated into English by me here.)

It lands somewhere in between the arcade and home versions, but faster and with a whole bunch of new mazes (and decent ingame 48K music too, sounding far better than the SMS/MSX game). Even though only one of the enemies can kill you you need eyes in the back of your head if you want to hang onto all your moneybags until the time runs out, and it doesn’t even stop when you lose a life. The needless pickups of the coin-op are also dispensed with to keep the pace and intensity high.

The old machine didn’t get many all-out action games as speedy and smooth and cute as this – it reminds me a bit of a personal favourite of mine, Orion by Software Projects – and if you’ve never seen it before you’re in for a little surprise treat.

93. TERRA CRESTA (91)

Arcade: 1985, Nichibutsu
Spectrum: 1986, Imagine

It’s funny how small things make a big difference. Terra Cresta is one of my favourite arcade vertical shmups, but it’s not the loss of the jaunty music or the brightly-coloured graphics that costs it about 20 places in this chart. (In truth the coin-op version is pretty yellow too.)

Even without the music, Terra Cresta is one of the most pleasingly fast, tough and smooth shooters on the Speccy, and it squeezes in splashes of colour whenever it gets the opportunity. What really lets it down, though, is the godawful screen placement.

The decision to shunt the game field all the way over to one side of the screen to make way for a needlessly huge and out-of-place comedy score/logo panel taking up almost half the total width must be the worst one the legendary Joffa Smith ever made in his illustrious coding career. The screen is SO lopsided and the score display SO loud and garish that it’s a constant distraction and irritation you never really get used to, and it very nearly manages to ruin an extremely accomplished piece of programming.

It doesn’t quite entirely succeed, though. Phew!

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Slap Fight (Imagine, 1987) at least has an excuse for shoving the game field to the side, as it’s got to fit the power-up options somewhere, and the sidebar takes up less than a third of the screen rather than nearly half.

It’s also a very decent port, although the total absence of any colour is a shame, as are the tiny, hard-to-see enemy bullets. The latter issue, however, was partially fixed by a 2023 mod which made them somewhat bigger, which you can download here.

 

92. RAMPAGE (89)

Arcade: 1986, Bally Midway
Spectrum: 1988, Activision

This is only so low because Rampage isn’t much of a game. In the arcades it was designed as a fun coin-guzzling multiplayer experience rather than something you played seriously for points or advancement, since all the levels are basically the same and there’s a limited amount of skill you can bring to bear as your huge, slow-moving monster is assailed by a blizzard of tiny, hard-to-dodge bullets and explosives.

But as a port it’s simply fabulous, as you might perhaps expect from the hand of Bob “R-Type” Pape. It looks and feels just like the coin-op, it’s bursting with colour and the graphics are full of crisp and characterful detail. It can even handle three players without any loss of speed.

(There’s a 2019 mod with AY music and new sound effects too for those who like that sort of thing, although in this case I prefer the original. The coin-op had no music.)

If this chart was solely about how closely Speccy conversions recreated the source material, Rampage would be challenging the top 10. Almost nothing touches it in that regard. As it is, the limited lasting appeal of the arcade original condemns it to a much humbler position, but the stellar magnificence of the conversion job is none the lesser for that.

——-

PASSING MENTION: Ramparts. A shamelessly straight clone, good-looking but super-hard, not least because you can’t really tell where the tower edges are.

 

91. CRYSTAL CASTLES (80)

Arcade: 1983, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

On first glance, Crystal Castles looks like an awfully big ask for the Spectrum.

A fast-moving, colourful, trackball-controlled game in a diagonal 3D perspective looks like an obviously impossible feat, so when you see what a mostly-fine job Andromeda Software made of it, it just makes it more annoying that the ship was substantially spoiled for a ha’porth of tar, in the shape of the almost total absence of sound.

(Automata’s unofficial knockoff Crazy Castles had sound, and was faster and much more colourful, but sadly the straight-on perspective made it utterly impossible to tell what the castle layouts were and where you could go after the first couple of stages.)

One wonders whether its bizarre supposed “limited edition” status was because US Gold realised that putting out a basically-silent game for nine quid in 1986 was a pisstake and wanted to give people an incentive to pick it up before they found out. Although in fact – despite it being a big licence release from a major publisher – Crash, YS and Sinclair User don’t seem to have been given review copies and the only contemporary review (in ZX Computing) doesn’t even mention the lack of sound.

It’s hard to believe that some tiny token clicks and beeps for picking up gems and other events would have rendered the game unplayably slow, but it is what it is. The two different C64 ports are both so vastly superior that it almost got left out of the chart for that reason alone, but the fact is that despite its shortcomings it feels so like the coin-op in play, as you scoot around the fun adventure-playground levels picking off gems and dodging the baddies, that it just bludgeoned its way in.

90. TETRIS ZX (NE)

Arcade: 1988, Atari
Spectrum: 2021, Bubu

It’s absurd that it took so long for the Spectrum to have a really good Tetris. A game that could have been designed for the system was represented instead for many years by Mirrorsoft’s lame official port, and it wasn’t until 2020’s Tetris Championship Edition (a modification actually created by its coders Fuxoft for your humble scribe, from their earlier homebrew incarnation) that it finally had the version it deserved.

But this is an arcade chart, so we need an arcade Tetris.

Atari’s 1988 coin-op, released in the middle of all the apocalyptic legal wrangling between the company and Nintendo over the game, was arguably the first proper “puzzle” version of Tetris built around discrete levels which cleared when you achieved the target number of lines.

Bubu’s conversion for the Speccy nails it near-perfectly, even including the music despite being a 48K game. Sadly it doesn’t include the two-player mode, meaning most of the screen is effectively wasted all of the time, and it’s almost ruined by a terrible choice of controls which don’t appear to be redefinable, but as we’ve previously noted the rules of this chart allow for such flaws to be circumvented via emulation (or programmable joysticks for old-skool original-hardware users), so phew.

Tetris Championship Edition is a better Tetris game, but this is an excellent rendition of the arcade one and that’s what we’re here for.

 

89. BOMB JACK (97)

Arcade: 1984, Tehkan
Spectrum: 1986, Elite

Elite started off with some pretty ropey licenced titles like Dukes Of Hazzard and 911TS, so when Bomb Jack was at the vanguard of the company’s shift to much better games it became (and remains) a much-beloved Speccy favourite. But Bomb Jack without “Lady Madonna” just isn’t Bomb Jack.

Which is to say, so much of the appeal of the coin-op is in its bright colours and jaunty music and jingles that a 48K Speccy simply doesn’t have a chance of replicating the core arcade experience. (And made disappointingly little effort to, soundwise. Even the old beeper could have managed a stab at the catchy little end-of-stage ditty, surely?)

So it speaks volumes for the extraordinary precision with which Elite’s port captures the gameplay that it still manages to overcome those issues and make the list, because it PLAYS so much like Bomb Jack and Bomb Jack is great. But this is a game you really wish had come out in the 128 era.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: As we mentioned back at Time Scanner, a few games actually suffer from this chart’s criteria, and none suffers more than Frank Bruno’s Boxing, another of Elite’s first tranche of non-terrible games. A highly accomplished slant on Nintendo’s hit Punch-Out!, FBB is almost completely unplayable under emulation due to the nature of its multiload and we just couldn’t find a defensible reason to include it.

88. FLYING SHARK (88)

Arcade: 1987, Taito
Spectrum: 1987, Firebird

And you were probably expecting this one to be nearer the top too. But absolutely the only reason Flying Shark places slightly higher in this list than Terra Cresta is the centred screen.

It’s a less fun and less interesting game (both in the arcade and on the Speccy), it has no colour, the sound is feeble, the port is less true to the original and it’s missing one of its five levels, but at least you don’t spend all your play time going “HNNNNGH WHY ISN’T IT IN THE MIDDLE?”

Flying Shark gets a partial pass for the thumb-mangling lack of autofire – an unwanted feature of almost all Speccy vertical shmups, but especially galling in a game like this one where you can’t stop firing for a second – because if you’re using a modern arcade joystick the constant hammering on the button is a bit less painful.

(And also because you can enable autofire with POKE 49004,0 as long as you don’t mind the sound being a bit grating. A pre-POKEd version can be downloaded here.)

Where it scores highly is on graphics, which are impressively clear for a monochrome game and manage to conjure up the jungles and oceans of the coin-op despite being all in yellow, and on its faithfully brutal difficulty. It’s still an impressive piece of work, but it’s a port that hasn’t stood the test of time quite as well as some others in this list.

87. TARG (86)

Arcade: 1980, Exidy
Spectrum: 2019, GOGoL

Very few Speccy ports meet the test of not just sort-of resembling the general outline of an arcade game, but being able to be actually mistaken for it on a dark night. The Pit (of which – SPOILER! – we shall hear more later) looks almost identical to its coin-op parent except for the one-colour player character and the vertical scrolling, which probably leaves Targ (a mysterious hack of the 2012 Stonechat Productions release Mole Rat) at the top of a very short list.

I mean, just look.

(Hey, I didn’t say it SOUNDED like it.)

Targ is a rather more sophisticated game than it seems on first glance, though admittedly that’s a low bar to vault. The coin-op is ferociously hard to clear more than a couple of stages of (the Speccy port is faithful in that regard), and you can plainly spot the genesis of Geometry Wars: Waves – arguably the most debilitatingly addictive videogame ever written – in it. It definitely shouldn’t be judged by appearances.

Given how basic Targ is it’s incredible that there weren’t more home versions of it made, especially in the early days of 8-bit micros, but there certainly aren’t any on any format as good as this one.

86. WEC LE MANS (93)

Arcade: 1986, Konami
Spectrum: 1989, Imagine

When compiling any best-of chart you have to make tough decisions, and one of them is how many of the same thing to include. So for example, assuming you wanted a Jet Set Willy game in a normal Spectrum top 100 would you include the original JSW, because it was the first and the most famous and the best-selling, or would you include JSW2 because it’s a better game by every possible measure, or would you include both? Can you justify taking up two precious spots with Operation Wolf AND Operation Thunderbolt, since they’re basically the same game and equally good, or do you pick one to stand for them both? Etc etc.

(The only flaw hindsight reveals in the Official Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100 was the tough choice to leave out Chaos, on the grounds that it was effectively represented – as a Julian Gollop turn-based strategy game – by Rebelstar, wrongly ignoring Chaos’s significant unique selling point as an eight-player battle. Although how many people other than games magazine staff ever played it with eight players is debatable.)

So anyway, here’s WEC Le Mans.

And therefore – prepare yourselves – here ISN’T Enduro Racer. There was only room in this chart for one high-quality port of an actually quite mediocre arcade racing game, and after much swithering WEC Le Mans got the nod over its Activision counterpart.

It did so despite that gruesome “bee trapped in your ear” sound and despite the bland scenery, which is mostly the arcade original’s fault. Those things aside it’s a speedy and challenging translation of the coin-op which is all about skill, rather than flying off jumps and just crossing your fingers that you don’t land right in front of a big rock or get flung off the track entirely because you were struggling to steer and wheelie at the same time.

With just one track it’s an addictive high score challenge where you can always do better until you finally nail that almost-impossible flawless four-lap run, and it gives you the tools for the job with controls of rare precision that mean you can jockey through a tight bend with four opponents blocking the track and still come out in front. Every overtaking manoeuvre is tense and exciting.

I liked Enduro Racer when it came out, but when I went through this top 100 trying to find a game I could justify dumping to make room for it, I drew a blank. Time has left it behind, but WEC Le Mans still holds up so it gets the spot. (And would have gotten a significantly higher one with just a bit more content.)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Pole Position (Atarisoft, 1984), which WEC Le Mans strikingly much resembles a modern updating of and is still a very playable conversion in its own right, more so than it’s generally given credit for. And in a more obviously similar vein US Gold’s port of Super Monaco GP isn’t half bad as a racing game, with more tracks than WEC Le Mans and a decent turn of speed, but just isn’t as satisfying to play and also doesn’t really feel anything like the coin-op.

85. GHOSTS’N’GOBLINS (79)

Arcade: 1985, Capcom
Spectrum: 1986, Elite

This is quite a tough one to call in some ways. The whole Ghosts’n’Goblins series is infamously one of the toughest in coin-op history, and the two ports that made it to the Speccy were no exceptions.

Ghosts’n’Goblins does give you nine lives in lieu of continues, but that still won’t get most players beyond the second stage. Which is just as well, because that’s more or less the point where the game runs out.

Up until the end of Level 2, the Speccy port is admirably faithful to its source material, clearly discernible as the same game despite the graphical compromises and the loss of the evocative and unusually classy music.

But while the arcade game has five full stages plus a megaboss, the Speccy version smushes everything after Level 2 into one hodge-podge of a rather generic final round with a deeply anticlimactic ending where you just sort of stumble into Princess Hus hanging around on a platform and that’s it.

You can see how it happened – GnG came out before the Spectrum 128 was well established and before multiloads were widely accepted, and in trying to cram it into 48K it probably seemed quite a sensible compromise to bin levels that most people would never see without cheating anyway.

(The C64 version did the same thing, and was only “fixed” when homebrew coders produced a phenomenally impressive complete version in 2015.)

And in truth, the last couple of levels of the arcade game are pretty phoned-in as well, both being very similar bog-standard platforms-and-ladders affairs, with Capcom having counted on getting players hooked during the far more atmospheric first three.

All the same, it feels like a bit of a swiz after the first two levels get your hopes up to realise that the game is almost over – as you can see from the video above, a speedrun all the way through Speccy GnG only takes five and a half minutes.

Ghosts’n’Goblins is still a good challenge for the money, and probably the Speccy’s best conversion of HALF an arcade game, but in this chart that’s only good enough for the No.85 spot.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Ghouls’n’Ghosts is an arguably better conversion in that it actually includes all the levels (or at least interpretations of them), and it certainly lives up to the coin-op’s insane difficulty, but it’s been SO compromised aesthetically in the trip to the Spectrum that it’s hardly recognisable.

The port lacks atmosphere as a result, despite 128K sound, but also Ghouls’n’Ghosts just isn’t as good a game as Ghosts’n’Goblins. It’s so hard, and often unfairly so (baddies spawning right where you’re standing, bridges collapsing with no warning or visual cues), both in the arcades and in the Speccy port, that it’s a limited amount of fun without the coin-op’s prettiness to distract you.

And while we’re talking about short games, a word needs to be said here for Legend Of Kage. When Crash reviewed it they gave it 50%, calling it “a big disappointment for fans of the arcade game”, which is an incredibly bizarre assessment.

(Arcade ports often got a raw deal in magazines in the 8-bit days because people knew nothing about the original – this was a world where MAME didn’t exist – but Crash’s reviewer expressly made a big deal about being an expert at coin-op Kage.)

Legend Of Kage isn’t a very good arcade game – it’s basically under four minutes long and for most of that you just run in one direction hammering the fire button – but it’s really hard to imagine what more anyone could have wanted from a Speccy port of it. You get all five levels, it’s fast, it’s colourful and it plays just like its big brother. All it’s missing is the music.

Other than not repeating with different “seasons” (colour schemes), the Speccy port is all but arcade-perfect. It’s just that making a perfect conversion of Legend Of Kage wasn’t all that great an idea in the first place.

(Also filed under “really rather good ports of very poor arcade games that probably didn’t deserve the effort” we find NARC, which is a tiny bit on the slow side but is in every other way a diligent and painstaking recreation of probably the worst game that Eugene Jarvis and Williams Electronics ever put their name to.)

84. STARCLASH (Astro Fighter) (83)

Arcade: 1979, Data East
Spectrum: 1983, Micromega

I put this in my all-time top 25 8-bit arcade conversions for a feature in Retro Gamer a few years back. It’s an unofficial clone of one of the most austere games of the early arcade era, the much-bootlegged Astro Fighter.

Starclash is a very close port, but switching the screen from portrait to landscape (for which author Derek Brewster made a couple of small adjustments) makes it noticeably faster and more enjoyable than its coin-op counterpart.

It’s also commendably noisy, and the fact that it all squeezed into the 16K Speccy’s 9K of available RAM makes it all the more impressive.

The one thing Brewster weirdly missed out was that in the arcade you scored 60 points for shooting down fireballs – more than you got for any of the enemies except the final boss, and therefore the main source of both points and gameplay tension, as you have to find a balance between harvesting fireball points and wiping out each wave before it escapes at the bottom of the screen and repeats, costing you fuel that you can’t afford to lose. But in Starclash fireballs are worthless distractions.

What seems quite likely is that Derek based the game on playing the common Revision 3 version of the coin-op where most fireballs score you 0, but every 7th one you shoot without losing a life nets 300. You could easily play the arcade game 100 times and never find that out.

But in HYPER EXCITING NEWS we’ve fixed it for him! Thanks to Who Else But Pgyuri, you can now enjoy All-New Starclash, 20% more accurate than ever before, in both authentic arcade flavours, which makes an already fine game noticeably better.

Downloads:
Original Arcade Edition (60pts per fireball)
Revision 3 (300pts for every 7th fireball)

83. FORGOTTEN WORLDS (NE)
(2023 version)

Arcade: 1988, Capcom
Spectrum: 1989, US Gold

The original Speccy version of this rotating-fire side-scroller was an agonising near miss. The graphics were excellent, the arcade levels were well replicated, the speed was admirable. Unfortunately, all of that excellent work was ruined by stupendously awful controls. You literally couldn’t fire while moving sideways without spinning your aiming direction, and the effect was like trying to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time.

But as we just saw with Starclash, one of the greatest phenomenons of our times is that people try to fix the mistakes of the past, and earlier this year Forgotten Worlds got a new modified version where your guns autofired (since there’s no reason to ever stop shooting in Forgotten Worlds) and the fire button could therefore be repurposed to control rotation.

That one simple hack revolutionised the entire game, transforming it from a basically unplayable mess into something wonderful, and its place in this revised chart is the well-merited result.

 

82. ARKANOID (84)

Arcade: 1986, Taito
Spectrum: 1987, Imagine

This was such a hard one. There were three contenders to represent Taito’s legendary Breakout sequel in the chart.

There was the original Arkanoid, the sequel, and Wipe Out, the never-released original version of Batty which was much closer to the coin-op in level design than the version that famously made it to the Your Sinclair covertape.

All have pros and cons. Arkanoid looks simply beautiful on the Speccy – all clean and sharp and colourful – and has all the original levels, but also extremely, uh… idiosyncratic controls where you’re never really sure how fast your bat is going to move when you press a key. (You can see that it was a brave attempt to somehow implement the arcade’s analogue dial, but ugh.)

Arkanoid 2 sorts the controls out and has more features and stages, but is based on a worse coin-op and OH DEAR GOD MY EYES!

Wipe Out, meanwhile, has really lovely control AND clear graphics, but only 20 of the arcade’s 33 levels and a much-too-wide screen, as well as feeling far less like an actual conversion than the two official ports.

In the end, the original won out because you can just about get used to the controls (and in fairness the coin-op is a bit of a bugger in that respect too), and the sense of playing real arcade Arkanoid it generates is so strong.

If someone had hacked Arkanoid 2 or Wipe Out’s controls into Arkanoid 1 (or just de-stippled Arkanoid 2 and/or hacked Arkanoid’s levels into it) we’d have been looking at top 30 minimum, but life is imperfect and we just have to deal with it as best we can.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: The extra-brutal coin-op sequel Tournament Arkanoid was ported to the Speccy in 2022, based on the Arkanoid 1 engine.

 

81. SDI (85)

Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1988, Activision

Compared to some of the other games in the list, SDI on the Speccy is a relatively poor copy of the arcade title it ostensibly mimics – a fairly obscure and extremely challenging Missile Command derivative that was rather out of character for Sega.

