I was in awe of my friends C64 when allI had was an acorn electron. It was all we could afford. Until one day, when I came home from school, my dad was sat at the desk setting up a second hand colour screen cpc464 with a big bag of games. One of my best weekends ever. It was out of date by then but I didn't care, I was over the moon. I love watching these videos, thanks
The ironic thing about nintendo banning the c64 version of the great giana sisters is that about 20 years later the c64 version appeared on nintendos wii shop as wiiware.
My first computer was the C64 and then the Amiga. On the C64 we got Bozos Night out and Beach head with it. It amazes me that new games are still being created.
I was always dead jealous of my mate's C64. God knows how many hours we spent in his front room playing Racing Destruction Set (it took hours to load mind. I used to ring him up to get the game loading so by the time I'd got round there it it was done). Being able to create our own tracks with different terrain was incredible - there was nothing like it on the Speccy. Summer Games (I and II) and Winter Games were much better on the 64 too. The other game we lived on was Revs. A proper racing game that actually felt like driving. It was sickening to go home and contemplate the, let's face it, terrible Chequered Flag. Keep up the videos mate, I've been loving them since I found them.
Thanks mate, I have heard good things about Revs from others too. Had a similar experience with tape loading. My mates would pile round my house at lunch as I lived near the school, so I would load (often rampage) in the morning and leave it running. 😁
I was confused at first, until I realized it must have been on tape. I had that game too, the fun of it was making your own track. I had the disk version of it, but I don't remember if you could save it or not. You could always grab a C=64 emulator if you want, but you'll find I think that nostalgia is best left in the past. I find every game to be unplayable today, and I mean EVERY game. I can't enjoy video games at all anymore.
In Germany back then there wasn't a single person who owned a ZX. At least i never knew one. Swapping games for the C64 on the other hand was the easiest thing in the world...😂
I left school at 15 and worked in a shop where we sold home computers and games. The one thing I wished we had was the disc drive because of games like Airborne Ranger and other Microprose titles
Not available in the 80's, but have you seen the recently released full version of Eye Of The Beholder for the c64? Its an incredible achievement, no way to do anything as complex on the humble 48k speccie.
You DO understand that this was possible ONLY with an external storage device (SDcard) with a capacity that wasnt available in the past. It is NOT a game for an ordinary C64, it NEEDS the external memory card drive to have the storage capacity to run, because actually this is what it does. EVERY step you make, it is another LOAD from the disk. It is just fast enough that you wont notice it. You couldn't do this with a disk drive, especially the 1541 which was slow (not as slow as the 1540, but still slow). Plus you would need hundreds of disks to fit the game. It is impressive, but it is not THAT impressive. P.S. And yes, in theory you can use the same trick to convert it to any 8bit computer as long as you can have access to a "fast" storage medium.
@@Nick-GR Yes, I do understand how it technically achieves it, thanks. Though even with the use of an equivalent high speed, machine controllable banked storage cartridge, I've yet to see anything remotely as impressive achieved on the 48k Speccy - happy to hear your recommendations for equivalent titles I could have a look at though?
Great video. I emigrated to Australia in the early eighties; in Oz disc drives were the way to go, so I had the joy of all these games and more...except...Alter Ego...which I always wanted but could never find. One of my early faves was Phantasy (or Phatasie) which was my first introduction to computer RPGs. A classic.
Brilliant video from an honest Spectrum owner! I owned a Spectrum too and loved playing the classics Manic Miner and Jetset Willy...until one fateful day I visited my friend who owned a C64 and saw Henry's House...I was overwhelmed and realized my life was incomplete until I owned a C64 too! Months later, after alot of pestering, I was finally gifted a breadbox C64. Those games such as Pitstop II, Summer Games I & 2, World games...the list goes on and on were incredible and couldn't be replicated on a ZX Spectrum. I think we all have to accept that...as difficult as it sometimes may seem. 😊
for me it was the Spectrum that had a few games that either weren't as good on my C64 or I simply couldn't get. Speccy Sabre Wulf remains the definitive version and Back to School I was very envious of. Also a much better version of T.L.L and Cyclone which you couldn't get on 64. Jet Set Willy was worse on 64 as well. Each machine had something over the other back then
@@adroharv5140 I think that the straight ports from the Spectrum to the C64 never seemed to produce quality C64 games. Manic Miner, JSW, Skool Daze, the Wally games etc, were all better on the Spectrum. I can accept that completely. But this category was quite a limited and niche group. When developers wrote the C64 version from scratch, that version was almost always better.
@@AbooSulaymaan yeah I think that's fair. Actually I do prefer Manic Miner on the C64 because you can change your direction the moment you land. The C64 was just very good overall at almost everything though so for many it was the machine to own if you had to get just one machine. Great days
@@adroharv5140 That's interesting but I prefer the Spectrum version of the Miner Willy games as part of their "genius" was the need for pixel perfect jumps and the timing of the enemy sprites. Take those two factors out then they are not the same games.
Great video. I absolutely loved Space Rogue, i feel the developers just didnt care about C64 limits when they made that game cramming an RPG and space combat into one disk. A well deserved GM when we reviewed it. Project Firestart was very atmospheric and another deserved high scorer. I'm in Team Quazatron however as i played it a lot more than Paradroid as i had a speccy at home and the C64 at work at Zzap (If you could call it work). Im surprised Pirates! didnt do well, the open world feeling was great, helped by the map you got with it.
Someone in the comments reckoned ZZap reviewed the tape version of Pirates, hence the score... I'm not sure... cool that you worked at ZZap! What did you do?
@SebsPlaceYT i never thought they might have reviewed the tape version. Makes sense. I reviewed games 1987-1991 as part of the editorial team and did the playing tips (did a small bit on Crash briefly before moving to Zzap). You showed my face and reviews of space rogue and firestart in your video :)
Ah that's brilliant! Thanks for commenting and letting me know. It's great to hear experiences from people that worked on a game or magazine. Cheers!!!
@@zxspectrum16KB And play WHAT? CPC+ had very few games specifically written for the system. Also came out 6 years after C64 and STILL failed to compete. Get lost.
@@plechaim Thats the key word. "SOME". I agree. Games that didnt had scrolling were good on the CPC like TAI PAN for example, (and a few others). But it couldnt compete with the C64.
Spectrum kid all the way up to 1990, when some financial luck enabled me to pick up an entire C64 set-up, brand new machine, disk drive, and most importantly, S.S.I. RPG's! Solid list though, agree with almost everything on there, although i'd probably switch Space Rogue for perhaps Buck Rogers, or one of the Krynn titles. Also, 64 exclusive Thalamus titles are conspicuous by their absence - no Hawkeye, Armalyte, Que-Dex?? Great video though, great channel too.
Thank you Mr Fox! I did play Armalyte and almost stuck it in but we had some great shooters on the speccy so wasn't ad impactful as other games on the list. I will check out your other recommendations for sure - thank you 😊
I was a speccy kid but had a couple of c64 owning friends. Dropzone is a c64 game that made me very jealous - a rather good defender rip off. Also the port of salamander which did come out on the speccy but was not comparable.
Dropzone was a great game, I played it on the C64 while waiting for one of the Atari 800XL to become free on the author's stand at a computer show in London and of course bought a copy for my brother's Atari. The Atari version was better, but not by much. It had some nice variations from Defender and was very playable, I really dug the lightning cloud when it killed me. One of my favourite games, apparently they toyed with releasing an arcade version.
Glad to see the excellent Slicks in there. The Super Sports compilation that was supposed to be released on the Spectrum with Slicks on never got released. That compilation only got a C64 release, with 1st Division Manager and Cue Boy getting their only C64 releases there. The likes of Project Firestart and Zak McCracken are excellent too, and glad those were featured. As for other C64 games that didn't get a Spectrum release, Turbo Charge (an excellent racing and shooting game, from System 3), the thinking shooter Hunter's Moon released by Thalamus, the superb shoot em up Armalyte (only a demo appeared on the Spectrum), also released by Thalamus, and of course, Creatures, Creatures 2 and Mayhem in Monsterland all programmed by Apex Computer Productions (the latter was released by themselves). Some choices you should definitely pick up and play there.
Thank you some great shouts there. I played Hunters Moon tonight actually on the c64 Mini. Enjoyed it. I played Armalyte too and was close to adding in the video but we did get some decent shooters on the speccy so it missed out. Super interesting you say that compilation never got released. I did wonder as the game is nowhere online. Cheers for the comment!
A C64 game you might want to try that didn’t make it to the spectrum is Raid On Bungeling Bay. It was eventually also ported to the NES and MSX. Fantastic top down helicopter shooter. Ironically the NES sold much higher numbers as it couldn’t be easily pirated like the C64 version. Another fun fact. It was Will Wright’s first game. He had so much fun making maps in the level editor he made for it that he ended up enhancing it. The map editor eventually evolved into the first Sim City.
Spectrum owners looking for a pirate game had few options outside Booty, true. But they did get 'Skull and Crossbones' - a pretty rough conversion of an Atari arcade late in the systems life...and i think Tai Pan...whilst not a pirate game per se had some of the same elements as Pirates! Trading, sea battles etc. Baffling though it was.
Childhood Spectrum owner here: Maybe good substitutes would be Deus ex Maxhina for Alter Ego, and the Magic Knight trilogy (Spellbound, Knight Tyme, and Stormbringer) in place of Zak Mckraken/Maniac Mansion.
The C64 was the one i grew up with, but there was one major issue that arose the longer i had it - the huge blocks everything was made up from; when Final Fight released for Spectrum, the characters were detailed and recognisible, the C64 version looked NOTHING like. Obviously games like Turrican 1&2 proved the machine was capable, but it was a huge issue when games like Streetfighter had those ginormous blocky characters.
I loved _Paradroid_ on my friend's C64 and was also disappointed by _Quazatron._ Fortunately the development of these games led directly to _Ranarama_ which had broadly similar mechanics and was a tremendously good game on both platforms. I still play it from time to time on the Spectrum Next.
I know, there were silly money. At the time the C64 sanctioned and branded drive was mega expensive and huge in size. I eventually got a disk drive but it was from the first company to make an after market one. Much smaller, separate power brick and a toggle peg/clip you turned a quarter turn to keep the disk in the slot. It never vanished into the drive on a button press like the official 64 version. I cant remember the name of these drives now, they were white and there is one in the start of this video on the desk, its that exact one! They were not cheap, but not the hundreds they wanted for the "real" one. I bought one for my 64 as the floppy prices were cheaper. I got it from CHIPS computers. It was rumoured that this cheaper drive was unreliable, would break down, damage disks or not load certain disk titles. All utter tosh to get you to buy the expensive one instead. The other fun thing with floppy disks of this era was the two sided trick. A dual sided disk was expensive. But you could buy a punch stamper like a stapler to cut a notch out of the other edge of the disk if it was single sided. This let you flip the disk and use both sides! Mental. Single sided disks were a lot cheap so buy the punch and make single siders into double sided with a button push...the inventiveness of the era to get round these problems. The other cool thing was the action reply cartridge systems. Load in your game off tape. Push a button on the cart and pause it into the carts memory, then go in and hack it add cheats and pokes etc, then dump the new version onto disk. No more waiting around for tapes! Borrow a friends game and rip it to disk in seconds....Such fun!....
