50 TIMES CRASH GLITCHED!
Part 2
25. RAID OVER MOSCOW (U.S. Gold) 92%
I'm not sure this one is Crash being out of sync with everyone else, more of a case of me holding a spiteful grudge as a result of personal experience. I saw the Smashed review of this game and thought it looked decent, so went and bought it. Then came the aircraft hangar bit, a ludicrous and near impossible task. I barely ever got past it, so can’t comment much on the rest of the game. All I know is I wasn’t impressed. I’m clearly in the minority as YS gave it a bonkers 5/5 HIT score, while SU forgot to review it, the sillies.
24. GAUNTLET II (U.S. Gold) 65%
It was probably inevitable that Gauntlet II would very strongly resemble Gauntlet I. Such are the rules of follow-ups. If it had been a text adventure, people would have complained. But anyone with sense loved the brilliant multiplayer orgy that was the original, and also the Deeper Dungeons that followed. And the law of diminishing returns says that this sequel probably deserved a lesser score than the original, but not to the level that Crash took it. SU typically lacked sense with a 10/10 Classic, showing that they didn’t actually know how their ‘Classic’ term worked, while YS probably hit the nail on the head with 8/10.
23. ALIEN 8 (Ultimate) 95%
Crash definitely loved Ultimate. And rightly so, up to a point. That point being when they got stuck in a groove releasing isometric game after isometric game, to the exclusion of all others. I know they invented the genre, so were largely entitled to do so, but I recall being a bit underwhelmed by this game. And yes, Alien 8 looked all cool and spacey, but fundamentally added little to the ground-breaking Knight Lore. So how did it score 1% more than it, eh Crash? Never mind. SU said 9/10 while YS waffled a bit about it, but failed to give it a score. Duh.
22. GRYZOR (Ocean) 49%
This game didn’t appear to be hugely original, but it looked like a fairly impressive conversion of the arcade title, certainly not one of Ocean’s duds of old, like Miami Vice, Knight Rider or Street Hawk. YS declared it a Megagame, and SU agreed with a hearty 9/10. 3 years after it originally came out, Crash gave the re-release an improved 65%, suggesting they may have been unnecessarily harsh in the first place. A bit like YS with 3D Deathchase, which they unfathomably disliked first time round, the loonies.
21. REDSHIFT (World XXI Soft) 75%
I thought I’d try and mix things up a bit now with one of them there modern era Speccy games, just to show that errors can still be made even in this day and age. Redshift is a cracking vertical shooter, previously reviewed on this site a while back and getting a princely 87%. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s furious and is surely the best shmup (have I said that right?) of the modern age. So why oh why oh why did Crash only give it 75%? They’re very kind to many an AGD platformer that breaks no new ground, but why not a great shooter, which are relatively rare these days? Come on guys, I know you’re better than this…
20. YES, PRIME MINISTER (Mosaic) 56%
How ‘80s is this? The sitcom was all the rage for a while and a clever TV time capsule in itself. And this game appears to be an amusing and characterful translation of it onto the Speccy screen. Admittedly it cost nearly £15 (*faints*) but it seemed quite a deep and strategic thing overall, and we know how Crash sometimes disliked those… YS Megagamed it and SU thought 8/10 was reasonable. It was surely better than Adrian Mole…
19. AIRWOLF (Elite) 90%
Oh gawd, I think we’ve said enough about this one recently, let’s move on for chrissakes…
18. SAVAGE (Firebird) 74%
I'm 74% surprised that I haven’t played this game at any point, as it looks like an early predecessor of Valley Of Rains, which I lurve, with its fantastically colourful graphics and arcade action. If it’s anything like that recent Zosya classic, surely this should merit some seriously high ratings. I mean, look at the sprites on it, missus! YS gave it the Megagame treatment and SU awarded it a whopping 96% and a shiny Classic badge. Crash? 74%. Miserable buggers!
17. ON THE RUN (Design Design) 91%
I was just checking my dates on this one, as it looks a little like a not-quite-as-good Nodes Of Yesod, which seems to have come out a mere month or so before On The Run. It seems good enough graphically but the gameplay looks a bit dull perhaps. YS and SU evidently thought so, giving it 6/10 and 3*. We need a tie-breaker. What did the mighty Popular Computing Weekly make of it? Aha, they reckon “Spectrum users may think they’ve seen it all before”. Probably just weeks before.
