Wings Over Sealand

Recently, just for fun and to pass the time now that I’ve retired from political journalism, I thought I’d compile a 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.

(Phew, made it with eight hours of 2021 to spare.)

There’s a whole torrid story attached to the undertaking, but meh, some other time. Here’s the entirety of the chart in one place. It takes about a thousand years to load as a single page because YouTube is such a big whiny baby, so I’ve split it into five.

Part 1 (below, 100-81)
Part 2 (80-61)
Part 3 (60-41)
Part 4 (40-21)
Part 5 (20-1)

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100. SPY HUNTER

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

Some of you will doubtless have been expecting 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 about a 003/10, but as a Spectrum game based on Spy Hunter it’s much more 007. (This better not be the standard. – All readers)

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HONOURABLE MENTION: Action Fighter. Less pretty but more action.

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99. ALI BABA
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 Croatian conversion for the Speccy.

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.

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98. THE NINJA WARRIORS
Arcade: 1987, Taito
Spectrum: 1989, Virgin

I was originally going to put US Gold’s colourful conversion of Vigilante in here, but going back and playing it again it’s so sluggish and so insanely hard that it’s just no fun. So representing the walky-walky-punchy-punchy genre instead it’s Ninja Warriors.

Taito’s double-wide-screen slash-’em-up was a slick and handsome affair and the monochrome Speccy port can’t match it in either area, but unlike Vigilante and most other Speccy games of this type it manages a decent smooth framerate that renders it nicely playable, and it deserves a lot of kudos for the simultaneous two-player mode that maintains the speed and has a clever marker system so you always know who’s who.

With no continues (also like Vigilante) it’s comically difficult, but that just adds value, and generally it’s far better than it has any right to be.

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97. BOMB JACK
Arcade: 1984, Tehkan
Spectrum: 1986, Elite

As with Spy Hunter, this low ranking will surprise some, 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.

(It’s probably worth noting at this point that this is a 2021 chart, reflecting things as played on modern hardware. So games get a free pass for terrible multiloads, and in Bomb Jack’s case also for not-very-good and non-redefinable key layouts, because you can fix those on emulators.)

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96. TIME SCANNER
Arcade: 1987, Sega
Spectrum: 1989, Activision

Time Scanner actually suffers from the rules of this chart, as mentioned in Bomb Jack’s entry, 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 present day.

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?

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95. MIDNIGHT RESISTANCE
Arcade: 1989, Data East
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Midnight Resistance is a strange case.

The arcade game isn’t actually all that good – 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 because of some splendid home conversions, and especially the Amiga/ST ones, which don’t look quite as good but play better due to simplified controls and having less of an urge to suck more 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 an eye-catching one too.

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. It lands on just the right side of the skill-vs-memory-test divide to still be enjoyable (unlike RD, which is basically 0% skill, 100% memory), and the sheer joy of the constant exploding mayhem does almost enough to overcome the epic amounts of frustration.

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NEARLY HONOURABLE MENTION: Capcom’s Forgotten Worlds is another game that used a rotating-fire mechanism, and unfortunately the ham-fisted attempt made at reproducing it in the Speccy conversion totally wrecks what’s otherwise a pretty excellent port.

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94. O-EYES
Arcade: 1982, Rock-Ola/Zaccaria
Spectrum: 2018, Oblo

Our first modern-era homebrew entry is a bit of a personal indulgence, because I absolutely love the arcade game it’s based on.

Its extraordinary Zaccaria cabinet was a fixture of my local arcade in the early 80s and it’s got fantastically atmospheric and weird sound effects. It’s also a really good game, a sort of cross between Pac-Man and Wizard Of Wor/Berzerk that’s intense and challenging from the off, and one that went almost totally unnoticed – the only home port I’m aware of is an unreleased one for the BBC Micro that was seemingly going to be published by Ocean but never was.

The Speccy port is 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 it’s no real 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.

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HONOURABLE MENTIONS: While I don’t know, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion O-Eyes might be written in compiled BASIC, which reminds me of the really well-done (and definitely compiled-BASIC) homebrew Speccy port of Galaxy Wars. It’s also got quite a bit of the feel of Profisoft’s 1984 conversion of Konami’s Jungler, Jangler.