I'm on the C64 side but this is a very fair list. Of course for us what we wanted was all the Ultimate isometric games, although only decades later did I learn these were all actually better on the Amstrad! We got them eventually.
I started with a Commodore 16, my mate had a '64. The difference was unreal. Even making my 16 a plus 4 with the RAM pack made little difference. The 64 just kicked ass, the SID chip was way ahead of it's time. I then moved on to the Amiga.
I had a C64 from 1983 onwards. It was all I knew really until my Dad bought an Amstrad PC for my mum to do accounts on and I started playing PC games like Elite and Prince of Persia. Once I got my Sega Megadrive in 1990 and a 486 PC in '94, I didn't go back to the C64 for about 20 years. I've been playing it constantly ever since though, especially in more recent times with the great modern conversions of Mario Bros and Sonic. As a kid almost all my friends had the Speccy and it always sucked IMO. The only game I ever played on it that was half way decent was Cobra.
@@zxspectrum16KB I wouldn't say that was accurate. C64 had a several vector graphics titles, for instance the port of the Star Wars arcade game. C64 handled it fine. More recently there's games like Fortress of Narzod which is Vector graphics based. Again, C64 handles them fine.
@caeserromero3013 frame rate mate its all about frame rate u see starstrike starglider cholo catch 22 mercenary starstrike2 starglider2 wasn't even available on c64!
Yet another fantastic subject to debate, great talking points amongst retro fans. Some brilliant examples of games that never made it across, very frustrating when you see screenshots in the magazines of the day. Hopefully we'll see them pop up on "Games that weren't" UA-cam page, we live in hope. I had to double take when you showed Parallax, I swear it's more or less a carbon copy of your video in the latest one I'm putting together, very spooky 🤣. One game on the Spectrum I always wanted on the C64 was Rollercoaster by Elite, again advertised in mags for the 64 but never released. One of my favourite games on the Speccy, again hopefully if it was written "Games that weren't" will release it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on games in a video that were better on the Spectrum and left the C64 wanting. There's a few I only play on the Speccy machine, love to hear your choices. Great production again mate.
Haha all better 😁😁 not sure about that Dave but for sure the renegade games are better on the Speccy.... Bruce Lee is better despite what Del says 🤣 Robocop is better too. Thanks Denny as always - will defo do a video the other way at some point!
Ultima 3-5, goblins, black magic... started with a tape deck moved to disk drive, got the notcher to use back side then lucked out my day got another used disk drive so i had two. Kept plaing on the c64 until ibm 256 came out. Haded to loose the 256 colors to go to ibm 16 colors. Did not change until windows 3.1
Giana Sisters and Pirates offer real opportunities for enterprising ZX retro developers to adapt the games. Giana could probably be done on a 48K, but would have better sound on a 128K. Pirates! was made in BASIC, so it should be possible to port directly, with changes to how graphics and sound are generated.
Speccy equivalent of Pirates? How about the excellent Tai-Pan by Ocean? Could sail the seas, run around the towns, and even do some gambling playing mahjong.
loved and continue to love the unique quality of the Speccy but the right choice was made I feel when we got a C64. It's great however we get to play these systems and games now so easily. Currently playing on a MIst 1.5 FPGA and it's as close as I need to playing these great systems so effortlessly
The only thing I will admit that I was jealous of the spectrum over when compared to the C64 was the Spectrum's ability to do vector graphics and isometric graphics, but in every other department, the C64 pisses all over the Spectrum. I will admit though that the Spectrum did have a few games that were better than the C64 counterparts, like Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg for example, but that's primarily because they were developed on the Spectrum to begin with.
Firstly you had a friend with a c64 😮. Did you feel sorry for him? Did the other kids throw things at him and laugh? Secondly all these games are definitely better on the spectrum, especially the ones that aren't on it 😂🤣🤪
Lol, don't listen to that. David retro games played badly... he's just jealous :-) love ya David buddy :-). Great video. I have so many memories of great spectrum games mostly from ultimate play the game but ask it to do a Jeff minter shooter or a psychedelic sprite heavy arcade game with parallax and music and my fave the c64 had the edge. Great times I had with ancipital or hunters moon or psi 5 trading company, etc, just to name a few. Like denny, we are so happy you are here in you tube land....excelsior sir
Thanks for the video.The only game I personally played on C64 was River Raid. That happened in "sort of" soviet arcade hall, with rows of Atari/ZXs/C64 that were waiting for the teenagers to rip them off all the pocket money in a matter of minutes. None of my friends had C64, so I was jealous only hearing that some guy got NES clone or IBM-compatible treasure. But, a remarks on zx alternative to C64 Pirates. Its TaiPan. Its not the clone, but the theme and some features are alike. As for that Slicks game - Grand Prix 2 is somewhere near as well. No scrolling though(
@@SebsPlaceYT per minute) So usually each of us had enough money to play for like 10 min or so. We did that in turn, each one tried a different game. After running out of money we were just watching for other random guys playing. I remember that t was a risky thing to visit such places alone, some hooligans could easily rob you)) Later those "halls" transformed a bit, first by replacing the old machines with NES clones and rare SEGAs, and in another 5-6 years time they became computer clubs with CS, Quake 2, Starcraft installed
Regarding the Great Giana Sisters, I think Your Sinclair had something in the tips section in an issue or two (or three?) after the review, so for someone to send in a tip means that someone somewhere must have owned a copy, however it was obtained.
Something is wrong with Project Firestart shown here. The sound effects were great as was the music ( though the music was a bit muted). The bit you showed was missing the rifle laser effects and the footsteps. Maybe an issue with the emulator?
Beyond the less powerful Cpu and less Ram memory, as I remember, the ZX Spectrum had a very serious limit: it hadn't a sound card; while the C64 already had a syntesizer inside, the Spectrum played the sound as the small speaker of a old PC without a sound card. Too bad.
Speaking as a C64 guy (Spectrums weren't really a thing here in North America, at least not in the traditional British form, we did have the Timex-Sinclair version which was far different) Target Renegade was far better on the Spectrum. The music from the c64 version was awesome, but the actual gameplay....
The ibm was mostly a business computer the c64 is the greatest home computer of all time I'm from N.Y and now gonna be 55 in May and have been a C64 fan since I got it in 1983 and finished my complete setup by the next year had 2 1541 drives 1702 monitor mps 801 and 802 vicmodem and a datasette I still have a great setup and still enjoy it to this day
Giana Sisters WAS ported to the Spectrum, but it was never released, and perhaps never completed. There were advertisements in game magazines, but Nintendo made their threats so.. As far as I know, the game on the Spectrum has never been seen outside of the magazine.
@@SebsPlaceYT No big loss. You wouldn't want to play it today on a Spectrum. I think the best version was on the C=64. I got the Amiga version later, but it ran slow to the point the game was more tedious than fun.
Well that’s delightful, and you might have given me an idea here. I’d be doing two different formats but somehow one of yours would appear…. Hard agree on pirates and I too have never played Zak and also don’t know why.
I was always jealous of my friend’s C64. I loved loved loved Paradroid and was also pretty disappointed with Quazatron. Iridium too was another, which I think ultimately did come to the spectrum.
For Parallax i would say a closer game on the Speccy, and maybe better? :) would be Astro Clone from Hewson Consultants. I actually prefer Quasatron over Parradroid, and see it as a graphical upgrade more than anything.
Tai-Pan is possibly nearer Pirates! than Booty lol - exchanging games with friends meant that I never gave it the time that I should have really, if you couldn't get right in there and play it instantly then there were plenty more that you could.
Die Hard Speccy kid/adult here ... up to Next KS2 that i received last week in fact! However, i have never been SO anti c64 as many of my mates, and indeed own one these days. Subjectively for me i still prefer the Speccy, but thats not to downplay how amazing the c64 was too. The SID especially still makes my jaw drop
It's actually WAY better than i even expected - it has genuine Speccy feel except it's SO much more. It feels weird to be on wifi on a speccy as well as running full video! If you get teh chance to pick one up in some way it is SO worth it - and the simple joy of loading older games via tape is a nostalgia rush @@SebsPlaceYT
Funny that you mentioned Slicks on the Speccy. I've been looking for that (albeit a little half-heartedly) for a while now, but only the NES collection with the same name seems to ever come up on eBay.
I enjoyed Gribbly's Day Out for many hours trying to master all the levels, it was made exclusively for the Commodore 64 and also Trolly Wally that was only on the C64 and Amstrad CPC, for the C64 at least it had a catchy long soundtrack.
I know the feeling of envying the C64 friends .. because my first computer was the C16. While technically a bit more advanced than the Spectrum, it of course suffered from a severe general lack of software and especially good games. I had about 20 discrete original games and a Kingsoft compilation with supposed 100 games (all on tape of course) and overall this made for about 10 games worth playing at best which grew pretty boring after owning only the C16 for years. And of course there's was no single other person owning a 264 machine which I could have swapped with as the 264 machines where a pretty rare buy (for reasons..). Easy to say, that it was an utter mystical and surreal feeling when I then got an Amiga! xD PS: It's not the Spectrum games that you asked for, but most of the few games worth playing I had on the C16 where: Berks 1-3, Fingers Malone, Tutti Frutti, Squirm, Airwolf, Bruce Lee and Big Mac xD
It didn't matter what home computer you had in the 80s, they were still cheaper than putting money into coin ops at the fair, I had a ZX81 and loved it, my c16 I got for Xmas 2 years later was incredible, the +4 was the year after, I was happy with them and I loved them. My games were my games. I didn't care if people had better computers, I was grateful that my dad bought me the ones I got and I loved them
My brother had a ZX81, 3d monster maze made me jump the first time the dinosaur appeared, the other things I remember it for, were loosing my programming due to ram pack wobble and burning my fingers on the hot keyboard, I also learnt basic on it. There were lots of amusement arcades around here, games were mostly 10p a go, games for my brother's Atari were typically around £30, to buy so about 300 plays in the arcade. I mostly used to play the arcade games I got good at fairly quickly, and even though I wasn't exceptionally good, or anything, once I got the hang of a game 10p could last a very long time. Must admit though, I actually preferred a good pinball machine.
Yeah, but to be fair, the Commodore 64 was also about 5 times the price of the Speccy. That's the reason we got a Speccy instead of the C64. My uncle had a C64, but would let no one touch it. I never even saw it on. In fact, even to this day I have never seen a C64 on in real life, but a few in CEX just stuck in the window. The only chance I got to experience aC64 was when I got an emulator. It is a good computer, but the basic was utter crap! At least the Speccy had a LOT better basic going for it. And the Speccy had twice the me memory, too (in some iterations.) I had a lot of fun with my Speccy back in the day. The worst time was when the keyboard membrane stopped working and I had to wait 6 weeks to get it back! Now, thanks to emulation, I can re-live those times again. I love emulation! I have over 10,000 Speccy titles in about 7 different languages. But I am deleting all the crap I would never use.
