It was Zzao64 for me as i was collecting them all and the cover tapes were generally good. I am 50 and been gaming since 1979 its the greatest hobby ever. Nice video my freind.
I bought all 3 as a kid, Sinclair user was my favourite, then a crash then your Sinclair. I switched my allegiance when Sinclair user introduced Kamikaze Bear in an effort to compete on puerile nonsense! Crash was then in pole position. Stopped buying all magazines when they turned into pamphlets with cassettes on.
You're not wrong, as the mags got more and more desperate for readers the review scores got higher and higher to try and tempt people to hang onto their 8-bit micros. I gave in around 1989 and bought a Sega Master System, consigning my once beloved 48k rubber key to the loft.
@@SebsPlaceYT You're 100% correct! The review scores are just daft. I certainly bought one or two of those games only to find they were unplayably hard (Bounder - I'm looking at YOU). How did those reviewers sleep at night?
Interesting. Someone leant me the big box Amstrad cassette North & South at school and yeah, the multi-load is a disaster. It also had only one battlefield, and as I recall, only one of the arcade platform sequences. All of the title sections and animated menus had to be loaded and then the map, make a move, then another ten mins loading some cut down sequence, then rewind the map tape and repeat. It did serve as an expensive demo of the disk version. Being a French game, apparently, disks were standard across the channel. I have no idea how they refactored that mess for the cover tapes when Amstrad Action gave the full game away.
Interesting, cheers for sharing. I suspected it was bad but not that bad!Even late on I only had one mate who had a disk drive. Cassette was king for us council estate kids 😁
Loving the 8 bit micro content mate, great idea this is👍 Head Over Heels a classic and worthy champion. I checked how Rainbow Islands was denied a place on the list and Myth beat it to Master Game status in the same Amstrad Action issue......gutted 🌈
can't believe the shade thrown on Zzap64, it was way better and more professional than CU. They used to play EVERY game they reviewed to completion, unlike CU and their standards were far higher. The Sizzler and Gold Medal awards were an excellent format. Not to mention the fantastic artwork by Eugene, and photography by Cameron Pound.
I love Zzap! That's why I chose it. Great magazine. Just thought the awards could've been named better although they did get the double ZZ in sizzler, which was cool. Cheers!
I was only really playing Spectrum ganes for 1987 and a bit in 1988, but having played the likes of Damocles I came to the conclusion that games Crash (which I loved) scored in the 80s were actually safer bets than Crash Smashes. For me Renegade will always be the best Spectrum game.
I also bought countless isometric games and disliked every one of them for the same reasons. Too fiddly, monochrome and no idea of what to do. Excellent video. And a big shout out to Wizzball. love it.
Yes!!!! True story. I noticed it after my final edit went up a couple of days ago and I was doing one last check through! How did I not see it! Knobhead!
Head over Heels was one of my bets at the beginning of the video, and I completely agree with your reflections: games of this style didn’t manage to hook me either, but I could recognize how good they were, and I almost felt bad for not really liking them (there were a few exceptions among the Filmation games, like Gunfright, which I found quite fun). In any case, I also think Head Over Heels is a perfect choice because it’s the best representation of a very particular style from that era and is also technically flawless. Certainly infinitely better than Driller or Spindizzy, as you rightly said. Thanks for the great work; it really is a fantastic video.
Epic video man! Nice that the magazines could agree at times. Of course not all games were available on all three or sometimes were quite different, like Myth.
Zzap was my go to magazine but quite a few times i think they got too political with the scores. I wish I'd have got Commodore user back in the day. Great video as always mate.
I just booted up the c64 version of myth straight away. Using steamdeck emulation station de. Worked off the bat, so not sure why its not loading for you. It is crazy good on c64. Excellent music and visuals
Interesting. I will persevere. I tried 3 different images on two different emulators but they would hang on menu. As I don't need to record it now I'll try the images on my actual c64c, see if they work . Cheers
🎼Surprise Surprise🎼 i never watched it with dinner 😂😂😂 Excellent episode mate, brilliant comparisons of the games and just a lot of fun for us aging 8 bitters 👍👍👍
Some great 8-bit computer games here, few of which have actually aged well. Interesting that the very best games on the (also 8-bit) NES or Master System are still as playable today as they ever were.
Great idea for a video, enjoyed it a lot! I didn't really like HOH when I was a kid on my Spectrum, but having been compelled to play it on the Next, I find it very enjoyable
I spotted the EMF CD in the background (in relating to them smashing TVs a la Smash TV, mentioned in one of the reviews). Nice placement. Interesting selection and thanks for taking the time to pore over those. I agree more with Gary Penn's Driller review of the C64 version - way too slow and only the Matt Gray lengthy soundtrack is noteworthy. That and Total Eclipse were hugely over-rated on the C64, so a realistic rating would have taken down the overall across all three. Turrican (and Turrican 2) started out on the C64 first with Manfred Trenz programming them both, they are the source version, the remainder being the ports. I did suspect Head Over Heels would be up there and fully deserved - for me, even as a C64 owner, the Amstrad CPC one is the one to get, but all three versions are a credit to their hardware, all playable and all just as addictive.
C64 was number 1 in Finland. I had a Speccy ;) My favourite was Your Sinclair, bought a hell of a Lot of them... All gone now :( Also bought some Crash... But mainly Your Sinclair...