The version we got from Activision was monochrome, 48K only, simplified the coin-op considerably including removing some gameplay elements entirely (like bombing the enemy ground bases) and greatly reducing the amount of enemy ordnance onscreen, and had exactly one sound effect.

But it’s actually loads of fun to play, in some ways more so than the arcade game, whose controls – a joystick with a thumb button AND a trackball – are a serious (two) hand(s)ful. The Speccy one strips that pretty effectively down to stick and one button and it’s a frantic, all-action game that feels much more like the experience of the coin-op than it strictly is.

I kept going back to it purely for enjoyment while compiling this list, which is why I unexpectedly found myself ranking it above some more widely-esteemed names, because at the end of the day enjoyment is what it’s all meant to be about.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: The Speccy never actually got anything close to a definitive port of Missile Command, which is a bit weird as it’s a pretty primitive game that should have been well within its technical capabilities. Missile Defence (Anirog, 1983), the least-known piece of work by the prolific Keith Burkhill – Commando, Space Harrier, Ghosts’n’Goblins, etc etc – is about as good as it got, a rough-around-the-edges take (some very odd things happen to the score display as the game progresses) which nonetheless includes all the elements and gets impressively fast and difficult.

The controls are a nightmare – cursor keys to move, with 1, 2 and 3 to fire – but as previously noted, this chart makes allowances for bad controls that can be fixed in 2021 with emulation (eg on Spectaculator you can assign the cursor keys to the PC cursors on your right hand and fire with your left), and Missile Defence is far more enjoyable now than it ever was at the time.

 

80. GUNSMOKE aka Desperado (78)

Arcade: 1986, Capcom
Spectrum: 1987, Go!

Now this is a strange one. A bit like Z-Man and Wild West Hero in the Speccy’s earlier days, this is an unofficial clone (a Spanish game by Topo Soft called Desperado) which was repurposed, probably under legal threat, as the official licenced conversion.

The arcade game was a hasty cash-in follow-up to Capcom’s super-successful Commando, an action-packed pseudo-sequel which did a lot less well than its predecessor thanks to its overcomplicated three-button firing system.

Desperado did away with that, and very much else besides: music, powerups, speed, accurate level layouts, baddies in windows, horse-riding and even a Game Over screen – if you lose all your lives you just get dumped straight back into a new game without so much as a by-your-leave. As befits its illicit origins, this isn’t so much a conversion of Gunsmoke as an interpretation of it.

(You also only get five levels compared to the arcade’s 10, but in fairness they’re looooooong levels – the first one alone is two minutes longer than the WHOLE of Speccy Ghosts’n’Goblins.)

But while in any empirical sense it barely resembles the arcade game, what it nails right between the eyes is the Wild West vibe of coin-op Gunsmoke, as well as its uncompromising brutality. While you lose some stuff you also gain some, like branching levels and the inventive new raft-riding stage, and for a scrolling Speccy shooter it splashes a heck of a lot of colour around without any clashing.

Gunsmoke partly makes this list just for sheer interestingness, as an official port that’s barely a port at all, but it’s also a fun, seriously tough shooter, and what’s wrong with being interesting anyway?

79. KARNOV (77)

Arcade: 1987, Data East
Spectrum: 1988, Electric Dreams

Karnov in the arcades was a pretty run-of-the-mill platformer best known for being the game where baddies threw giant Ginger Nuts at you.

But on the Speccy it carved itself out some notability for its absolutely stunning, colour-packed graphics (you could make a legitimate case for it being the best-looking Speccy game of all time in terms of static screenshots) – achieved of course by substituting the coin-op’s smooth movement for character-block scrolling.

Now, character-block scrolling is a perfectly valid design choice which makes for a fantastic-looking and highly accurate conversion, but sadly it was also four-way PUSH-scrolling, which at certain points (eg when you jump and trigger first a vertical scroll and then a separate horizontal one) is so intrusive as to be deeply visually upsetting and distracting.

Fortunately such moments of two-plane scrolling are reasonably rare, and also Karnov is largely a game of quite slow and stop-start progress, so while you never quite stop noticing the scrolling, you don’t end up getting motion sickness and can mostly enjoy an otherwise-superb port. But with steady rather than push scrolling this would have been top 20.

——-

SEMI-HONOURABLE MENTION: The Speccy port of The New Zealand Story is also a multi-plane push-scrolling nightmare, and being monochrome it doesn’t have the excuse of doing it to protect ambitious use of colour. And being a game where you’re constantly moving, and often diagonally, it’s much more noticeable than in Karnov. It’s a real shame because apart from that it’s a great conversion, with the arcade’s graphics and music and levels largely intact, but while the scrolling in Karnov is merely a flaw in the port, in TNZS it absolutely destroys it.

78. SPACE HARRIER (76)

Arcade: 1985, Sega
Spectrum: 1986, Elite

Space Harrier nearly didn’t make the cut. It’s almost outrageous hubris on the part of Elite to have even bought the licence to attempt to convert Sega’s gloriously colourful and melodious lightning-fast 3D scaling shooter to the humble Speccy at all.

And every time I’ve looked at footage or tried to play it, it seemed like a heroic failure – probably as good as the Speccy could have dared to imagine, and faster than anyone could have dreamed but still a semi-unplayable visual mess not helped by the bizarre and arbitrary partial-centering controls, whereby if you move to the row between the horizon and the ground it instantly jerks you back to the middle as soon as you release the button, but DOESN’T do the same for any other vertical position.

(It also semi-centres you horizontally, but only after a couple of seconds rather than instantly, and not all the way back to the middle but only about two-thirds. I mean, WTF? Obviously this was all a misguided attempt to mimic the coin-op’s self-centering analogue stick, but since the Speccy didn’t have analogue controls it should have been left alone.)

But then I gave it a last try on my Retropie setup with an arcade joystick rather than with keys or a joypad on PC Spectaculator, and suddenly it just clicked. The selective centering is still annoying and inexplicable – though fortunately you tend to be moving constantly anyway – and you do still quite often get hit by things you didn’t see coming (in fairness that happens with the coin-op too), but somehow with stick controls the whole thing feels more solid and stable to the point where it’s actually enjoyable to play and starts to evoke its arcade parent.

None of the reviews of the time even MENTION the wacky controls, of course. Although let’s take a moment to note the Sinclair User one, which said “I dare say other magazines will give it all sorts of mega awards. I think that it may not have much staying power”, before awarding it… the maximum 5/5.

I’m surprised Space Harrier isn’t one of the games that’s had an AY music mod, because it’s a prime contender (the music in the coin-op just kept playing when you died too). Maybe one day.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Grandslam’s conversion of the sequel is also a fair effort, a little bit slower but with slightly clearer graphics and restoring some things that were cut from SH1, like trees. It also thankfully binned the auto-centering controls.

It’s difficult to see why it needed a multiload when the first game didn’t, but since this chart discounts multiload issues the reason the original takes the spot is partly that Space Harrier II just doesn’t have the character of its big brother, but also that it was a Mega Drive release rather than an arcade one, and so is disqualified on a technicality.

 

77. SHAO-LIN’S ROAD (75)

Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1986, The Edge

There’s more than one way to get into this chart. You can be a super-authentic port, or you can capture the feel of an arcade game without necessarily replicating it all that closely, or – as in the case of Gunsmoke or SDI or Spy Hunter – you can just be a good game that’s based on a coin-op.

Because in truth the Speccy conversion of Shao-Lin’s Road doesn’t FEEL all that much like Konami’s original, even when compared to the C64 and Amstrad ports. It’s slower and lacks the music that’s so much part of the arcade game’s character, as well as its bright palette. (Although it’s splendidly colourful for the Spectrum overall.)

But what it is is a fun fighting game with all the features of the arcade title, and which definitely belongs alongside the likes of Mikie, Ping Pong and Green Beret on the good side of the Speccy’s rather bipolar catalogue of Konami ports, rather than with the absolute stinkers like Jailbreak, Nemesis and Jackal.

(In truth the release version was a little buggy, but there’s an excellent mod that fixes and improves the game significantly, which you can download here.)

 

76. SOLOMON’S KEY (51)

Arcade: 1986, Tecmo
Spectrum: 1987, US Gold

You don’t get all that many sandboxy action puzzle games in arcades, and the ones there are don’t tend to be huge hits.

So when US Gold ported Solomon’s Key to the Speccy, hardly anyone (a) had ever heard of it, or (b) appreciated what a splendid job Probe had done of it. I actually prefer the colour scheme of the Speccy version (limited as it is), and it plays identically.

So it was really disappointing when it suddenly just ran out. To fit it into 48K you got a pretty measly 17 levels out of the arcade’s 44 (which for any C64 owners reading is less than half), and at a time when 128K and multiloads were commonplace it seems like some serious cheapskatery.

(How much effort could it have been to get the rest of the levels in by one of those methods? They’re already designed for you and the game code is already written, the amount of extra time/work seems pretty minimal.)

Now, most people never get near completing most games, and Solomon’s Key gets pretty challenging pretty fast. With only six lives and no continues, the vast majority of players would never even know that 60% of the levels are missing (or indeed anything beyond about stage 4). But I know, so an otherwise near-flawless port of an excellent game finds itself at a humblish No.76 and that’s just how things are sometimes.

75. SLY SPY (73)

Arcade: 1989, Data East
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Sly Spy (aka Secret Agent, which is what its own main menu calls it) is one of many entries in this chart that would never have been included at the time of its original release. And it’s certainly not because it’s a bad game – the arcade original is a super-shallow but fun romp through nine varied levels of classic James Bond antics.

And the Speccy version captures them all pretty accurately, albeit with crude and mostly-monochrome graphics. (There are only a couple of small sections where visibility is an issue.) Which is no small feat in itself – by 1989 arcade videogames had come a long way in their first big decade, and for the Speccy to still be able to produce creditable imitations of them in any way, shape or form was remarkable.

But with stages as little as 20 seconds long, and only three credits to make headway in a conversion that didn’t compromise on the continue-hungry coin-munching difficulty of the original, the amount of back-and-forth tape-loading sucked every last bit of fun out of it. With the pain of multiload taken away by modern technology, however, it’s possible to appreciate what a fine job Software Creations did of capturing the gameplay and atmosphere – and more unusually for a Speccy arcade port, the speed and smoothness too.

That makes Sly Spy really playable and addictive – for all that there isn’t a vast amount of content, beating it with three credits is a real challenge, and beating it properly with just one will keep you happily occupied all day.

74. MS. PAC-MAN (72)

Arcade: 1981, Midway
Spectrum: 1984, Atarisoft

Everyone remembers the home versions of Psycho Pigs UXB (a renamed UK release of a Japanese coin-op known as Butasan, or Pigs & Bombers) for its grossly tacky, wildly sexist and – worst of all – painfully unfunny ad campaign. Which was a grave disservice to a rather spiffy little arcade game.

The campaign also failed on its own terms, since despite attracting a lot of outrage the game didn’t trouble the upper reaches of either the review scores or the charts. Psycho Pigs was a pure old-school high-score challenge, fast and slick and both looking and sounding cute and cartoonish.

(In 48K mode, without the brilliantly catchy hoedown music – actually better than the arcade’s – it’s about 10% as much fun.)

It also included the two-player simultaneous mode, which just added to the confusion about what the game was actually called – in the ads and on the box it was Psycho Pigs UXB, plural, whereas on the loading screen and menu screens it was Psycho Pig UXB, singular.

The monochrome display of the port made the game even more chaotic than it was designed to be, especially in two-player where your pigs looked identical. Even the real thing could be a bit hard to follow amid all the exploding mayhem and you do have to concentrate a little bit harder in the Speccy version, but it does get easier as you figure out how the game works rather than just running around screaming and hurling bombs any old where and hoping for the best.

In fact, it gets much TOO easy. The big flaw of the arcade game was that you could lie down and usually survive most of a level while the baddie pigs blew each other to bits, before getting up and picking off the last couple. It was boring, but it also wasn’t a totally foolproof plan because if someone landed a bomb very near you and it detonated, you’d be killed even if you were lying down.

On the Speccy, though, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain you can NEVER be killed if you’re lying down, which wrecks the whole game. You can just cower in total safety right through every level (you might sometimes have to get up to take out one pig, but that’s an easy job), then rack up tons of points in the bonus rounds until you can’t be bothered any more. What a crying shame.

So here’s Ms Pac-Man instead.

The Speccy port is fast and smooth and has all four mazes from the coin-op.

So that’s good.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Pacman – Curse Of The Slimers is also a fun and slick multi-maze Pac-game.

73. P-47 THUNDERBOLT (71)

Arcade: 1988, Jaleco
Spectrum: 1990, Firebird

I’m not sure why this is called P-47 Thunderbolt. The coin-op is called P47 Freedom Fighter (sometimes P47 Phantom Fighter) and that’s also what it says on the Speccy version’s loading screen, but for some reason all the micro ports were Thunderbolt. (Curiously the only contemporary console version was the PC Engine’s, which was Freedom Fighter again and is actually less authentic than the Speccy one – for example the first stage’s train boss is gone completely, replaced by an aeroplane boss.)

It’s certainly not because it was radically altered for home ports – this is a very authentic port in most respects, with a bit of simplification on some of the bosses being the only significant compromises made to bring the game to the 8-bit micros.

One major plus is that the Speccy version autofires at a decent rate if you hold the fire button down, ending the thumb agony caused by so many shoot-’em-up conversions on the machine, which is one of the reasons P-47 places above celebrated titles like Flying Shark and Terra Cresta. The difference it makes in the enjoyability of the play experience just can’t be overestimated, and weirdly the rule seems to be that horizontal arcade blasters got autofire (the not-bad Silkworm port has it too) while vertical ones didn’t.

It also does pretty well for two of the big tests for Speccy shooters – bullet visibility and at least a little bit of use of colour. P-47 was a very decent and likeable, albeit generic, scrolling shmup in the arcades, and it’s hard to think how you could have reasonably asked for a better Spectrum conversion of it.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: UN Squadron put up a brief fight for this slot. It’s a really good piece of conversion work, capturing the graphics and all the gameplay features, with some nice presentation and again better control than the coin-op in that you have autofire, with separate taps elegantly used to trigger your special weapons. It also, it should be noted, makes the C64 port look like absolute dog dirt.

But it lost out because UN Squadron is a significantly less good coin-op than P-47, the graphics are just too busy to be clear in monochrome (mainly a problem on the boss fights), and for some reason the sound and music are incredibly quiet. Which is a solvable problem in itself – turn the TV way up – but you tend to forget you’ve done it and then the next thing you play or watch will be so astonishingly loud that you’ll probably soil yourself, and as any games journalist will tell you that’s a standard 10-point review score deduction.

72. BREAK THRU (70)

Arcade: 1986, Data East
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

Break Thru is one of Data East’s least well-known coin-ops, and one of its most underrated. It’s a fast, varied and imaginative side-scroller, joyously bereft of dull money-guzzling boss fights, that maybe got slightly shunned because of its incredibly ungainly-looking jump graphics.

The Spectrum port actually fixes that problem, and is a fantastic-looking conversion – vastly more so than the Amstrad or C64 ports – bursting with colour and speed as well as, it must be acknowledged, a monstrously dickish control layout. (Z-X-R-D-5 and Space? What? Good luck reaching that jump button on a rubber-keyed 48K Speccy unless you’re Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the game doesn’t run on a 128.)

But of course we forgive those in this chart because they can be fixed with emulators (or on real hardware with programmable joysticks), so that’s not a problem. There is, though, one other snag in Speccy Break Thru that I ummed and ahhed over for ages before choosing to overlook.

That’s the fact that if you hold down the jump button, you become invincible. Your little jeep can sproing happily over rocks, water, buildings and anything else, all the way to the end of the game. A bug like that was enough to get Psycho Pigs UXB booted off the list, but Break Thru gets away with it because you can’t score any points while cheating.

You can’t fire while jumping, and there are basically no points for anything else, so if you exploit the bug all you’ll do is see the end screen without getting any score, which somewhat defeats the point of playing the game at all. You might as well just watch a YouTube walkthrough, because at least then you’ll see it played properly.

There’s no advantage to using the bug to cheat – all you’re doing if you take advantage of it even intermittently is reducing your scoring opportunities in the scant three minutes or so Break Thru takes to play from start to finish. (It doesn’t loop after the last level, which means you’ve got to max your points in a single runthrough.) So the bug it isn’t to the game’s detriment, and therefore it still makes the chart because everything else about it is pretty fab.

(There ARE a couple of other little quirks, like being able to cross lanes freely on the bridge level, but that’s just a bit of compensation for the fact that the Speccy version has bigger graphics than the arcade and therefore relatively less manoeuvering space. And you sadly lose one of the arcade levels, but we’ve let several games off with missing levels already, like Flying Shark and most drastically Ghosts’n’Goblins.)

The bottom line is that this zippy, addictive pure-action highscore blaster is an unfairly overlooked game in both its coin-op and Spectrum incarnations (Crash and YS pasted it, in reviews written by clueless idiots – one of them said it was a Moon Patrol clone, ffs – while most of the Sinclair User review consisted of explaining that if you pressed the left button you moved left), and it’s simply past time that it got some appreciation.

71. PLOTTING (69)

Arcade: 1989, Taito
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

It’s funny how some games seem to be destined to always be spoken of as part of a pair, just because they came out around the same time from the same company and have some sort of vague similarity. (See also Last Duel and LED Storm from Capcom, for example.)

Plotting (aka Flipull) is a less immediately good puzzle game than its Taito cousin Puzznic from the same year. It’s initially quite hard to get your head round the central gameplay mechanic and physics, and it’s not as satisfyingly neat and tidy as its sibling (you don’t have to clear every block from a stage to win and you don’t get any nice chain reactions).

But once you get into the groove it’s a fine puzzler, and the Speccy port is so exceptionally good that it should keep you there for long enough to get past the slightly less user-friendly start.

This is a FAR better conversion than Puzznic’s, losing none of the speed, colour or music. Indeed, purely in “how good a Spectrum conversion is it?” terms it’s better than just about anything. It basically just IS the arcade game.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Indeed, Puzznic missed the cut for the 2023 version of this list because it could easily have been much better on the Spectrum than it is. It’s hard to see why the 128K version couldn’t have included the catchy arcade music or at least the between-level jingles, because a static-screen block-based puzzle game can’t exactly have been straining even the old Speccy’s CPU.

It’s also a real shame it couldn’t have enjoyed the stunning use of colour deployed in Plotting. You can see why – a few levels have pixel movement for the elevator blocks – but either those could have been turned to block movement (which wouldn’t have harmed the gameplay) or we could have put up with a very small amount of colour clash in a few stages in order to make the game vastly prettier overall.

Losing the music, colour and (inexplicably) some of the speed makes Puzznic on the Speccy a much more sedate and staid experience, but it’s still a fundamentally good puzzle game, all the levels are here, it plays exactly the same as its coin-op parent and apart from colour the graphics are almost pixel-for-pixel. Decent work.

70. WIZARD OF WOR/
THE WIZARD’S WARRIORS (68)

Arcade: 1983, Midway
Spectrum: 2007, Weird Science/1983, Abersoft

So this might be a bit controversial, and in some ways it’s a cop-out, but I didn’t want multiple entries in the chart for the same game and in a handful of cases I just couldn’t choose between two equally valid contenders, so here we are.

Wizard Of Wor is one of my favourite classic coin-ops. Basically a more intense take on Berzerk in narrower corridors, it’s a really atmospheric and challenging maze shooter notable in the arcade (as Berzerk was) for its extensive synthesized speech. It got loads of official ports, most of them pretty good, from the Atari VCS upwards.