16. BMX SIMULATOR (Code Masters) 63%
Ah I’ve played this one! Played it A LOT. And no way does it deserve a measly 63%. If there’s one thing the Codies did well, not mentioning any eggy folk, it was multi-player games, and this one was right up there with the best. I can only assume the lonely Crash reviewer couldn’t rustle up any fwiends to play this with, as it was a blast in my book. But even YS only rated it 7/10, so leave it to SU to be the only ones to speak sense with a 5* review. God bless the Unclear ones!
15. PENTAGRAM (Ultimate) 93%
Ultimate were unstoppable from the birth of the Spectrum up to say 1985. But by the middle of ’86 things had changed. After the miracle of Knight Lore, they played a very similar tune with Alien 8, Nightshade, Gunfright, then this. Crash risked ridicule by giving it such a high score, while the other mags could see the writing on the wall, YS preferring 7/10 and SU going for 3*. Lowly stuff, but I think much more realistic on the whole.
14. DOUBLE DRAGON (Melbourne House) 64%
So we’d had the glory of Target; Renegade and all its associated punctuation in 1988. Then a year later we got this arcade conversion which had its similarities. Like TR, you could play with your mate and team up to smash the AI baddies, and like TR it was rather good fun doing so. Admittedly it wasn’t on a par with the semicoloned marvel, but it seemed a better game than this mark indicates. Having said that, SU gave it 51%, but I think YS hit the spot more with an 8/10.
13. LUNAR JETMAN (Ultimate) 95%
Oh no, the Ultimate anti-love-in continues! I think there are mitigating circumstances for this one in all fairness. It was Crash’s first issue, the general quality of software wasn’t great in 1983, and so Ultimate’s early titles seemed that much more amazing. This game always looked great but played like a dog, the difficulty level much too high for most mortals. Other mags declined to give it a rating due to them being rubbish, but Crash went big on it, also bizarrely giving it 100% Value For Money. Not sure how that works, also not sure how it didn’t get Game Of The Month (in pre-Smash) days when 3D Deathchase grabbed that with a lower score of 92%. Ah, the early days…
12. CHAMPIONSHIP SPRINT (Electric Dreams) 44%
Crash’s aversion to good clean multiplayer fun continued with this abjectly low score for Super Sprint’s admittedly hugely similar sequel. It largely amounted to more tracks for the original game – kind of a “Super Sprint: The Deeper Dungeons”, but that was often good enough in them days. YS were marginally more impressed, opining 6/10, but SU were in pole position this time round with 7/10. I still think it merits another one mark myself, as there’s plenty of fun in this game to justify an 80% score. Unless you don’t like fun, of course.
11. ZOIDS (Martech) 96%
I think I used to have a Zoid at one point which you wound up, let go and watched as it fell over. Nowadays it sounds like a nasty complaint, but they were very big in the ‘80s for a good 10 seconds. And this game was probably decent enough, with YS also declaring it a Megagame and SU going for a more sober 8/10. But is it really worthy of this level of adulation? Such a dizzying score would rank it among the top ten Spectrum games of all time ever, and let’s face it, it doesn’t really belong there.
10. ATV SIMULATOR (Code Masters) 66%
I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record here, but this was a seriously enjoyable 2 player game, and quite an original one to boot. It’s rather like those Trials bike riding games they’ve done for a while on Playstations – trying to go the appropriate speed to get over the various obstacles in your way. It was great fun in 2 player mode, not much surpassing the amusement of seeing your rival flying off their ATV and through the air, landing in great pain. SU also thought 6/10, the numpties while YS were a bit nearer with 8/10.
9. RENEGADE III: THE FINAL CHAPTER (Imagine) 91%
I suppose everything’s relative. By 1989 the software market wasn’t what it had been in the glory days of yore (Sinclair) and maybe this game was ahead of most others of the time. But pretty much everyone has slagged it off good style as it certainly doesn’t hold a candle to its illustrious predecessors. It’s not much of a looker either, so it seems that the other mags’ scores of 79% (YS) and 71% (SU) were surely the more accurate at the time. Sorry Rene.
8. RAMPAGE (Activision) 69%
Oh man, Rampage was ace! What other game could you play where you and 2 mates (not just one, two) could play as huge monsters destroying a city and eating as many humans as you could manage? It might have been a bit repetitive after a while, but the amount of fun involved was immense. But hold on, this must be a fault on my part, as even the other two rags only gave it 6/10s. Frankly they’re all completely wrong and must be made to pay! I hereby claim the last word on the subject.
7. THE SHADOWS OF MORDOR
(Melbourne House) 93%
Alright, it’s time for me to get personal on Crash’s arses here. As a massive fan of The Hobbit once upon a time, I had high hobbity expectations for this game, despite not having played The Fellowship Of The Ring in between them. The graphics looked nice and Crash gave it a hugely impressive score, even if YS (8/10) and SU (3*) didn’t quite back them up on it. I bought it, I tried to play it, it was total unplayable orc $h1t. Putting a ludicrous maze in right at the start ended the experience very early for me. It had me less singing about gold, more ranting and raving like a demented balrog.