@@SebsPlaceYT You can bet your a.... Oh, no... ;) You can bet your nose hairs, there was! :D We have had a few computer magazines, the biggest was (and still IS) Pelit (Games). They started by publishing a yearly collection of reviews in a single magazine and then had a Commodore magazine (I told you Commodore was number one here and I weren't kidding... C64 was named "The computer of the republic" here) and combined everything to Pelit. They started the Pelit-magazine at 1992 and they're still publishing (and I'm ordering ;) Bought the very first number also and ordered from second number! Something like 6 or 7th oldest gaming publication in the world... Check out the details from english wikipedia, easier than copying things here ;)
I'll have to get hold of a copy to add to my growing random collection! It was quite a late magazine for the c64, so it was not much use in this video, but you're not the first to say you loved it. Cheers.
That’s a great video , really enjoyable. I find it interesting how the top 3 were all the best attempts at the time to make 3D games I remember at the time that games could be both fun enjoyable experiences, but also a fascinating glimpse into what the future would bring. I was often willing to give up on gameplay if I could glimpse the future in some way. But retrospectively that feeling when looking at these basic 3D Games does seem harder for me to connect with now.
I only rarely bought British magazines back then (Self-Slap!). Mostly because I guess the process of shooting them off eastwards, across the Dogger Bank, tended to make them cost at least twice as much as the Danish equivalent. But also because they were only to be found in more specialized shops. Which you wouldn't be able to find anywhere out here in the middle of "the fields of Lars Von Diarrhea" (as in smells of 🐄💩) back then (2×Self-Slap!). But rather only by venturing down some dark alleys within some of the larger cities. The Danish magazines were all just generally covering the common micros in the beginning, and only started specializing into specific brands, much later on back then (3×Self-Slap!), at around the time were the Amigas started to appear. I tended to hunt for the ones with the most program-listings and peek/poke hacker-cheats. Because I was a bit of a programming-nerd (clearly one of the greatest understatements of the last century). However, there were a series of English magazines later on, during my Commodore years, which would eventually make me muster enough courage to venture into even the obscurest of Black Books -shops in order to acquire, even despite the much higher prices. And this was "Commodore Disk User". Simply because, you guessed it, they came with a floppy-disk instead of type-in listings. I really wasn't very fond of the Amstrad CPCs back then (4×Self-Slap! and an extra Self-Slap! just for good measure). I think it was mostly because of Sinclair Research eventually getting gobbled up by Lord Alan Sugar. And in accordance with his mentality, he deliberately changed the joystick DB9-pinout of those sugar-coated Speccys, to something as far away from the Atari/Sinclair/Commodore standard as he possibly could. So that absolutely none of the joysticks we already owned, were compatible with them (or at least not without adapters). Thereby pumping us for even more of our already stretched out pocket money, since we'd have to buy his crappier "mugs eyeful" proprietary sugar-Speccy joysticks. Which BTW obviously meant that they also didn't even work with any of his CPCs... Just such a sweet sweet guy, ay? - Only much later realizing that none of this really was any proper reason for shunning, putting down, and picking on the CPC machines themselves. Since even though the early models looked like something that could only ever be sold in Toys'R'Us stores, they really were quite capable computers. With a lot of thought clearly spend on working around many of the compromises of their older competitors... at the obvious expense of just having to compromise elsewhere. After all, there really were no perfect way of flawlessly circumventing the overall hardware limitations of that particular era. So, a few years ago, in an attempt to purge myself of my rather persistent adolescent biases, I bought and fixed up a CPC6128 deliberately without holding back any TLC. Only to find that me previously participating in bullying these poor PowerPuff CPCs (Sugar, spice, and everything nice) seem to have just rushed on back to bite me in the 🐴(hee-haw). Since it seems exceedingly difficult to find any Amstrad CPC dedicated YT-videos, free of us being constantly reminded of how mind-bogglingly awesome and supremely superior the Amstrad CPCs really were, compared to everything and anything else back then (7×Self-Slap!). All while attempting to impress us with mediocre (at best) or just straight up lazy Speccy (mostly) or bad Commodore ports, of games we already knew all too well, from those exact machines back then (8×Self-Slap!). Instead of showing us those games, that are either completely unique to the CPC's or really take advantage of their hardware in order to make them stand out and shine. I really genuinely want to love my CPC6128 with at least as much enthusiasm as any of the other micros from back then (9×Self-Slap!). But having to endure listening to this constant nursing of this massive collective inferiority complex... sigh... it just makes it such an uphill struggle. - I guess what I am trying to say with this Tolkien-sized rant of mine, is that it is just soooo refreshing to watch somebody who doesn't do this... and it kind of makes me wish that you'd make more solely CPC dedicated content, Seb. ❤
Zzap!64 was my favourite, I got published on a few occasions with cheats, some included tiny machine code loaders to break into games too, I was popular at school for a while when other kids spotted me in there.
@@SebsPlaceYT I'd dox my unusual surname name, although I doubt it's difficult to find anyway so one example is I made cheats for is The Human Race by Mastertronic that included being able to jump to whatever level you wanted immediately and listen to each of the 5 Rob Hubbard soundtracks, the game was so difficult most people had never heard more than 1 or 2 before that. I initial gave Zzap!64 only first letter of my surname, but in the 2nd issue I was published they said we've just found out his surname and published it lol, someone from my school probably told them. Back then I was concerned because cheating in games was quite new and some software companies were looking into the legality of breaking into their games like that.
The weeklies also did reviews, but they seem to be largely forgotten. Popular Computing Weekly and others weren't exactly in-depth, but they were the most up to date news available.
"kak" is that an Afrikaans curseword ? 2:22 Thanks for the vid. I remember we had to smuggle these mags in because of the sanctions "back in the day". Was my reason for living xD Starquake took me to places in my imagination that I've never been to again.
