I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos from British YouTubers like Guru Larry and Kim Justice and Ashens who fawn over the days of the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC fondly, but I just can’t get them.
I’ve done a bit of faffin’ about with emulators, trying to play Jet Set Willy and others, but as an American millennial I just can’t figure out the appeal.
As I can see it these games fall into the following categories:
1. Ports of games that are infinitely more playable somewhere else.
There’s a ton of arcade ports on these systems. They all look like complete ass. At best, they actually worked with the original developers of the arcade game. At worst, all they had was a handful of 10p coins, a Polaroid camera and a notebook. In all cases, they look and play so much unlike the actual game that there’s no reason to even touch these, unless you’re a British child in 1986 or you remember being one.
2. Games that are very ambitious to the point that they’re nearly unplayable.
These games are very technically impressive and packed to the brim with features. But to their detriment that makes them unplayable without studying a novel of a manual. They’re also just overambitious for the hardware they’re made for, so a lot of the systems they’re trying to have just don’t work correctly.
3. Games that require godlike patience.
Some games, like the famed Dizzy series have the potential to be good, but they require the patience of a saint. Obtuse level design, sprawling map you need to memorize, lots of cheap deaths and you have to constantly backtrack.
There’s gotta be something on these PCs that’s actually good, right? I doubt the hype around them 100% nostalgia based.
Some of the ports are ok if approached as their own thing and not forced to compare to other ports. The Renegade series is a good example or ports of Contra which are barely Contra anymore but a new terrible thing like Gryzor.
Lot of the good ones got ports later or got redone by the people on the retro remakes site if you can figure out how to get that archive.
there were still micros around when i was a kid,but they were pre-owned or hand-me-downs from older kids, and honestly the main draw was that when you got one, it’d always come with several boxes of pirated games.
i can#t actiually think of anything on the 8-bits that i can say “you should go and play this in 2025, it’s good”, though i have some recommendations for the amiga, which is 16-bit
super obliteration - like pang if it were a lot faster and you could shoot diagonally
wicked - completely unique folk/cosmic horror fungus-cultivating single screeen stg
wizkid - sometimes it’s kind of like arkanoid but you directly move the ball around, sometimes it’s a weird adventure game
elevation 2 - super simple and very addictive homebrew game about avoiding elevators
llamatron 2084 - like robotron 2084, but it’s by jeff minter
I had a CPC as a child, and while there are a couple of legitimately good games (mostly non-action ones), in general they are unplayable yet extremely charming games made by a team of at most two people, which is an interesting quality in itself. If anything it taught me that art is made by people just fucking around.
A lot of games are really glorified demos. Which is fine, because demos are awesome.
Worth a look:
Moondust on the Commodore 64
Very very beautiful “art game” from 1983 with generative music and things and obtuse scoring mechanics.
Thanatos on the ZX Spectrum, also Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64
A sad game about being a dragon with a beating heart.
Not to be too obvious but Elite is a classic. Sure it had later ports to DOS and the like, but the best version is still a weird british micro: the Acorn Archimedes port, ArcElite holds up as the foundational space combat and trading sim. The genre might be pretty dead now (and was always a bit of a grognard genre, I gotta admit) but its still good
technically not a version of Elite proper, but have you tried Oolite yet? that’s the best competitor for ArcElite imo. kind of an alternate reality sequel to the original Elite that forgoes most of what the proper sequels did in favor of expanding on the ideas of the first game
i tried jet set willy and i thought it was amazing… at a certain remove, at least. that beeper music (IF I WAS A RICH MAN, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo)! but it didn’t have the juice to hold my interest in-game for nearly as long as i spent researching it and learning more about it. idk, some of the rooms i could not pass despite excessive numbers of attempts and i had no idea what to do. maybe i’ll revisit it with a guide!
the ones i’m most interested on the venerable zed ecks are the Ultimate: Play the Game stuff like Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, etc. i’ve still not played much of any of those.
that batman isometric game looks sick too, thanks felix for reminding me about that. i could even play that remake that bachelor streamed… hmmm
anyway as far as the question goes, are we including Commodore 64? i think the C64 library is by far the most playable 8-bit micro library. tons of incredible stuff
i’d talk about great stuff on Apple ][ and TRS-80 and TI-99/4(A) and Atari 8-bitters but those ones are firmly non-european for the purposes of this thread, i’m thinking
going the other way and getting more european, i still haven’t explored the Thomson stable of machines yet… fascinating stuff
Yeah, as someone who’s come to this stuff a lot later, that’s been my main takeaway. Same thing as what appeals to me about lil freeware projects as well. Just people goofing off and having a good time and you can really feel that playing this stuff. Even the inscrutability is pretty charming in and of itself… Not to mention the more out there theming you get on some of these things… Pretty refreshing when compared to the safer/family-friendly stuff that fills the catalogs of most consoles of the same time period. Some of those zx spectrum games were also like £2.50 to buy which immediately adjusts expectations!
Also that Moondust game is beautiful looking/sounding!!