(The Bally Astrocade version, for some reason renamed The Incredible Wizard, is an absolute stunner and by a mile the primitive console’s best game. If any of you are into the Pico-8 there’s a terrific version on there too, and there have also been excellent modern homebrew ports for the Colecovision and Intellivision.)

For many years the only Speccy attempt was The Wizard’s Warriors, a very early release from Abersoft (later republished by Mastertronic). It lost the characteristic chunky look and colourscheme of the coin-op, as well as the two-player co-op mode, and all the enemies are just clones of your own player instead of being a variety of scary monsters, but it’s otherwise a good effort – it’s fast, has accurate mazes, great sound for a 48K beeper game and it plays just like the arcade.

(I initially thought the cloned graphics might have been deployed to help it fit it into 16K, but it’s a 48K game.)

It would certainly have been good enough for inclusion in this chart had it been the Spectrum’s only Wizard Of Wor, but in 2007 matters were complicated somewhat by the arrival of a full-on conversion by Hungarian coders Weird Science (starring none other than our very own Pgyuri).

Strictly it’s a conversion of the C64 port rather than the arcade game, but since the C64 version was excellent that’s not a problem. It looks much, much closer to the coin-op than Wizard’s Warriors does – almost identical in fact, let down only by the bizarre decision to make the radar scope so pointlessly large that it requires most of the maze’s bottom wall to be bulldozed to make room.

(Something that didn’t happen in the C64 version. The radar blobs could surely have been 2×2 or 3×3 pixels and still worked, rather than a bloated 6×6.)

It also restores the two-player co-op game and has lovely arcade-style presentation complete with attract mode, and you get nice smooth movement rather than TWW’s blockier sort, but on the downside it’s a bit slower than TWW and – strangely – also noticeably quieter.

So how to decide? Speed or prettiness? Two players or better sound? Ugly radar or uglier mazes? What a dilemma! In the end it just seemed too unfair to pick one arbitrarily on what was basically a coin-toss and relegate the other to an Honourable Mention, so they’ll just have to squish up on the podium and share.

69. PHEENIX (Phoenix) (67)

Arcade: 1980, Centuri
Spectrum: 1983, Megadodo

Pheenix is perhaps responsible for years of over-expectations from Speccy arcade ports. Released in mid-1983 it predated all the dedicated Spectrum magazines, and indeed the days of review scores in general, but it was generally acknowledged as a fine port of the inventive and atmospheric coin-op generally credited with the first appearance of a “boss”, in the form of the spectacular and daunting alien mothership.

While not quite as accurate visually as the C64’s Eagle Empire (I don’t know why Pheenix made the player ship so different to the original when it tried to make everything else look as close as possible – a proper arcade-style ship would have enhanced the feel even more), the Speccy game played better. Eagle Empire’s mothership is an embarrassment, sitting there passively while you blow it to bits, while Pheenix’s puts up a good fight.

The Speccy game also includes the iconic classical intro sequence from the arcade, although in a very before-its-time touch you could skip it by hitting the fire button to get straight into the action.

(Weirdly, both games get the Shield wrong. In the arcade you can shoot through it but not move, whereas in both Pheenix and EE it’s the other way round.)

The fact that the whole thing, colourful and smooth and fast, fits into the 16K Speccy isn’t relevant to its placing in this chart but it adds to the impressiveness of the feat. In the entire rest of the machine’s commercial life, very few coin-op conversions would scale such heights.

——-

SEMI-HONOURABLE MENTIONS: The quality of Pheenix makes the standard of the Spectrum’s versions of the much simpler Galaxian all the more disappointing, which is why – SPOILER AGAIN! – you won’t find a Galaxian port in this chart.

The early-days champion was Artic’s decent Galaxians from right back in 1982, which is a very respectable clone let down only by being a bit slow and not very prettily presented.

Atarisoft’s official port two years later fixed both of those things (adding an attract mode and restoring the scrolling twinkly-stars backdrop that was such a big part of the coin-op’s distinctive look as one of the first properly full-colour arcade games). But despite being a 48K game where Artic’s ran in 16K, it abysmally still couldn’t be bothered to depict the Flagships properly – again just drawing them as normal aliens but in yellow – and it actually had worse sound.

(Neither game, shamefully, managed ANY sort of attempt at the famous starting jingle, but at least in Artic’s game shooting an enemy sounded vaguely like it did in the arcade.)

68. STAR WARS (66)
(mystery sound version)

Arcade: 1983, Atari
Spectrum: 1987, Domark

This was a REALLY hard choice, and ultimately a surprising one. Atari’s 1983 arcade game is an all-time favourite of mine, and of all sane people.

But when I sat down to compile this chart I’d assumed it would be represented by 3D Starstrike, because the official Speccy conversion infamously had no sound at all, and a game without sound isn’t a proper game. (Except on formats where the host machine has no audio capability, obv.)

So when I loaded up a random version from my TZX folder to check a detail, I was distinctly startled to find myself playing something with what appeared to be the sound from 3D Starstrike.

Despite the loading notice from the programmers in the original release that 48K sound rendered the game unplayable, it made little to no appreciable difference to the speed or framerate, and although it’s just a couple of small crunchy effects it completely transforms the experience.

There’s no clue as to where this version came from. It’s in the Spectrum Computing database simply as “V2”, with no note about its provenance. I don’t know if it’s a later official release or a hack. But in the end those couple of sound effects are enough to take it past Starstrike, because in almost every other way it feels more like the coin-op. It’s not that it’s a better game – there’s absolutely nothing between them in that regard – just that it’s a better arcade conversion.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: 3D Starstrike, obviously. It’s got a superior Death Star surface level to the official release, but the addition of overheating lasers is a bit of a pain. And of course the prototype Parker Brothers ROM version is worth a look too for its own interestingly dumbed-down take.

The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi also got pretty excellent conversions on the Speccy, but sadly neither was anything like as good a game in the arcades as the original Star Wars (the asteroid field in TESB is such an anti-climax compared to the Death Star trench run, and the perspective in ROTJ is hideous) so they don’t get the spot.

67. SUB TRACK (Depthcharge) (65)

Arcade: 1977, Gremlin
Spectrum: 1983, Amba

Like Starclash at No.83, this also featured in my Retro Gamer feature of the 25 all-time best 8-bit arcade ports. It’s a port of the ancient but hypnotically atmospheric time-attack score-chaser Depthcharge.

Sub Track is a very respectable copy of the coin-op, but it also expands on it with multiple game variations (in the manner of Atari VCS games of the time), with 24 permutations in all available, and also the deadly red nuclear sub which shows up occasionally and ends your game if you sink it.

It’s such an early and obscure Spectrum game that nobody knows what the box looked like and I had to make a gameplay video of it myself because there wasn’t one on YouTube. (I don’t know why it’s come out all fuzzy.)

Like the original, Sub Track is a game of precision and skill – you don’t have lives, just a time limit, so every shot has to count and you lose half your score if you get hit – and perfect for a quick session because each play only lasts a couple of minutes. (Plus it ran in 16K so it loaded fast, although that’s not a factor in this chart.)

An even better, arcade-perfect version of Depthcharge (with pixel movement, proximity detonation, 128K sound, the end-of-game bonus and maybe even Sub Track’s gameplay variations as dipswitch settings) has always seemed to me like a great project for someone starting out in Speccy coding – it’s quite slow-moving, natively monochrome and landscape format, so basically begging for a Speccy port – but Sub Track is already just about the best one ever made for any platform.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: A contemporary of Depthcharge, also coming out in 1979, was the very similar Deep Scan by Sega, which still isn’t emulated properly anywhere. The only way to play it today with sound is either as the bonus game in Die Hard Arcade on the Sega Saturn, via the Atari VCS version Sub-Scan, or the basic but fun homebrew Speccy port by Beyker Soft. It was one of only two entries to a Deep Scan coding contest in 2005, the other one being quite spectacularly terrible.

December 2021 also saw a very respectable Speccy homebrew hybrid of Depthcharge and Destroyer, a similar 1977 Atari game, under the name Carga de Profundidade.

It was written in Portuguese (in which the name translates, confusingly, to Depth Charge), which doesn’t affect the gameplay at all, but I translated it into English myself anyway and made some box art. Click the pic to download the game file.

——-

REALLY WEIRD MENTION: The spiritual arcade sequel to Depthcharge is Woodplace Inc’s 1987 release The Deep.

It was licenced for home conversions by US Gold the next year, and Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Atari ST and Amiga ports duly appeared. They were similar to the arcade game in that they all featured a ship dropping depthcharges on submarines and… that’s about it.

On the Spectrum, collecting powerup capsules results in a helicopter flying overhead and dropping the bonus item, which you have to pick up before it hits the water. This does not happen in the arcade game.

Among the bonus items are “pods”, which you need when the game regularly stops scrolling and an object appears on the sea bed. You have to use the pod to convert your ship into a diving bell, go down and retrieve the object. If you don’t have a pod you have to wait for minutes until you obtain one from a powerup capsule. None of this happens in the arcade game.

After a level you get a minigame where you have to shoot out the bridge of an oncoming warship by adjusting the power of your own gunfire as it approaches. This does not happen in the arcade game.

After that, there’s another minigame which is sort of an upside-down Missile Command, where you have to intercept torpedoes fired at small ships coming towards you to stop them from being sunk. This does not happen in the arcade game.

Why US Gold spent the money to licence a little-known coin-op and then produced a game bearing almost no resemblance to it – rather than just making an original submarine game of their own – is anyone’s guess. There’s no sign this was an unofficial clone repurposed, like Desperado/Gunsmoke. It’s just plain weird.

66. IVAN ‘IRONMAN’ STEWART’S
SUPER OFF-ROAD (64)

Arcade: 1989, Leland Corporation
Spectrum: 1990, Virgin

I mean, I’m reasonably sure it wouldn’t have KILLED them to have your truck flash a couple of times at the start of the race so you knew the hell which one you were supposed to be controlling and didn’t have to spend the first quarter-lap of every race banging into stuff until you worked it out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Everyone loves Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Ridiculously Excessively Named Single-Screen Truck-Based Circuit Racing Videogame, of course.

It’s a dirt-track laugh riot and for some reason it got a collection of incredibly good home conversions, from the excellent NES (by Rare) and Master System games to the basically-arcade-perfect Amiga and DOS versions and then to the better-than-arcade perfect SNES and Megadrive ports – which gave lucky players not only the eight original coin-op tracks but also the extra eight from the add-on “Track Pack” board released to arcade operators to extend the machine’s lifespan.

The Speccy version was no exception to the high quality.

It’s a thoroughly splendid piece of work, doused in far more colour than anyone was expecting and with all the speed and physics of the original intact. The one big drawback is that your truck looks identical to all the others, and although it has a tiny marker above it to help you pick it out, it’s all but invisible 95% of the time, and at the starting line or in any sort of tangle it’s easy to get hopelessly lost.

Of course, that’s just extra incentive to stay ahead of the field, and definitely not enough to ruin the fun of this excellent conversion.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Super Sprint is a slightly purer game than Super Off-Road, and the Speccy version looks beautiful with no visibility issues, but the iffy collision detection on the track edges at corners really wears you down after a fairly short amount of time.

65. RYGAR 2019 (63)

Arcade: 1986, Tecmo
Spectrum: 2019, Rafal Miazga (Original 1987, US Gold)

Rygar is another personal mid-80s arcade favourite of mine. Generic of theme and unremarkable of appearance, it’s such a pure test of zoned-out lizard-brain reaction/co-ordination skills that I can play it for high scores for hours, not caring that it barely changes the whole way through.

US Gold’s port of it, if we were looking for kind things to say, stays true to that minimalist ethos. It looks only very passingly like the coin-op, the sound is like a tin can full of angry bees and the controls could be slicker – don’t try pressing fire in the middle of a jump across a lava pit unless you want to suddenly plummet to a burny death.

What little gameplay sophistication and variation the arcade game has (low enemies you have to crouch to hit, several other baddie types and the levels where you’re shimmying up a rope) are missing entirely, as is the trademark six-note music loop.

But despite all of that, it still feels like Rygar at heart – a constant high-intensity battle against the same small handful of enemies throughout as you smash stones to try to find, and hopefully retain, the game’s five powerups.

Rafal Miazga’s 2019 graphics mod – sadly he didn’t manage to add any music – if anything looks LESS like arcade Rygar than the US Gold version, but since the US Gold version barely looked like arcade Rygar in the first place that’s not much of a loss.

What you do get is a lot more scenery variation to keep you interested throughout the game. The USG port is basically 27 levels of lava streams and waterfalls and very little else, but now you get icy wastelands with igloos, deserts, woodland villages, caves, temples and town. You also only get half as many levels – 13 – but that just makes the task of completing the game something like achievable (there are no continues).

Rygar is comfortably one of the least impressive games in our chart. I’m very sure a considerably better Speccy port could have been achieved. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that it does the core of what coin-op Rygar does, does it quite well, and as such offers a pretty satisfyingly Rygar-y experience despite all its shortcomings.

——-

GREY MENTION: I’m still not really sure what the deal is with the Pentagon 128/Scorpion 256, but there’s also a version of the mod called Rygar GT for the Russian machines, which is the same except it has AY sound from the Amstrad version. (But still not the main ingame music.)

64. OPERATION THUNDERBOLT (62)

Arcade: 1988, Taito
Spectrum: 1989, Imagine

Maybe not the expected choice here again, but I’ve always felt Op Wolf was a tiny bit overrated as an arcade game. You never really get much of a sense from it that you control how much you get hit, and it’s so stingy with the ammo that you spend most of your time worrying about that rather than on having fun shooting the baddies.

Operation Thunderbolt is a little bit less pernickety in that field, but the main reason I find it a more fun game is that where Wolf is quite po-faced, Thunderbolt is just so comically over-the-top.

In the 3D levels especially it’s the equivalent of an Andrew WK song, everything permanently at 11 with an endless onslaught of enemy troops to mow down, and the Speccy version makes no compromises on the mayhem.

Operation Thunderbolt takes the inevitability of getting hit and makes it into a feature, saying “Okay, you’ll get shot to hell but we’re going to shower you in powerups to make up for it”. Unlike Op Wolf with its obsessive need to conserve ammo to have any chance at all, you can let rip in Op Thunderbolt and just enjoy going totally postal all the time, with spotting and collecting all the pickups (rather than bullet conservation) being the main challenge.

They’re both excellent conversions – the flaws in their gameplay are the flaws of the arcade games and their coin-sucking design – and could easily have shared the spot just like Wizard Of Wor and The Wizard’s Warriors, but in truth I do find one a lot more enjoyable than the other so Thunderbolt gets the nod.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Operation Wolf, natch. And Ocean also deserve a little nod for their highly ambitious take on Space Gun, even if it didn’t have the framerate to pull it off.

 

63. BATTLE CITY (Tank Battalion) (61)

Arcade: 1980/1985, Namco
Spectrum: 2016, Epsilon

Two nations really love Battle City/Tank Battalion: the Japanese and the Russians. The original 1980 arcade game, Tank Battalion, was converted to the MSX and the Sord M5 (and probably inspired the tank section in Bally Midway’s 1982 hit Tron), but when the enhanced sequel Battle City came to the NES in 1985 it was a wow in the Land Of The Rising Sun and hit platforms from the Sharp X-1 and X68000 to the Game Boy, as well as an arcade release via the NES Vs system and countless hack versions.

But neither title made any noticeable impact in the West, so even though it’s a very Speccy-friendly game (take the code from Eric And The Floaters and you’re halfway there already) it got neither an official release nor a clone on these shores.

Russian coders, however, are Battle City potty. There are no fewer than SEVEN versions listed under that name alone in the Spectrum Computing database, all Russian-made, of which two stand out above the rest.

Battle City III by Makushin is annoyingly all in Russian (if you want to try it out, hit 3 to define keys and enter them as POAQM in that order) and only runs on the Pentagon 128/Scorpion 256, so we’re going to disqualify it here on a technicality. That leaves us with the 2016 Epsilon version, Battle City 4. (Both are just called Battle City onscreen.)

It lacks the music of the Makushin version but is more authentic-looking, has stage select and the two-player co-op mode, is all in English and, most importantly from this chart’s point of view, runs on a standard Spectrum 128. It’s a superb, bordering on perfect, recreation, and all the Battle City you need.

(The custom level construction kit is totally undocumented so goodness knows how – or indeed whether – it works, but who wants to put in that much effort anyway? Just blat those tanks and have some fun.)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Tank 1990 (from 2018 by the enigmatic “Dwa83”, who may or may not be Russian) is also a pretty slick and playable Battle City derivative. Rather than the old version found on most Spectrum sites, get v1.04 from here, which has a nice front end, three difficulty levels and redefinable keys. There’s also another decent new take on the game here.

 

62. PANG (60)

Arcade: 1989, Mitchell Corporation
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Look, nobody’s more surprised than me.

I was expecting this to be challenging for the top 10. The triumphant Arkanoid-style updated return to the Speccy of the arcade game that started out years earlier as Bubble Buster/Cannon Ball has it all – the graphics, the music, all the levels, even a decent splash of colour.

 

But going back and playing it now, the slight lag in response when you fire off your harpoon is SO jarring that it constantly gets in the way of the enjoyment and you never get fully used to it. (If you look closely, the harpoon in the arcade effectively starts at the muzzle of your gun while the Speccy one starts at your feet. That fraction of a second makes all the difference.)

It’s not enough to totally ruin everything else the port gets right, but it’s like being given the Royal box at the World Cup final and then having Keith Lemon take the seat next to you and talk incessantly, in character, from the kick-off to the final whistle. You wouldn’t leave – it’d still be the World Cup final, after all – but it wouldn’t half take the shine off it.

61. SHINOBI (59)

Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1989, Virgin

Shinobi is one of Sega’s iconic arcade products, spawning a long line of sequels across more than 20 years and making all sorts of cameo appearances in other games. It’s easy to see why – it’s a fast, slick and accessible action platformer with lots of eye-catching moments.

The Speccy version, bewilderingly, scraped an average review score of just 69.8%, at a time when things like the stupendously terrible conversions of Jail Break and Nemesis were averaging almost 75% and 80% respectively. I mean, what did people want?

Binary Design’s port for the Speccy is speedy, colourful, responsive, has the arcade music in 128K mode, proper scrolling rather than push-scrolling, and features all the stages including the 3D bonus rounds. It’s a hugely accomplished bit of coding that’s fun to play as well as technically admirable. (It’s hugely better than the broadly-similar and equally-colourful Vigilante, say, which also got higher scores.)

The only flaws in Shinobi are the unnecessarily fiddly “big jump” control (there are only ever two heights, so why not make it a toggle instead of having you faff around pressing two keys?), and the fact that the screen is a bit zoomed-in and you don’t get any clues about what’s on the level above or below you – even when you can actually see the floor it doesn’t show you the feet of the enemies that are in fact standing there – so you have to make an occasional leap in the dark in a couple of stages.

Those merit docking a few points, sure, but only from what should otherwise have been nailed-on 90%+s all round. (Rick Dangerous is ALL leaps in the dark but still managed an 80% review average.)

Compiling this chart has made me realise just how amazingly, shockingly bad most Spectrum-magazine game reviewing actually was – in the same issue of YS that gave Shinobi 71%, Altered Beast got 80% and the monochrome mediocrity of Strider got a ridiculous 90% – but never more so than with the absolutely gross injustices done to this superb port.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: On a similar ninja theme, I love Irem’s all-action Ninja Spirit in the arcades and the Speccy port is half-decent, but its refusal to compromise on the highly-detailed graphics while remaining totally monochrome makes it absurdly hard to make progress in compared to the likes of Shinobi. A bit less ambition could have made it a real contender.