Oooh. Cack is slang for poo. Caca is spanish for poo where I think it comes from. Super interesting about how you got these magazines back in the day! Cheers!
Your channel seems so retrospectively cool, you got yourself a new retrospective subscriber from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮 😺👍🕹️. I'm still a retrospective gamer 🕹️ of the Commodore 64 (tapes / disks / cartridges) and Amiga 500. 😺👍🕹️
I was a Crash and Your Spectrum/Sinclair reader. The 8 /18 I would agree are great. But I was speccy guy so didn't care about other platforms ;) Great round up though, and I will have to check Myth out because that passed me by. Cheers!
Great video - and a serious nostalgia trip! Wow, some of those games look very janky now - and the scores awarded to them were ludicrous. Head Over Heels on CPC looks superb (Glad to see Knightlore get a mention - it was revolutionary when it came out). I had a C64 - which was the best for super-smooth 2D scrolling and sprite movement - Dropzone and Uridium being stunning examples - but not so hot for isometric games and terrible for 3D. Fun fact: ZZAP! was just a C64 version of the legendary Crash! I remember there was great rejoicing amongst us C64 owners when it came out - as we were all envious of the excellence of Crash! Anyhow, those were great times! In subsequent years I never enjoyed video games as much as I enjoyed the 8-bit games. Even today, the latest games seem no fun compared to the games of yore.
Oh man, Gauntlet. Apparently even our North American release by Mindscape for the C64 had the same glitchiness that would happen if the U.S. Gold release is played on an NTSC machine. By that, I mean you the game is so easy, you literally cannot lose.
@@SebsPlaceYT yeah. I only have a UK imported cassette of the game, but when ran on my NTSC C64 and 128 in 64 Mode, all the level layouts were scrambled, and there was morw than enough health pickups and magic potions to keep the game going forever.
I agree with a lot of what you said. Isometric games also weren't my cup of tea (probably because I was pants at them), Spindizzy was very frustrating (I had the 8 bit Atari version), and Elite should have been higher up on the list. For me Elite should have been number one. So, so far ahead of its time, and it was playable on a 48k machine. Astounding.
Thanks for another nostalgic trip. Felt a bit surprised with Elite being only the 7th in the list. There was more fast 3D in it than anyone in the 80's could wish for. Generally, if to speak about the choice of the portal to the fantasy/sci-fi 3D world then my choice would be with games like Ring Wars or Academy with its sort of 2,5D. Never was an isometric-games-ZX player until HeroQuest (looong game sessions) and probably Pacmania (for a short period of time). Head over Heels was a cool one but too complex for me at that tender age. As for the Bounder, to my mind the whole hype around the game was connected with the usage of parallax scrolling which is missing in most of the versions. No screen in depth resulted in quite ordinary perception of the game in my company BACK IN THE OLD DAYS.
Back in the day..... 🤣I'll give you a slap if I ever bump into you 😂 Totally agree with you, though. Elite could easily be number 1. Cheers as always !
@@SebsPlaceYT jealous that you guys had so many speccy/other humble machines magazines. But we had fun investigating 8bit era computers on our own. I have a nice story you can use in other videos: when in the 80's a soviet astroscientist sold his car (old one though) to buy Speccy from one British student. Then (and thats the best part) when the room sized old pc had broken the whole research facility the scientist worked for utilized almighty zx spectrum to run calculations for months!!! Can provide proof if needed
i can NOT fondly remember buying a mag and spend bloody hours taping in the code for a specie only to find out the game was complete pants !! it was cheaper to buy a mag and code it in rather then the exorbitant price of a cassette something like £5.99 i did get a few not too bad ones which we pirated onto tapes and sold at school for two quid (five pack of tapes was a fiver) it also meant i learned to code Sinclair basic without learning it )if that makes sense _ i basically got to recognize blocks of code that did certain things and would put them together to make a simple game myself , which was also PANTS
Love it! Right little entrepreneur eh? I remember typing in games only to be really disappointed 99% of the time. You should watch whathosnorkers here on youtube. He takes those type in and makes them better but explains it along the way. He also acts out the game which is bonkers brilliant.
Commodore User became more and more Amiga until they dropped the C64. Your Commodore was a serious computer magazine until it was just game reviews and lost its way till its demise. Zzap did do Amiga at one point but stopped being good as it didn’t have much competition. Then Commodore Format came along and was most excellent. Gave Zzap a kick up the ass. Zzap dropped the Amiga and started improving but was behind on sales. Zzap in the end changed their name to Commodore Force and rebranded. Reading Zzap / Commodore Force, they were quite bitter till the end.
Hi Sean, yeah it's funny how it all worked out. The magazines got more zany and tried to appeal to the teenage market more and more during the end of the 8-bit era, which seemed to work for a bit.
Got Myth to work on Vice :C64. In options turn off Virtual device traps, and because i`m old for got what else i did. But you can emulate it. ps CV&G was my goto. :)
I would trade off between YS and Crash but got SU monthly I know it was the least popular of the three but I happened to like it (it did lose something when they dropped Kamikaze Bear though)
Fab Vid Seb (could be your catch phrase) 🙂Could never stand the isometric games. Far too slow. HOWEVER that short clip of the Next version of Head Over Heels shows just why its been down, completely fixes the treacle motion. Same applies to the Freesdcape games, run them on a next with the hz turned up and it's almost an a playable FPS. Don't know if you remember (how could I i'm not a mind reader) but i have the same speakers as you. Well i've decided to sell them and the amp I have because I never use them. It'll be a sad day but needs must.