Thanks for the comment! Some great stories there 🥰 check out my argos video for a price comparison, the speccy was definitely cheaper but still quite expensive back in the day. Cheers!
Yeah! I never realised us speccy lot only got Last Ninja 2 and not the first one! That Falcon Patrol looks like a great defender clone! Cheers for the comment.
Part of the reason Pirates was so poorly reviewed is that Zzap reviewed the tape version, which is indeed pants. One interesting thing about it is that a surprisingly large amount of the game is actually written in BASIC.
I was a Speccy user from about 1983- 89 then had an Amiga 500. The original Speccy with rubber keys, I loved it to bits. All my mates had one. One of my mates had a VIC 20, so went on that sometimes. I never played on C64. Still glad I had the Spectrum. Best computer ever.
As a C64 fanboy, I should be legally obliged to laugh and point at the ZX Spectrum allegiance like Nelson Muntz. But to be honest, I have a real soft spot for the Speccy. I did actually own one in the mid 90's, but I don't consider myself a true Spectrum owner. I used it a few times, then abandoned it because it offered nothing that my C64 already did. The ZX Spectrum was a sweet old thing, I know I would have loved it if fate had handed me one as a Christmas present in 1990 instead of a C64. So despite my love of the C64, I'm a conscientious objector in the C64 V Speccy war.
Regarding Giana Sisters: There was an amazing version we traded in pirate trading groups which featured sprites and other game elements designed to make the game resemble Super Mario Brothers even more closely; it still wasn't a 1 for 1 clone by far (the stock Sisters levels remained as did the music but some of the bricks, barrels, and mobs have been reskinned to resemble SMB) but it felt a lot closer to the NES version. I had both SMB and the SMB hack of Giana Sisters, and both were a lot of fun. I have since found that reskinned version GS on one of the C64 archives (I'm sorry, I do not recall which one) and have it on my The64 maxi today. :) See video X6TJ_xMJVgw for an upload of a longplay video from user phoenix1291.
The original C64 version of Pirates is not a fun experience and I'd argue the point and click adventures are better with a point and click device so better on Amiga with a mouse than the clunkier joystick. I'd not played the C64 versions of either game until very recently and, despite being a slower experience, they are still playable. Zacks the better game with far less fail states and some deviously silly puzzles. Space Rogue is a real forgotten gem of a game. A solar system to explore with a proper Ultima style RPG under the bonnet. Oh, and for a left field horror experience, the Lurking Horror is well worth a look as it's one of Infocoms best written text adventures.
I also had a few speccys, the first came from our cousin and was a shared one then when that went wrong I got a number of used ones from the paper cheap, I did this because all the games still worked I had a +2 3 a 128 and possibly others the games were very cheap to buy if there was no one to copy off (I did buy some things that I wanted because of the big box that comes with) I had one bud at school who had a v2 64 with the nicer slicker model so I ended up finding a breadbin 64 so I took copies of some of his stuff (I had booty on the spec it was a stunning game one of my number of favs, the music), after this I found a a500 when I was just looking around above a tv shop there was a computer shop and they had one used (I could not afforrd a new one becasue I was only a teen and had to biy it myself, so I ended up saving paper and christmas and any money I could get my hands on I put towards that I could my hands on including the 64 when it came to buy time luckily it did not sell, I was terrified because of the ok price and fairly decente deal that someone else would buy they did not so I did get it, after that when he saw it he mamanged to a 600 for christmas so he got games that I had also there was a guy that sold cheap discs and games and labels so we went up there a lot and wasted our paper money but he got busted annoyingly so had to get other sorces.
@@SebsPlaceYTWell I don't have any of the original because I had to sell stuff to buy other stuff but I did buy a spec 48k but ended up selling that for different things, I do have an a120 a few years ago that I have kept because the amiga is my fav and it's the one that I wanted because of the better chips but I couldn't afford it when I was younger, I still use this.
The games that I remember and I wanted for my Speccy were Toki, Speedball 2, Indy Heat and Blood Money. I also wanted a decent version of Kung Fu Master that the C64 had, and it took almost 40 years for it to come on the Speccy with Mister Kung-Fu
There are so many C64 games I never played that I appreciate different perspectives when listing favourites, so now I can add these games to play on the C64 (or an emulator) that I didn't play as a kid: Parallax Scarabaeus Slicks (IronMan aka Super Off Road was also a great top down racer though) Paradroid Space Rogue (The fastest vector graphics game on the C64 I loved was Stuntcar Racer) Pirates! Played and loved all the others of course, and I truly loved how each LucasArts game put in easter egg references to the other games. That can of petrol you were looking for in Maniac Mansion to power the chainsaw? In one of the Monkey Island games while being tortured you can ask where that can is, the answer: On Mars, and of course in Zak McKracken you find the can on Mars. The first thing I install on any new computer/phone I get is ScummVM and 70GB+ of game data for close to 200 point-and-click games including all LucasArts ones.
One that springs to my mind at once is - Blackwyche . It was an Ultimate Play the Game C64 only title. And its a prate adventure game!! So there you go, another one for you.. Its pretty decent as well, with pretty graphics and atmosphere. The theme of this video feeds into my fascination with games that were better on the Spectrum than the 64, and vice versa. Stuff like Trap Door, Skool Daze and Bak to Skool are utter Spectrum classics and unique to the time period. Nothing like the School Daze games today. Forbidden Forest is another C64 game not released for the Spectrum. The obvious ones that are true C64 original classics like Wizball and the Last Ninja are covered a lot. Last Ninja was utterly ground breaking at the time. It was one of those games that had a mysterious one page advert in game magazines for about two years before it came out. No screen shots, just the ninja eyes peering from the mask. Then closer to release a couple of tiny screen grabs. Everyone expected it to be crap at the time. As it was advertised forever and no one expected it to actually come out, as it took so long. Games like that rarely lived up to the adverts. But this one did. I still play it today. The music, the graphics and different areas with all unique looks. I still love the palace gardens for the sheer effort involved in making it look realistic, with beds of flowers, trees and fountains. Manic Mansion was great fun too. A Rocky Horror style game with so many characters. It was like a cartoon in looks and it felt like you were playing a Scooby Doo style parody. Ahh those were the days....
Thanks for the comment, I'm defo going to do a video the other way round at some point. Weirdly Last Ninja 2 was available on the Speccy but the first one wasn't. Wizball is my favourite C64 game. I've done 2 videos on it 😁
Yes, Wizball is a classic. Its a unique idea. Last Ninja was one of the games along with Wizball that tempted me into finally getting a C64. The fact Last Ninja was 64 only never registered with me, for the two years or so before it came out and the adverts that were everywhere. Its not until it was released and I actually saw it running was what made me badly want a Commodore at long last. I visited my local computer shop Topsoft, and all the lads in there were talking in hushed tones about this game Last Ninja that was finally being released later that week. They would have it in on Thursday, this was the Saturday before. I shrugged my shoulders and was not impressed as I was there for the Spectrum stuff. They told me I would change my mind when I saw it. The following Saturday when I made the usual trip in to see what was new I had forgotten about it entirely. Till I saw the crowd of people OUTSIDE the shop. So many had turned up you could not even get in the place! I had to wait outside for a while before I got in to see what the fuss was about. I could not believe what I was seeing. The colours and the music. And the different weapons, it really did look...Japanese or whatever and made you feel like a Ninja, it drew you in, and it was the first time I started to understand that computer games were going to get bigger and more complex and epic and tell a story. Rather than just jumping in a ship and blasting aliens and going peow peow... It was the first time I had seen a game that was not just r a shootemup or a standard platformer etc, something that was as impressive as Knightlore had been on the Spectrum but took things to the next level. It was truly the start of the event A list title, and state of the art game era. I was hooked. From that day on my plan to save and beg borrow and steal to get a C64 began. It became an obsession. The sequels to this first game never resonated in the same way. The one in New York was good, but it did not have the impact the first one did as we had now seen it, and were jaded as having played it. I always thought the sequel was weaker and less entertaining. The Ninja out of the Japanese setting felt out of place to me. And the more sequels they did the weaker it seemed. It was also the first game to be over done by too many poor follow ups, trying to cash in without doing enough new things. A useful lesson for today I think....
Yes it was and is a truly great game. One of the first epic titles that broke new ground and put computer gaming on the map. Thinking about it today and all the nostalgia of the memories is almost painful. Nothing like it now, that sort of shared event. My story is not unique and things like that over Last Ninja and other games of the era will have been going on in every town in England, shaping the lives and experiences of the kids of that time, who like me are now old men...well not old but no longer young. One thing about it I am now wondering about. Something I thought of at the time but never gave it much heed. And its this - How did the two older lads in Top Soft that I spoke to, know that the Last Ninja was going to be amazing and a brilliant game? They had no internet, no way of getting a demo of it, as there were none available and no reviews in magazines....At least none I knew of, but then I only read Crash and Your SInclair etc... Yet they acted as if they knew what it was like before it was released....I suppose its one of the mysteries I will never solve. Its not important in the scheme of things, but still...
Seb, check out io for C64, rock hard side scolling shooter. One of the best days of my life when I completed it on my friends C64, the look on his face still lives with me today.
Only the c64 that used the Vic 20 case was called a "bread bin" because it was big and ugly even by 80s standards, the c64c was a way cooler design even though the internal specs were virtually the same.
Weird Dreams is a great shout. I'd never seen it but apparently Spectrum and CPC versions were cancelled so never got released. Looks like an odd game! I love my speccy too 😍
Oh, wow yeah.... if I did a video on Atari 2600 owner cries at spectrum games I could be here for hours 😂 I never knew anyone who had one back in the day. Had one mate who had a dragon32 but always thought that was kinda cool back then 🙂 cheers for the comment
I was lucky enough to own a C64 back in the day, and loved it. But to be fair to the humble speccy, a lot of the games were easily more playable than their C64 counterparts. Gauntlet, Bombjack, Chase HQ and Renegade to name a few. The C64 was by far the best all round 8-bit computer though, and the incredible SID chip helped edge out the competition.
Man that color palette on C64 is simply awful! Too bad.... Speccy was really design on a budget, but man, the colors were right. Red was red, yellow was yellow, blue was blue and so on.
The C64's palette was designed for NTSC. PAL had more stable colour than NTSC, but it was also more washed out. This is why (a) nobody actually properly agrees on what the C64's palette was and (b) why people in PAL regions perceive it as having an ugly palette. But it didn't, and there's a reason why you can depict vaguely plausibly coloured human beings on a C64, but the other 8-bits struggle. And before you bring it up, I mostly do like the CPC's palette, but it lacked the supporting hardware to show it off well, and it didn't help that they had to endure shoddy Spectrum ports.
