As you may or may not have realised, one of Fantasm's major uses is in games writing, where very fast real time code is needed. It is my own personal opinion that the good olde (sic - Ed.) Speccy could have had some of the most spectacular and playable games. Hence for all those games writers out there, who occasionally want a bit of inspiration, fire up you olde speccy, or a good emulator (Mac Spectacle 1.8.2 or later is good...see our links page to get it) and play away.
Jet Set Willy classic platform game written by Matthew Smith. No other platform game was (is!) this simple yet so playable. Jet Set Willy 2 also was cool, and although Matthew Smith didn't write it (he had fallen out with Software Projects, I think) this was played a lot, the new rooms were great!. Manic Miner, its predecessor was also very playable.
AnyUltimate (Play the Game) game - they are now doing games for a certain console manufacturer under the name Rare. Their classics started with the four brilliant 16K Speccy game - TransAm, Cookie, Pssst, and JetPac. Then after Lunar Jetman and the cool Atic Atac there was the FANTASTIC Sabre Wulf - very colourful, very enjoyable. Following this, (although written first) was Knight Lore - The first Isometric ad game to my knowledge. Also worth taking a look at were Underwurld (monsters don't kill you, just knock you ... off great heights if you are unlucky ... the game is all climbing!), Alien8 (like knight lore, but in space), Cyberun (fantastic scrolly spaceship on planet surface type game)...there are several others. In conclusion - simple but VERY effective graphics, GREAT game play and worth every penny!!
Head over heels- this was the definitive 3D Isometric game, as defined in Ultimate's Knight Lore. This is the conclusion of the technology. Jon Ritman (code) and Bernie Drummond (graphics) were working together on this type of game previously on a version of Batman. However, Head over heels was really the peak of their work to my knowledge. Great graphics, fantastic game play. Also worth every penny. Also from the pair was Match Day which is a very playable Football (soccer) game.
Skool Daze and Back to Skool - Classic platforms, based in a school, with a whole host of things to accomplish, leading up to stealing your very bad school reports. Every kid wants to be the 'brave but naughty' one at school, and so do most adults I'm sure!!!
Quazatron- Steve Turner's (?) classic conversion of Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid (a C64 game). This was Isometric 3D scrolling, instead of Paradroid's top view. Steal parts of alien robots of varying strength.
Critical Mass - 3D surface floating ship shoots it was across a desert landscape in order to stop a nuclear explosion.
Turbo Esprit - The works only real driving game. (As opposed to racing game). Break the drug barrons hold over a city, with you Turbo Esprit equipped with guns! Funniest bit: (a) knocking over pedestrians (b) knocking down ladders of people repairing the streetlights.
Saboteur - Another classic game...blow up an enemy complex.
Technician Ted - One of the best copies of Jet Set Willy. Perhaps the best bit was the tape loader that featured a whole host of Ted's walking across the screen, whilst the CPU simultaneously read in bits by timing them with small loops.
Thanatos - Fly a real big dragon, on a mission to rescue a beautiful maiden, who could refuse?
3dEscape - 16K spectrum game. Running away from dinosaurs around a maze!
GulpMan - Very funny, configurable 16K speccy game based on you know what.
StarQuake - game similar to Underwurlde, but with Access cards and transporters, along with deadly monsters.
Spellbound - Playable game with action menus!?!
ScubaDiver - The best bit of this was the shark animation!
Zynaps - Sideways scroller type shoot 'em up, with really nice graphics.
Driller - just for beauty of coding. There were people who said it couldn't be done on a 3.58Mhz Z80 CPU, but Incentive proved them wrong. (It being a full first person 3D game on the Sinclair Speccy)
The Hobbit - really cool text adventure with nice graphics. Based on the book.
Valhalla - real time(!) text adventure based on Norse legend with fully moving graphics. Nice parser, that tried to correct spelling mistakes, funniest when you typed in 'sit' and the computer spelling correction misread it, and Mary came and hit you for swearing.
Fairlight- Fantastic 3d graphics, similar to Knight Lores, but a little more advanced in some ways. One of the first games to feature two channel on a 48K Speccy (which only had a one bit sound output!). Also worth a look is Fairlight 2.
Agent X- five level game, via multiple tape loads. Amazing 5 channel sound on a 48K Speccy (which only had a one bit sound output!)
Tantalus- A very strange hedgehog, in a very strange but good game.
Sentinel - Although this appeared on several platforms as well (I played it quite a bit on the Atari ST), the speccy version had something which really got to us. Maybe it was the time it took to generate the graphics on the turn, the feeling of impending DOOM which really threatened us when we knew the Sentinel or one of his minions was 'checking us out'!!!!
That's all for now. you've probably had enough of me talking about speccy games......
(Ed. Note - the spell checker gave up about half way through)