Nice! Cambridge Audiio pretty decent eh? I've got this yamaha av receiver thing at the moment as I wanted something that did 5.1 for my SACD player but I hardly use it for that and will probably get a regular amp again at some point just for vinyl and regular CDs.
@@SebsPlaceYT Tetris (‹See Tfd›Russian: Тетрис[a]) is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer.[1] It has been published by several companies on more than 65 platforms, setting a Guinness world record for the most ported game.
Lol, you have made me feel like a master games player by saying The Untouchables is very difficult. I had the speccy 128k game and level 1 gets much easier with practise. I did have trouble with the 'protect the runaway pram going down the stairs' level but again a wee bit of practise. The untouchables is one of the small handful of games that when complete once I could go back later and complete within about 3 trys. Robocop and Op Wolf also fall into this category (Speccy 128k Versions)
Your sinclair was my 8bit read of choice, I never fast forward 😮. A list of personal favourites and classics, obviously all far superior on the mighty zx spectrum. Underpowered zx spectrum, how dare you 😮. Huge fan of myth, was the last full price game I bought, used to be able to complete it but it's beyond me these days. Hate spindizzy 💩. Always wanted to like the isometric games, I just find them all a bit meh. Great vid 👌.
I bought the cab, flat packed from Ebay, years ago. Then bought all the joysticks and buttons, pc bits and set it all up. Think I did a video on it an age ago. It won't be very good but will show off what it is. Cheers.
It was just too late to the party for me to use it properly for any comparison. It didn't run in the 80s at all. I only mentioned Commodore Force because that was essentially ZZap64 rebadged which was also a late magazine. You are not alone in your love for CF though, a few have mentioned its absence, so I might do something on that in another video down the road. Cheers.
The Ludlow magazines never jelled with me - it felt schizophrenic with its 3 voices often diverging from each others - and it focused on things in the reviews that felt aparte for me. CU and CCI and C&VG and many of the others had an approach that talked more to me. P.S Your C= 64 emulator(?) messes with sound samples - Exploding Fist was much more volume balanced between samples and music; no funky variations when they played. Bounder, IMO, is not telegraphing(as it is called these days) the actions well enough (kinda sh!t game methinks). As for Head over Heels, it is infamously a _direct_ conversion, converted line by line and no optimization.
It was Zzao64 for me as i was collecting them all and the cover tapes were generally good. I am 50 and been gaming since 1979 its the greatest hobby ever. Nice video my freind.
Thank you, very kind. Do you still have your collection of Zzap64s?
I bought all 3 as a kid, Sinclair user was my favourite, then a crash then your Sinclair. I switched my allegiance when Sinclair user introduced Kamikaze Bear in an effort to compete on puerile nonsense! Crash was then in pole position. Stopped buying all magazines when they turned into pamphlets with cassettes on.
Ah yes! Kamikaze bear! What a nutter!
You're not wrong, as the mags got more and more desperate for readers the review scores got higher and higher to try and tempt people to hang onto their 8-bit micros. I gave in around 1989 and bought a Sega Master System, consigning my once beloved 48k rubber key to the loft.
Yeah that's tbe way I always saw it. Cheers.
@@SebsPlaceYT You're 100% correct! The review scores are just daft. I certainly bought one or two of those games only to find they were unplayably hard (Bounder - I'm looking at YOU). How did those reviewers sleep at night?
Bounder score still baffles me.
Interesting. Someone leant me the big box Amstrad cassette North & South at school and yeah, the multi-load is a disaster. It also had only one battlefield, and as I recall, only one of the arcade platform sequences. All of the title sections and animated menus had to be loaded and then the map, make a move, then another ten mins loading some cut down sequence, then rewind the map tape and repeat. It did serve as an expensive demo of the disk version. Being a French game, apparently, disks were standard across the channel.
I have no idea how they refactored that mess for the cover tapes when Amstrad Action gave the full game away.
Interesting, cheers for sharing. I suspected it was bad but not that bad!Even late on I only had one mate who had a disk drive. Cassette was king for us council estate kids 😁
Loving the 8 bit micro content mate, great idea this is👍
Head Over Heels a classic and worthy champion. I checked how Rainbow Islands was denied a place on the list and Myth beat it to Master Game status in the same Amstrad Action issue......gutted 🌈
Rainbow islands is worthy on such a list that's for sure 😍
can't believe the shade thrown on Zzap64, it was way better and more professional than CU. They used to play EVERY game they reviewed to completion, unlike CU and their standards were far higher. The Sizzler and Gold Medal awards were an excellent format.
Not to mention the fantastic artwork by Eugene, and photography by Cameron Pound.
I love Zzap! That's why I chose it. Great magazine. Just thought the awards could've been named better although they did get the double ZZ in sizzler, which was cool. Cheers!
@@SebsPlaceYT yeah 'Gold Medal' was a bit wack tbf. Keep up the great WWork!
Thanks mate
I was only really playing Spectrum ganes for 1987 and a bit in 1988, but having played the likes of Damocles I came to the conclusion that games Crash (which I loved) scored in the 80s were actually safer bets than Crash Smashes.
For me Renegade will always be the best Spectrum game.
Target Renegade is mine 🥰 those are great games
@@SebsPlaceYT Also good, but the Master System had stolen my attention by then so I started finding monochrome graphics offensive!
😁
When we got the ZX81 in 83, My dad bought Sinclair User every month. But in the 90's I started buying Your Sinclair.