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93. ALTAIR
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.

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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.

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92. TERRA CRESTA
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 and smooth shooters on the Speccy, and it squeezes in some 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 it’s a constant distraction and irritation that you never quite get used to, and it very nearly ruins an extremely accomplished piece of programming.

It doesn’t quite manage it, though. Phew!

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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, but the total absence of any colour is a shame, as are the tiny, hard-to-see enemy bullets.

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91. PUZZNIC
Arcade: 1989, Taito
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean

Puzznic, like Terra Cresta, could have been a LOT further up this chart, tbh. 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 its contemporary, 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 otherwise you couldn’t ask for much more from an arcade conversion. It’s 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.

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90. RAMPAGE
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.

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

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89. TAPPER (128K REMIX, IN 48K MODE)
Arcade: 1983, Bally Midway
Spectrum: Original 1985, US Gold

We’ve had a few games in this list already that suffered for their lack of the arcade version’s music, but this is the first one that’s dropped a significant number of places because it DID have music.

The Speccy port of Bally’s short-staffed happy-hour simulator is a full and accurate replication of the coin-op’s rudimentary but frantic gameplay. (Tapper did well in ports generally, with a particularly impressive Atari VCS version. It’s such a videogaming icon that I even paid tribute to it in Cannon Fodder 2 for the Amiga.)

Everything’s in there and despite the XORing graphics it’s a nice-looking game with some clever use of attributes to keep the visuals simple but colourful and maintain a lively pace. But dear God, my ears! I’ll tell you where the microfilm is! Just make it stop!

The warbling, criminally un-switch-offable music with its constant tinnitus hum makes the official release of Tapper almost unbearable to play for more than a couple of stages. Someone made a 128K remix wth proper music, but inexplicably not the actual tunes from the arcade, which are replaced by some absolutely godawful coder noodling that somehow comes close to being worse than the torture of the 48K version.

BUT! Fortunately you can run the 128 remix in 48K mode, which lets you play in the blissful peace of a lovely old boozer with no jukebox and no patrons under 60, broken only by the occasional brief end-of-level jingle to let you know you haven’t gone deaf.

Normally a game would be looking at instant disqualification for having no sound, but those six-note jingles let Tapper through on a technicality while reminding you that sometimes, silence really is golden.

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88. FLYING SHARK
Arcade: 1987, Taito
Spectrum: 1987, Firebird

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 the rules of this chart also let it off for its rubbish non-redefinable key layout.) But given most Speccy users played games with the keyboard [CITATION REQUIRED] would an autofire-and-separate-bomb-button option really have killed it?

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.

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87. SPECCY BROS (Snow Bros)
Arcade: 1990, Toaplan
Spectrum: 2012, Climacus

Only the absence of music kept this one from a much higher position. The coin-op got rather lost in the huge morass of similar Bubble Bobble derivatives (of which the most successful was probably Tumble Pop), but is just about the only one of them, apart from Bubble Bobble itself, that made it across to the Speccy.

This homebrew 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 only at No.87 here is another testament to the high standard this list is going to showcase.

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86. TARG
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.

Above is the coin-op, below the Speccy. 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.

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85. SDI
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.

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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.

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84. WEC LE MANS
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 debateable.)

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 straight 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.)

Stay tuned for another SHOCK! in a similar vein, Spec-chums!

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HONOURABLE MENTION: 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.

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83. ARKANOID
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.

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82. STARCLASH (Astro Fighter)
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)

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81. MOON PATROL
Arcade: 1982, Irem
Spectrum: 1984/never, Atarisoft

Moon Patrol was a personal favourite of mine in the arcades – I was a sucker for anything with really catchy music, but it was a game that oozed character as your moon buggy bounced across the lunar surface showcasing its impressive three-axle independent suspension.

So I was super-excited when someone with contacts in Atarisoft, er, leaked me an early copy of the Speccy version on a C90 in the 1980s, and doubly thrilled that unlike most Speccy arcade ports of the time, it actually had the music intact (albeit sadly at the expense of any sound effects).

It perhaps wasn’t quite as speedy as one might have hoped – this is a game that copes very well with being run at 2x speed in Spectaculator – 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 being lost to history 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.

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Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (20-1)