60. GRYZOR (aka Contra) (58)

Arcade: 1987, Konami
Spectrum: 1987, Imagine

Gryzor is one of the games that definitely benefits from this chart’s eligibility rules. It was a little bit of a handful back in the day, whether with keyboard or joystick controls, because needing six keys or two fire buttons at a time when joysticks only had one is a serious handicap in a game as famously unforgiving as Konami’s run’n’gun platformer.

The Speccy conversion makes a few compromises, but difficulty isn’t one of them. The graphics are stripped down somewhat for visibility (but still highly recognisable as the coin-op, and with plenty of colour), there are some weird quirks (you can’t go backwards in the horizontally-scrolling stages) and some sections have been made easier (like the first “boss” emplacement, which just sits passively waiting to be shot), but mostly this is still a very tough game.

There are no missing stages here, unlike many Speccy arcade ports of the time, and although the game’s been simplified quite a bit you only get one credit with six lives. So it’s a real godsend to be able to program a modern multi-button joystick or gamepad and give yourself a fighting chance at getting to the end.

The 8-bit conversions of Gryzor are all radically different from each other. The C64’s is comically, drawn-by-a-toddler-with-finger-paints ugly and too fast, while the Amstrad port looks fantastic and is the most accurate of the three, but the heavy price of prettiness is the loss of the music present in the other two, and the fact that it’s (madly) a flick-screen game rather than a scrolling one. (Bad in the horizontal stages, ruinously awful in the vertical one.) Overall I reckon the Speccy got the best deal.

59. DRAGON SPIRIT (57)

Arcade: 1987, Namco
Spectrum: 1989, Domark

In mid-80s arcades where every other cabinet was a vertically-scrolling shooter, Dragon Spirit really struggled to stand out. (Its own 1990 sequel Dragon Saber was a far better game.)

But the Speccy field for the genre was a lot less crowded (perhaps because the landscape-format screen was much more suited to side-scrollers), so for keen Spectrum shmuppers the conversion, led by prolific veteran coder Christian Urquhart, was a much more attractive prospect than it was to spoiled arcadegoers.

And it’s a really good job. While mostly monochrome (it does admirably get some colour in where it can, like the river on stage 1), visibility is high thanks to big masked bullets and a very respectable framerate, and difficulty is pretty well pitched – the graphics are relatively bigger than the coin-op’s and there’s no horizontal scrolling, so the action is more intense and most of your shots hit something.

Dragon Spirit is one of the games in this list that emulation is the making of – it’s a pain in the arse with keys or a one-button joystick, because you need to bomb constantly, but when you can map buttons to an arcade stick or joypad it radically transforms it into a far more enjoyable experience.

(Autofire would have been nice, but remember that Speccy coders all hate you and want the main test of your gaming skill to be how strong your thumb muscles are.)

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Sonic Boom is a pretty decent stab at the coin-op and unusually smooth for a Speccy port. (Get the 2021 edition that gets rid of the nasty crackly sound.)

Gemini Wing takes the opposite approach, sacrificing framerate for more colour, but is still very playable.

58. ELEVATOR ACTION (56)

Arcade: 1983, Taito
Spectrum: 1987, Quicksilva

Taito’s much-ported cult spy hit was one of the cutest-looking coin-ops of its era, and with its real-world location and non-linear play it was arguably also one of the first germs of the idea of the “sandbox” game.

This chart’s seen a lot of Speccy ports so far with lazy 128K versions that didn’t bother to include any music, so Elevator Action is a big gust of fresh air.

In fact the Speccy music is BETTER than the arcade game’s, offering a much bouncier tune. It’s also a fantastic-looking port, with really nice graphics and tons of colour with minimal clashing. (It knocks the C64 version into a cocked hat visually, it’s smoother than the MSX or CPC versions and it’s prettier than even the NES port. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that overall it’s the handsomest Elevator Action money could buy until the arcade sequel and the Game Boy Advance remake.)

Like its coin-op daddy the Speccy game could probably do with a smidge more speed, but it’s hardly fair to criticise an arcade port for not being faster than the original. Elevator Action wasn’t the greatest arcade game in the world, but if you loved it and wanted to take it home you really couldn’t ask any more from a Spectrum conversion of it than this. It’s very near to flawless.

——-

SECRET MENTION: Mission Elevator, a 1988 release from Kixx, looks for all the world like an unofficial port of Elevator Action, but actually turns it into an odd little arcade adventure. The whole thing appears to be set in a single 63-storey skyscraper hotel in which you’re constantly examining plants and barging into the rooms of voluptuous ladies, ostensibly while searching for keys and parts of a code to defuse a bomb.

57. MR HELI (55)
(REMASTERED 128K)

Arcade: 1987, Irem
Spectrum: 2014, Rafal Miazga (1989, Firebird)

Irem’s Mr Heli is one of those arcade games where so much of its appeal is in the bright colourful graphics and jaunty music that bringing it successfully to the Spectrum almost seems like a hopeless task.

Firebird’s original conversion did a decent job of replicating the gameplay, but with no music and ugly stipply monochrome graphics it was left with only what’s actually quite a forbiddingly difficult game. Suddenly it was less Budgie The Helicopter’s Happy Fun-Time Adventure, more (Yellow And) Black Hawk Down.

So it’s hard to overstate the change effected by Rafal Miazga’s superb remaster.

This is a completely transformational hack. With an excellent AY rendition of the coin-op music and much cleaner, sharper graphics, the mod version steps away from the grim military vibe and as if by magic we’re back at the cheery, cartoony arcade game again, just played on a slightly broken monitor. As to why it was ever drawn with the uggo graphics in the first place when it could just as easily have looked like this, that’s a mystery for the ages.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Pac-Land Reimagined. Grandslam’s port of the strange Pac-Man sequel wasn’t bad and especially benefitted from having an excellent rendition of the coin-op music included, but the atmosphere was somewhat spoiled by the glum monochrome palette. Miazga said “to hell with colour clash” and just colourised the whole damn thing, which made it feel twice as much like the arcade game.

56. BUGGY BOY (128K) (54)

Arcade: 1985, Tatsumi
Spectrum: 1988, Elite

PEDANTRY FACT: the Spectrum in fact never got a conversion of Buggy Boy. Buggy Boy was an arcade game whose main selling point was its spectacular triple-screen display with epic draw distances, and very few Spectrum games were ever released which allowed people to connect three TVs together for widescreen play.

What we actually got was the cut-down single-screened Buggy Boy Jr. But in fairness we got a pretty impressive version of it.

Neither of the other 8-bit ports had anything like the ambition of the Speccy version. The C64 game, while superb, zoomed way back until the trademark giant colourful buggy of the coin-op was a tiny little thing, and the less said about the stinky Amstrad CPC effort the better.

But the Spectrum release tackled the daunting task of replicating the fast, sprite-scaling original head-on, and came out on the other side with one of the best-looking racers ever seen on the machine. In fact, it made the buggy even BIGGER, to the extent that sometimes you just can’t see where you’re going, which is unfortunate.

(The problem is exacerbated by its bouncy gait, something probably done to enhance the feeling of speed, and especially in downhill sections.)

Various other compromises were made too – you don’t get the bonus footballs, the colour-coded flag collection or the banked sections of track (which is a bit weird as they DID go to the trouble of coding in graphics for when the buggy’s tilted at a 45-degree angle), and the collision detection can be somewhat opaque, but none of that stops the port from feeling more like arcade Buggy Boy than anyone would ever have dared to dream.

This is a game like no other on the Speccy, and showcases just what the old machine could do if someone really put their minds to it.

55. GILLIGAN’S GOLD (Bagman) (53)

Arcade: 1982, Valadon Automation
Spectrum: 1984, Ocean

This game might be completely unique, in that it’s a 48K Spectrum port of an arcade game where the Speccy version has continuous ingame music and the arcade doesn’t.

Valadon’s 1982 mine-robbing romp is one of the most absurdly, ferociously hard games ever to hit an arcade. Even the more enjoyable hacked version where you can run twice as fast at the touch of a button (Bagman Turbo) is still absolutely savage.

(In fact Gilligan’s Gold is more like a conversion of Bagman Turbo than the original – it picks up the pace noticeably, and is all the more playable, though no easier, for it.)

It also helps speedwise that the screen is squished down from the arcade’s portrait format to the Speccy’s landscape one, while still including all the “floors” of the mine.

(Trivia fact: it was only after watching some YouTube videos for this chart that I discovered Gilligan’s Gold actually changes colours in the second level, having never managed to get that far before. Round 2’s colours are actually much more arcade-like, so I wonder why they didn’t start with those. Even in 1984 I think everyone knew that just changing the colours in your unlicensed ripoff didn’t offer you any legal protection.)

Gilligan’s Gold is basically a better Bagman than Bagman in nearly every respect, with only the overly pernickety collision detection on picking up money bags and dropping them in the wheelbarrow spoiling the party a bit. Just don’t expect an easy time.

54. POWER DRIFT (128K) (52)

Arcade: 1988, Sega
Spectrum: 1989, Activision

I really couldn’t make my mind up about this one. It’s based on a really fun and characterful Sega coin-op that’s basically a cross between Super Mario Kart and Stunt Car Racer done on an upgraded version of the firm’s iconic mid-80s sprite-scaling hardware that also brought you Out Run, After Burner and Space Harrier.

In most respects the Speccy port is a triumph – it’s fast, with a decent framerate and responsive control, and includes all the arcade’s 25 tracks complete with all their spectacular rollercoaster ups and downs and twists and turns. It also doesn’t compromise on difficulty – just like the coin-op you’ll really struggle for a podium spot if you have even a single serious shunt on anything but the first track in any of the five race series.

The audio, however, is the cat poop in the Coco Pops. The 48K version has none at all – not a single beep or click – and the 128’s is all over the shop. Seemingly at random it’ll switch from music or sound effects to neither or both, between races or after a crash or just whenever it feels like it. And if you’re not in 1st position in a race, the sound cuts out completely as soon as the leader crosses the finish line until the rest of the field trails in, which is disconcerting and distracting.

The phrase “[Game X] would have placed a lot higher if not for [Y]” is becoming a familiar refrain in this list, but Power Drift’s audio really lets down an otherwise superb port that didn’t even need multiload to cram everything in, and definitely dumps it from the top half of the table to the bottom half.

53. TROJAN (NE)

Arcade: 1986, Capcom
Spectrum: 1988/never, Durell

I only very recently discovered the existence of this. Penned by the prolific Clive “Saboteur” Townsend, it was never released for reasons unknown, and only recovered when Townsend dug some old Microdrive disks out of his attic earlier this year.

Despite being essentially complete it never seems to have been previewed, advertised or discussed in a single Speccy mag, which is bizarre, but as you might expect from its pedigree it’s a superb piece of work – fast and colourful with 128K music and most of the arcade game intact. The only concession is that it’s changed from a scrolling game to a flick-screen one, but the impact on the gameplay is pretty minimal.

Like Shadow Warriors back at No.98, Trojan (designed by the creator of Kung-Fu Master) was eclipsed in arcades by better games in a very crowded genre. Its only home ports were for MS-DOS and the NES, and the NES version – as with Shadow Warriors – was radically different to the coin-op. But on the Speccy it stands very close to the top of its particular pile.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Taito’s thematically-similar Gladiator is better known to Speccy fans by its Japanese title, Great Gurianos. Initially only released on a compilation, David Perry’s conversion is a really high-quality rendition of a very thin game and the roots of his later tour de force, Savage, can be easily discerned in it.

 

52. MOTOS (50)

Arcade: 1985, Namco
Spectrum: 1987, MAD

Namco’s game of intergalactic bumper cars certainly looks like the kind of thing that would be pretty achievable on the Speccy.

And sure enough, Binary Design’s port – remarkably released on a £2.99 budget label – is an extremely complete conversion. The screen is a little smaller (11×11 rather than the portrait-mode coin-op’s 13×14) but the speed is reduced a little to compensate. All the features and baddies are there, it’s got 62 levels (although they’re not all the same as the arcade ones) and it’s brightly-coloured with the proper 128K music. (48K sound is minimal but adequate.)

It seems like one of those cases where the coders were just given a loan of an arcade machine or a video of it and left to figure stuff out for themselves, though, rather than being given the proper design documents, because on closer inspection several of the enemies and objects behave quite differently to their coin-op counterparts.

But none of that changes the fact that this FEELS just like playing arcade Motos, and it’s just as tough as its big brother. Neither the original nor the Speccy port offers any continues, so clearing either without cheats is a serious long-term challenge, and nudging your highscore up a little at a time on the way is its own reward.

51. ROUST (Joust) (49)

Arcade: 1982, Williams
Spectrum: 2018, Allan Turvey

For a long time Winged Warlords by CDS, from the very early days of the Speccy, was the best take on Williams’ ostrich-unseating medieval melee the machine had to offer. Despite being a stripped-down version that plays as one continuous level with no disintegrating platforms or special waves, it squeezed some excellent fast-paced Joust action with lovely smooth physics and control into the 16K machine.

Nearly 30 years later, though, someone decided it was time to do the job properly.

Roust restores all the missing features from the coin-op in a terrific port with authentic graphics and 128K sound. Only the slightly skittish movement/control – which isn’t as pleasing or precise as that of Winged Warlords – disappoints a bit, but the tradeoff of a fully-featured Joust more than makes up for it.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Crazy Cars, a very obscure 1985 title from Denmark (although it has speech in a very Scottish accent), is a splendid and fast port which inexplicably switches the ostriches for fairground bumper cars – I suppose, in fairness, ostriches can’t actually fly either – but has all of the arcade’s features except for the lava troll, and is let down only by the occasional AI flaw like baddies sometimes getting stuck on the centre-right platform. Other than that it would have given Roust a serious challenge for the slot.

50. ROAD BLASTERS (128K) (48)

Arcade: 1987, Atari
Spectrum: 1988, US Gold

I have a special place in my heart for Road Blasters, because the Speccy version is the game I mostly won the 1989 UK Computer Games Championships on. But it’s interesting for more reasons than that.

One is that on the Speccy the 48K and 128K versions are so radically unalike that they’re practically different games. The 48K version is pretty rancid, in fact – ugly and heavily cut-down, lacking any sort of front end or basic features like the starting-level select.

The 128K version, though, is far prettier and slicker.

But another thing is that by being slower and lacking the coin-op’s fancy analogue controller, the Speccy port of Road Blasters actually plays better than any of the 16-bit ports and arguably even better than its arcade parent. From being a frantic semi-controllable rollercoaster, the conversion turns it into more of a game of skill and shooting precision, where the key is to take down enemy cars and gun turrets without wasting any bullets (each miss lowers your score multiplier, you see).

It also, incidentally, CRUSHES the hideous C64 version visually – although we should acknowledge that the Amstrad port is an absolute stunner to look at and only plays fractionally less well than the Speccy one.

This is another of those games, like SDI, that feels more like the arcade experience than it strictly is. Your brain just sort of adjusts to the changes and tells you that this is Spectrum Road Blasters rather than the arcade game, and that somehow that’s okay.

 

49. IKARI WARRIORS (47)

Arcade: 1986, SNK
Spectrum: 1988, Elite

Whoever invented the rotary-fire concept in arcade games really needs a slap. Offhand I can’t think of a single game (okay, maybe Tron) where it adds anything to the experience, and in fact it’s almost always a giant pain in the arse even in the original, let alone for the poor saps trying to translate such a fiddly and dedicated control method to the simple keyboards and joysticks of home micros.

And so it was with Ikari Warriors.

But like a few of the games in this list, necessity was the mother of improvement when it came to the Speccy port. Without adding any extra controls – you still had movement and two buttons – the home version played better than its big brother, thanks to mapping grenades to a long press and a clever toggle which either locked your direction of fire or let you shoot Commando-style in the direction of movement.

It’s a terrific conversion, bursting with colour and with very little from the coin-op missing or simplified, though it’s a real shame we never got a 128K version with music, either officially or as a hack. That and the pointlessly annoying limited ammo for your gun – the arcade game’s fault, of course – and the minor problems with bullet visibility in some areas are the only reasons why it doesn’t place even higher. It’s also a game that plays even better with modern controls than it did back in the day, so if you enjoyed it then, enjoy it even more now.

——

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: The arcade sequel Victory Road got an equally good conversion with the same engine. (The related SNK titles Guerrilla War and Tank fared rather less well, and showed how basically the same controls could also be adapted very badly.)

48. TIMEBOMB ARCADE (Check Man) (46)

Arcade: 1982, Zilec-Zenitone
Spectrum: 1984, CDS Microsystems

We’ve touched on the slightly odd story of Check Man before, and not just in relation to its possible connection to Ultimate. Its arcade flyers depicted a game with a playfield of blue tiles, but every known emulated version has yellow ones, as did the real-life one I played in my local arcade in the early 80s.

Whether the original Timebomb had blue ones in tribute to the flyer version is anyone’s guess, but lucky Spectrum owners now have a choice, since Hungary’s own tireless Pgyuri has modded up a version with the colours of the real one that appeared in arcades.

(I’m really fascinated to see if a blue arcade ROMset ever shows up.)

As for gameplay, CDS’s conversion was a bit of a triumph – fast and true to the original with a challenging difficulty curve and a real sense of urgency. It had a lot of competition on the Speccy – Check Man probably vies with Pengo for the highest number of clones of one arcade game on the machine – but for my money it’s the champ.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: There were LOADS of Speccy clones of Check Man, and many of them are good in various ways (there were even a couple of highly respectable magazine type-in versions). Chocman and De-Fusion don’t quite make the podium, but Stomp by Omega is almost as good as Timebomb overall and visually probably better, and only lost out because of its lack of music and slightly odd take on the row-shifting power.

Grid Trap from Livewire is also very decent and has music but again doesn’t handle the row-shift quite as elegantly as Timebomb (although mappable controls under emulation help with that). Any one of them will do a fine job, but Timebomb is just narrowly the best all round.

 

47. ALIEN SYNDROME (45)

Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1988, ACE

This chart has marked some games down quite harshly for (a) push-scrolling and (b) failing to make use of the features of the 128K Speccy. But while those are both disappointing shortcomings, they’re not total dealbreakers, and here’s a case in point.

Sega’s splattery space rescue with hints of Gauntlet is a classic of its era, and the Spectrum conversion is an instantly recognisable and likeable recreation with cute, colourful graphics and accurate maps.

Would it have been better with constant scrolling? Probably, but as it moves in blocks to avoid colour clash it would have either had to be significantly less pretty or have given players motion sickness. The push-scrolling is well-calibrated so that you almost never scroll straight into a baddie, and you fairly quickly stop even noticing it.

The lack of 128K sound and music is harder to excuse, especially in a game that’s a multiload anyway, and the same goes for the two missing levels from the arcade’s six (you get all the spaceshippy levels but not the alien-planet ones). You’re getting plenty of Alien Syndrome fun for your money here, though, and you won’t feel too short-changed.

46. TERRAPINS (128K) (48)
(Turtles/Turpin/600)

Arcade: 1981, Konami/Stern/Sega
Spectrum: 2017, Allan Turvey

Although my opinions are of course at all times objective and definitive, if pressed while drunk at a party or something I’ll secretly admit that my personal favourite coin-ops enjoy a high level of representation in this chart, and Turtles/Turpin/Terrapins is a case in point.

It’s a game I only encountered once in the wild (the Turpin version in the long-gone Purple Penny arcade on the promenade in Southport, local colour fans) but which made a big impression on me with its bouncy music and cute-but-intense maze-chasing gameplay.