Sinclair User was definitely the more serious magazine back in the early days.
@@SebsPlaceYT
Sinclair Loser as I think Crash or YS termed it. ;)
@@SebsPlaceYT And it was rather a dull read.
I also bought countless isometric games and disliked every one of them for the same reasons. Too fiddly, monochrome and no idea of what to do.
Excellent video. And a big shout out to Wizzball. love it.
Cheers! Couldn't agree more!
Elite is obviously the best of the decade. The issue is the ports from the masterful BBC original. I enjoyed watching this.
Thank you. Yes, very hard to disagree with anyone who goes for Elite. Incredible game!
Noticed the AA in Amstrad Action's mAster gAmes, but missed the ZZap siZZler letterplay.
Yes!!!! True story. I noticed it after my final edit went up a couple of days ago and I was doing one last check through! How did I not see it! Knobhead!
Head over Heels was one of my bets at the beginning of the video, and I completely agree with your reflections: games of this style didn’t manage to hook me either, but I could recognize how good they were, and I almost felt bad for not really liking them (there were a few exceptions among the Filmation games, like Gunfright, which I found quite fun). In any case, I also think Head Over Heels is a perfect choice because it’s the best representation of a very particular style from that era and is also technically flawless. Certainly infinitely better than Driller or Spindizzy, as you rightly said.
Thanks for the great work; it really is a fantastic video.
Thank you, very kind.
Your Sinclair was blantantly the best mag.
Was great and one that I often purchased. Cheers!
Zzap64 magazine is back iirc the chap over at Retro Recipes is involved with it.
Epic video man! Nice that the magazines could agree at times. Of course not all games were available on all three or sometimes were quite different, like Myth.
Thank you! Yeah Myth really surprised me on the C64!
Zzap was my go to magazine but quite a few times i think they got too political with the scores. I wish I'd have got Commodore user back in the day.
Great video as always mate.
Cheers mate
I just booted up the c64 version of myth straight away. Using steamdeck emulation station de. Worked off the bat, so not sure why its not loading for you. It is crazy good on c64. Excellent music and visuals
Interesting. I will persevere. I tried 3 different images on two different emulators but they would hang on menu. As I don't need to record it now I'll try the images on my actual c64c, see if they work . Cheers
@@SebsPlaceYT yeah I tested both the disc and cartridge versions. The cartridge version had an extra intro from what I can see.
I could never work Wizball out, but then I have ADHD and... oh look, a butterfly.
😁
🎼Surprise Surprise🎼 i never watched it with dinner 😂😂😂
Excellent episode mate, brilliant comparisons of the games and just a lot of fun for us aging 8 bitters 👍👍👍
😂😂 I did wonder how long it was taking you to eat your dinner and comment 😁😁 cheers for watching. I'm glad you enjoyed 😁
It was too epic for a mere large chicken pakora and naan 😂😂😂
🤣
Some great 8-bit computer games here, few of which have actually aged well. Interesting that the very best games on the (also 8-bit) NES or Master System are still as playable today as they ever were.
Yes, agreed! Although I concentrate mainly on the micros in the 8-bit era, I feel like I will want to explore NES and MS more. Cheers
Your thumbnails are brilliant. Well it's all brilliant but you know what I mean. Always makes me laugh and click 🙂
Thank you very kind!
Great idea for a video, enjoyed it a lot!
I didn't really like HOH when I was a kid on my Spectrum, but having been compelled to play it on the Next, I find it very enjoyable
Thank you! It looks stunning on the Next! Looks quite fast though!
Another excellent video Sir!
Thank you, very kind.
Thanks
Thank you! 🥰 that's very kind and generous 🥰
I spotted the EMF CD in the background (in relating to them smashing TVs a la Smash TV, mentioned in one of the reviews). Nice placement.
Interesting selection and thanks for taking the time to pore over those. I agree more with Gary Penn's Driller review of the C64 version - way too slow and only the Matt Gray lengthy soundtrack is noteworthy. That and Total Eclipse were hugely over-rated on the C64, so a realistic rating would have taken down the overall across all three.
Turrican (and Turrican 2) started out on the C64 first with Manfred Trenz programming them both, they are the source version, the remainder being the ports.
I did suspect Head Over Heels would be up there and fully deserved - for me, even as a C64 owner, the Amstrad CPC one is the one to get, but all three versions are a credit to their hardware, all playable and all just as addictive.
Blimey, you are good!
C64 was number 1 in Finland. I had a Speccy ;)
My favourite was Your Sinclair, bought a hell of a Lot of them... All gone now :(
Also bought some Crash... But mainly Your Sinclair...
Nice! Was there any Finnish equivalents?
@@SebsPlaceYT You can bet your a.... Oh, no... ;)
You can bet your nose hairs, there was! :D
We have had a few computer magazines, the biggest was (and still IS) Pelit (Games). They started by publishing a yearly collection of reviews in a single magazine and then had a Commodore magazine (I told you Commodore was number one here and I weren't kidding... C64 was named "The computer of the republic" here) and combined everything to Pelit.
They started the Pelit-magazine at 1992 and they're still publishing (and I'm ordering ;) Bought the very first number also and ordered from second number!
Something like 6 or 7th oldest gaming publication in the world...
Check out the details from english wikipedia, easier than copying things here ;)
Commodore Format was my fave back in the day. Loved the cover tapes!
I'll have to get hold of a copy to add to my growing random collection! It was quite a late magazine for the c64, so it was not much use in this video, but you're not the first to say you loved it. Cheers.