@@scottbreon9448 If you need to advocate that some colors do not look so bad on C64... They chose a washed out palette when they could pick one similar to the Amstrad CPC
I had an atari 800xl . The addition of the GTIA chip and Yamaha 4 channel sound and slightly faster version of the 6502 made the ATARI versions look and run so much better. Later i bought an Atari ST(I still have it) . Interestingly the Amega was actually designed by ATARI who designed all the specialized chips, a flip flop from the 8-bit days. I taught myself to program on the 8-bit. I bought it myself using collected soda bottle deposits, it took 2 years to buy it. I was 8 when I started 10 when I bought it. I wrote in assembler on paper then hand assembled it into hex code and entered it in using basic POKE commands. Wrote my first games that way.
I found a brand new 8-bit 1020 plotter, the one that uses the 4 pens, I'm connecting it to an atmel chip ATMEGA to see if i can get it working. I need to find colored pens that fit it. @@moforetro3612
My brother had an Atari 400, and later bought the 800xl when it was discounted with a disc drive. As I recall it was cheaper buying the XL bundle than buying the drive on its own, besides the 800 xl had a proper keyboard and an extra 16k of ram. The sound/ IO chip was a Pokey, which was also used in some atari arcade machines, it did have 4 8-bit channels, but could be linked in pairs for 16 bit sound. Interestingly, the designer of atari's serial peripheral interface bus was one of the developers of USB. I also used to hand code for it on paper, although eventually got MASM. As an Atari/Jay Miner fan, I later bought an amiga 500+ 590 and later the a4000/040, which I've still got somewhere, and had no interest in the ST as I considered it a rush job put out by former commodore employee, Jack Trammel after he failed to secure the Amiga design. The best Atari 8-bit games were marginally better than the C64's, but I was quite impressed by the spectrum when I borrowed one from a friend, most of the games as I recall were around £5 for the spectrum and some were pretty playable and the graphics weren't that bad, whereas most of the Atari games were £30+ and there were a lot of really bad ports from other system to avoid, which didn't make proper use of the Atari's custom hardware.
@SebsPlaceYT Yep my dad was an opps manager of a computer department ICL Me29. He really bought it for himself to program on. He programmed things like yahtze backgammon and chess. Annoying never getting to play on your own computer.
Wonderful stuff. I've got that very review of Great Giana Sisters on the Speccy in a Sinclair User from my youth! I've never played Zak McKracken either... but I remember reading about it in "Computer Warrior" in the Eagle :)
Yeah! He was made to play these games in some kind of Virtual Reality or something. The ones I remember were Gauntlet and Zak McCraken. Cheeky advertising, really....@@SebsPlaceYT
In most cases they were, but in when it came to games using vectors or Isometric graphics. Games like Barbarian were better on the C64, but games like Head over heels, Elite, etc. were better on the Spectrum
Not on our 8-bit system from the eighties, the Philips P2000T. The computer was expensive (around 1200$ at launch, later going down to 600$), but Philips arranged every official software title was having rights for 100% free distribution. You could either download them (nearly) for free on the Viewdata server, or copy them at user events. Because of their online software distribution, quality control was excellent, where most games for the ZX/C64 lacked very rudimentary software basics, like an introduction guide, quit option with memory restore, key configuration, self explanatory operation, translation to native user language and such.
2:40 80 IBM compatibles were mostly terrible games machines. The only one that could play 1/2 decent games was the Tandy 1000, which was a crap PC. CGA was absolute crap for games. The 8088 is a very slow processor. Worst of all, ISA is a very slow bus on an XT class computer and frankly even on an AT class computer. The 8088 ISA bus is lucky if it can put 64k across the ISA bus per second. But 60fps gaming requires a MUCH higher data rate.
What you talking about! I had hours of fun playing Alley Cats in CGA 😂😂 Joking aside we got a 386 sx not long after the 286 and it made a big difference in EGA if I remember. The big jump was going to a 486 though. Shit got real then!!!
@@SebsPlaceYT Even the (early) 486 has a pretty slow bus, which is why most games from the early 90s have mostly empty screen space or repeating patterns. It wasn't until the vesa local bus and the vesa specifications for video cards (different than the bus) came into being that console grade gaming could be done on the PC. Beacuse while 16 bit ISA is a lot faster than 8 bit ISA, these later video standards had to move a lot more data. A 256 color game requires 8 bits per pixel. To get full screen 60fps gaming with VGA, you would have to move over 4megabytes per second.
The fanboy'ism were equally bad back then. C64 vs everything else. Amiga vs Atari, Amiga (Intel outside) vs PC in 1990's etc. Besides C64, the most fascinating thing from 1980's were the Vectrex console from 1982 which could run 3D Games at 60 FPS.
@@SebsPlaceYTYes, same here. I play on Vectrex at every retro show i'm on in Norway. I even played the rare Virtual Boy there. That RMC guy were in Norway last time in August at the show.
I donm't known, I quite liked the Bally Aastrocade as well, even though it was very short lived. it was the Neo Geo of its time, vne used the same hardware as most Bally/Midway arcade games like Wizard of Wor
I think the Atari 800 was really fascinating, it is way older than the C64, yet better in every aspect. Too bad almost 0 Atari's were sold in Europe, they never made one with proper PAL output.
@@lovemadeinjapan I think Atari ST and Lynx were the only ones who were also in Europe. Falcon never were a thing here because Amiga dominated so much even IBM looked it as a threath. Commodore were American, but only had success in Europe. We got everything Commodore made.
I don’t care. The good thing about the Spectrum was that it was easy to program your own games and make them as you pleased. That’s how I learned programming and made a lot of money. The Commodore mostly created (there’s everything, obviously) mediocre consumerist people.
Me la suda. Lo bueno del Spectrum que era facil programar tus propios juegos y hacerlos como se te cantaba. Asi aprendi programacion y gane mucho dinero. El Commodore solo creo mayormente(hay de todo obvio) gente consumista mediocre.
I was in awe of my friends C64 when allI had was an acorn electron. It was all we could afford. Until one day, when I came home from school, my dad was sat at the desk setting up a second hand colour screen cpc464 with a big bag of games. One of my best weekends ever. It was out of date by then but I didn't care, I was over the moon. I love watching these videos, thanks
Love this! It's memories like those that make these old systems so special.
I had junior school I think bud with an electron it did have good games repton and the other games in that were damn good.
The ironic thing about nintendo banning the c64 version of the great giana sisters is that about 20 years later the c64 version appeared on nintendos wii shop as wiiware.
😁😁
My first computer was the C64 and then the Amiga. On the C64 we got Bozos Night out and Beach head with it.
It amazes me that new games are still being created.
I was always dead jealous of my mate's C64. God knows how many hours we spent in his front room playing Racing Destruction Set (it took hours to load mind. I used to ring him up to get the game loading so by the time I'd got round there it it was done). Being able to create our own tracks with different terrain was incredible - there was nothing like it on the Speccy. Summer Games (I and II) and Winter Games were much better on the 64 too. The other game we lived on was Revs. A proper racing game that actually felt like driving. It was sickening to go home and contemplate the, let's face it, terrible Chequered Flag. Keep up the videos mate, I've been loving them since I found them.
Thanks mate, I have heard good things about Revs from others too. Had a similar experience with tape loading. My mates would pile round my house at lunch as I lived near the school, so I would load (often rampage) in the morning and leave it running. 😁
I was confused at first, until I realized it must have been on tape. I had that game too, the fun of it was making your own track. I had the disk version of it, but I don't remember if you could save it or not.
You could always grab a C=64 emulator if you want, but you'll find I think that nostalgia is best left in the past. I find every game to be unplayable today, and I mean EVERY game. I can't enjoy video games at all anymore.
In Germany back then there wasn't a single person who owned a ZX. At least i never knew one. Swapping games for the C64 on the other hand was the easiest thing in the world...😂
Haha - defo the other way round in the UK! 😁
Same in NZ and Australia. C64s were everywhere, ZX Spectrums were nowhere to be found.
I left school at 15 and worked in a shop where we sold home computers and games. The one thing I wished we had was the disc drive because of games like Airborne Ranger and other Microprose titles
Hi - for sure a disk drive was a game changer back then! Literally!
Not available in the 80's, but have you seen the recently released full version of Eye Of The Beholder for the c64? Its an incredible achievement, no way to do anything as complex on the humble 48k speccie.
I have. Not played it but I did find it when researching this video. Very impressive.
You DO understand that this was possible ONLY with an external storage device (SDcard) with a capacity that wasnt available in the past. It is NOT a game for an ordinary C64, it NEEDS the external memory card drive to have the storage capacity to run, because actually this is what it does. EVERY step you make, it is another LOAD from the disk. It is just fast enough that you wont notice it. You couldn't do this with a disk drive, especially the 1541 which was slow (not as slow as the 1540, but still slow). Plus you would need hundreds of disks to fit the game.
It is impressive, but it is not THAT impressive.
P.S. And yes, in theory you can use the same trick to convert it to any 8bit computer as long as you can have access to a "fast" storage medium.
@@Nick-GR Yes, I do understand how it technically achieves it, thanks. Though even with the use of an equivalent high speed, machine controllable banked storage cartridge, I've yet to see anything remotely as impressive achieved on the 48k Speccy - happy to hear your recommendations for equivalent titles I could have a look at though?
Loved this and also most if the rpg.. like phantasy 1-3
Great video. I emigrated to Australia in the early eighties; in Oz disc drives were the way to go, so I had the joy of all these games and more...except...Alter Ego...which I always wanted but could never find. One of my early faves was Phantasy (or Phatasie) which was my first introduction to computer RPGs. A classic.
yeah, i also was super jealous at all the c64 guys back in the day's...
that sound, those graphics!!!
Brilliant video from an honest Spectrum owner!
I owned a Spectrum too and loved playing the classics Manic Miner and Jetset Willy...until one fateful day I visited my friend who owned a C64 and saw Henry's House...I was overwhelmed and realized my life was incomplete until I owned a C64 too! Months later, after alot of pestering, I was finally gifted a breadbox C64. Those games such as Pitstop II, Summer Games I & 2, World games...the list goes on and on were incredible and couldn't be replicated on a ZX Spectrum. I think we all have to accept that...as difficult as it sometimes may seem. 😊
Yep, agreed! Thanks for the comment!
for me it was the Spectrum that had a few games that either weren't as good on my C64 or I simply couldn't get. Speccy Sabre Wulf remains the definitive version and Back to School I was very envious of. Also a much better version of T.L.L and Cyclone which you couldn't get on 64. Jet Set Willy was worse on 64 as well. Each machine had something over the other back then
@@adroharv5140 I think that the straight ports from the Spectrum to the C64 never seemed to produce quality C64 games. Manic Miner, JSW, Skool Daze, the Wally games etc, were all better on the Spectrum. I can accept that completely. But this category was quite a limited and niche group. When developers wrote the C64 version from scratch, that version was almost always better.
