Uncle Clive Sinclair's finest moment helped bring gaming to a wider audience, thanks to his policy of making it affordable to normal folk. I remember we had one at school, an old 48k with the (in)famous rubber keys, and I was smitten. The time of the week we were allowed to mess about on it was always cherished by me and one of the happiest days of my childhood was when I got my own Speccy for Christmas.
So, in tribute to Sir Clive and the little bit of microchips and plastic that started me on a journey that led to terminal disillusionment at the end of Mass Effect 3 (yes, I'm still annoyed), here's my five favourite titles on my initial burst into the wonderful world of gaming.
1. Skool Daze/Back to Skool
Seminal in every word games where you played Eric, a young miscreant who needed to swipe his somewhat negative school report before it made it back home - resulting in a severe thrashing from dad, I expect.
But apart from that, you had to attend lessons, sit quiet during assembly and dodge a good kicking from the school bully. And if you did take a punch, you could always take it out on the local swot, who would always answer every questions the teachers posed.
Both games were pretty much the same, though the sequel had the added bonus of putting a girl's school next door, from which you could charm a young lady into doing your lines for you.
Brilliantly, you could also rename all the characters, so that you could have revenge on that dickhead at school who called you names, as well as make Eric's girlfriend that wee lassie you had a crush on. Wither you now, Kelly Atkinson?
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| Rumbled! |
Of course, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are legendary names in the platform/puzzle genre, but I always preferred this slice of taxing gaming.
The conceit was simple: every level is a cave where there's a time limit to collect the diamonds. But to make things difficult, one wrong move resulted in a big rock landing on the bonce. And that was it, really: like many of the time, it was simple but often infuriatingly difficult. Very, very addictive too.
3. Tracksuit Manager
My brother and I must have bought about 30 different footy manager games between us for the Speccy, but this was always the yardstick. Though Football Manager may be the birth of the genre, this beauty is the point where losing days at a time to a game became all-too-easy.
Rather than putting you in charge of a league team, Tracksuit Manager handed you the reins to that all-too Impossible Job: leading England to international glory. Amazingly for the time, you had about 100 players to choose from, all real-life ones too. In the days where Football Manager 2012 has apparently anybody who ever kicked a ball in its database, this might not seem much, but trust me - the fact you could stick Martin Hodge in goal or Keith Houchen up front was very impressive to us misguided youth of the time.
After working your way through qualification and the odd tour of the South Pacific (as I would always arrange, for some reason), there was the drama of the World Cup or European Championships. The tension generated when putting your troops against the likes of Diego Maradona and Ruud Guillit could have been cut with a knife.
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| Rare high drama, Spectrum style |
Superior joystick waggler in that it give you a wide range of sports to compete in - from the more obvious sprinting and cycling to more skill-related gigs as ski-jump and, err, pistol shooting.
Daley's stock was at an all-time high, given he'd won Gold in LA the year before, which saw this game's prequel, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, knacker more young male wrists than a subscription to Mayfair. Super Test provided many hours of fun for this young gamer,
Best of all, as well as a somewhat moving version of the theme from Chariots of Fire, it didn't have that impossible bastard High Jump event that its predecessor had.
5.Mercenary
The road to Grand Theft Auto begins here, methinks, with this sandbox-style game even receiving a 99% score in Your Sinclair.
And quite right too. Mercenary saw you play the titular role of a bod trapped on a war-ravaged planet after their spaceship elected to stop working. The plot was simple: earn enough cash to get it fixed up by working for one or both of the factions scrapping for control. You had the whole planet to explore and huge underground complexes. Miles ahead of it's time, it also spawned a couple of decent sequels a few years later for the Amiga.
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| It's better then it looks. |
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