Ever played any of these Atari conversions? Any of them stand out? Have a shout about it :) Thanks for watching, and here's a link for Arcade Decades: www.kickstarter.com/projects/tabletop-book/arcade-decades-80s-edition
They are, it's Kim's voice and witty commentary combined with the Speccy color palette that gives me those Christmass Vibes. Oh and those nostalgic feelings hit the right spot :)
Typing in the games from the Spectrum manual with a friend - one reading, one typing - before we'd ever encountered a tilde in real life is why I still internally vocalise it as a 'wiggly'. Ditto '$', in my head, will always be 'string'.
Man, I really appreciate these series about Spectrum conversions. It was the computer of my childhood and they always bring a smile to my face when I see them coming. Thanks a lot for the hard work.
1:04:45 gauntlet 3 was co-composed by tim and geoff follin. Geoff's works (including most of plok's legendary ost) are often mistakenly misattributed to Tim, and unfortunately Geoff passed away earlier this year. Gauntlet 3's title theme is one of my favorite works of the follin brothers, especially the c64 version.
I am a simple person Kim Justice makes a new Arcade video. I pour myself a glass pf Dr. Pepper. Fix a bowl of BBQ Crisps. Sit myself down on the couch. And have a blast watching!
Just watched this via you tube revanced. Great that you have released a video to coincide with the release of TheSpectrum. Looking forward to revisiting these games in November. Especially with the licensed pre installed Horace games. It's gonna be a mega success.
Never had a spectrum, (C64 kid here) but the 8 bit war even reached us in NZ. I remember feeling particularly hostile to the Amstrad machines for some reason :) Thanks for another great vid Kim :)
Great to see some Road Blasters love, I have always loved it and still play it today. Usually it gets iffy scores but you seem to love it as much as me. Great stuff.
Wow, Telly Tennis at the beginning, I never did see what that game looked like at the time as I could never get it running at all! Also loved the Bottom reference, great days.
Kim, I have two ideas for firepro tournaments! One is all legendary managers and announcers that weren't wrestlers (so no Lawler, Dibiase, or Ventura types) just guys like JR, Shiavoni, Paul Bearer, Lord Alfred Hayes, etc., and the other one is arcade game characters like Pacman and DigDug, if you can find any skins 😂😂😂 both would be a whopping fun time to gamble channel points on!! I have a feeling you could hold some really oddball ones!
21:35 Star Wars wasn't released on cartridge for "the 17" Timex/Sinclair 2068 users 😤, but was intended to be released on an Interface 2 cartridge, hence it being a 16k game-the hardware restriction on said interface. Paul Farrow (current maintainer of the EightyOne emulator) has an article about it on his Interface 2 webpage. The slow sales of IF2 cartridges was the reason for Parker Brothers to drop their 7 cartridge games releases.
As always Kim, great stuff and I enjoyed the video immensely. I'm usually broadly in agreement with you but in this case I must make the case for The Empire Strikes Back as the superior vector game. It has AT-ATs! That you can fly under or take out with guns or toe-rope. It's a bang up job and I love it dearly
Kim I absolutely love your work on retro gaming mate. As an ex pat of Manchester for 29yrs, now living in Australia for the last 21yrs I adore your work on the glory days of the ZX spectrum particularly. Ocean software was incredible and the love you have for Joffa Smith fills my heart always ♥️
Looks like the next Retro Games "mini" is gonna be The Spectrum (the 48k rubber key model) - a full size model. It comes with 48 games built in - many of them really good!
Unpopular opinion, but I loved Super Sprint and Championship Sprint BUT I haven’t revisited them in over 30 years so I’ll probably have a go and see bad they are! That said nothing beat Grand Prix simulator on the Amstrad. My mate next door had it and we played it for hours. Brilliant video, brilliant subject matter and (as ever) thank you for the exceptional content.
I also remember attempting to unsuccessfully input one of the games from the manual 😂 so frustrating reading through all of the lines looking for where I'd gone wrong lol
Speccy was my first PC and I always like it the best but I've played 'Paperboy' on Commodore C64 cause it was much better conversion.Too bad that Spectrum doesn't have dedicated graphics chip otherwise it would be the ultimate machine of it's time!For me it's even now (probably nostalgic opinion not realistic). ;-)
I am pretty certain I had an Arctic computing Galaxians variant in 1982. The first game I ever bought for the Spectrum. it was one of my favourite go-to games. At least until Jet Pack came out :)
Would it be possible to look at every one of Atari's arcade games? One part could be about the 70s. The second coul be about the 80s and the last part could be about Atari games in the 1990s.
