Wings Over Sealand

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

80. CRYSTAL CASTLES
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.

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79. GHOSTS’N’GOBLINS
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 arguably the Speccy’s best conversion of HALF an arcade game, but in this chart that’s only good enough for the No.78 spot.

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HONOURABLE MENTION: 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.

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77. GUNSMOKE aka Desperado
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?

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77. KARNOV
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.

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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.

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76. SPACE HARRIER
Arcade: 1985, Sega
Spectrum: 1986, Elite

On my early draft of this chart, Space Harrier 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.

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HONOURABLE MENTION: Grandslam’s conversion of the sequel is also a respectable 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 is therefore disqualified on a technicality.

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74. SHAO-LIN’S ROAD
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 the overall use of colour is splendid for a Spectrum game.)

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.

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74. RODLAND REIMAGINED
Arcade: 1990, Jaleco
Spectrum: 2012, Rafal Miazga (Original 1991, Storm)

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.

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73. SLY SPY
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-lightweight and 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.

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72: MS. PAC-MAN
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.

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

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71. P-47 THUNDERBOLT
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.

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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.

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70. BREAK THRU
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.

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68. PLOTTING
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.

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68. WIZARD OF WOR/THE WIZARD’S WARRIORS
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 derivative of 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).

(I apologise for the tedious arseholes who block their YouTube videos from being embedded. There are no other clips of the Speccy WoW on the site.)

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.

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67. PHEENIX (Phoenix)
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.

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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.)

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66. STAR WARS (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.

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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.

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65. SUB TRACK (Depthcharge)
Arcade: 1977, Gremlin
Spectrum: 1983, Amba

Like Starclash at No.82, 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.

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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.

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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.

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

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63. RYGAR 2019
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.

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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.)

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62. OPERATION THUNDERBOLT
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.

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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.

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61. BATTLE CITY (Tank Battalion)
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.)

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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.

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