@@AbooSulaymaan yeah I think that's fair. Actually I do prefer Manic Miner on the C64 because you can change your direction the moment you land. The C64 was just very good overall at almost everything though so for many it was the machine to own if you had to get just one machine. Great days
@@adroharv5140 That's interesting but I prefer the Spectrum version of the Miner Willy games as part of their "genius" was the need for pixel perfect jumps and the timing of the enemy sprites. Take those two factors out then they are not the same games.
Great video. I absolutely loved Space Rogue, i feel the developers just didnt care about C64 limits when they made that game cramming an RPG and space combat into one disk. A well deserved GM when we reviewed it. Project Firestart was very atmospheric and another deserved high scorer. I'm in Team Quazatron however as i played it a lot more than Paradroid as i had a speccy at home and the C64 at work at Zzap (If you could call it work). Im surprised Pirates! didnt do well, the open world feeling was great, helped by the map you got with it.
Someone in the comments reckoned ZZap reviewed the tape version of Pirates, hence the score... I'm not sure... cool that you worked at ZZap! What did you do?
@SebsPlaceYT i never thought they might have reviewed the tape version. Makes sense.
I reviewed games 1987-1991 as part of the editorial team and did the playing tips (did a small bit on Crash briefly before moving to Zzap). You showed my face and reviews of space rogue and firestart in your video :)
Ah that's brilliant! Thanks for commenting and letting me know. It's great to hear experiences from people that worked on a game or magazine. Cheers!!!
I had a CPC as a kid but love the sound and smooth scrolling on the 64
Get a cpc+ if you want sprites and smooth scrolling haven't u seen Chase hq for cpc?
That's because the CPC was crap for gaming. C64 had custom chips and also direct memory access from the video chip (VIC II), to main ram.
@@zxspectrum16KB And play WHAT? CPC+ had very few games specifically written for the system. Also came out 6 years after C64 and STILL failed to compete. Get lost.
@@Nick-GR there are some good games and i will always defend the system of my childhood
@@plechaim Thats the key word. "SOME". I agree. Games that didnt had scrolling were good on the CPC like TAI PAN for example, (and a few others). But it couldnt compete with the C64.
Spectrum kid all the way up to 1990, when some financial luck enabled me to pick up an entire C64 set-up, brand new machine, disk drive, and most importantly, S.S.I. RPG's! Solid list though, agree with almost everything on there, although i'd probably switch Space Rogue for perhaps Buck Rogers, or one of the Krynn titles. Also, 64 exclusive Thalamus titles are conspicuous by their absence - no Hawkeye, Armalyte, Que-Dex??
Great video though, great channel too.
Thank you Mr Fox! I did play Armalyte and almost stuck it in but we had some great shooters on the speccy so wasn't ad impactful as other games on the list. I will check out your other recommendations for sure - thank you 😊
I was a speccy kid but had a couple of c64 owning friends. Dropzone is a c64 game that made me very jealous - a rather good defender rip off. Also the port of salamander which did come out on the speccy but was not comparable.
Hi! Yeah I played dropzone for this video but I was awful. I died ALOT 🤣
Dropzone was a great game, I played it on the C64 while waiting for one of the Atari 800XL to become free on the author's stand at a computer show in London and of course bought a copy for my brother's Atari. The Atari version was better, but not by much. It had some nice variations from Defender and was very playable, I really dug the lightning cloud when it killed me. One of my favourite games, apparently they toyed with releasing an arcade version.
Glad to see the excellent Slicks in there. The Super Sports compilation that was supposed to be released on the Spectrum with Slicks on never got released. That compilation only got a C64 release, with 1st Division Manager and Cue Boy getting their only C64 releases there. The likes of Project Firestart and Zak McCracken are excellent too, and glad those were featured.
As for other C64 games that didn't get a Spectrum release, Turbo Charge (an excellent racing and shooting game, from System 3), the thinking shooter Hunter's Moon released by Thalamus, the superb shoot em up Armalyte (only a demo appeared on the Spectrum), also released by Thalamus, and of course, Creatures, Creatures 2 and Mayhem in Monsterland all programmed by Apex Computer Productions (the latter was released by themselves). Some choices you should definitely pick up and play there.
Thank you some great shouts there. I played Hunters Moon tonight actually on the c64 Mini. Enjoyed it. I played Armalyte too and was close to adding in the video but we did get some decent shooters on the speccy so it missed out. Super interesting you say that compilation never got released. I did wonder as the game is nowhere online. Cheers for the comment!
We didn't need Pirates on the Speccy, we had Tai-Pan.
Now there's a video title!
A C64 game you might want to try that didn’t make it to the spectrum is Raid On Bungeling Bay. It was eventually also ported to the NES and MSX. Fantastic top down helicopter shooter. Ironically the NES sold much higher numbers as it couldn’t be easily pirated like the C64 version. Another fun fact. It was Will Wright’s first game. He had so much fun making maps in the level editor he made for it that he ended up enhancing it. The map editor eventually evolved into the first Sim City.
Oooh thanks, I will!
Spectrum owners looking for a pirate game had few options outside Booty, true. But they did get 'Skull and Crossbones' - a pretty rough conversion of an Atari arcade late in the systems life...and i think Tai Pan...whilst not a pirate game per se had some of the same elements as Pirates!
Trading, sea battles etc.
Baffling though it was.
Ah yeah, I'd forgotten about Tai Pan. I remember being baffled as it would.have been a copy! Cheers
Childhood Spectrum owner here: Maybe good substitutes would be Deus ex Maxhina for Alter Ego, and the Magic Knight trilogy (Spellbound, Knight Tyme, and Stormbringer) in place of Zak Mckraken/Maniac Mansion.
Loved Spellbound!
The C64 was the one i grew up with, but there was one major issue that arose the longer i had it - the huge blocks everything was made up from; when Final Fight released for Spectrum, the characters were detailed and recognisible, the C64 version looked NOTHING like. Obviously games like Turrican 1&2 proved the machine was capable, but it was a huge issue when games like Streetfighter had those ginormous blocky characters.
When my Spectrum owning friends came over to play on my C64 my mum would try and give them extra food at teatime to take home with them.
🤣🤣🤣 very funny
I loved _Paradroid_ on my friend's C64 and was also disappointed by _Quazatron._ Fortunately the development of these games led directly to _Ranarama_ which had broadly similar mechanics and was a tremendously good game on both platforms. I still play it from time to time on the Spectrum Next.
Great shout 👏 cheers!
Ranarama is indeed excellent! Though I'd say that it has some Gauntlet-like elements the Paradroid doesn't.
To be honest, I don't mind Quazatron, but Paradroid 90 on the Amiga was very disappointing to me.
u sort of see where they came up with the idea for cannon fodder with those little men running around
Disc drives never really dropped below price of the c64 really, even early 90s the 1541-mk 2 cost as much as the system!
I know, there were silly money. At the time the C64 sanctioned and branded drive was mega expensive and huge in size. I eventually got a disk drive but it was from the first company to make an after market one. Much smaller, separate power brick and a toggle peg/clip you turned a quarter turn to keep the disk in the slot. It never vanished into the drive on a button press like the official 64 version. I cant remember the name of these drives now, they were white and there is one in the start of this video on the desk, its that exact one! They were not cheap, but not the hundreds they wanted for the "real" one. I bought one for my 64 as the floppy prices were cheaper. I got it from CHIPS computers. It was rumoured that this cheaper drive was unreliable, would break down, damage disks or not load certain disk titles. All utter tosh to get you to buy the expensive one instead. The other fun thing with floppy disks of this era was the two sided trick. A dual sided disk was expensive. But you could buy a punch stamper like a stapler to cut a notch out of the other edge of the disk if it was single sided. This let you flip the disk and use both sides! Mental. Single sided disks were a lot cheap so buy the punch and make single siders into double sided with a button push...the inventiveness of the era to get round these problems. The other cool thing was the action reply cartridge systems.
Load in your game off tape. Push a button on the cart and pause it into the carts memory, then go in and hack it add cheats and pokes etc, then dump the new version onto disk. No more waiting around for tapes! Borrow a friends game and rip it to disk in seconds....Such fun!....
I bought a third-party C64 floppy drive, and it was just as good as the 1541 IMHO, and cheaper
I'm on the C64 side but this is a very fair list. Of course for us what we wanted was all the Ultimate isometric games, although only decades later did I learn these were all actually better on the Amstrad!
We got them eventually.
They are pretty cool although I was never a huge fan of the isometric games at the time. I have grown to appreciate them now. Cheers
I started with a Commodore 16, my mate had a '64. The difference was unreal. Even making my 16 a plus 4 with the RAM pack made little difference. The 64 just kicked ass, the SID chip was way ahead of it's time. I then moved on to the Amiga.
Ever played Commando on the C16? It's interesting......
@@SebsPlaceYT I've never felt so disappointed. Made me save up for the C64! I actually loved that game so much I got the Arcade machine in '89!
Nice!! It is a great game and I recently played it in the Arcade for the first time.
I had a C64 from 1983 onwards. It was all I knew really until my Dad bought an Amstrad PC for my mum to do accounts on and I started playing PC games like Elite and Prince of Persia. Once I got my Sega Megadrive in 1990 and a 486 PC in '94, I didn't go back to the C64 for about 20 years. I've been playing it constantly ever since though, especially in more recent times with the great modern conversions of Mario Bros and Sonic. As a kid almost all my friends had the Speccy and it always sucked IMO. The only game I ever played on it that was half way decent was Cobra.
Speccy has over 100 titles that are Vector graphics something the c64 couldn't cope with
@@zxspectrum16KB I wouldn't say that was accurate. C64 had a several vector graphics titles, for instance the port of the Star Wars arcade game. C64 handled it fine. More recently there's games like Fortress of Narzod which is Vector graphics based. Again, C64 handles them fine.
@caeserromero3013 frame rate mate its all about frame rate u see starstrike starglider cholo catch 22 mercenary starstrike2 starglider2 wasn't even available on c64!
Creatures 1 & 2 were both brilliant games that the NES, let alone the Spectrum would have struggled with. No suprise they never got ported over.
Yes, I looked at those. Fantastic games but didn't make me top ten. Good shout though.
Yet another fantastic subject to debate, great talking points amongst retro fans.
Some brilliant examples of games that never made it across, very frustrating when you see screenshots in the magazines of the day.
Hopefully we'll see them pop up on "Games that weren't" UA-cam page, we live in hope.
I had to double take when you showed Parallax, I swear it's more or less a carbon copy of your video in the latest one I'm putting together, very spooky 🤣.
One game on the Spectrum I always wanted on the C64 was Rollercoaster by Elite, again advertised in mags for the 64 but never released. One of my favourite games on the Speccy, again hopefully if it was written "Games that weren't" will release it.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on games in a video that were better on the Spectrum and left the C64 wanting. There's a few I only play on the Speccy machine, love to hear your choices.
Great production again mate.
They are all better on the zx spectrum.