It’s actually a game with a really fascinating history. Despite being little-known now and not very successful in its day, it had several different coin-op incarnations spread between three of the big-name publishers of the time, which featured quite radical gameplay differences as well as aesthetic ones.

The original Konami release, for example, was actually called 600, had racecars as the enemies – presumably on a sort of Frogger theme – rather than beetles, and played the same music the whole way through. Turtles, the Stern licence, had four tunes which changed each level, while Sega’s version, Turpin, had EIGHT different melodies and changed them with every two turtle babies rescued.

In 600 you also rescued all the babies at once rather than one at a time and your bombs recharged automatically over time instead of having to be collected from the centre of the maze.

It got even weirder with a whole raft of official ports for various obscure home formats ranging from VCS-era stuff like the Philips Videopac G7000 and Emerson Arcadia to the Tomy Tutor educational console and the Casio PV1000, in which the screen layouts, graphics and game rules got overhauled yet again. Turtles was even one of the only four games ever released for Entex’s bizarre spinning-mirrors standalone console the AdventureVision.

Strangely, though, despite looking like ripe fodder for budding coders to cut their teeth on knockoffs of, it was a game of which there appear to be very few unofficial clones. Compare and contrast with Bagman, released around the same time, which is an equally obscure and much less good game, but which got bootlegged faithfully on the Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC (all as Gilligan’s Gold – see #52), Dragon 32, Tandy Coco, Colecovision, C64 again (as Bagitman) and Amiga to name but eight releases.

As far as I can establish, the Speccy was one of the few formats to get any Turtles homages, in the shape of the quite playable Turtle Timewarp and a really rather impressive type-in from Your Computer called Terrapin (singular).

Neither had the cuteness or catchy music of the coin-op, though, which is where Allan Turvey’s splendid 2017 remake showed up.

It’s a really pretty and smooth clone with great use of colour, authentic level layouts and slick arcadey presentation. It plays beautifully and really evokes the original, even though it sadly doesn’t use any of the arcade music, preferring its own original tunes. It also dumbs down the difficulty a bit for my liking – it’s noticeably slower and you start with only two beetles in pursuit.

(I’ve never understood making Speccy ports EASIER than the arcade game. Keep them the same or even make them harder, because it doesn’t cost you 20p a go and there’s no queue of other people waiting to play and laughing at your incompetence. You’ve got all the time in the world to practice in the privacy of your own home and git gud, as the kids today say. Or just POKE it with a cheat if you’re irretrievably rubbish.)

I’m also gutted that the promised “Rally-X” game mode never materialised, as it looked like a lot of fun, but as the coin-op didn’t have one of those that’s very excessive nitpicking. Terrapins is an absolutely lovely Speccy version of Turpin and that should be enough for any reasonable person.

45. BATTLEZONE (43)

Arcade: 1980, Atari
Spectrum: 1984, Quicksilva

57 entries in and we’re hitting the point where it’s difficult to think of things to say about some games. Everyone knows what Battlezone is, right?

Quicksilva’s first official arcade licence did a bang-up job of bringing the coin-op’s vector graphics to the Speccy’s pixel screen, bright and solid and impressively fast.

It also nailed the tank-tracks controls and some nicely gritty 48K sound, in what’s basically as flawless a port as the Speccy could possibly have been asked to deliver. And hey, we’ve all got busy lives to get on with, so let’s just leave it at that.

—

HONOURABLE MENTION: If you prefer a more colourful take on Battlezone, and with simpler joystick controls, 3D Tank Duel from Realtime – the game they cut their vector-graphics teeth on before Starstrike – was best in class before Quicksilva’s version came along, and will do you very nicely.

44. BOSCONIAN 87(128K) (42)

Arcade: 1981, Namco
Spectrum: 1987, Mastertronic

Nitpickers, or lovers of games that didn’t make the cut, could legitimately call for a steward’s inquiry on this one, because despite being billed on the inlay as an “OFFICIAL NAMCO ARCADE LICENSE” and “A classic conversion from the ever-popular arcade game”, there was never any such arcade game as Bosconian 87. What there was was plain old Bosconian (1981).

And the list of differences between Bosconian and Bosconian 87 is a long one.

For a start the colours are all wrong. The enemy fortresses in Bosconian are green and red and there’s no reason they couldn’t have been the same in the port, since the game scrolls in character blocks. It could just as easily have looked like this, ie lovely and actually like Bosconian:

But instead it’s mostly in black and white for no obvious reason. It’s also WAY more zoomed-in than the coin-op, with tons of the screen given up to a largely needless surround in unpleasant cyan. And the two-way fire that comes equipped with your ship as standard in arcade Bosconian now has to be found as a powerup here.

You don’t only lose things, though. Bosconian 87 has a whole raft of additions to the original arcade game – deadly space mines, smart bombs, extra-life pickups, extra-fuel pickups even though it’s almost impossible to run out of fuel, weird docking stations you can dock with to very little apparent purpose (they’re basically a wildly overcomplicated pause button), but mainly a catchy continuous tune with an especially fabulous end-of-level jingle that makes you want to keep playing just so you can hear it again.

(Unusually for the time, Bosconian had no music other than an intro fanfare.)

Essentially, then, what I’m saying is that this game is NOTHING LIKE BOSCONIAN. But of course it is, because the core shoot-the-fortresses gameplay is exactly the same and none of the other stuff really affects it in any very noticeable way. It’s loads of fun, unless you only have a 48K machine in which case drop it about 50 places because that jingle is EVERYTHING.

43. HUNCHBACK (41)

Arcade: 1983, Century Electronics
Spectrum: 1984, Ocean

Generally held to be the Speccy’s first step into the respectable world of licenced arcade conversions rather than unofficial knockoffs with one letter in their name changed, Hunchback was an auspicious start.

(Ocean got value for money out of their licence, porting Hunchback to the C64, Amstrad, Dragon 32, BBC Micro and an especially good MSX version as well as the Spectrum. They also produced a home-micro sequel, a graphic adventure game and a totally original Game Boy title.)

There are actually about a dozen different versions of the coin-op, running on different hardware in a range of colour schemes and with various graphical, gameplay and audio differences, so it’s actually hard to be definitive about how accurate any conversion is. But they’re all broadly the same game.

The Spectrum port gives you all 15 stages of the castle wall to traverse to save Esmerelda, with the proper hazards on each one, all depicted in some large, un-Speccy-like graphics. On busy levels it plays better than the arcade game, lacking the slowdown that occasionally afflicted the primitive hardware.

The only things missing are the arcade intro sequence and the strange little platforming bonus level at the end, which actually showed up in the sequel Hunchback II – Quasimodo’s Revenge instead and always felt totally out of place in the coin-op anyway.

It’s a smashing conversion of a characterful and addictive game, and if you haven’t played it give it a try and see if it rings your bell. (I’m fired. – Me)

42. PING PONG (40)

Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1986, Imagine

This one was quite hard to place. It’s almost certainly the slimmest game in this entire chart, offering just five stages of perhaps the simplest sport in existence without even the superficial novelty of different opponents.

On the other hand, if you’re going to execute something as exquisitely as this, how much does that matter?

After all, this is a coin-op conversion. Anyone who buys it presumably knows exactly what they’re getting, or at least what they WANT to get – an accurate recreation of the arcade game. And there can be little argument that Ping Pong delivers on that count. It looks as close to a 1:1 clone as is within the Speccy’s power, although I’m not quite sure why they decided to make the table green and black rather than green and white – I can’t really see how it could have caused anything but very minimal colour clash.

And if anything the one-button gameplay is a welcome simplification of the arcade’s confusing and unnecessary two buttons, where normal shots are taken with the joystick but smashes are counter-intuitively on the second button and it takes much longer to get your head around for no gameplay gain.

Every point on the Speccy version is a delightful joust of thrust and parry, with quick thinking and hand-eye co-ordination increasingly crucial as the game takes you along a well-judged difficulty curve. (It’s a little bit slower than the arcade, but that just tips the balance slightly more towards the tactical than pure reactions.)

Konami’s central innovation – doing away with all the boring running around after the ball, leaving you to concentrate only on shot selection – is revealed as a stroke of genius, turning every point into a “How did I mess that up?” facepalm instead of a curse at an infallible superhuman opponent whacking the ball into an unreachable corner.

But at the end of the day, it IS still inescapably shallow and limiting (as befits its arcade heritage). There’s none of the madness of real ping-pong, with players racing around an arena the size of a REAL tennis court pulling off absurd 20-foot shots. And ironically it does such a good job of teaching you that you’ll best it all too soon, with very little incentive to come back once you’ve got the beating of Level 5 other than the occasional 10-minute zip through the whole game just for the pleasure of it.

Ping Pong is a beautiful thing, superbly ported, and on its own terms it’s basically flawless, but it just runs out of steam too quickly to climb any higher than this.

——-

MYSTERY MENTION: The game was released in arcades as Konami’s Ping Pong, although the Speccy version is just plain Ping Pong. Imagine also released a game called Konami’s Tennis the same year, along with Konami’s Golf, but I can find no record anywhere of Konami ever releasing arcade games under those names (or any other Konami tennis or golf games that they could be ports of). So that’s a bit weird.

41. CHASE HQ (128K) (39)

Arcade: 1988, Taito
Spectrum: 1989, Ocean

You’re shocked, I know. This game was voted the Speccy’s best of all time by readers of Your Sinclair, although they also put Mr Freeze at No.90 so let’s keep their opinions in some sort of perspective.

And if this was just a chart of technical achievements, Chase HQ would be a lot nearer the top. For a start, it’s surely the best-looking 3D racer the Speccy ever produced, and it’s not even a very close contest. It’s also both fast and smooth, with lovely animation.

But the problem in the end is that while as stunning a feat of programming as this is, it’s still a port of Chase HQ, and Chase HQ just ain’t all that great. While the racing bit is terrific, zooming along through towns and over dirt tracks and through tunnels and whatever, the ramming phase is dull and fiddly and drags on far too long (which is why they gave you a gun in the sequel).

None of that is the exemplary port’s fault, but I’m sure we’ve all dreamed of what could have been if Chase HQ’s coders had been given the Out Run job instead.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Out Run LOL JOKING. But the sequel, Turbo Out Run, is a halfway-decent effort even if your giant Ferrari obscures half of the road in front of you.

And we should also take this chance to award a moderate amount of kudos to Continental Circus, which is a fast and smooth racer that’s not half bad at all but not quite strong enough to get into the chart on its own merit, thanks to some unsophisticated steering, very samey graphics and the quite distracting way the engine noise stops whenever you overtake someone.

40. QUACKSHOT (Tutankham) (38)

Arcade: 1982, Konami
Spectrum: 1985, Sparklers

Tutankham was a ridiculously hard arcade game whose atmosphere did most of the heavy lifting. Endlessly-spawning baddies flooding into passageways where you can only shoot horizontally made it a bit of a grind, perhaps to conceal the fact that it only actually has four levels, which repeat endlessly if you clear them.

The Speccy’s first attempt at a clone, Micromania’s primitive-looking but slick Tutankhamun, improved significantly on that with 14 different tombs to explore, although your hero’s jittery movement suggested a serious case of claustrophobia-induced anxiety.

Tutankhamun got the job done well enough for a couple of years until budget label Sparklers produced Quackshot, which was not only far superior visually but has 16 stages, the first two of which are accurate replications of the coin-op’s mazes before it goes off and does its own thing, which includes some quite inventive level designs.

There isn’t really much else to say about it. If you liked Tutankham, Quackshot was in most key respects identical but there was four times as much of it. That’s a result in anyone’s book.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Cavelon is a surprisingly similar game in nature, and Ocean’s copy of it both simplifies and slightly improves on the coin-op. It only narrowly failed to make the chart.

39. DONKEY KONG ARCADE (37)

Arcade: 1981, Nintendo
Spectrum: 1986, Ocean/2019, Pgyuri & Mick Farrow

The Spectrum had perhaps more absolutely terrible attempts at clones of Nintendo’s iconic Donkey Kong than of any other game.

They included what’s widely regarded as the machine’s worst game of all time, C-Tech’s hilariously bad Krazy Kong. The various efforts were so dire that for several years Ocean’s deeply dreadful unofficial version, simply entitled Kong, was probably the best of a truly abysmal bunch.

So when the publisher cleaned up its act in 1986 with a legitimate licenced conversion, it had a very low bar to clear. Its phenomenally good Amstrad CPC port, sadly, wouldn’t be replicated on the Spectrum, but we did get a sort-of okay version with all four stages included (which remarkably gave it a big advantage over almost all the official conversions up to that time, including the NES one), and also unusually appearing in the proper Japanese/European order.

For completely unfathomable reasons, though, Sentient Software decided to recolour the whole game so that it looked nothing like the coin-op. The first and third stages got weird pink girders and white ladders instead of the proper red and cyan, and the fourth stage was an inexplicable atrocity in green and red instead of blue and yellow.

So when I talked Pgyuri into deploying his magic paintbrush to fix it in the Donkey Kong: True Colours Edition, we already had a game that looked and felt much more like arcade Donkey Kong.

But the improvements weren’t over. Sentient had given the game a nondescript “Jumpman” that looked like some random flat-capped chubster in a one-piece jumpsuit, but the supertalented Mick Farrow stepped in to complete the reworking with an almost perfect dungareed Mario and a whole new set of graphics to go with him, from girders to barrels and fireballs and a much less deformed-looking Kong.

In truth the gameplay (mainly the jumping) still leaves a little bit to be desired and a truly definitive Speccy DK to compete with the Amstrad version is still a dream, but the cosmetic transformation alone is so dramatic that when it comes to feeling like the coin-op the Arcade Edition is in a different league to Ocean’s release, which itself was in a different league to the previous attempts, and our little black wonder can finally hold its head up at meetings of the Kong Konversion Klub (an organisation whose name has led to some unfortunate but hilarious misunderstandings).

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: None. Other than this, the history of Donkey Kong on the Spectrum is all dishonour.

38. SPECTIPEDE (Centipede) (36)

Arcade: 1980, Atari
Spectrum: 1983, R&R

As with Battlezone a few entries ago, there isn’t a huge amount of explanation required for a game like Spectipede.

The Speccy had bazillions of ports of Atari’s bug-blasting classic – DK’Tronics had two different goes at it by themselves – but the bulk of them are pretty bad, missing out one or more key features. Loads of them, remarkably, don’t even have diagonal movement.

Spectipede does, though, and boasts the full roster of arcade beasties all behaving just like they do in the coin-op. (Including the centipede behaving properly in the bottom section of the screen, which lots of clones failed at.) The only inaccuracy I’ve noticed is that it clears the poison mushrooms for you after every screen, which is a useful assist in a fast and challenging game that looks good and has pleasingly zappy sound.

Despite a couple of titles borrowing the name, nobody appears to have tried to actually port the more interesting arcade sequel Millipede to the Speccy, so Spectipede is the best way to commit mass insecticide the old machine has to offer, and a terrific pure arcade shooter in its own right.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Thor’s weirdly-named Night Stalker is the best of the rest. It messes up the centipede movement in the player area (when it reaches the bottom row it just teleports back to the top), but it’s otherwise solid and scores a point over Spectipede by offering 10 difficulty levels for those of you with no motor skills.

MYSTERY MENTION: Centipedes by EMM Software and Rapedes by Visions appear to be slightly modified versions of the same game, although they’re credited to different people.

The EMM version, credited to Boris “G-Force/Tempest” Baginski, has batshit-mad 11-key controls (10 for movement and a fire button) with no joystick option and no sound, but 10 difficulty levels.

The Visions version has good sound and sensible controls, but only five speed settings (only one of which is worthwhile), no diagonal movement and incredibly no autofire, rendering it all but unplayable. The two versions combined into one could have been excellent, but instead we got two messes.

37. ROLLING THUNDER (35)

Arcade: 1986, Namco
Spectrum: 1988, US Gold

There’s a unique elegance to arcade Rolling Thunder. Maybe it’s your tall, slim, ramrod-backed hero in his smart polo-neck-and-chinos combo, or maybe the authentic spy-serial music, or the classy palette in primary colours against the sober battleship grays of the evil villain’s underground lair, but it’s a notably handsome game that doesn’t really look like anything else.

Now, there’s a lot of that the Speccy can’t replicate, but the clean-cut conversion (by John Prince, author of the classic “overhead Deathchase” shooter Storm Fighters, Stuey’s obscure favourite games fans) manages to look pretty sharp by itself.

The characters and animation are instantly recognisable, and the use of colour is really clever, particularly the choices of the Speccy’s dark and bright shades in some areas to make background and foreground stand out from each other.

Some levels are simplified somewhat, but most of the game is in there, and it plays all but identically to its parent. (Right down to recreating videogaming’s dumbest ever energy bar – eight units that can only ever read 8, 4 or 0.) It places above the very similar Shinobi because clarity beats prettiness, and because it has significantly better controls for performing the same tasks.

It’s also a game crying out for a modern 128K mod with AY music, but for now we’ll just have to appreciate it for what it is.

 

36. WEST BANK (Bank Panic) (30)

Arcade: 1984, Sega
Spectrum: 1985, Dinamic

I assume West Bank must be set in Australia, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Bank Panic is a charismatic and instantly appealing coin-op that looks like it should be a light-gun game but isn’t.

Setting you up as security guard in a weirdly circular bank with WAY too many doors, your job is to make snap decisions every time one of them opens, about whether the person standing behind it is a customer trying to make a deposit or a bandit planning an illegitimate withdrawal that can only be stopped by a bullet between the eyes.

Both of the Speccy’s clones originated in Spain, but West Bank got a UK release after being bought up by Gremlin Graphics. It’s a really nice-looking clone with gorgeous graphics, although as well as missing the classic “Look Away Dixieland” music the arcade gameplay’s been dumbed down quite a bit, with fewer possible scenarios behind each door.

That’s a pity, because what’s there is beautifully executed and does a very good job of recreating the Bank Panic experience, and with just a bit more effort it could have been reaching for our top 20. But one thing about it jars like a bank door that’s not a door. (Because it’s ajar. Keep up.)

When you’ve ratched up some deposits at the three windows you’re defending at any one time and want to move on, you press left or right and the doors of the bank scroll in WHAT IS QUITE OBVIOUSLY THE COMPLETELY WRONG DIRECTION.

It’s really disorientating, and I can only assume that the coders wrote the game while on holiday in the Southern Hemisphere where water goes down the plug the wrong way round and everyone is upside down, but forgot to adjust for where it would be sold. I’m afraid that’s a mandatory five-place penalty, lads.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Silvergun aka The Bang Bank appears to have been a remarkably high-quality covertape-exclusive version of Bank Panic from the Spanish magazine Micro Hobby.

It’s very like the Gremlin game, with more colourful (but less clear) graphics and basically identical gameplay, except it seems that banks in the Spanish Wild West had almost entirely robber clientele. At least the doors scroll the right way, though.

 

35. METRO-CROSS (34)

Arcade: 1985, Namco
Spectrum: 1987, US Gold

Metro-Cross was a quirky little low-key release from Namco that isn’t really like any arcade game before or since.

The original Speccy release was a very fine port that nailed the gameplay with great accuracy, boasted nice clear graphics too – it’s a fundamentally monochrome game that doesn’t LOOK monochrome, thanks to judicious use of background colour – zipped along at a fair old pace with a very solid framerate and missed only the music.

(That music – a perky little tune that really livens up the atmosphere – was added in a 2021 mod for Pentagon and Scorpion machines that hopefully someone will convert to a standard Speccy format at some point.)

