Wings Over Sealand

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

20. GAUNTLET
Arcade: 1985, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold

Gauntlet was probably the first ever Spectrum 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.

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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.)

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19. SUPER HANG-ON
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.

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18. YIE AR KUNG FU
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.

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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.)

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17. COMMANDO REMIX (128K)
Arcade: 1985, Capcom
Spectrum: 20??, Mega Byte Group (Original 1985, Elite)

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.)

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

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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, 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.

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15. HYPER SPORTS
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 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 the pole-vault event was rubbish anyway), and the balance of keyboard-pounding and precision is very satisfying.

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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 being padded out from six events to 10 to fit the “decathlon” licence, especially as the extra four are basically just repeats of the javelin and high jump 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.

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14. SPACE INVADERS/SPACE INVADERS ZX
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 even bother to disguise 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?

So this year someone 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, if only anyone had bothered to do it right.

We couldn’t have had the emulated one then, for all sorts of reasons, but in 2021 these two spectacular conversions are inseparable and which one you want to play is your call.

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FAINT PRAISE MENTION: What I’ll say about Domark’s official port of Super Space Invaders is this: it’s better than the Amiga version. Let’s leave it there.

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13. RASTAN (128K)
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 that includes 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.

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12. CABAL
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.62.

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?

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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 any of the arcade levels and it actually plays like a slower, more precise version of Cabal – in the sense 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.

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11. RENEGADE
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.

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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.

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10. R-TYPE
Arcade: 1987, Irem
Spectrum: 1988, Activision

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 a stunning conversion – just won’t seem right without it.

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 an unconvertable coin-op, so I’m tempted to just stop here – he wrote an entire book about it, after all.

But the standard of the top 10 in this list is such that without the music, and with only basic 48K sound effects (although it sounds better and busier than most 48K games), R-Type only just scrapes in. At this level you really need to be the full package.

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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 AY music absolutely transforms it from a merely superb job of converting the arcade 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.

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9. THE PIT
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.

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8. ANTEATER/ANTEATER ZX
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 (including, strangely, 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.

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7. GREEN BERET
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 and artist F. David Thorpe.

(Thorpe in particular, for someone whose name will mean nothing to most Spec-chums, has a phenomenal body of art work on his CV, including Yie Ar Kung Fu, Tapper, Spy Hunter, Pogo, Mikie, Hunchback and Gilligan’s Gold, and that’s just the stuff that’s in this chart.)

But for my money the pinnacle is Konami’s classic run-and-stabber Green Beret.

Smith and Thorpe 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.

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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!

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6. ROBOTRON 2084
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 source material and the conversion.

Everyone 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, right?)

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.

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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.

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5. MISTER KUNG-FU (128K) (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!

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4. RAINBOW ISLANDS (128K)
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.

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3. ASTRO BLASTER (128K)
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 MOON CRESTA!”

>>sub please check above<<

And this Speccy port, which appeared fully-formed completely out of the blue from the mysterious Matt Jackson (never 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.

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2. MAZE DEATH RALLY-X (128K) (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. That tune was so catchy, in fact, that it actually lodged itself inside my head for about 15 years and I could have hummed it to you accurately throughout that period, before retro releases and emulation finally confirmed my memory and saved everyone a lot of awkwardness.)

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.

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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 16K 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.)

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1. MR DO! (128K)
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 (which is 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 the world a slightly lovelier place. At least the people who wrote the bulk of the games in this chart got paid for it, and got covered in magazines that sold tens of thousands of copies. (Of course, some of them are the same people.)

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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.

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So there we go. Seven of our top ten (which is actually a top 11 but shush) are modern homebrew remakes, as are 22 of the list in total, alongside several substantial hacks/mods that significantly improve on the original releases. Partly, of course, that reflects that homebrew coders can take as long as they like to do a really good job, helped by modern resources like emulation, rather than having to churn something out in six weeks to a deadline. But partly it’s just because they’re labours of love.

This feature – all 32,000 words of it – was an attempt to give a little of that love back, not just to the remakes but also to the 80s and 90s coders who went above and beyond the call of duty to produce something good in those tougher circumstances too. Consider it a little blue plaque of posterity.