@@davidretrogamesplayedbadly3533🤣😎
Haha all better 😁😁 not sure about that Dave but for sure the renegade games are better on the Speccy.... Bruce Lee is better despite what Del says 🤣 Robocop is better too. Thanks Denny as always - will defo do a video the other way at some point!
@@SebsPlaceYT Look forward to that 😉👍
Ultima 3-5, goblins, black magic... started with a tape deck moved to disk drive, got the notcher to use back side then lucked out my day got another used disk drive so i had two. Kept plaing on the c64 until ibm 256 came out. Haded to loose the 256 colors to go to ibm 16 colors. Did not change until windows 3.1
Giana Sisters and Pirates offer real opportunities for enterprising ZX retro developers to adapt the games.
Giana could probably be done on a 48K, but would have better sound on a 128K.
Pirates! was made in BASIC, so it should be possible to port directly, with changes to how graphics and sound are generated.
Yeah 100%
Alter Ego is perhaps a game like no other which can be played over and over again. Just loved it!
100%
There’s some great new homebrews for the c64 and the Speccy.
100%
Our neighbours had c64( also colecovision) and when i saw last ninja....wowsers
Lovely looking game 🥰
Speccy equivalent of Pirates? How about the excellent Tai-Pan by Ocean? Could sail the seas, run around the towns, and even do some gambling playing mahjong.
Great video love to this day the 64 .ive just subbed 👍👍
Thank you Gaming Grandad 😁 Love the name!
loved and continue to love the unique quality of the Speccy but the right choice was made I feel when we got a C64. It's great however we get to play these systems and games now so easily. Currently playing on a MIst 1.5 FPGA and it's as close as I need to playing these great systems so effortlessly
Nice! I will get me one of those eventually!
@@SebsPlaceYT they are very good and £200 for what it allows is rather good I feel. Thanks for video
Plenty of early games like Forbidden Forest and Beach Head etc
Had a few mention Forbidden Forest, will check that out cheers. We had Beach Head on the Speccy. It was actually pretty good!
@@SebsPlaceYT The Kamikaze level on the C64 looks great but it's the movie quality SFX that grab you :)
The only thing I will admit that I was jealous of the spectrum over when compared to the C64 was the Spectrum's ability to do vector graphics and isometric graphics, but in every other department, the C64 pisses all over the Spectrum. I will admit though that the Spectrum did have a few games that were better than the C64 counterparts, like Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg for example, but that's primarily because they were developed on the Spectrum to begin with.
Fair. There were heaps of games better on the speccy I think but ultimately, the C64 did piss all over it 😁
Firstly you had a friend with a c64 😮.
Did you feel sorry for him?
Did the other kids throw things at him and laugh?
Secondly all these games are definitely better on the spectrum, especially the ones that aren't on it 😂🤣🤪
🤣🤣 this made me laugh, cheers mate
@SebsPlaceYT still watching... and hunting desperately for slicks, I neeeeeeeed it.
lol Dave, you crack me up 🤣
Slicks is awesome 😍😍
Lol, don't listen to that. David retro games played badly... he's just jealous :-) love ya David buddy :-). Great video. I have so many memories of great spectrum games mostly from ultimate play the game but ask it to do a Jeff minter shooter or a psychedelic sprite heavy arcade game with parallax and music and my fave the c64 had the edge. Great times I had with ancipital or hunters moon or psi 5 trading company, etc, just to name a few. Like denny, we are so happy you are here in you tube land....excelsior sir
Thanks for the video.The only game I personally played on C64 was River Raid. That happened in "sort of" soviet arcade hall, with rows of Atari/ZXs/C64 that were waiting for the teenagers to rip them off all the pocket money in a matter of minutes. None of my friends had C64, so I was jealous only hearing that some guy got NES clone or IBM-compatible treasure. But, a remarks on zx alternative to C64 Pirates. Its TaiPan. Its not the clone, but the theme and some features are alike. As for that Slicks game - Grand Prix 2 is somewhere near as well. No scrolling though(
Thanks for the comment, I love your Russian stories. So they had rows of home computers in halls that you paid to play? Was it an hourly rate?
@@SebsPlaceYT per minute) So usually each of us had enough money to play for like 10 min or so. We did that in turn, each one tried a different game. After running out of money we were just watching for other random guys playing. I remember that t was a risky thing to visit such places alone, some hooligans could easily rob you))
Later those "halls" transformed a bit, first by replacing the old machines with NES clones and rare SEGAs, and in another 5-6 years time they became computer clubs with CS, Quake 2, Starcraft installed
Super interesting thanks 😊 👍
Regarding the Great Giana Sisters, I think Your Sinclair had something in the tips section in an issue or two (or three?) after the review, so for someone to send in a tip means that someone somewhere must have owned a copy, however it was obtained.
Yeah - good shout! Maybe it did get out in limited copies. Shame it seems lost forever.
Something is wrong with Project Firestart shown here. The sound effects were great as was the music ( though the music was a bit muted). The bit you showed was missing the rifle laser effects and the footsteps. Maybe an issue with the emulator?
Beyond the less powerful Cpu and less Ram memory, as I remember, the ZX Spectrum had a very serious limit: it hadn't a sound card; while the C64 already had a syntesizer inside, the Spectrum played the sound as the small speaker of a old PC without a sound card. Too bad.
There was a reason the Specrtum was considerably cheaper ( see my argos video 😊 )
Speaking as a C64 guy (Spectrums weren't really a thing here in North America, at least not in the traditional British form, we did have the Timex-Sinclair version which was far different) Target Renegade was far better on the Spectrum. The music from the c64 version was awesome, but the actual gameplay....
Target Renegade is awesome on the Speccy 👍
I miss:
THE LAST NINA 1+2
TURRICAN 1+2
Probably the best games on the C64 ever.
SMUGGLER for spectrum was a game I truly loved
The ibm was mostly a business computer the c64 is the greatest home computer of all time I'm from N.Y and now gonna be 55 in May and have been a C64 fan since I got it in 1983 and finished my complete setup by the next year had 2 1541 drives 1702 monitor mps 801 and 802 vicmodem and a datasette I still have a great setup and still enjoy it to this day
It is pretty awesome 😍
Giana Sisters WAS ported to the Spectrum, but it was never released, and perhaps never completed. There were advertisements in game magazines, but Nintendo made their threats so.. As far as I know, the game on the Spectrum has never been seen outside of the magazine.
Yeah, I did show the magazine screenshots 😊 must have been a couple.of review copies. That's it. Gone forever!
@@SebsPlaceYT No big loss. You wouldn't want to play it today on a Spectrum. I think the best version was on the C=64. I got the Amiga version later, but it ran slow to the point the game was more tedious than fun.
Tai-Pan on Spectrum was closest to Pirates.
Well that’s delightful, and you might have given me an idea here. I’d be doing two different formats but somehow one of yours would appear…. Hard agree on pirates and I too have never played Zak and also don’t know why.
Cheers mate! We are now officially "Not played Zak" brothers 🥰
That project firestart looked good, had great sound effects, but i could never understand what was going on in that game !
I was always jealous of my friend’s C64. I loved loved loved Paradroid and was also pretty disappointed with Quazatron. Iridium too was another, which I think ultimately did come to the spectrum.
For Parallax i would say a closer game on the Speccy, and maybe better? :) would be Astro Clone from Hewson Consultants.
I actually prefer Quasatron over Parradroid, and see it as a graphical upgrade more than anything.
Tai-Pan is possibly nearer Pirates! than Booty lol - exchanging games with friends meant that I never gave it the time that I should have really, if you couldn't get right in there and play it instantly then there were plenty more that you could.
That was the issue sometimes with having too many games 😒
Die Hard Speccy kid/adult here ... up to Next KS2 that i received last week in fact! However, i have never been SO anti c64 as many of my mates, and indeed own one these days.
Subjectively for me i still prefer the Speccy, but thats not to downplay how amazing the c64 was too. The SID especially still makes my jaw drop
Couldn't agree with you more. Super jealous of your KS2 Next! Nice one! Worth the wait?
It's actually WAY better than i even expected - it has genuine Speccy feel except it's SO much more. It feels weird to be on wifi on a speccy as well as running full video! If you get teh chance to pick one up in some way it is SO worth it - and the simple joy of loading older games via tape is a nostalgia rush
@@SebsPlaceYT
Yeah I'd love one. They go for silly money outside of the kick-start. Maybe one day. Cheers.
Funny that you mentioned Slicks on the Speccy. I've been looking for that (albeit a little half-heartedly) for a while now, but only the NES collection with the same name seems to ever come up on eBay.
Yeah - someone here commented that the compilation never materialised either so maybe it never existed at all.
I enjoyed Gribbly's Day Out for many hours trying to master all the levels, it was made exclusively for the Commodore 64 and also Trolly Wally that was only on the C64 and Amstrad CPC, for the C64 at least it had a catchy long soundtrack.
Great thank you! Will defo check those out. New to me!
I know the feeling of envying the C64 friends .. because my first computer was the C16.
While technically a bit more advanced than the Spectrum, it of course suffered from a severe general lack of software and especially good games. I had about 20 discrete original games and a Kingsoft compilation with supposed 100 games (all on tape of course) and overall this made for about 10 games worth playing at best which grew pretty boring after owning only the C16 for years. And of course there's was no single other person owning a 264 machine which I could have swapped with as the 264 machines where a pretty rare buy (for reasons..).
Easy to say, that it was an utter mystical and surreal feeling when I then got an Amiga! xD
PS: It's not the Spectrum games that you asked for, but most of the few games worth playing I had on the C16 where: Berks 1-3, Fingers Malone, Tutti Frutti, Squirm, Airwolf, Bruce Lee and Big Mac xD
Love this thanks 😊 The leap from C16 to Amiga must of felt incredible!!
It didn't matter what home computer you had in the 80s, they were still cheaper than putting money into coin ops at the fair, I had a ZX81 and loved it, my c16 I got for Xmas 2 years later was incredible, the +4 was the year after, I was happy with them and I loved them. My games were my games. I didn't care if people had better computers, I was grateful that my dad bought me the ones I got and I loved them
100%
My brother had a ZX81, 3d monster maze made me jump the first time the dinosaur appeared, the other things I remember it for, were loosing my programming due to ram pack wobble and burning my fingers on the hot keyboard, I also learnt basic on it. There were lots of amusement arcades around here, games were mostly 10p a go, games for my brother's Atari were typically around £30, to buy so about 300 plays in the arcade. I mostly used to play the arcade games I got good at fairly quickly, and even though I wasn't exceptionally good, or anything, once I got the hang of a game 10p could last a very long time. Must admit though, I actually preferred a good pinball machine.