But even without it the standard 48K game, which plays really nicely and fits into a single load on the humble original machine, merits a high placing. It’s just a top-notch port of a fun coin-op with no particularly interesting features or backstory that I know of, so that’s pretty much all I can think of to say about Metro-Cross.

 

34. CARNIVAL (fixed edition) (33)

Arcade: 1980, Sega
Spectrum: 1984, Eclipse (fixed 2020 by Pgyuri)

Eclipse’s extremely faithful rendition of Sega’s fairground shooter was fatally flawed by a bug that no reviewer noticed at the time, and which rendered the game impossible after stage 2.

Which was a terrible shame, because just look how close to the coin-op it was.

But lo! Thanks to the tireless history-fixer that is Who Else But Pgyuri, for the last year Speccy owners have been able to enjoy the phenomenal conversion of a highly likeable but challenging arcade game that Carnival so nearly was in 1984 and now finally is just 37 years later. Now if only someone could do something about the music.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Actually someone did. Kobrahsoft’s 1987 release Sharpshooter is so little-known there isn’t a single video of it on YouTube and it didn’t get a single review in a magazine.

But it’s still a really decent port of Carnival, not far behind the Eclipse version, and uses the authentic arcade calliope music. It isn’t quite as pretty as Eclipse’s version but it sounds better and plays pretty much the same, so you pays your money and you makes your choice.

33. CRAZY PENGUIN (Pengo) (32)

Arcade: 1982, Sega
Spectrum: 1986, Magic Team

Pengo is surely one of the most-ported and most-cloned videogames in history. My own personal Retropie collection of Pengos has almost 60 different games in it, and that’s just including the good and/or interesting ones.

There were also tons of Speccy clones, of which my favourite for many years was Silversoft’s Freez’ Beez (aka Frozen Penguin), which despite an iffy colourscheme and lacking the major gameplay feature of the diamond blocks was a really zippy and authentically tough port.

It wasn’t until I was putting together the Retropie collection that I found some of the others, which all have their pros and cons, but by far the most complete and accurate recreation of the coin-op is the splendid Spanish effort Crazy Pingoin.

It’s got everything – the diamond blocks, the electric fences that are missing from several versions, more or less the right colours, and even a warbly Speccy rendition of the famous “Popcorn” music of the original arcade release. (Later revisions, including Sega’s own licenced ports on formats like the Game Gear, Mega Drive and Switch, replaced it with new music after copyright issues.)

So unless the Spanish bugs you because you can’t work out that “PUNTOS” means “POINTS”, this is a practically perfect Pengo. And if it does, well, I’ve translated this one (and even the tape box) into English for you too. Click the pic to download.

—

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Freez’ Beez is definitely the best out of the rest, but Micromania’s Pengy is a fair stab as well, as is Sinclair User’s warehouse-themed covertape effort Go Bear Go.

(While it’s probably the best known, Ocean’s Eskimo Eddie is absolute rubbish – even with the tedious preliminary Froggerish minigame and the long delay for it to play a jingle every time you die hacked out, your penguin is frozen on the spot for several seconds while iceblocks slide across the screen, which is deeply tiresome.)

32. DINGO (31)

Arcade: 1983, ACG
Spectrum: 2011, Tardis Remakes

The tale of Dingo is a beautifully circular one. The arcade game, a sort of cross between Targ and Food Fight in which a teddy bear who looks nothing like a dingo runs around a jungle throwing fruit at bouncing horsey animals who also look nothing at all like dingoes, was one of the early works of Ashby Computer Graphics, later to be known as Ultimate Play The Game.

Seen with hindsight one can spot the roots of Sabre Wulf in it, but it wasn’t a hit, and very few people had ever heard of it until decades later when the existence of MAME gave it a second lease of life and people suddenly noticed the credits.

And it was at that point that Tardis Remakes decided to bring it home to the Speccy.

And what a fine job they did. The port is visually gorgeous and it plays just like its parent – fast and slick and frantic and, well, Ultimatey. What was puzzling was that despite having 128K sound available and being a very simple one-screen game that can’t have taken up a lot of memory, they left out the ingame music.

Why, I have no idea. Maybe it made the game run less smoothly, in which case it was a worthwhile sacrifice. But everything else about the port is so wonderful that it’s a bit of a heartbreaker that the music didn’t make it in, and it feels a little sparse as a result.

As with Metro-Cross it’s not a DEALbreaker – there are loads of games in this chart that lack the arcade music, and Dingo’s music wasn’t that great anyway – but for some reason the omission seems more painful here than most, because this could have been all but indistinguishable from the coin-op. It’s still an excellent piece of work, though, and seeing a lost Ultimate classic back where it belongs is a “RARE” joy yes yes I’ll get my coat.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: A game where the missing music WAS a dealbreaker was Majikazo, a fine 2012 port by Retroworks of the obscure Namco block shooter Toypop.

It’s a very good clone, with cute cartoony graphics and pretty much all the gameplay elements, but the problem is that Toypop is a pretty thin game distinguished only by its super-catchy fairground music, and without it Majikazo is a bit of a repetitive trudge lacking Dingo’s addictive intensity.

31. PAC-MAN ZX ARCADE (NE)

Arcade: 1980, Namco
Spectrum: 2023, Marco Leal

For years the Speccy lacked anything remotely like a definitive Pac-Man. And then all of a sudden there was a competition. See the Honourable Mentions for more on the various contenders, but we’re giving the title to this one:

Marco Leal’s debut on the Spectrum is a stunningly accurate and complete rendition of Namco’s classic coin-op, with a perfect recreation of the arcade’s ghost AI that even replicates the “safe spot” in the maze where you can hide from Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde forever, or just long enough to make a cup of tea.

It scores over the emulated version (see below) by dodging its catastrophic colour clash and running on the basic 48K or 128K machine rather than needing the relatively rare +2A or +3 models, and it pips Pac-Hack on smooth movement and accuracy and not having an awful, awful name. It is in effect a super-slick hybrid of the two and it’s the Pac-Man the Speccy always deserved.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: In one corner, the stunning emulated version:

And in the other corner, instigated by your humble correspondent and executed by Allan “highrise” Turvey, the splendiferous if terribly-titled Pac-Hack, a mod of the official Atarisoft release (itself a mod of DJ Looker’s unofficial Z-Man) which squishes the landscape-format maze up to much more arcade-like dimensions.

Each has pros and cons. The emulated game is obviously arcade-perfect in almost every detail. Its downsides are that it runs on the +2A and +3 only, the graphics are exactly the wrong sizes for the Spectrum so there’s a really uncomfortably large amount of colour clash unless you play it in mono, and (oddly) there’s no high score.

Pac-Hack, on the other hand, has crude character movement but is fast and intense, has a pretty bezel surround (in its Plus version) and a high-score table, and plays on even the humblest 16K Speccy. It’s a huge improvement on the Atarisoft version, completely changing the character of what was a playable port but where moments of action were few and far between. Now it’s ALL action, because in the shrunken-down maze the ghosts stay blue for what’s now a relatively long time, so you’re constantly tempted to chase them down for big points rather than just clearing the maze.

Pac-Hack is the one I’ve played the most (mainly due to the colour issues) – indeed, I’ve probably played it more than I have any other port of the game or even the arcade original – but how could you possibly discount something like an actual arcade emulator running at full speed on a 1980s micro-computer? Both are terrific, but Pac-Man ZX Arcade sneaks in between them to take the gold medal.

 

30. LUNAR RESCUE RX (NE)

Arcade: 1979, Taito
Spectrum: 2023, Allan Turvey

Several years in the making, and having been scrapped when it was 99% finished and restarted from scratch, Lunar Rescue RX was worth the wait.

For WoSland’s money this is the pinnacle of Allan “Highriser” Turvey’s conversion work so far, eclipsing even his tremendously good Asteroids RXC for accuracy and feel. (Although – SPOILER ALERT – Asteroids RXC gets a higher placing in this chart because it’s got lots more content and Asteroids is a better game than Lunar Rescue.)

Every last tiny detail of the original – actually one of the more sophisticated games of its very early era – is replicated painstakingly here (fortuitously the arcade version had its own version of “colour clash”), and it’s one of only about three or four games in this list (eg Targ at No.87) that could credibly be mistaken for its coin-op parent at a glance.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: A close contemporary of Lunar Rescue which we’ve discussed on this site before was Galaxy Wars. It also got a Speccy port, in 2013, albeit a much more rudimentary one than Lunar Rescue – it’s written entirely in BASIC and the version archived on Speccy sites doesn’t even autorun on loading – and I’ve always had a little soft spot for it because it shows just what you can do with the Speccy’s native OS.

Even the BASIC version is very playable. However, at some point I stumbled across a compiled machine-code version – I can’t even remember where – which is much faster and more fun (as well as weirdly having different controls: Z, X and Enter rather than Sinclair joystick keys). You can download autorunning snapshots of both versions by clicking on the pic above.

29. G-FORCE (Tempest) (28)

Arcade: 1980, Atari
Spectrum: 1983, EMM Software

Tempest’s colour Quadrascan visuals were an almost impossible ask for the poor colour-clashing Speccy, as the skanky official port illustrated. What was needed was a radical thinking-outside-the-box solution, such as the one Alexander The Great adopted to the Gordian Knot.

Boris Baginski’s approach was to forget about about graphical fidelity and instead try to capture the heart of Tempest. So the varied array of pseudo-3D “webs” was replaced by a single flat rectangular surface, but the roster of baddies remained, rendered in (for the Speccy) unusually beefy, chunky graphics which conveniently allowed it to be a blaze of non-clashing colour.

The introductory stages could be skipped (for bonus points, like the arcade) in order to drop you straight in at whatever level of mayhem you could handle, a high degree of user-friendly professionalism for the time. There was also an inventive if impractical attempt to mimic the analogue control of the arcade’s spinner by having fast and slow movement keys, but you can just ignore that in play to no noticeable detriment.

The key is that G-Force is a manic all-out blaster of a sort very rare on the Spectrum, which generally wasn’t up to throwing around a lot of big, colourful graphics at speed. It has almost all of the appeal of Tempest while not really looking anything like it, and when you can pull off that particular trick you know you’ve really found a game’s soul.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Tempest – Deep Space Edition is a total recolouring of Mikro-Gen’s little-known Spectrum version of their incredible ZX81 clone. Just like G-Force, the ’81 game had totally reimagined the look of Tempest in order to recreate the gameplay experience, and it did a truly stunning job. But the Speccy version inexplicably kept the white background and looked awful, although it was still fast and addictive to play. Pgyuri’s mod fixed the colours and let the deceptively good game underneath shine through.

28. MIKIE (27)

Arcade: 1984, Konami
Spectrum: 1985, Imagine

It’s time for another one of those entries where the conversion feels closer to the arcade game than it really strictly is.

Or at least, depending which version of the arcade game you played.

The original coin-op Mikie had the fairly central gameplay element of being able to stun the pursuing teachers with a headbutt. But that caused complaints from the sort of awful people you’d expect, so Konami rushed out a new version (“Mikie: High School Graffiti”) where the headbutt was replaced with a harmless shout, making the game considerably harder but also less subversive.

And it’s this version that the Speccy port is based on.

The change very considerably alters the way the entire game is played, and for the worse in this reviewer’s opinion. But there’s something about school settings – even unfamiliar US ones with locker rooms and such – that seems to be especially evocative in videogames, so everyone just sort of overlooked it all, and Mikie got rave reviews.

And rightly so, because different or not (and even when also tragically lacking the arcade’s bouncy ingame rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night” because there was no 128K version), it’s still a hugely fun game with crisp and colourful graphics and constant action that gives off the same vibe as the coin-op. It’s not the best possible Mikie, but it’s still a Mikie, and that’s close enough.

27. POGO (Q*Bert) (26)

Arcade: 1982, Gottlieb
Spectrum: 1984, Ocean

The ZXDB lists no fewer than 28 Q*Bert clones on the Speccy and ZX81, which is mildly surprising as you might think its necessarily-colourful graphics and unusual pseudo-3D perspective would have proved offputting to coders who had a wealth of simpler and equally popular arcade material sitting around waiting to be ripped off in the machine’s first couple of years.

They’re a mixed bag, as you’d expect, with varying approaches to the graphical style, but Pogo – one of the earliest releases – stands out above the crowd.

Other than changing the cubes to hexagons this is a very accurate port with pretty much all the arcade features intact, which plays very smoothly and even offers a couple of different control options (it’s possible to map an arcade stick such that you can choose between diagonal joystick movement or using four buttons, so there’s something to suit everyone).

It’s a real shame that Parker Brothers’ official ROM-cartridge port was never finished, as the prototype which came to light a few years ago was well on the way to being a solid conversion that might have given Pogo a fight for its money, but really Ocean’s game was already all the Q*Bert that Speccy owners needed.

26. BUBBLE BOBBLE (25)

Arcade: 1986, Taito
Spectrum: 1987, Firebird

Do we really need to say anything about Bubble Bobble?

One of Taito’s most famous and beloved coin-ops is also pretty famous for the quality of its Spectrum conversion (and indeed most of its other ports, both at the time and in subsequent homebrew remakes on formats like the Amstrad CPC and Amiga), which included most of the gameplay features and 80 of the arcade game’s 100 levels in a colourful and highly playable port complete with the music.

So why only No.26? In truth I’ve never liked Bubble Bobble the arcade game as much as most people seem to. (I’m totes Team Rainbow Islands.) The jumping is fiddly and awkward and there are a few too many rounds (eg 12 and 19) that are dull wars of attrition or waiting for a lucky powerup to deal with baddies trapped at the bottom of an inaccessible pit or similar. The loss of those last 20 levels also costs it a few spots, as with several other games in this list.

But it’s still a GOOD game, and the conversion is terrific, and hey, 26th is a pretty darn respectable showing. Wait until you see what’s still to come.

25. TYPHOON (aka A-Jax) (24)

Arcade: 1987, Konami
Spectrum: 1988, Ocean

Extra-specially alert readers will probably have immediately worked out by a process of deduction and elimination that this is the highest-ranked vertical shmup in the chart. The arcade original was a decent game but not particularly remarkable or good (though it was wildly hard), so why this much love for the Speccy port?

And the answer (as well as there being much less competition in the Speccy shmup field – no Raidens or Dodonpachis to go up against here) is again simply that the conversion is a more enjoyable game than its big brother.

While it’s still very far indeed from a pushover, the coin-sucking brutality of the arcade game has been filed down a bit at the edges. It’s well presented, with a properly-centred screen and excellent chonky graphics, including big bullets that are really easy to see against the monochrome backdrops, and it all shifts around at impressive speed with a lovely smooth framerate.

(Though it’s a little bit confused as to how user-friendly it wants to be. You can’t redefine the keys, and while you get autofire on your bombs you DON’T get it on your machine-gun, EXCEPT on the two into-the-screen stages. The manual also doesn’t tell you that powerups are selected depending on how far down the screen they are when you collect them.)

Rather than messing around with continues you get nine lives to make some headway into the six stages, and you’ll need them all, but unlike many other Speccy shmups it won’t be because you got hit by a something you couldn’t see coming.

24. FARMER JACK AND THE
HEDGE MONKEYS (Lady Bug) (23)

Arcade: 1981, Universal
Spectrum: 2008, Cronosoft

We’ve only had a small smattering (which is just over a smidgen) of modern-day ports in this chart so far, but you’ll be seeing more as we reach the final stages, because the quality of them is so startling. Partly that’s due to homebrew coders being able to take as long as they want to really do a game justice, and partly it’s because by definition these things are labours of love rather than just another job to get out of the door.

Lady Bug is a game that as far as I can ascertain was completely bypassed on the Spectrum despite being well represented on other formats of the 1980s, with official and unofficial versions being released on the Colecovision, Intellivision, C64, Dragon 32, Atari 800 and BBC Micro among others. (There’s also a great Atari VCS remake.)

But nobody made even a superficial attempt at it on the Speccy, perhaps put off by the amount of colour required to make the game work or the complexities introduced by the way the maze layout changes every second as you play. So when Bob Smith’s 2008 clone Farmer Jack And The Hedge Monkeys suddenly showed up it was even more of a shock.

Suddenly it looked like it would have been easy all along. This was a near-flawless coin-op conversion – albeit with a new graphical theme – in which colour clash just somehow seemed to forget to happen and we even got the bonus of a cheery 128K tune where the arcade had none, even if it was the same tune used in the other two Farmer Jack games.

(If you want it more authentic, play in 48K mode.)

Old purist that I am, I’d still love to see a reskinned version with actual Lady Bug graphics, but that’d just be a cherry on the cake. Although that’s a terrible analogy as I don’t like cherries. They RUIN cakes. Forget I said anything.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: I’ve been looking for somewhere to say something about Exterminator, so the “bug infestation” theme here will have to do.

Audiogenic’s only licenced arcade conversion is a fantastic job, which actually improves on the coin-op by simplifying its needlessly-fiddly aiming-dial controls, but the arcade game itself just wasn’t quite good enough to justify inclusion (although it was close), partly because even in the original it’s a bit hard to distinguish the various types of beasties or shoot them accurately and it’s even worse in Speccyvision.

The port really is stellar, though, capturing the graphics, gameplay and music close to perfection, and its authors deserve a shout out.

23. HORACE AND THE ROBOTS (22)
(Berzerk)

Arcade: 1980, Stern
Spectrum: 2017, Reptilia Design

I’ve always been really really fond of Berzerk.

It was probably the first arcade game with a sense of humour, thanks to its liberal use of speech, but it’s also got such a classic 1950s sci-fi vibe about it, with its big dumb robots and electrozappy noises.

Unfortunately speech and electrozappy noises were two things the Speccy wasn’t very good at, so for nearly 40 years, and despite numerous attempts, it never had even a halfway-decent Berzerk despite it ostensibly being a very simple game to port.

(Ocean’s version of Frenzy, released when the publisher still went by the imaginative name of Spectrum Games and in which the robots have laser-proof feet, was probably the least poor but that’s very faint praise. I was always surprised Silversoft didn’t have a go at it.)

So big yays for Reptilia Design!

Featuring a wholly gratuitous cameo/starring role from the Speccy’s first “mascot”, Horace And The Robots pulls off a near-perfect Berzerk which – via some dastardly coder trickery – manages to have both AY sound and speech, despite the Currah Microspeech which provides the latter not being compatible with the 128K models of the Spectrum.

(You have to run it as a 48K game with the Currah enabled AND the Melodik AY soundbox addon. I have no idea whether it was possible to have both of those plugged into a real Spectrum at the same time, so it escaped a possible disqualification for cheating. Although it’s fine with just 128K sound so it would have survived anyway, just maybe a few places lower.)

I did almost demote it because the Retropie emulator lr-fuse doesn’t support the AY box, so I can’t play it with the sound and speech on my preferred system, but I talked myself out of it as being marginally too unjust. Hard but fair, that’s me.

 

22. CITY CONNECTION (128K) (NE)

Arcade: 1986, Jaleco
Spectrum: 1988/2023, Manuel Lemos

This bouncy little arcade platformer was a favourite of mine on the Amiga and Atari ST when a derivative of it called Car-Vup was released by Core Design, but this recently-retrieved homebrew Speccy port knocks it into a cocked hat. A markedly inferior 48K take had been kicking around for a few years, but this is the real deal.

It’s got all the music of the coin-op, all the levels (although some have had their order slightly jiggled around), all the features and even the sampled speech, it’s bursting with colour and it plays just like its big brother.

HONOURABLE MENTION: If we’re talking about games with jaunty music and jumping vehicles that were almost lost to history, we have to mention Moon Patrol. The Speccy version perhaps wasn’t quite as speedy as one might have hoped but it’s a commendably complete effort with parallax scrolling and both the coin-op’s backdrops, something many versions (including the C64’s) lacked. Everything except the sloping stages got in, but the frustrating thing is that we don’t know how much better it might have been if it was finished.