6. ARKANOID (Imagine) 59%
It’s surprising that Crash took such a dislike to Arkanoid, since its deadly rival in the field was Batty, which was Your Sinclair’s champion really, since it came free with one of their issues. I’ve always marginally preferred Batty to this game, but there really isn’t much in it, and both were great fun back in the day. YS called it a Megagame, SU called it a Classic and Crash called it a “meh”. Pretty hard to explain really, it’s not even a 2-player Code Masters game or anything…
5. FAT WORM BLOWS A SPARKY
(Durell) 95%
It’s a good thing to be original. And also to be quirky. This game certainly came out of leftfield and seemed to be well liked by many at the time. It’s probably my bad that I’ve only first played it a few weeks back, and the intervening decades have probably not been kind to it. I really can’t see what the attraction is, I couldn’t get into it at all. SU were with me, only giving it 3*, but YS sided with Crash, calling it a Megagame too. It’s made this list due to just how far into the 90%s it got – again surely the Newsfield boys had a sugar rush on when reviewing this one.
4. GRAND PRIX SIMULATOR
(Code Masters) 42%
We’ve pretty much been over this ground already, but I do remember being quite shocked when I saw this score after playing and thoroughly enjoying this multiplayer classic. It’s not like they took a bit of a dislike to it, they really really hated it! Let’s check for sanity elsewhere: 7/10 from YS and a much-more-like-it 8/10 in SU. This one really is a nasty blot on Crash’s mostly pristine copybook. Whatever a copybook is.
3. KENTILLA (Micromega) 10/10
Ooh, the unpleasant spectre of favouritism rears its ugly head here, something that has been pointed out by many over the years. Derek Brewster of course was Chief Wizard of the Adventure Trail in Crash for quite some time, as well as making a number of Spectrum games himself. Some were well received, like Velnor’s Lair and Codename Mat, while towards the end of the Spectrum’s lifetime, he seemed to program rather too many dubious arcade budget efforts. I’ve played Kentilla, and while it’s not a bad little affair, there’s no way it’s perfection itself. SU thought 6/10 was right, and I’m inclined to agree, with YS going one lower. Maybe they weren’t big fans of the anorak look.
2. ZOLYX (Firebird) 14%
Surely this is just plain nasty. Pete Cooke wrote this. PETE COOKE! Author of many ground-breaking games. He went all budgety in the late ‘80s, but he still did some really good stuff even then. Crash even Smashed his previous budget puzzler, Brainstorm! But they reckoned this game was great on the C64 (spit, spit) but a terrible conversion to the Speccy. As far as I'm concerned, it's a simple but effective concept overall. YS were non-committal with 5/10 but SU thought it was well worth 8/10. Nick Roberts even reckoned it looked like a programmer’s first effort on a ZX81! Wonder if he realised who actually wrote it...
1. TECHNICIAN TED (Hewson) 96%
Maybe it’s me, since I did name Jet Set Willy as my favourite Spectrum game of all time. Nearly a year after the release of JSW came Ted, apparently a technician. Even the title doesn’t do it for me, sounds kinda boring. Yes, the loader is extraordinary but once you’ve got over that, I don’t see anything remarkable about this game at all. It’s ludicrously difficult, you’ve got millions of lives which suggests the programmers knew just how hard it was, and the whole thing is not even slightly up to the standard of Matthew Smith’s classic. But Crash adored it, saying “the graphics certainly surpass those seen in JSW and MM”, which I can’t agree with. They loved it to bits but to me it just seems like a quite polished, but fairly generic clone. Wonder what the others said, since clearly I must be wrong! Well they both gave it 7/10, a not unreasonable conclusion. I guess this game really is the definition of Marmite (except it’s not strictly a savoury spread in a jar). Users on Spectrum Computing were mostly split between 6/10 and 9/10, averaging out to 7.3. Maybe this proves that opinions really are like a-holes and each to his own etc. Still, it’d be boring if we all liked the same thing, eh? Cliche, cliche.
HOPE THAT'S BEEN INTERESTING AND/OR CONTROVERSIAL READING... DESPITE THESE 50 EXAMPLES, CRASH IS UNDOUBTEDLY THE GOAT! IF YOU DISAGREE AT ALL, WHICH YOU WILL, PLEASE DO COMMENT AND START A HEATED DEBATE :)
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