@@SebsPlaceYT I was a Future Publishing whore.
That’s a great video , really enjoyable.
I find it interesting how the top 3 were all the best attempts at the time to make 3D games
I remember at the time that games could be both fun enjoyable experiences, but also a fascinating glimpse into what the future would bring.
I was often willing to give up on gameplay if I could glimpse the future in some way.
But retrospectively that feeling when looking at these basic 3D Games does seem harder for me to connect with now.
Thank you, interesting thought. I didn't really see the connection with all three games, but you are right! Cheers!
A splendid list, consider your love button smashed.
I only rarely bought British magazines back then (Self-Slap!). Mostly because I guess the process of shooting them off eastwards, across the Dogger Bank, tended to make them cost at least twice as much as the Danish equivalent. But also because they were only to be found in more specialized shops. Which you wouldn't be able to find anywhere out here in the middle of "the fields of Lars Von Diarrhea" (as in smells of 🐄💩) back then (2×Self-Slap!). But rather only by venturing down some dark alleys within some of the larger cities. The Danish magazines were all just generally covering the common micros in the beginning, and only started specializing into specific brands, much later on back then (3×Self-Slap!), at around the time were the Amigas started to appear.
I tended to hunt for the ones with the most program-listings and peek/poke hacker-cheats. Because I was a bit of a programming-nerd (clearly one of the greatest understatements of the last century). However, there were a series of English magazines later on, during my Commodore years, which would eventually make me muster enough courage to venture into even the obscurest of Black Books -shops in order to acquire, even despite the much higher prices. And this was "Commodore Disk User". Simply because, you guessed it, they came with a floppy-disk instead of type-in listings.
I really wasn't very fond of the Amstrad CPCs back then (4×Self-Slap! and an extra Self-Slap! just for good measure). I think it was mostly because of Sinclair Research eventually getting gobbled up by Lord Alan Sugar. And in accordance with his mentality, he deliberately changed the joystick DB9-pinout of those sugar-coated Speccys, to something as far away from the Atari/Sinclair/Commodore standard as he possibly could. So that absolutely none of the joysticks we already owned, were compatible with them (or at least not without adapters). Thereby pumping us for even more of our already stretched out pocket money, since we'd have to buy his crappier "mugs eyeful" proprietary sugar-Speccy joysticks. Which BTW obviously meant that they also didn't even work with any of his CPCs... Just such a sweet sweet guy, ay?
- Only much later realizing that none of this really was any proper reason for shunning, putting down, and picking on the CPC machines themselves. Since even though the early models looked like something that could only ever be sold in Toys'R'Us stores, they really were quite capable computers. With a lot of thought clearly spend on working around many of the compromises of their older competitors... at the obvious expense of just having to compromise elsewhere. After all, there really were no perfect way of flawlessly circumventing the overall hardware limitations of that particular era.
So, a few years ago, in an attempt to purge myself of my rather persistent adolescent biases, I bought and fixed up a CPC6128 deliberately without holding back any TLC. Only to find that me previously participating in bullying these poor PowerPuff CPCs (Sugar, spice, and everything nice) seem to have just rushed on back to bite me in the 🐴(hee-haw). Since it seems exceedingly difficult to find any Amstrad CPC dedicated YT-videos, free of us being constantly reminded of how mind-bogglingly awesome and supremely superior the Amstrad CPCs really were, compared to everything and anything else back then (7×Self-Slap!). All while attempting to impress us with mediocre (at best) or just straight up lazy Speccy (mostly) or bad Commodore ports, of games we already knew all too well, from those exact machines back then (8×Self-Slap!). Instead of showing us those games, that are either completely unique to the CPC's or really take advantage of their hardware in order to make them stand out and shine.
I really genuinely want to love my CPC6128 with at least as much enthusiasm as any of the other micros from back then (9×Self-Slap!). But having to endure listening to this constant nursing of this massive collective inferiority complex... sigh... it just makes it such an uphill struggle.
- I guess what I am trying to say with this Tolkien-sized rant of mine, is that it is just soooo refreshing to watch somebody who doesn't do this... and it kind of makes me wish that you'd make more solely CPC dedicated content, Seb. ❤
9 slaps in one comment! I hope you are OK! And just for you I'll figure out some CPC only content very soon. 😍😍😍 Was a brilliant comment btw.
I still have the odd Amstrad action magazine and cover tape kicking around 😄
Zzap!64 was my favourite, I got published on a few occasions with cheats, some included tiny machine code loaders to break into games too, I was popular at school for a while when other kids spotted me in there.
Ha - brilliant! Remember any examples? I'd love to seek them out.
@@SebsPlaceYT I'd dox my unusual surname name, although I doubt it's difficult to find anyway so one example is I made cheats for is The Human Race by Mastertronic that included being able to jump to whatever level you wanted immediately and listen to each of the 5 Rob Hubbard soundtracks, the game was so difficult most people had never heard more than 1 or 2 before that. I initial gave Zzap!64 only first letter of my surname, but in the 2nd issue I was published they said we've just found out his surname and published it lol, someone from my school probably told them. Back then I was concerned because cheating in games was quite new and some software companies were looking into the legality of breaking into their games like that.
The weeklies also did reviews, but they seem to be largely forgotten. Popular Computing Weekly and others weren't exactly in-depth, but they were the most up to date news available.
Very true. Often had lots of small reviews per page. Cheers.
"kak" is that an Afrikaans curseword ? 2:22 Thanks for the vid. I remember we had to smuggle these mags in because of the sanctions "back in the day". Was my reason for living xD Starquake took me to places in my imagination that I've never been to again.
