30. CAULDRON

Loved this, even if I didn’t warm to its sequel quite as much. Play testing was rarely a big feature of early Spectrum releases, and that may account for why Cauldron – a game that put you in the warty nose of witch – was so bleedin’ hard. The origins of the game are in the John Carpenter classic movie Halloween (the same publisher put out a game of The Evil Dead), and it married up a segment where you flew around on your broomstick shooting things, and then a more traditional platformer. Off the back of the success of Cauldron and Cauldron II, incidentally, its programmer, Steve Brown, was given the greenlight to go ahead and make the gorefest that became Barbarian…

29. FOOTBALLER OF THE YEAR 1 & 2

Oh, I know they weren’t very good really. But just as with Virgin’s F.A. Cup Football (where you had to manage ten teams at once!), I played both Footballer Of The Year games a lot. Both hinged around the idea of you being one player, looking to build up your career. Depending on which of the two games you were playing, you did this via goal cards, trivia quizzes, transferring from team to team, and buying attempts on goal during a match. It was all a bit of a mess, but surprisingly gripping. That said, New Star Soccer has come along and done it all a lot better now, while marrying it up to the idea behind Anco’s 16-bit hit, Player Manager (Avenger: Way Of The Tiger 2, advertised on the billboard in the screenshot above, is also still worth digging out).

28. TRAILBLAZER

I never got on with Marble Madness and Gyroscope on the Spectrum in the way that I think I was supposed to. For guiding a ball around, I instead went for Gremlin’s Trailblazer (the Spectrum never had a decent version of Bounder, after all). Basically, you guide your ball along a road that’s constantly coming towards you. And that’s when the assorted obstacles and different tiles with different effects kicks in. Hair would frequently be pulled out when the bastard ball kept falling off the edge though. I’ve never forgiven Trailblazer for that.

27. BOOTY

The first budget game I, and many of us, ever bought for the Spectrum. Published on British Telecom’s Firebird label, Booty was a rough around the edges, pirate-centric platform game, that I hold a special affection for seeing as it was the only game I could afford at the time I got it. It wasn’t massive, with just 20 screens to venture through, and there’s not much originality to the idea of picking up lots of treasure. It snuck up on you though, and while it was always easy to pick holes in, Booty consistently entertained. It boasted some of the finest colour clash to be seen on Sir Clive’s old baby, too.

26. BIONIC COMMANDO

As it reached the peak of its powers, the ZX Spectrum played host to some increasingly strong arcade conversions. Rainbow Islands remains the daddy of them all, and The New Zealand Story isn’t too far behind. I was torn between saluting either the 128k version of Bionic Commando or Midnight Resistance (both of which were strong in the audio department, incidentally), and the former won on points. I think because it’s a game that not only worked a treat, but given the angles you need to fire your arm gadget at, it lent itself well to the Spectrum’s keyboard controls too. It was the closest we had to the feeling of Spider-Man on the Spectrum. A shame the modern day take on Bionic Commando didn’t manage that.