I remember it all

[Dave]

Every room, all the stress, and the time I completed it.



Not as colourful on the Spectrum, but just as good. I think this was a remake from around 2003, and somebody's recently made a new version with extra rooms and puzzles. The player on this makes it look easy, but any false moves and your lives were easily gone.

[Ratty]

That's going back a bit, although we had one of those you hook up to telly, tennis or ping pong or football. I never saw the point of them.
My kids played SuperMario all the time, I knew all the damn tunes off by heart and still hum them now and again. I sometimes had to help them get out of trouble and all it did was irritate me.

[Saintjeff]

I had a speccy back in the day. Christmas 1984 was probably my best of my childhood when i got one, I would have been 14 years old. I pestered Mum and Dad for a Commodore 64 so much that year but they were expensive and we weren't a well off family. Dad had got made redundant from Pilks, well it was a voluntary redundancy before it would have become inevitable and they just couldn't afford one. I had to settle for a second hand ZX Spectrum 48k. The C64 was the more powerful computer but I appreciated what my parents could afford and I never looked back. I probably spent way too much time on it and it definitely affected my education. Wish I could say it started me off with a career in computer programming or something but it was a games machine to me and I'm a still a gamer now on the consoles. Through the computer magazines at the time and the classified ads in them I did end up as part of a sort of european piracy network swapping games on C90 tapes through the post. Good memories of a great time in my life and I don't think I turned out too bad from it all.

[Dave]

In 1982, a girlfriend introduced me to computers. She'd used them at school shortly before she'd left. She said she wanted one, and because at the time I was like 'loadsa money', I bought her a Commodore VIC-20 with its stunning 5K of onboard memory. Then we found out that we'd need a 16K RAM pack and a cassette recorder/player if we actually wanted to do anything. That was still very uninspiring, and at first I couldn't work out why we needed a keyboard connected to a TV. Although a few years earlier I'd had one of those basic ping-pong consoles (with 2 or 3 games), and that was the only incentive, really. You had to buy games for it, though, and they were quite primitive compared to what came out a bit later with the C64s, Spectrums, Orics, Dragons, etc. Another option was to buy magazines and type out the BASIC program listings. Oh, that was fun; one typing mistake and you'd be there for hours trying to debug it. Shortly after that acquisition, the C64 and others came out, making the VIC-20 seem like a relic. I lost interest in computers for a few years until about 1987, when I got a Spectrum +2 (128k). That's when the above game and a few others, like Renegade, perked up the interest a little.

[HORT]

I still have ny Commodore 64.

[Dave]

I still have my Amiga 1200 and a SAM Coupe. The Spectrums went into a skip at the tip in the midst of a relationship schism.

[Saintjeff]

I missed out on the Amiga, they were great computers. I did loan one from a friend once when he went on holiday along with a box of pirated games. Hated having to give it back. I went over to consoles after the Spectrum when the Nintendo Entertaimnent System came out, then on to the Super Nintendo, then Playstation 1,2 and 3. Now i have The PS5 and Xbox series X and for the old systems and games, I use emulators on the PC through Launchbox.

[Dave]

That reminds me. I could have POKEd the game in the first post to give me infinite everything (lives, donut weapons, etc.) but I didn't do that. I saved my progress using the Multiface, and if things went wrong, I could just load the saved restore point. Talking about pirated games, there were a few things you could use on the Amiga – XCopy being one, but as time progressed, they'd use non-standard disk sectors or other intentional damage for copy protection, so I used a plug-in device; I think it might have been called Cyclone or something like that.