Oooh. Cack is slang for poo. Caca is spanish for poo where I think it comes from. Super interesting about how you got these magazines back in the day! Cheers!
That was a great roundup, cheers :)
Thank you!
Your channel seems so retrospectively cool,
you got yourself a new retrospective
subscriber from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮 😺👍🕹️.
I'm still a retrospective gamer 🕹️ of the
Commodore 64 (tapes / disks / cartridges) and Amiga 500.
😺👍🕹️
Brilliant! Welcome aboard! Kiitos!
I was a Crash and Your Spectrum/Sinclair reader. The 8 /18 I would agree are great. But I was speccy guy so didn't care about other platforms ;)
Great round up though, and I will have to check Myth out because that passed me by.
Cheers!
Yeah, definitely check it out. Lovely little game. Cheers!
Fantastic work mate!
Cheers Snorkers!
Great video - and a serious nostalgia trip! Wow, some of those games look very janky now - and the scores awarded to them were ludicrous.
Head Over Heels on CPC looks superb (Glad to see Knightlore get a mention - it was revolutionary when it came out). I had a C64 - which was the best for super-smooth 2D scrolling and sprite movement - Dropzone and Uridium being stunning examples - but not so hot for isometric games and terrible for 3D.
Fun fact: ZZAP! was just a C64 version of the legendary Crash! I remember there was great rejoicing amongst us C64 owners when it came out - as we were all envious of the excellence of Crash!
Anyhow, those were great times! In subsequent years I never enjoyed video games as much as I enjoyed the 8-bit games. Even today, the latest games seem no fun compared to the games of yore.
Great comment, cheers. I agree about those old games vs ones now. Yes there are some games I play today but I'll always play the oldies. Great times!
Oh man, Gauntlet. Apparently even our North American release by Mindscape for the C64 had the same glitchiness that would happen if the U.S. Gold release is played on an NTSC machine. By that, I mean you the game is so easy, you literally cannot lose.
oooh really!
@@SebsPlaceYT yeah. I only have a UK imported cassette of the game, but when ran on my NTSC C64 and 128 in 64 Mode, all the level layouts were scrambled, and there was morw than enough health pickups and magic potions to keep the game going forever.
I was a little distracted by My Little Pony club magazine.
😁😁 My cousin had my little ponies. They were great getaway horses for my action man. Nice hair too.
I agree with a lot of what you said. Isometric games also weren't my cup of tea (probably because I was pants at them), Spindizzy was very frustrating (I had the 8 bit Atari version), and Elite should have been higher up on the list.
For me Elite should have been number one. So, so far ahead of its time, and it was playable on a 48k machine. Astounding.
Yep, I don't think anyone could complain if it was. What a game! Cheers
Thanks for another nostalgic trip. Felt a bit surprised with Elite being only the 7th in the list. There was more fast 3D in it than anyone in the 80's could wish for. Generally, if to speak about the choice of the portal to the fantasy/sci-fi 3D world then my choice would be with games like Ring Wars or Academy with its sort of 2,5D.
Never was an isometric-games-ZX player until HeroQuest (looong game sessions) and probably Pacmania (for a short period of time). Head over Heels was a cool one but too complex for me at that tender age.
As for the Bounder, to my mind the whole hype around the game was connected with the usage of parallax scrolling which is missing in most of the versions. No screen in depth resulted in quite ordinary perception of the game in my company BACK IN THE OLD DAYS.
Back in the day..... 🤣I'll give you a slap if I ever bump into you 😂 Totally agree with you, though. Elite could easily be number 1. Cheers as always !
@@SebsPlaceYT jealous that you guys had so many speccy/other humble machines magazines. But we had fun investigating 8bit era computers on our own. I have a nice story you can use in other videos: when in the 80's a soviet astroscientist sold his car (old one though) to buy Speccy from one British student. Then (and thats the best part) when the room sized old pc had broken the whole research facility the scientist worked for utilized almighty zx spectrum to run calculations for months!!! Can provide proof if needed
flippin heck! yeah I'm sure that could be used somewhere! thank you.
"LOVE BUTTON" HAHAAHHA
I'm such a knob
@@SebsPlaceYT yeah but a funny and endearing one at that!
🤣🤣 thank you
i can NOT fondly remember buying a mag and spend bloody hours taping in the code for a specie only to find out the game was complete pants !! it was cheaper to buy a mag and code it in rather then the exorbitant price of a cassette something like £5.99
i did get a few not too bad ones which we pirated onto tapes and sold at school for two quid (five pack of tapes was a fiver)
it also meant i learned to code Sinclair basic without learning it )if that makes sense _ i basically got to recognize blocks of code that did certain things and would put them together to make a simple game myself , which was also PANTS
Love it! Right little entrepreneur eh? I remember typing in games only to be really disappointed 99% of the time. You should watch whathosnorkers here on youtube. He takes those type in and makes them better but explains it along the way. He also acts out the game which is bonkers brilliant.
The Greatest 8-Bit Game
Beach Head II on the c64
Possibly! 😁
I have many comments but mostly that the Zzap rebrand should have been called C Sixty Force
😂😂 yes!
I love (button) you Seb
Haha - right back atcha 🥰
My top favourite Speccy game was Gun Fright.
great game!!
Commodore User became more and more Amiga until they dropped the C64. Your Commodore was a serious computer magazine until it was just game reviews and lost its way till its demise. Zzap did do Amiga at one point but stopped being good as it didn’t have much competition.