Hopefully the tiny community (and the even tinier one within) has enjoyed it, and isn’t too upset that a game they like is at No.74 instead of No.61. But if they are, that’s okay too. Opinions make the world go round, even idiotically wrong ones that disagree with this CLEARLY DEFINITIVE AND OBJECTIVE RANKING. If you think it’s rubbish, go and write your own 32,000 words and make your case and see if it’s better. Maybe it will be, and we’ll all have a lovely time reading it.

Better yet, go and write a version of Scramble or Dig Dug or Burger Time or Space Zap or Time Pilot or Gorf for the Spectrum that’s so good that I’ll have to redo the whole thing. Or do Moon Cresta properly. Whatever.

Either way, I’m off for a large raspberry mojito. No calls please.

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

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APPENDIX: COMPLETE LIST

1. MR DO! (128K)
2. MAZE DEATH RALLY-X (128K) (New Rally-X)
3. ASTRO BLASTER (128K)
4. RAINBOW ISLANDS (128K)
5. MISTER KUNG-FU (128K) (Kung-Fu Master)
6. ROBOTRON 2084
7. GREEN BERET
8. ANTEATER/ANTEATER ZX
9. THE PIT
10. R-TYPE
11. RENEGADE
12. CABAL
13. RASTAN (128K)
14. SPACE INVADERS/SPACE INVADERS ZX
15. HYPER SPORTS
16. GUARDIAN II – REVENGE OF THE MUTANTS (Stargate)
17. COMMANDO REMIX (128K)
18. YIE AR KUNG FU
19. SUPER HANG-ON
20. GAUNTLET
21 ASTEROIDS RXC
22. HORACE AND THE ROBOTS (Berzerk)
23. FARMER JACK AND THE HEDGE MONKEYS (Lady Bug)
24. TYPHOON (aka A-Jax)
25. BUBBLE BOBBLE
26. POGO (Q*Bert)
27. MIKIE
28. G-FORCE (aka Tempest)
29. PAC-MAN (EMULATED)/PAC-HACK PLUS
30. WEST BANK (Bank Panic)
31. DINGO
32. CRAZY PINGOIN (Pengo)
33. CARNIVAL (fixed edition)
34. METRO-CROSS
35. ROLLING THUNDER
36. SPECTIPEDE (Centipede)
37. DONKEY KONG ARCADE EDITION
38. QUACKSHOT (Tutankham)
39. CHASE HQ (128K)
40. PING PONG
41. HUNCHBACK
42. BOSCONIAN 87 (128K)
43. BATTLEZONE
44. TERRAPINS (128K) (Turtles/Turpin/600)
45. ALIEN SYNDROME
46. TIMEBOMB – ARCADE EDITION (Check Man)
47. IKARI WARRIORS
48. ROAD BLASTERS (128K)
49. ROUST (Joust)
50. MOTOS
51. SOLOMON’S KEY
52. POWER DRIFT (128K)
53. GILLIGAN’S GOLD (Bagman)
54. BUGGY BOY (128K)
55. MR HELI REMASTERED (128K)
56. ELEVATOR ACTION
57. DRAGON SPIRIT
58. GRYZOR (aka Contra)
59. SHINOBI
60. PANG
61. BATTLE CITY (Tank Battalion)
62. OPERATION THUNDERBOLT
63. RYGAR 2019
64. IVAN ‘IRONMAN’ STEWART’S SUPER OFF-ROAD
65. SUB TRACK (Depthcharge)
66. STAR WARS (mystery sound version)
67. PHEENIX (Phoenix)
68. WIZARD OF WOR/THE WIZARD’S WARRIORS
69. PLOTTING
70. BREAK THRU
71. P-47 THUNDERBOLT
72: MS. PAC-MAN
73. SLY SPY
74. RODLAND REIMAGINED
75. SHAO-LIN’S ROAD
76. SPACE HARRIER
77. KARNOV
78. GUNSMOKE (aka Desperado)
79. GHOSTS’N’GOBLINS
80. CRYSTAL CASTLES
81. MOON PATROL
82. TAPPER (128K remix, in 48K mode)
83. STARCLASH (Astro Fighter)
84. ARKANOID
85. SDI
86. TARG
87. SPECCY BROS (Snow Bros)
88. FLYING SHARK
89. RAMPAGE
90. PUZZNIC
91. TERRA CRESTA
92. ALTAIR
93. WEC LE MANS
94. O-EYES
95. MIDNIGHT RESISTANCE
96. TIME SCANNER
97. BOMB JACK
98. THE NINJA WARRIORS
99. ALI BABA
100. SPY HUNTER