Because the Speccy Moon Patrol was never released. Atarisoft gave up on the machine just when they were starting to get the hang of it, and chucked Moon Patrol (and Robotron, of which more later) in the bin, meaning that leaked pirate copies – mine, in fact – were the only thing that stopped it vanishing forever.

We can only dream of what a final polished version might have been like (the MSX port offers a tantalising possible glimpse), but as it stands it’s a very acceptable way to scratch your Moon Patrol itch.

21. ASTEROIDS RXC (21)

Arcade: 1979, Atari
Spectrum: 2021, Allan Turvey

Atari’s vector classic was another glaring omission from the Speccy’s roster of quality coin-op conversions until this year. It looked like that had finally been fixed with the release of Asteroids RX, a superb recreation that also casually throws in its sequel Asteroids Deluxe to sweeten the deal.

But there was a giant wormhole in the game’s excellence continuum, namely that its default state – effectively having a permanent cheat mode enabled where you can just Hyperspace safely out of any danger rather than having to manoeuvre properly – completely wrecks Asteroids on a fundamental level, like having an unlimited-use turbo button in Pac-Man or Rally-X or Pole Position. And unlike the rocks and alien UFOs there was just no escaping it.

You can rack up tens of thousands of points without using thrust at all, or even the direction controls – just Hyperspace and Fire. There was a reason arcade Asteroids didn’t have unlimited Hyperspace, and in a game with so few rules and such delicate balance you screw with the design fundamentals at your peril.

However, thanks to the incessant nagging of your humble scribe, author Allan Turvey created a modified version, Asteroids RXC (the C stands for Campbell in the nice version of the story, and something else in the alternative version), and that version is now included in the download so that the game can be enjoyed by both proper arcade gamers and snivelling, uncoordinated milksops.

(Asteroids Deluxe, which doesn’t have Hyperspace and therefore wasn’t ruined, is by common consensus and by an order of magnitude a much less fun game than Asteroids thanks to the constant harassment of the killsats – it sold barely a tenth as many units as its predecessor as a result. But it’s a heck of a nice bonus, as is the new RX Mode, which is a sort of twin-stick-shooter spin on Asteroids and well worth a play.)

20. GAUNTLET (20)

Arcade: 1985, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

Gauntlet was probably the first ever Speccy coin-op conversion that I saw and thought “That is to all intents and purposes arcade-perfect”. Because US Gold’s big Christmas blockbuster title for 1986 – oddly coded by Gremlin Graphics – looked like this:

The Spectrum port of Gauntlet is everything anyone could ever reasonably have asked of the machine. The only things lost visually were the dungeon floors, a very worthwhile sacrifice for graphical clarity and to let the colourful walls and sprites shine. Sound was unspectacular but plentiful, the multiload was the most unobtrusive in Speccy history – just a few seconds every few levels – but most of all the gameplay was captured in its entirety, with every feature included and no slowdown even with two players and dozens of enemies onscreen.

The only flaws in the port are the flaws of the original game, namely that it was quite repetitive and designed to suck in money with your constantly-depleting health and often-unavoidable hits, but the Speccy version’s single credit makes a virtue of even that, forcing you to eke out life and maximise your score rather than just galumphing around and shovelling more money in until you got bored.

(I should mention at some point that in principle I broadly support Speccy arcade ports having very limited credits or even only one. I’m totally in favour of people getting to see all of the game they paid for, but buying your way to the end of an arcade game is basically cheating, and if you want to cheat on the Speccy version you can just use an infinite-lives POKE or savestates and at least face up to the fact by cheating properly.)

It got some weirdly grudging reviews, but this is truly a 10/10 job, in that it’s impossible to see any credible way in which it could have brought Gauntlet to the Spectrum any better. Proper triple-A quality.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Having gotten themselves a legit hit US Gold duly milked it with a new-levels add-on (The Deeper Dungeons) and then a conversion of the arcade sequel, both equally good. Atari’s 1987 spiritual successor in 3D, Xybots, also got a surprisingly respectable Speccy release.

(The “official” 3D sequel on the Spectrum, Gauntlet III: The Final Quest, is neither (a) a coin-op conversion, nor (b) good.)

19. SUPER HANG-ON (19)

Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1987, Electric Dreams

I always think it’s extra-impressive when a Speccy port came out the same year as the arcade original. And doubly so when it’s a 3D racing game, because 3D racing games weren’t the Speccy’s natural strength.

So this is deservedly the highest-placed one in our chart, because it’s really very impressive indeed. You get all 48 stages spread across four courses – although only the disk version apparently lets you choose which course to start on.

(I say “apparently” because whoever owns the rights to Electric Dreams stuff these days are the sort of tiresome spiteful greedy wankers who forbid distribution of their ancient Speccy games, so there doesn’t seem to be a disk version anywhere to verify it with.)

That’s a really weird omission, but luckily because the game treats every course as a separate entity anyway (when you finish a set of stages the game ends and you type your name in on the highscore table, you can’t carry on to the next one), you just have to load whichever one you want manually. Which is a bit of a tiresome faff with TZXs, but less so with real hardware and can be easily enough sorted with savestates or snapshots on emulators.

Not only is it packed with content (which is the main reason it’s so much higher than WEC Le Mans, with SIXTEEN times as many stages) but it’s also fast, pretty and responsive – you can choose how sensitive you want your bike’s steering to be, and also how much colour you want. It’s an object lesson in how coin-op conversion should be done, and it’s only a shame that unlike Enduro Racer and Power Drift it didn’t get a version with nice 128K sound.

18. YIE AR KUNG FU (18)

Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1985 (48K version)/1986 (128K version), Imagine

It’s odd to remember the days when one-on-one fighting games were still esoteric rarities in arcades.

Given the typical complexity of their controls, it was even more unusual to see one brought to the Spectrum at all, never mind as tremendously well as this:

Several other things are also really really strange about it, though. Because this particular arcade fighting game DIDN’T have complex controls, just two buttons for punch and kick. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that Speccy port went completely control bananas. It also used two buttons, but bizarrely made one of them the attack button and the other one a punch/kick toggle, instead of having one for punch and one for kick. What? Why add in a totally unnecessary extra layer of complication for no benefit? What was the point of that? It didn’t really get in the way of the game, whose structure allowed time for the switch (and especially if you’re using emulator-mapped joystick controls), but it’s such a totally nutso choice.

Even madder was the fact that the default controls used EIGHT keys for movement. Fortunately that was completely bypassable by choosing one of the joystick options, so it turned from “crippling, game-destroying flaw” into “option that’s nice to have for weirdos and octopuses”.

In these final stages of this chart you’re going to be hearing a lot about the tiny margins that separate the creme de la creme of Speccy arcade ports from each other, and in the case of Yie Ar Kung Fu it’s also a real shame that the 128K version – uniquely, I think, released a year after the 48K game, as part of a compilation – includes the arcade music but only at the cost of all the 48K version’s sound effects.

In fighting games especially the audio feedback of landing a hit is crucial, and for that reason this is the only game in the chart where the 48K version is probably preferable overall to the “enhanced” one, despite the 128 having slightly better graphics too.

And the fact that neither is the “definitive” version probably costs it a couple of spots at this rarefied height. In the Olympic 100m, the difference between Usain Bolt and everyone else, phenomenon though he was, was still barely a couple of blinks.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: The Speccy was very poorly served with one-on-one fighting games. The ambitious attempt at Street Fighter 2 is infamously terrible, and the original Street Fighter not much better (although the unofficial sequel Human Killing Machine is actually kind of okay, but not a port).

International Karate and Way Of The Exploding Fist are both decent stabs at Data East’s seminal Karate Champ, though – despite neither attempting to recreate the coin-op visually, they both play very much the same as it and each other.

WOTEF is the better game, with smoother animation and actual working joystick controls so you don’t have to use the nine-key default mode, but IK is a bit closer to the arcade, with speech synthesis, more backgrounds – five, split across two loads, compared to just three scenes in WOTEF – and bonus games. (And the Kempston joystick mode in IK works.)

 

17. COMMANDO (128K REMIX) (17)

Arcade: 1985, Capcom
Spectrum: 1985, Elite
Remix: 20xx, Mega Byte Group

Our poor old pals the C64 owners got really short-changed with Elite’s conversion of Commando. While very nicely executed, it delivered just THREE of the arcade game’s eight stages before announcing that your mission was completed.

The Speccy port, though, gave you the whole game.

When I was a kid I was off school with a bug once, and I was playing it when I came over really queasy, something I attributed at the time to the great surfeit of empty yellow space and sound that’s best described with the good old Scottish word “skittery”, as in “I’ve got a nasty case of the skitters”.

I’d never quite felt the same about Commando after that, but a couple of years ago a bunch of hackers fixed the problem.

Mega Byte’s 128K mod does nothing other than add a funky remixed version of the classic arcade music to the 48K game, but the mere act of largely drowning out the farty sound effects and filling in while you traverse some of the larger yellow expanses somehow stopped my stomach churning from the trigger memories any time I played the Speccy port, so for that alone it earns my undying gratitude.

It also, much more trivially, adds some arcade atmosphere to what was already a terrific port in gameplay terms, one of the Speccy’s smoothest and slickest run-and-gunners and also one of the most playable, because the upside of all that yellow emptiness was super-visible enemy fire, giving Commando a big advantage over the likes of Ikari Warriors.

In summary, then: the C64 was crap. But we knew that already.

(For rhetorical purposes, this entry has imagined that the excellent C64 remake of Commando from 2014, which included all eight levels, does not exist.)

16. GUARDIAN II – REVENGE
OF THE MUTANTS (Stargate) (16)

Arcade: 1981, Williams
Spectrum: 1990, Hi-Tec

This well-known game by a well-known software house belongs to a class that while once as common as muck was actually pretty rare in the Spectrum world by 1990 – an unofficial clone of an arcade game. The beast it had the temerity to rip off was Williams’ 1981 Defender sequel, Stargate.

Stargate was an extraordinary thing – a game expressly designed for people who found Defender too easy. (I’m still not sure I’ve ever reached Wave 7 of Defender, and I’m a bona-fide international videogames champion.)

Guardian 2, oddly named after a first Guardian that never existed on the Speccy (despite the inlay’s boast that “the original Guardian game was described as ‘an amazing and fast moving space spectacular in the classic mould’. It was also considered by many in the home computer games industry as a standard by which others were judged”), copies it to all but perfection.

Defender and Stargate, of course, are better suited to the Spectrum than a lot of arcade games because they’ve got so many controls, which makes it rather annoying that Guardian 2 doesn’t have redefinable ones – honestly, who was still putting out games in 1990 with non-redefinable keys? – but luckily (a) this chart, as previously noted, makes allowances for any control issues that can be fixed by remapping on emulators or otherwise, and (b) they’re pretty well-chosen anyway.

This is a fast and silky-smooth port, and other than inexplicably getting the colours wrong it’s pretty much a 1:1 recreation of one of the most demanding coin-ops ever made, so good luck with it. Frankly it’s going to run you down like a truck.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: The Speccy had a few decent Defender knockoffs but no one definitive one. Defenda by Interstella was fast, smooth, pretty and full-featured but dismayingly light on sound – although it had a secret 128K mode with a lot more – whereas Starblitz by Softek wasn’t quite as pretty or smooth and lacked the Hyperspace function, but did at least make some noise when you shot things.

 

15. HYPER SPORTS (15)

Arcade: 1984, Konami
Spectrum: 1985, Imagine

When the original Track & Field/Hyper Olympic came out, you literally had to wipe blood off the buttons in my local arcade when it was time for your go. Decades before Wii Fit, this was a game that exacted a real physical toll on the pasty denizens of amusement arcades.

By the time Hyper Sports came along, though, the format had been slightly refined. This was a game with a bit less pure button-mashing and a bit more skill and timing involved, and it was all the better for it.

The Speccy port of Hyper Sports probably looks a lot worse than you remember it.

It’s a game that somehow gives the impression of having more graphics than it actually does, but in reality it’s a very stripped-back representation of the coin-op that’s rather shamed visually by the C64 version (except for the C64’s much uglier skeet shooting).

Happily, though, that frees up resources for it to be fast and slick and smooth and all fit into a single load (albeit without the pole-vault event, but it was rubbish anyway), and the balance of keyboard-battering and precision is very satisfying.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Combat School, a game that’s close to unplayable on real hardware, ALMOST snuck in as an entry in its own right here on the grounds that if you have a multi-button arcade joystick you can map various combinations of buttons into something that’s just about manageable.

So far example I map two buttons to left and right (for the assault course), two different buttons to up and down (for the Iron Man race in conjunction with the joystick), and use the stick for the shooting ranges. But even then the Iron Man race is such a miserable trial that what is basically an excellent port didn’t quite make it.

Daley Thomson’s Decathlon (which may have been the Speccy’s first ever multiload of a sort) is obviously also worth a runner-up spot on the podium as the original Speccy take on the button-battering sports genre.

It’s actually a very good unofficial port of Track & Field, but suffers somewhat from having almost no sound, and being padded from six events to 10 to fit the “decathlon” licence – especially as the extra four are basically just repeats of the high jump and javelin and two extra distance races, including the horrendous, exhausting, keyboard-wrecking 1500 metres. It would have been a much better game as a sextathlon, or so your mum says.

(The sequel Daley Thomson’s Supertest is an excellent combination of Decathlon and Hyper Sports with some fun new events like penalty kicks, but is in no coherently-arguable sense an arcade port and is therefore disqualified.)

REALLY EXTREMELY DISHONOURABLE MENTION: The official Speccy port of Track And Field – only released as part of the “Game, Set And Match 2” compilation – is stupendously, offensively terrible.

14. SPACE INVADERS/
SPACE INVADERS ZX (14)

Arcade: 1978, Taito
Spectrum: 2017, 40Crisis/2021, SplinterGU

It was always weird to me that in the flood of Invaders clones that sprang up in the very first weeks and months after the Spectrum’s debut, none of them made even the slightest attempt to actually look like the arcade game.

These were days when people didn’t bother disguising their unlicensed knockoffs, and Space Invaders should have been a godsend to coders just learning a new machine, with its near-monochrome graphics, well-kent gameplay rules and unhurried pace.

But instead we got a slew of multi-hued monstrosities that neither looked nor played much like the coin-op Big Daddy. Sinclair’s own Space Raiders, by Psion, is generally regarded as the best of the bunch, but it’s barely tolerable. The actual best of the early efforts was Artic’s not-bad Invaders, which ran in 16K but had the right number of defence bunkers and aliens, who behaved and looked reasonably like their arcade counterparts, assuming you were comparing them to Taito’s later colour editions.

(The only Speccy version that actually bothered getting the original colours right was Design Design’s throwaway, soundless, scoreless hidden game that popped up if you (I think) held down F while loading Forbidden Planet.)

But then in 2017 someone wrote an arcade emulator for the Spectrum.

Wait, they did WHAT?

Astonishingly, if you had a Spectrum +2A or +3, you could now run the actual arcade ROMs on it, at full speed, with sound, acting exactly like real-life Space Invaders. (Except for a single unfortunate bug if you activate the secret “trail” by shooting an invader from the bottom rows last, which ends the game as soon as it hits the right edge of the screen.)

But apart from how amazing it was in its own right, the emulated Invaders raised one obvious question: if the Speccy was capable of displaying an arcade-perfect Invaders – which it manifestly was – why hadn’t anybody just written a native one?

And four years after the emulator, someone finally did.

Space Invaders ZX by Juan Jose Ponteprino runs on any Spectrum from the 48K up (absurdly there’s also a high-res ZX81 port) and looks and plays almost identically to the emulated one, right down to the UFO 300-point count and simulating the “trail”. It’s the Space Invaders we COULD have had in 1983, had anyone bothered to do it right.

We couldn’t have had the emulated one then, for all sorts of reasons, but in 2023 these two spectacular conversions are inseparable and which you like best is your call.

 

13. RASTAN (128K) (13)

Arcade: 1987, Taito
Spectrum: 1988, Imagine

We’ve had a lot of conversions in this chart of relatively advanced arcade games (as opposed to the easy stuff like Space Invaders) that got MOST things right, or included MOST of the coin-op’s features. But Rastan set a benchmark that very few lived up to.

Imagine’s 128K version is a stunning piece of work with recognisable graphics, AND background scenery without loss of clarity, AND plentiful colour, AND a solid framerate, AND excellent controls, AND a splendid rendition of the coin-op music, AND sound effects, AND all of the arcade’s six levels in pretty much their original forms.

(It also shipped with a bug preventing you from finishing the last level, but that’s fixable now within the chart’s rules.)

Rastan itself is a pretty generic hack’n’slasher, but since it more or less defined that genre in the first place it’s allowed to be. It’s far more fun than most of its peers, both in the arcades and in this terrifically slick, speedy and super-polished port.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: In broadly similar vein, Black Tiger and Tiger Road got half-decent Speccy translations that were fast and recognisable, although both were missing several stages from their arcade counterparts.

 

12. CABAL (12)

Arcade: 1988, TAD Corporation
Spectrum: 1989, Ocean

It’s weird that when people talk about military crosshair shooters on the Speccy, all the love goes to Operation Wolf when there’s a game in very much the same field that’s so obviously better both in the arcades and in the home version – and I’m not talking about Operation Thunderbolt, which alert readers may recall from No.63.

TAD Corporation only have a tiny handful of coin-ops to their name, although they’re all fun (like the shameless Final Fight ripoff Legionnaire and the lively Wild West-based Jail Break-alike Heated Barrel). Their biggest hit was Toki (which has just arrived on the Speccy, sort of), but their best game was this one.

Cabal is Operation Wolf but with entertainingly destructible scenery, no tiresome running out of ammo, and most crucially the ability to actually tell when you were being shot. The Speccy port is an absolute belter, capturing all of the above in colourful, cuted-up graphics and relentless action.

It does make a few compromises over the coin-op, such as the absence of the dive move and bonus-points tokens, but nothing that really changes or diminishes the enjoyment of the game, which is far more strategic and skillful than Op Wolf while still letting you mow down enemies by the battalion.

It’s slightly weird that being in possession of such a great engine, Ocean didn’t licence a couple of the other arcade games that were basically Cabal reskinned (such as TAD’s own Blood Bros) and cash in on it a bit more, but everyone knows software publishers aren’t in it for the money, right?

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Cop-Out, a Speccy game written by Raffaele Cecco (probably his least well-known title), is loosely based on a really fun but very little-known effort from Data East called Shoot Out.

It doesn’t attempt to replicate the arcade levels and it actually plays like a slower, more precise version of Cabal – in that you have a crosshair rather than just shooting with the joystick – which is why it gets a mention here, but it’s clearly an homage to the Data East game, and a very good one too, although it’s murderously hard.

11. RENEGADE (11)

Arcade: 1986, Technos
Spectrum: 1987, Imagine

As with a number of vertical shmups included in this chart, there are certain Speccy ports of games which were little-known run-of-the-mill releases in arcades, but achieved fame in home markets where their field was much less crowded.

The walky-walky-punchy-kicky genre of games made up around 74% of all arcade releases right across the late 1980s and 1990s. Its most famous names included the likes of Double Dragon and Final Fight, which did get rather underwhelming Spectrum incarnations, but the vast bulk went unconverted. So nobody was expecting especially much from Renegade.

Man, did THOSE guys ever look stupid!

Imagine’s team pulled off a masterpiece of coding with the unheralded Technos title, turning in a beautiful-looking, colourful yet gritty Speccy port that was much cleaner and crisper visually than the rather garish and blobby coin-op. The 128K version also included the arcade music, although Renegade is a game that doesn’t really need it.

