Oh god not this chestnut !madcrow wrote:As a clueless American, I've long been interested in the "strange" world of UK home computers. While from a technical standpoint, both the Amstrad CPC and the Acorn BBC Micro both appear to have FAR outclassed the ZX Spectrum, lots of folks (including many writers for your fine magazine) seem to have had the fondest memories of the Spectrum. My question is simple: which of your three "homegrown" systems actually had the best games available and what were those games?
The BBC wasnt great for games compared to the Amstrad/C64/Speccy, never was in the top 3. The BBC was bought by lots of parents as it was the computer for schools. 'Most' kids though just wanted a computer for games back then.
The C64 was very popular but a bit high priced, NOT that parents were poor (Like some idiot german guy said here a year ago), its just computers were so new it was probably the most expensive Xmas present for a 9 or 10 year old back then and some parents probably thought it was a 'fad' which might not last.
Plus when your friends started getting a computer you often followed, all my friends had a Speccy so i got one and was happy as anything.
The Amstrad was very good but seemed to come in a bit too late as the Speccy/C64 dominated everything. There were tons of great games out in the 80's, very original games, arcade conversions, adventure games etc. Just so much. Of course tons of kids did copies of games from their friends so piracy was huge.
The Speccy on paper might have seemed quite weak but the games people created for it were amazing. The C64 had better colour (but chunkier graphics) and sound but Speccy games had more defined graphics and being from the UK seemed to have got a very loyal following.
The best Speccy site is www.worldofspectrum.org , click in the archive there and you can see tons of games listed, can even click on reviews from the mags at the time. Or go to www.myspeccy.com , an online emulator which saves scores and you can see some of the famous games.
To me it was all about playability (still the same today) and sooo many Speccy games were playable, great little machine which i'm sure has helped many of us in a career in computers to this day (Has with me personally).
I love trying emulators of machines i never had (PC Engine, NES, MSX etc), you should get a Speccy emulator and try the games.