Then Commodore Format came along and was most excellent. Gave Zzap a kick up the ass. Zzap dropped the Amiga and started improving but was behind on sales. Zzap in the end changed their name to Commodore Force and rebranded. Reading Zzap / Commodore Force, they were quite bitter till the end.
Hi Sean, yeah it's funny how it all worked out. The magazines got more zany and tried to appeal to the teenage market more and more during the end of the 8-bit era, which seemed to work for a bit.
Could you do a video on Amstrad games in green monitor mode please? Bet Thanatos looks good.
Ha - yeah I am intrigued by the differences. I like that Amstrad Action always let you know how it faired on a green monitor.
I unsubscribed and then subscribed to make it feel I was rewarding you for your efforts 😂
🤣🤣 thanks !!
Crash was my go too, though due to covertapes etc I did pick up YS and SU as well.
Yeah same, a good covertape always took my money.
@@SebsPlaceYT And as you mentioned, certain, ahem, covers also had an influence 🤣
😂😂
Got Myth to work on Vice :C64. In options turn off Virtual device traps, and because i`m old for got what else i did. But you can emulate it. ps CV&G was my goto. :)
Thank you. I'll try that
I would trade off between YS and Crash but got SU monthly I know it was the least popular of the three but I happened to like it (it did lose something when they dropped Kamikaze Bear though)
Ha - gotta love kamikaze bear! Cheers!
Fab Vid Seb (could be your catch phrase) 🙂Could never stand the isometric games. Far too slow. HOWEVER that short clip of the Next version of Head Over Heels shows just why its been down, completely fixes the treacle motion. Same applies to the Freesdcape games, run them on a next with the hz turned up and it's almost an a playable FPS.
Don't know if you remember (how could I i'm not a mind reader) but i have the same speakers as you. Well i've decided to sell them and the amp I have because I never use them. It'll be a sad day but needs must.
Thank you! Ah yes the tannoys! I do still use mine, still going strong, great little speakers. What amp are you selling?
@@SebsPlaceYT The amp is a Cambridge Audio Azur 540R in black. Open to offers.
Nice! Cambridge Audiio pretty decent eh? I've got this yamaha av receiver thing at the moment as I wanted something that did 5.1 for my SACD player but I hardly use it for that and will probably get a regular amp again at some point just for vinyl and regular CDs.
Tetris,nemisis,manic miner
I don't think I played Tetris until the Gameboy!
@@SebsPlaceYT Tetris (‹See Tfd›Russian: Тетрис[a]) is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer.[1] It has been published by several companies on more than 65 platforms, setting a Guinness world record for the most ported game.
great video
Thanks!
19 games but countdown dyarts at 18?? Following orders not to skip ahead so maybe all is revealed....
Haha, yes, all is revealed at no.11....!
Love button, your on tinder😂😂😂
🤣🤣🤣
Lol, you have made me feel like a master games player by saying The Untouchables is very difficult. I had the speccy 128k game and level 1 gets much easier with practise. I did have trouble with the 'protect the runaway pram going down the stairs' level but again a wee bit of practise. The untouchables is one of the small handful of games that when complete once I could go back later and complete within about 3 trys. Robocop and Op Wolf also fall into this category (Speccy 128k Versions)
Haha you are a master gamer! I could not get on with that game at all, then or now ! 😁😁
Your sinclair was my 8bit read of choice, I never fast forward 😮.
A list of personal favourites and classics, obviously all far superior on the mighty zx spectrum.
Underpowered zx spectrum, how dare you 😮.
Huge fan of myth, was the last full price game I bought, used to be able to complete it but it's beyond me these days.
Hate spindizzy 💩.
Always wanted to like the isometric games, I just find them all a bit meh.
Great vid 👌.
😂😂 cheers mate. So annoyed I missed Myth back then. Would have sunk hours into that when I actually had time too!
BRW where did you get the arcade cab setup?
I bought the cab, flat packed from Ebay, years ago. Then bought all the joysticks and buttons, pc bits and set it all up. Think I did a video on it an age ago. It won't be very good but will show off what it is. Cheers.
No Commodore Format? Or for the few CDU.
Commodore Format was too late to the party really, only covering a period in the 90s . There were so many magazines back then, we had so much choice!
Why no mention of commodore format?
It was just too late to the party for me to use it properly for any comparison. It didn't run in the 80s at all. I only mentioned Commodore Force because that was essentially ZZap64 rebadged which was also a late magazine. You are not alone in your love for CF though, a few have mentioned its absence, so I might do something on that in another video down the road. Cheers.
The Ludlow magazines never jelled with me - it felt schizophrenic with its 3 voices often diverging from each others - and it focused on things in the reviews that felt aparte for me. CU and CCI and C&VG and many of the others had an approach that talked more to me. P.S Your C= 64 emulator(?) messes with sound samples - Exploding Fist was much more volume balanced between samples and music; no funky variations when they played. Bounder, IMO, is not telegraphing(as it is called these days) the actions well enough (kinda sh!t game methinks). As for Head over Heels, it is infamously a _direct_ conversion, converted line by line and no optimization.
I did swap emulators throughout, as I wasn't sure what Vice was doing, so I appreciate the heads up. Cheers.
@@SebsPlaceYT Well, YMMV as no C= sounds alike, especially after the C= 64C with the 8580 SID came out.
i’m tony, so i ⏩️’d
I knew it!!!!
@@SebsPlaceYT 🤭
boooo, no Atari User? boooooo
Haha - sorry! Really just cover the 3 big home micros here in the UK. I am gonna do some Atari stuff at some point though.