Just about the only flaw in the conversion is that due to a sprite shortage the whip-wielding hookers of Level 3 cut about wearing tracksuit bottoms rather than their somewhat more traditionally alluring arcade outfits. But otherwise this is a fantastic port that shames the versions of far more powerful machines like the Amiga.

(Although let’s take a moment to appreciate the Amstrad CPC version, with the tasteful pools of blood that ooze out of the baddies’ heads if you punch them on the ground.)

This is a strategic game of tactics, timing and accuracy, rather than just charging in with fists flailing, and it’s rightly regarded as not only one of the Speccy’s best arcade ports but one of its best games full stop.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: Renegade is actually a reskinned version of a Japanese coin-op with completely different high-school-themed graphics, called Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun. So it was entirely in keeping with the source material when Rafal Miazga produced the astounding Renegade Reimagined/Recoloured in 2013 – a complete graphical redesign.

It’s not that it looks better than the already-excellent original Speccy version, but to redraw an entire game like this is a jaw-dropping feat, which Miazga would go on to repeat with both of the non-arcade, Speccy-only Renegade sequels – the brilliant Target Renegade and the very much NOT brilliant Renegade III.

10. R-TYPE (10)

Arcade: 1987, Irem
Spectrum: 1988, Activision

Nobody needs me to tell them about Bob Pape’s tour de force incredible, complete, beautiful, colour-laden Spectrum conversion of what should have been a completely unconvertable coin-op, so I’m tempted to just stop here – he wrote an entire book about it, after all.

The problem is, R-Type’s music is just too good.

Like that of Out Run, it’s so memorable and so evocative and so inextricably identified with the game that even the most stunning conversion – and this is beyond a shadow of doubt a stunning conversion – just won’t seem right without it.

And even when you add music to it via a splendid 128K mod (that also makes the game significantly nicer to play with the addition of an autofire hack), it still doesn’t cut it properly because while it’s better than no music at all, it’s still not the R-Type music.

So it’s still top 10, but only just, because at this level you need to be the full package.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: R-Type GT is a 2019 Pentagon/Scorpion mod, and if we were allowing games for the Russian super-Spectrums in the chart it’d be a serious contender for the top spot, because the inclusion of the proper R-Type soundtrack absolutely transforms it from a merely superb job of converting the gameplay into something that really feels like being stood in an arcade.

Pape also ported another horizontal scroller to the Speccy that gets much less attention. His take on Dragon Breed, also for Activision, is almost as well done as R-Type, but because there isn’t much foreground detail in Dragon Breed it looks a lot emptier and isn’t nearly as widely loved. It could easily have featured in the chart in its own right, but there were only 100 places and something had to give.

9. THE PIT (9)

Arcade: 1982, Zilec
Spectrum: 2020, Dave Tansley

It’s a real shame The Pit doesn’t have 128K sound. Because the arcade game was also based on 8×8 block graphics in bright primary colours and there’s almost no scrolling involved, this is a port which looks staggeringly close to the coin-op original.

So on a passing glance, it’s only the rather minimalist 48K sound that alerts you to the fact that someone hasn’t plugged an arcade PCB into your telly. (Although on a closer look you’ll notice the single unobtrusive push-flick that allows it to accurately fit in the whole portrait-mode screen of the coin-op.)

But as the original coin-op wasn’t exactly a festival of lavish audio either, so it’s not the loss that it was in the case of R-Type or a few others in our list. In visual and gameplay terms this is a phenomenal, faultless conversion, and when you add in the fact that it was author Dave Tansley’s first shot at coding a Spectrum game, it rises from merely stunning to absolutely gob-smacking.

The Pit is a highly addictive pure arcade game that inspired Boulder Dash and Gran Turismo, but other than a couple of VIC20 and C64 ports back in the day it never got the appreciation it deserved – ironically enough, it was basically buried treasure. This fabulous port is the tribute it’s deserved for almost four decades, and I fervently hope it’s not the last thing we see from its creator.

8. ANTEATER/ANTEATER ZX (8)

Arcade: 1982, Tago Electronics
Spectrum: 2021, DEFB Studio/2021, Bubu

So this is very high in the chart for two games to be sharing a place, but both generally and under the chart’s specific rules (only one entry per arcade game) I really don’t see how you can separate them.

Anteater is a lost arcade classic, never officially converted to anything but bootlegged many times (even, oddly, by its own author) in many forms on all sorts of systems from the Amiga to the ZX81, because it’s such a clever and inventive twist on Pac-Man.

Both look good and play brilliantly.

There have been a few games in this chart where small, needless imperfections cost games a lot of places or even inclusion at all, and there can be none more needless and dismaying than Anteater ZX’s bewilderingly hideous maze layout, where the top layer of soil is missing in order to include a completely pointless extra layer at the bottom of the screen, into which the queen ants are wedged in a manner so crude and slapdash it defies belief compared to the painstaking care and attention to detail taken over every other aspect of the game.

Without a doubt that inexplicable giant double dogturd of a visual flaw cost both games a credible shot at the No.1 spot (which is terribly unfair on the DEFB version, but the rules are the rules and them’s the breaks), because at this point the margins between the contenders for the title are so tight that any small blemish is costly.

But it’s ultimately superficial and otherwise the quality of both games is so stellar that they easily justify this ranking both individually and collectively – if one of them hadn’t existed, the other one would have been here by itself.

7. GREEN BERET (7)

Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1986, Imagine

Imagine’s coin-op conversion production line of the mid-80s produced some sterling work, particularly when it involved Joffa Smith. But for my money the pinnacle is Konami’s classic run-and-stabber Green Beret.

Smith really knocked the Speccy port of this one out of the park from the title screen onwards. The graphics are gloriously crisp and colourful, all four arcade levels are replicated closely, complete with the coin-op’s daunting level of challenge, which ensures that while it’s not the longest game in the world, you’ll be coming back to it for a long time before you ever see the end.

(Actually it’s slightly HARDER than the arcade, with the tricky leaping Cossack troops showing up from the very start.)

With tight, responsive controls, Green Beret plays identically to its arcade counterpart, and in a slightly understated way I think it’s got a case as one of the best-LOOKING Speccy arcade conversions of all, pulling off the slightly austere atmosphere of the coin-op beautifully with a palette so fresh and minty you can almost see your lone commando’s breath turning to vapour in front of his face as he stealthily infiltrates the Siberian base with nothing but a dagger to his name.

If we’d been making this chart in 1991 and only considering real hardware, it would have ranked even higher for fitting into a single 48K load (or if it had had 128K sound), but it’s a glorious piece of work that’s just as good today as it was 35 years ago.

——-

PASSING MENTION: This seems the most suitable place to note the strange case of another game with Smith and Thorpe’s names on it – Kong Strikes Back, an unofficial sequel to an unofficial clone (Ocean’s terrible first Kong) which actually took the form of a rough copy of a completely different game from a different series, namely Mr Do!’s Wild Ride. So that’s that noted, and just in time. Phew!

6. ROBOTRON 2084 (6)

Arcade: 1982, Williams
Spectrum: 1984/never, Atarisoft

The fact that a game that was never released or even finished on the Spectrum has placed so high in this chart tells you a lot about both the original and the port.

Everybody loves Robotron, of course. In an imaginary survey I just conducted in my head, it narrowly edged out the cockpit version of Star Wars as the arcade cabinet most people would love to have in their home. (Because who’s got THAT much room?)

The incomplete Speccy version, built from the code of Wild West Hero, lacks only the Tank waves from the coin-op – they get replaced with standard Grunts-and-Hulks waves – but it’s so fantastic and so intense that you barely even notice their absence. (The Tank waves with their fusillades of bouncing cannonballs were Robotron’s least fun and most unfair rounds anyway.)

Even in the standard one-joystick mode it’s magnificent to play, but it supports a second and if you’ve got a nice big sturdy double arcade stick it’s just wondrous. (If perhaps slightly easy, since the difficulty was tuned to people using normal controls.)

It’s scary to imagine how good it could have been if it was finished (and doubly so if it had had the power of the 128K machines), but if you’d shown anyone this in the early days of the Spectrum they’d simply never have believed it possible.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: The second game with the same title to get a citation in despatches, Exterminator by Silversoft is a very playable early Robotron knockoff on the Speccy that offered a couple of control methods and included versions of all the Robotron baddies including the Tanks. It’s very sparse compared to the Atarisoft game, but it’s smooth and speedy and good fun.

5. MISTER KUNG-FU (128K) (5)
(Kung-Fu Master)

Arcade: 1984, Irem
Spectrum: 2018, Uprising Games

Mister Kung-Fu is actually quite a rarity in this chart. It’s a game which DID get an official Speccy port back in the day, but which has been remade from scratch because that one was so terrible. Irem’s arcade original is widely credited with being the father of the scrolling beat-’em-up, and its trademark tune rang out of every mid-80s arcade worth its salt.

(It was also one of the earliest “retro” releases on modern systems, coming out as part of Irem Arcade Classics for the PS1 in 1996.)

US Gold’s conversion for the Spectrum was an atrocity, looking not bad in static screenshots but featuring some of the worst push-scrolling in recorded videogaming history, which wreaked havoc with the player’s timing and rendered the game close to unplayable as enemies effectively doubled in speed if they approached you mid-scroll.

It actually had continuous music, but NOT the arcade tune, and generally speaking it felt absolutely nothing like Kung-Fu Master in any respect. It was a wrong just waiting to be righted, and boy was it ever.

Elton Bird’s 2018 homebrew probably looks less like its arcade cousin than any of the other games in the top 10, but in one way that just goes to show that graphics are the least important facet of a great game, or certainly of a great arcade port. The return of the proper Kung-Fu Master music (on 128K machines, though you get a fully playable game in 48K) does half the job straight away, but it’s the bang-on gameplay that really sells the illusion you’re testing your skills on the coin-op back in 1984.

The pace and the timing are right on the money (helped by having proper scrolling, of course), and the arcade’s two-button controls are distilled down to one in a really clever way that makes them totally instinctive. If you’re used to the coin-op you’ll feel instantly at home, with nothing to adjust to.

This top 10 has already featured three of my favourite Golden Age arcade games that as a youngster I yearned for good Speccy ports of, and had my wildest dreams realised. Are there any more to come? Not long to wait!

4. RAINBOW ISLANDS (128K) (4)

Arcade: 1987, Taito
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Visually it’s hard to think of a starker contrast between two Speccy arcade ports than Green Beret and Rainbow Islands. Where the former is all cool, clear and wintry, Rainbow Islands is more like a mass paintball game during a Pink Floyd laser show on Bonfire Night.

Throw colour clash into the equation and the visual chaos should be off the scale, but somehow (mainly, of course, by using character-block scrolling) Graftgold’s extraordinary conversion keeps it all under control.

Having grown up with the Amiga version it was only a few months ago that I had a really seriously proper bash at the Speccy one, getting to the sixth of the seven islands, and I was startled to the degree with which I stopped even noticing the old machine’s palette limitations.

As the scrolling is only in one direction it doesn’t make you feel queasy, and the graphics are clear enough that you can always see where everything is, so you simply “tune out” the Speccy’s technical shortcomings and are able to focus on the stellar Rainbow Islands gameplay, which is superbly captured, including most of the arcade’s secret features (but sadly not the three hidden islands that didn’t make it to any of the home ports).

Other than occasional mild slowdown it’s an easy match for even the 16-bit ports. It’s ALMOST fatally undermined by some idiotically bad and non-redefinable control options, but fortunately chart rules let us bypass those and appreciate a truly monumental piece of coding, the equal in scale of R-Type but this time WITH gorgeous-sounding renditions of all the coin-op’s music fully intact, which makes a massive difference to the experience.

(Although I’m taking points, and probably one place, off for the absence of the Arkanoid sound in Doh Island, because that was such a cute touch in the coin-op.)

1990 was just about the Speccy’s last hurrah in terms of the really big-name, triple-A releases, but Rainbow Islands was one hell of a swansong to go out on, picking up a well-deserved AVERAGE review score of a dizzying 94%. It’s an epic, epic feat.

3. ASTRO BLASTER (128K) (3)

Arcade: 1981, Sega
Spectrum: 2019, Matt Jackson

Any one of the top four games in this chart could have legitimately taken the No.1 spot. I’ve always loved Astro Blaster since I first heard that attract-mode clarion call booming out in a 1980s arcade – “FIGHTER PILOTS NEEDED IN SECTOR WARS! PLAY ALIEN SPACEKILL!”

>>sub please check above<<

And this Speccy port, which appeared fully-formed completely out of the blue from the mysterious Matt Jackson (who’s never been heard of, or from, before or since) is a simply magnificent recreation of it in every feasible detail. The graphics are basically pixel-perfect, every attack wave is there, and crucially all the secret bonuses too. In gameplay terms I’ve yet to discover a single error or inaccuracy or omission. This IS Astro Blaster, on your Spectrum.

In the end, though, it came third for two reasons, both of which would have been very hard if not impossible for it to get around.

One is that I wish it had been possible for the screen to be centred rather than having the whole status panel over to one side – even if that meant rotating the score readouts or superimposing things – and the second is that the arcade game’s speech is such a huge element of its appeal, and we’ve already seen in Horace And The Robots how hard it is to fit in both speech and decent sound.

It’s not just that the speech is nice – it actually has a gameplay function, in giving you a handy warning if your laser temperature is critical or your fuel status marginal without having to take your eyes off the action to check your gauges.

So by that hair’s breadth Astro Blaster only takes the bronze medal, and has to content itself with only being the Speccy’s finest space shooter. Now, someone play the dramatic pause music, because here we go.

2. MAZE DEATH RALLY-X (128K) (2)
(New Rally-X)

Arcade: 1981, Namco
Spectrum: 2018, Tom Dalby

This was so, so close.

Namco’s big hope for a 1980 follow-up to Pac-Man was Rally-X, but the austere and oddly downbeat racecar maze-chaser didn’t go down as well as hoped. So the following year they revised it with brighter colours, an easier couple of opening levels with fewer enemy cars, a bit more to do (with the addition of the Lucky bonus flag), and most importantly of all a much catchier tune.

(Based on the intermission screen music from Pac-Man, funnily enough.)

Maze Death Rally X is actually a bit of a hybrid of the two games – it has New Rally-X’s music and structure but in Rally-X’s colours. (As with Mister Kung-Fu, the game is fully playable in 48K but without music.)

It looks absolutely stunning, even managing to implement the coloured borders around the “hedges” of the maze without creating colour clash, the gameplay is flawless and that all-important music is note-perfect. (Namco still use variants of it in their modern games like Ridge Racer, trivia fans.)

So I had to start looking for tiny insignificant niggles in this game and the eventual No.1 just so that I could put some daylight between them. And sadly for MDR-X it had slightly more surface scratches. It got docked tiny fractions of points for starting with too many lives (four instead of three, although you can fix that easily with a POKE), lacking the Challenging Stage jingle, and having an inexplicably inaccurate top left corner in the first maze.

None of those things actually matter in the slightest, and I love Maze Death Rally-X into little teeny pieces, but you’ve got to make a decision somehow and there it is.

If you’ve got any wits about you at all you’ll have worked out what that No.1 is by now, so let’s go.

——-

REMEDIAL MENTION: It’s remarkable that for 35 years the Spectrum’s generally-regarded best Rally-X clone was a game that DIDN’T WORK AT ALL. The 1983 PSS release Maze Death Race went out with a graphical bug that effectively rendered it totally unplayable, apparently completely unnoticed by anyone for more than three decades. Fortunately in 2019 a hero rode to the rescue – you all know which one I mean – and fixed it, leaving the game as a crude and dumbed-down, but fast and playable, knockoff.

(The only other efforts were Artic’s lookalike-but-not-playalike Road Racers and Joe The Lion’s brash and jerky Bimbo, which is actually more like the VIC20 clone Radar Rat Race. It plays more like Rally-X than Maze Death Race does, but hardly anyone’s heard of it.)

1. MR DO! (128K) (1)

Arcade: 1982, Universal
Spectrum: 2019, Adrian Singh/Mark Jones

So there was nothing else it could be.

Mr. Do! is of course a classic, ported officially or unofficially to just about every platform under the sun EXCEPT the Spectrum – the Atari VCS, Colecovision, C64, Atari 800, Dragon 32 (as Mr Dig), BBC Micro (as Mr Ee), Game Boy, MSX, SNES, Amiga (as Bob’s Magic Garden and Derring-Do), Sharp X68000, even the Apple II and the Tomy Tutor all got good versions. There was a fruit machine, a Neo Geo remake, and of course three sequels.

But not us.

And then finally, nearly 40 years on, it was our turn.

Adrian Singh and Mark Jones’ Mr. Do! was a revelation. It defied the amount of colour anyone would ever have dreamed a Spectrum version of the game could be capable of. The graphics were gorgeous and exquisitely animated. The music was impeccable down to the last jingle. It had all the gameplay rules. So much so that more than once it passed the ultimate test – I forgot I was even playing a conversion and just thought “What do you do here in Mr Do?”

When I was looking for tiny flaws to separate it from Maze Death Rally-X, the only things I could find missing were the randomly-appearing bonus diamond (which gave you a free credit in the arcade, something you don’t need in a home version) and the cute little rose – pictured below – which appears if you “half-eat” a cherry from all four sides (a purely-decorative Easter egg, you don’t get any extra points for it or anything).

(And I only think the diamond isn’t in there, because I vaguely remember possibly reading something about it not being. I might just not have seen it yet, it’s very rare.)

Seriously, it’s superhumanly good. And you got it for nothing.

None of these homebrew games get enough praise. They might pick up the odd little review on some obscure YouTube channel or someone’s hobbyist website, but by and large they go barely noticed. Nobody gets rich, because nearly all of them are free. Months or even years of people’s work goes into the Mr Dos and the Maze Death Rally Xs and the Astro Blasters and the Mister Kung Fus and the Anteaters and the rest, for the benefit of a tiny community of people, most of whom don’t even comment.

Why do they do it? God knows. Go and ask them, not me. Or maybe don’t, because gift horses and all that. But if you do, say thanks while you’re at it, because they make this awful world a slightly lovelier place.

——-

HONOURABLE MENTION: The Speccy went for quarter of a century without even a remotely decent attempt at Mr Do! – Hard Cheese by DK’Tronics was as good as it got, and that wasn’t very good at all. But for 13 years we were at least a big step closer with Bob Smith’s brilliant Farmer Jack In Harvest Havoc.

Visually absolutely beautiful, it took quite a lot of liberties with Mr Do!’s gameplay, such as replacing his bouncing magic ball with static time bombs and losing the E-X-T-R-A monsters that are quite fundamental to Mr Do!, but there’s still no mistaking which game it’s paying a splendid tribute to.

——————————————————

So there we go. It’s not all change but it’s quite a bit of change: seven new entries – two of which have crashed into the top 30 – a fair bit of shuffling around, and a modest smattering of exciting discoveries along the way.

I still live in hope of Time Blaster being finished one of these days, and of the Speccy finally getting a conversion of Scramble to rival those on the Atari VCS, Amstrad CPC, C64 and Ti-99, and of a Lunar Rescue-quality Astro Invader, and of a halfway-decent Dig Dug or Burger Time or Cat’n’Mouse or Guided Missile or Solar Fox or Road Fighter or Frogger or Juno First or Space Zap.

(The Speccy has at least 67 Frogger games, and none of them even got close to making this chart. The best by far is one written in BASIC that might just have had a shot if the author could have been bothered to finish it up.)

And if this chart shows anything, it’s that you should never give up hope.