Lovely comment. You were happy with your machine and that is what matters the most. 😊
Yeah, but to be fair, the Commodore 64 was also about 5 times the price of the Speccy. That's the reason we got a Speccy instead of the C64. My uncle had a C64, but would let no one touch it. I never even saw it on. In fact, even to this day I have never seen a C64 on in real life, but a few in CEX just stuck in the window. The only chance I got to experience aC64 was when I got an emulator. It is a good computer, but the basic was utter crap! At least the Speccy had a LOT better basic going for it. And the Speccy had twice the me memory, too (in some iterations.) I had a lot of fun with my Speccy back in the day. The worst time was when the keyboard membrane stopped working and I had to wait 6 weeks to get it back! Now, thanks to emulation, I can re-live those times again. I love emulation! I have over 10,000 Speccy titles in about 7 different languages. But I am deleting all the crap I would never use.
Thanks for the comment! Some great stories there 🥰 check out my argos video for a price comparison, the speccy was definitely cheaper but still quite expensive back in the day. Cheers!
cool old stereo set up
Cheers!
The Great Giana Sisters was the most pirated C64 game. Way more than bought copies.
Yeah, I can believe that!
15:55 It's freakin Tendril from Inhumanoids, looks like they scanned a photo of the toy.
Admittedly I had to Google that, but yes! Very similar!!!!
For me it was The Last Ninja which was missing on the speccy. And Falcon patrol too!
Yeah! I never realised us speccy lot only got Last Ninja 2 and not the first one! That Falcon Patrol looks like a great defender clone! Cheers for the comment.
Part of the reason Pirates was so poorly reviewed is that Zzap reviewed the tape version, which is indeed pants. One interesting thing about it is that a surprisingly large amount of the game is actually written in BASIC.
Ooooh interesting.... does the tape version differ gameplay wise or was it just a multiload nightmare?
Yes pretty much all the text portions were done in BASIC. All the action parts like the sword fights were done in assembly though
I remember Speccy Kikstart II. It was actually pretty good, though I didn't have the C64 version as a point of comparison.
I loved wheelie on spectrum.. epic
Wheelie was awesome! And Kikstart 2 wasn't horrendous on the speccy just was miles apart from the c64 👍
I was a Speccy user from about 1983- 89 then had an Amiga 500. The original Speccy with rubber keys, I loved it to bits. All my mates had one. One of my mates had a VIC 20, so went on that sometimes. I never played on C64. Still glad I had the Spectrum. Best computer ever.
100% 🥰🥰
As a C64 fanboy, I should be legally obliged to laugh and point at the ZX Spectrum allegiance like Nelson Muntz. But to be honest, I have a real soft spot for the Speccy. I did actually own one in the mid 90's, but I don't consider myself a true Spectrum owner. I used it a few times, then abandoned it because it offered nothing that my C64 already did. The ZX Spectrum was a sweet old thing, I know I would have loved it if fate had handed me one as a Christmas present in 1990 instead of a C64. So despite my love of the C64, I'm a conscientious objector in the C64 V Speccy war.
Love it ❤️
Regarding Giana Sisters: There was an amazing version we traded in pirate trading groups which featured sprites and other game elements designed to make the game resemble Super Mario Brothers even more closely; it still wasn't a 1 for 1 clone by far (the stock Sisters levels remained as did the music but some of the bricks, barrels, and mobs have been reskinned to resemble SMB) but it felt a lot closer to the NES version. I had both SMB and the SMB hack of Giana Sisters, and both were a lot of fun. I have since found that reskinned version GS on one of the C64 archives (I'm sorry, I do not recall which one) and have it on my The64 maxi today. :) See video X6TJ_xMJVgw for an upload of a longplay video from user phoenix1291.
Ooooh I will do, thanks!
I loved wizball, I remember the first time I completed it 😊 yeah can't do it again lol
😁😁
The original C64 version of Pirates is not a fun experience and I'd argue the point and click adventures are better with a point and click device so better on Amiga with a mouse than the clunkier joystick. I'd not played the C64 versions of either game until very recently and, despite being a slower experience, they are still playable. Zacks the better game with far less fail states and some deviously silly puzzles.
Space Rogue is a real forgotten gem of a game. A solar system to explore with a proper Ultima style RPG under the bonnet.
Oh, and for a left field horror experience, the Lurking Horror is well worth a look as it's one of Infocoms best written text adventures.
Thank you, I will take a look. As for Pirates, I can't disagree, except.back in the day, I was very jealous. It hasn't aged well though. Cheers.
I also had a few speccys, the first came from our cousin and was a shared one then when that went wrong I got a number of used ones from the paper cheap, I did this because all the games still worked I had a +2 3 a 128 and possibly others the games were very cheap to buy if there was no one to copy off (I did buy some things that I wanted because of the big box that comes with) I had one bud at school who had a v2 64 with the nicer slicker model so I ended up finding a breadbin 64 so I took copies of some of his stuff (I had booty on the spec it was a stunning game one of my number of favs, the music), after this I found a a500 when I was just looking around above a tv shop there was a computer shop and they had one used (I could not afforrd a new one becasue I was only a teen and had to biy it myself, so I ended up saving paper and christmas and any money I could get my hands on I put towards that I could my hands on including the 64 when it came to buy time luckily it did not sell, I was terrified because of the ok price and fairly decente deal that someone else would buy they did not so I did get it, after that when he saw it he mamanged to a 600 for christmas so he got games that I had also there was a guy that sold cheap discs and games and labels so we went up there a lot and wasted our paper money but he got busted annoyingly so had to get other sorces.
Nice! Cheers for the story! But the question is...... do you still have any of it?
@@SebsPlaceYTWell I don't have any of the original because I had to sell stuff to buy other stuff but I did buy a spec 48k but ended up selling that for different things, I do have an a120 a few years ago that I have kept because the amiga is my fav and it's the one that I wanted because of the better chips but I couldn't afford it when I was younger, I still use this.
Paradroid sound 86% is well off… should be much higher! The unique warbling sounds are brilliant and utterly distinctive.
The games that I remember and I wanted for my Speccy were Toki, Speedball 2, Indy Heat and Blood Money.
I also wanted a decent version of Kung Fu Master that the C64 had, and it took almost 40 years for it to come on the Speccy with Mister Kung-Fu
Some great shouts there. Speedball2 is a great one. I loved that game on the PC. 😍 Will have to check out Mister Kung Fu - cheers
There's a remake
@@zxspectrum16KB yes I know but it's not the original that was planned
There are so many C64 games I never played that I appreciate different perspectives when listing favourites, so now I can add these games to play on the C64 (or an emulator) that I didn't play as a kid:
Parallax
Scarabaeus
Slicks (IronMan aka Super Off Road was also a great top down racer though)
Paradroid
Space Rogue (The fastest vector graphics game on the C64 I loved was Stuntcar Racer)
Pirates!
Played and loved all the others of course, and I truly loved how each LucasArts game put in easter egg references to the other games. That can of petrol you were looking for in Maniac Mansion to power the chainsaw? In one of the Monkey Island games while being tortured you can ask where that can is, the answer: On Mars, and of course in Zak McKracken you find the can on Mars.
The first thing I install on any new computer/phone I get is ScummVM and 70GB+ of game data for close to 200 point-and-click games including all LucasArts ones.
Love this, thanks 😊 I'm definitely gonna play more Zak Mckraken! Can't believe I missed it all these years!
One that springs to my mind at once is - Blackwyche . It was an Ultimate Play the Game C64 only title. And its a prate adventure game!! So there you go, another one for you.. Its pretty decent as well, with pretty graphics and atmosphere. The theme of this video feeds into my fascination with games that were better on the Spectrum than the 64, and vice versa. Stuff like Trap Door, Skool Daze and Bak to Skool are utter Spectrum classics and unique to the time period. Nothing like the School Daze games today. Forbidden Forest is another C64 game not released for the Spectrum. The obvious ones that are true C64 original classics like Wizball and the Last Ninja are covered a lot. Last Ninja was utterly ground breaking at the time. It was one of those games that had a mysterious one page advert in game magazines for about two years before it came out. No screen shots, just the ninja eyes peering from the mask. Then closer to release a couple of tiny screen grabs. Everyone expected it to be crap at the time. As it was advertised forever and no one expected it to actually come out, as it took so long. Games like that rarely lived up to the adverts. But this one did. I still play it today. The music, the graphics and different areas with all unique looks. I still love the palace gardens for the sheer effort involved in making it look realistic, with beds of flowers, trees and fountains. Manic Mansion was great fun too. A Rocky Horror style game with so many characters. It was like a cartoon in looks and it felt like you were playing a Scooby Doo style parody. Ahh those were the days....
Thanks for the comment, I'm defo going to do a video the other way round at some point. Weirdly Last Ninja 2 was available on the Speccy but the first one wasn't. Wizball is my favourite C64 game. I've done 2 videos on it 😁
Yes, Wizball is a classic. Its a unique idea. Last Ninja was one of the games along with Wizball that tempted me into finally getting a C64. The fact Last Ninja was 64 only never registered with me, for the two years or so before it came out and the adverts that were everywhere. Its not until it was released and I actually saw it running was what made me badly want a Commodore at long last. I visited my local computer shop Topsoft, and all the lads in there were talking in hushed tones about this game Last Ninja that was finally being released later that week. They would have it in on Thursday, this was the Saturday before. I shrugged my shoulders and was not impressed as I was there for the Spectrum stuff. They told me I would change my mind when I saw it. The following Saturday when I made the usual trip in to see what was new I had forgotten about it entirely. Till I saw the crowd of people OUTSIDE the shop. So many had turned up you could not even get in the place! I had to wait outside for a while before I got in to see what the fuss was about. I could not believe what I was seeing. The colours and the music. And the different weapons, it really did look...Japanese or whatever and made you feel like a Ninja, it drew you in, and it was the first time I started to understand that computer games were going to get bigger and more complex and epic and tell a story. Rather than just jumping in a ship and blasting aliens and going peow peow...
It was the first time I had seen a game that was not just r a shootemup or a standard platformer etc, something that was as impressive as Knightlore had been on the Spectrum but took things to the next level. It was truly the start of the event A list title, and state of the art game era. I was hooked. From that day on my plan to save and beg borrow and steal to get a C64 began. It became an obsession. The sequels to this first game never resonated in the same way. The one in New York was good, but it did not have the impact the first one did as we had now seen it, and were jaded as having played it. I always thought the sequel was weaker and less entertaining. The Ninja out of the Japanese setting felt out of place to me. And the more sequels they did the weaker it seemed. It was also the first game to be over done by too many poor follow ups, trying to cash in without doing enough new things. A useful lesson for today I think....
That's a great story! Thank you for sharing. What a game eh!
Yes it was and is a truly great game. One of the first epic titles that broke new ground and put computer gaming on the map. Thinking about it today and all the nostalgia of the memories is almost painful. Nothing like it now, that sort of shared event. My story is not unique and things like that over Last Ninja and other games of the era will have been going on in every town in England, shaping the lives and experiences of the kids of that time, who like me are now old men...well not old but no longer young. One thing about it I am now wondering about. Something I thought of at the time but never gave it much heed. And its this - How did the two older lads in Top Soft that I spoke to, know that the Last Ninja was going to be amazing and a brilliant game? They had no internet, no way of getting a demo of it, as there were none available and no reviews in magazines....At least none I knew of, but then I only read Crash and Your SInclair etc... Yet they acted as if they knew what it was like before it was released....I suppose its one of the mysteries I will never solve. Its not important in the scheme of things, but still...
Paradroid in the pac man arcade! Its my favourite C64 game!
Blimmin brilliant!!!
Seb, check out io for C64, rock hard side scolling shooter. One of the best days of my life when I completed it on my friends C64, the look on his face still lives with me today.
Haha - I will!
Only the c64 that used the Vic 20 case was called a "bread bin" because it was big and ugly even by 80s standards, the c64c was a way cooler design even though the internal specs were virtually the same.
I like both but the c64c just edges it for me.
Ok- doesn’t count, but I remember being at my C64 mates house and him playing Weird Dreams and having my mind blown! Still loved the Specky more…
Weird Dreams is a great shout. I'd never seen it but apparently Spectrum and CPC versions were cancelled so never got released. Looks like an odd game! I love my speccy too 😍
Chase HQ, R-type, Cobra, and 3D Deathchase were all Spectrum games this Atari 2600 owner was jealous of...
Oh, wow yeah.... if I did a video on Atari 2600 owner cries at spectrum games I could be here for hours 😂 I never knew anyone who had one back in the day. Had one mate who had a dragon32 but always thought that was kinda cool back then 🙂 cheers for the comment
Kind of surprised that nobody has ported Deathchase to the C64 yet. It shouldn't be too hard to implement
Your mate down the road with the C64 wasn't Perifractic by any chance? 😃
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Great spot! I tagged and credited him in the description. Love that bedroom recreation!
I was lucky enough to own a C64 back in the day, and loved it. But to be fair to the humble speccy, a lot of the games were easily more playable than their C64 counterparts. Gauntlet, Bombjack, Chase HQ and Renegade to name a few. The C64 was by far the best all round 8-bit computer though, and the incredible SID chip helped edge out the competition.
Hard to argue with any of that 👍
@@SebsPlaceYT Great channel by the way. I'm a new sub, and loving your content.
Thank you 😊
Omg yes to all of those!
Man that color palette on C64 is simply awful! Too bad.... Speccy was really design on a budget, but man, the colors were right. Red was red, yellow was yellow, blue was blue and so on.
The C64's palette was designed for NTSC. PAL had more stable colour than NTSC, but it was also more washed out. This is why (a) nobody actually properly agrees on what the C64's palette was and (b) why people in PAL regions perceive it as having an ugly palette. But it didn't, and there's a reason why you can depict vaguely plausibly coloured human beings on a C64, but the other 8-bits struggle.
And before you bring it up, I mostly do like the CPC's palette, but it lacked the supporting hardware to show it off well, and it didn't help that they had to endure shoddy Spectrum ports.
Interesting, I do prefer the Speccy colours but both computers have a certain charm about them that is influenced by their colour pallette.
Blue and green didn't look too bad on the C64, but colors like orange...
@@scottbreon9448 If you need to advocate that some colors do not look so bad on C64... They chose a washed out palette when they could pick one similar to the Amstrad CPC
Enter the CPC 464: 27 colours, both bold and bright, and more subtle for people and landscapes.
However, I was extremely annoyed at the C64 not having a version of Back to School.
I agree. Academy (The sequel to Tau Ceti) was also not released on the C64, which pissed me off.
I had an atari 800xl . The addition of the GTIA chip and Yamaha 4 channel sound and slightly faster version of the 6502 made the ATARI versions look and run so much better. Later i bought an Atari ST(I still have it) . Interestingly the Amega was actually designed by ATARI who designed all the specialized chips, a flip flop from the 8-bit days.
I taught myself to program on the 8-bit. I bought it myself using collected soda bottle deposits, it took 2 years to buy it. I was 8 when I started 10 when I bought it. I wrote in assembler on paper then hand assembled it into hex code and entered it in using basic POKE commands. Wrote my first games that way.
2 years collecting soda bottle tops!! Hats off to you sir!!!
You mean Pokey. Pokey wasn't a Yahama chip.
ah, that's right, the Yahama was in the ST it had 3 16 bit channels and the MIDI port. Good catch. It's been a long time. @@moforetro3612
I found a brand new 8-bit 1020 plotter, the one that uses the 4 pens, I'm connecting it to an atmel chip ATMEGA to see if i can get it working. I need to find colored pens that fit it. @@moforetro3612
My brother had an Atari 400, and later bought the 800xl when it was discounted with a disc drive. As I recall it was cheaper buying the XL bundle than buying the drive on its own, besides the 800 xl had a proper keyboard and an extra 16k of ram. The sound/ IO chip was a Pokey, which was also used in some atari arcade machines, it did have 4 8-bit channels, but could be linked in pairs for 16 bit sound. Interestingly, the designer of atari's serial peripheral interface bus was one of the developers of USB.
I also used to hand code for it on paper, although eventually got MASM. As an Atari/Jay Miner fan, I later bought an amiga 500+ 590 and later the a4000/040, which I've still got somewhere, and had no interest in the ST as I considered it a rush job put out by former commodore employee, Jack Trammel after he failed to secure the Amiga design.
The best Atari 8-bit games were marginally better than the C64's, but I was quite impressed by the spectrum when I borrowed one from a friend, most of the games as I recall were around £5 for the spectrum and some were pretty playable and the graphics weren't that bad, whereas most of the Atari games were £30+ and there were a lot of really bad ports from other system to avoid, which didn't make proper use of the Atari's custom hardware.
If you think you was disappointed I had the Oric 1 and the atmos conversion.😢
Oh dear... I didn't have any oric friends, I did have one who had a Dragon32 but I thought that was pretty cool at the time 😁
@SebsPlaceYT Yep my dad was an opps manager of a computer department ICL Me29. He really bought it for himself to program on. He programmed things like yahtze backgammon and chess. Annoying never getting to play on your own computer.
😁😁 brilliant!
If you wanted to own a C64, just buy a Spectrum.
Now I'm confused!
Zx spectrum is so much better than the commode 64 back in the day and still is to this day 100%
Wonderful stuff. I've got that very review of Great Giana Sisters on the Speccy in a Sinclair User from my youth!
I've never played Zak McKracken either... but I remember reading about it in "Computer Warrior" in the Eagle :)
In the Eagle! Blimey that takes me back!! Cheers Snorkers!
Yeah! He was made to play these games in some kind of Virtual Reality or something. The ones I remember were Gauntlet and Zak McCraken. Cheeky advertising, really....@@SebsPlaceYT
How dare you not love *INSERT RANDOM GAME* that I loved 40 years ago! So rude!
🤣🤣 Sorry Lee! It's payback for increasing the ebay prices of +2's 😁
I love the spectrum but the 64 graphics are so much better eg Outrun etc
In most cases they were, but in when it came to games using vectors or Isometric graphics. Games like Barbarian were better on the C64, but games like Head over heels, Elite, etc. were better on the Spectrum
C64 graphics aged badly, and look really ugly in 2024. Spectrum games not so much, as they look very artistic with their weird colour clash.
Software piracy is a crime!
True!
Not on our 8-bit system from the eighties, the Philips P2000T. The computer was expensive (around 1200$ at launch, later going down to 600$), but Philips arranged every official software title was having rights for 100% free distribution. You could either download them (nearly) for free on the Viewdata server, or copy them at user events. Because of their online software distribution, quality control was excellent, where most games for the ZX/C64 lacked very rudimentary software basics, like an introduction guide, quit option with memory restore, key configuration, self explanatory operation, translation to native user language and such.
You wouldn’t steal a car!
2:40 80 IBM compatibles were mostly terrible games machines. The only one that could play 1/2 decent games was the Tandy 1000, which was a crap PC.
CGA was absolute crap for games. The 8088 is a very slow processor. Worst of all, ISA is a very slow bus on an XT class computer and frankly even on an AT class computer. The 8088 ISA bus is lucky if it can put 64k across the ISA bus per second. But 60fps gaming requires a MUCH higher data rate.
What you talking about! I had hours of fun playing Alley Cats in CGA 😂😂 Joking aside we got a 386 sx not long after the 286 and it made a big difference in EGA if I remember. The big jump was going to a 486 though. Shit got real then!!!
@@SebsPlaceYT Even the (early) 486 has a pretty slow bus, which is why most games from the early 90s have mostly empty screen space or repeating patterns. It wasn't until the vesa local bus and the vesa specifications for video cards (different than the bus) came into being that console grade gaming could be done on the PC. Beacuse while 16 bit ISA is a lot faster than 8 bit ISA, these later video standards had to move a lot more data. A 256 color game requires 8 bits per pixel. To get full screen 60fps gaming with VGA, you would have to move over 4megabytes per second.
The first last ninja game?
Good shout, although confession time..... I've never played it!
@SebsPlaceYT me ether! You seen doom running on a 64? It's using a pi but not interlaced 80 column or super cpu!
@@SebsPlaceYT ua-cam.com/video/zAla_RtPECE/v-deo.htmlsi=IF2d3g5EN57gb-s-
The fanboy'ism were equally bad back then. C64 vs everything else. Amiga vs Atari, Amiga (Intel outside) vs PC in 1990's etc.
Besides C64, the most fascinating thing from 1980's were the Vectrex console from 1982 which could run 3D Games at 60 FPS.
I played on one for the first time two weeks ago at RMC's cave. Lovely little thing. Would love to own one.
@@SebsPlaceYTYes, same here. I play on Vectrex at every retro show i'm on in Norway. I even played the rare Virtual Boy there. That RMC guy were in Norway last time in August at the show.
I donm't known, I quite liked the Bally Aastrocade as well, even though it was very short lived. it was the Neo Geo of its time, vne used the same hardware as most Bally/Midway arcade games like Wizard of Wor
I think the Atari 800 was really fascinating, it is way older than the C64, yet better in every aspect. Too bad almost 0 Atari's were sold in Europe, they never made one with proper PAL output.
@@lovemadeinjapan I think Atari ST and Lynx were the only ones who were also in Europe. Falcon never were a thing here because Amiga dominated so much even IBM looked it as a threath. Commodore were American, but only had success in Europe. We got everything Commodore made.
I don’t care. The good thing about the Spectrum was that it was easy to program your own games and make them as you pleased. That’s how I learned programming and made a lot of money. The Commodore mostly created (there’s everything, obviously) mediocre consumerist people.
Commodore 64 was a lie. It was 48k + 16K ROM. Spectrum gave the true free RAM. It listed as 48K, but it also had 16k ROM.
I'm pretty sure it could all be utilised?
Me la suda. Lo bueno del Spectrum que era facil programar tus propios juegos y hacerlos como se te cantaba. Asi aprendi programacion y gane mucho dinero. El Commodore solo creo mayormente(hay de todo obvio) gente consumista mediocre.