Awesome as usual Kim Did road blasters have an ending (arcade)? Obviously as kids we used to play it but not for long as the arcades usually are !!! Thank you
It's a shame Return of the Jedi had to be an arcade conversion really: with a blank canvas they could have done a lot more, I think. An updated Deathchase style speeder bike level would have been incredible. The death star scene with the Millennium Falcon would have been a real challenge simply because the innards of the death star are a lot more intricate than the exterior. But still, a vector approach might have been possible. As far as Hard Drivin' goes, I'd be pretty tempted to try that out on a ZX Spectrum Next running at a higher clock speed to see if that makes it more playable. The thing with Hard Drivin' is, in the arcade it was a real technical tour de force. I remember my friends and I being blown away by it. The fact that it was paper thin with only two tracks didn't really matter if you only played it for a minute (because it was so expensive you'd generally only have one go on it). I had it on the Amiga which also isn't exactly a perfect conversion but, even if it had been, it wouldn't have mattered: it's just not a game that you can play for more than a few minutes at a time because there's so little to it. If you wanted 3D, Stunt Car Racer was a much better option, and then actually there were plenty of decent arcade racers that were more fun and would allow for longer play sessions. Impressive that they could get it to run at all on the Spectrum, but not a great game to begin with. Certainly a game that I don't find myself wanting to go back to nowadays very often whatever the version.
19:12 but Moon Patrol has parallax scrolling ! I give it points for that alone. Yeah, it is pretty treacle-y, but i was not expecting independently scrolling background layers. Also, I'll always remember APB for being the game that caused me to ask my mom what hookers were. I saw the arcade Peter Packrat and i thought "that little guy is so cute" Then i see the speccy loading screen Peter Packrat and i think: "mom isn't gonna like this, definitely can't let dad see it either. I feel dirty" That loading screen makes me deeply uncomfortable. I'm not body shaming or anything, but you've gotta stare at that screen for minutes while the tape loads. The art is a little too intense to feel comfortable looking at for that long.
Funny to think that premium price point on a micro game back in the day was a tenner, that's £30 in today's money. Two things woud come to our young sugar addled minds, a) "Wow! £10 it must be bloody good!" b) "Nuts! It's at least 3 months to my birthday or Christmas. Wonder if Nan needs her grass cutting or shopping getting in?! Gotta be a quid in doing that.". Ha ha!!!
How did you get sound effects on the Star Wars game? Never heard sound effects in that game, even the official release which I had back in the day was silent bar the music at the start. Its why I think 3D Starstrike is superior, because it managed to have sound effects along with some speed. I wonder if there is a hacked version, adding the sound?
Hmm. From what I can see there are 2 TZX versions of the game kicking around, and perhaps this is the 2nd with sound? I'm not sure -- this is the version I've always played on emu, so honestly I'm not sure if the sounds hacked in there or if this was a proper 2nd version or what. Alas, I can't really remember if the one I played when I was a kid had sound (I don't think it was the Hit Squad one)
There seems to be two different versions of Star Wars, both released by Domark in 1987. The first version has no sound. There's a message in the game which explains why: "Star Wars on the Spectrum is a fast, all action game. We found that the 48K sound slowed down the game to such an extent that we felt it would spoil your enjoyment. It has therefore been removed. Instead, why not put your favourite record on the deck turn up the volume, sit back and enjoy the classic arcade shoot-'em-up - Star Wars. May the force be the with you." The second version (which is also the version used in the later Star Wars Trilogy compilation) does have in-game sound effects, and is lightly slower than the silent version. Presumably Domark decided that the slower gameplay was preferable to games reviewers and customers complaining about the lack of sound.
The sound on these games really put me off. My memory isn't what it was but in general I don't remember my c64 games sounding this bad. Graphics aside (there are some cracking graphics on some speccy games) it's the sound and the dreaded attribute clash that made me so happy to be a c64 owner.
The c64 sound was way ahead of the Texas Instruments 99/4, far more expensive Apple // computer and the UK Spectrum. The SID chips in the c64 was a custom chip made at a Commodore owned factory that no other computers had.
Ever played any of these Atari conversions? Any of them stand out? Have a shout about it :) Thanks for watching, and here's a link for Arcade Decades: www.kickstarter.com/projects/tabletop-book/arcade-decades-80s-edition
Now this is what I call a great video
I'm American so the ZX Spectrum never really took off here. The arcade conversion of Bently Bear and the Crystal Castles looked good though.
Many many thanks for all your videos. I watch them alot as your delivery and research is excellent my friend.
I am truly grateful for your videos.
I miss your old intro music
@@tattoodude232 I do have to second this
Your Spectrum videos are probably the coziest videos on YT Kim.
They are, it's Kim's voice and witty commentary combined with the Speccy color palette that gives me those Christmass Vibes. Oh and those nostalgic feelings hit the right spot :)
Well said. I find any video about Speccy games to be relaxing, and Kim does it so well.
Typing in the games from the Spectrum manual with a friend - one reading, one typing - before we'd ever encountered a tilde in real life is why I still internally vocalise it as a 'wiggly'. Ditto '$', in my head, will always be 'string'.
Loved the bottom reference at the start 😂
Sorry for the tune speed, Kim. I didn't program it. 😄
No worries. Thanks for providing the best thing about a lot of these conversions! :)
A quick quiet Saturday night in, with nothing to do... then this video appears!! Bravo...
Same. I am going to stick the curry in the microwave soon, pour myself a few Vodka Red Bulls and sit down to watch this video.
Watching this reminds me of my huge pile of ‘your Sinclair’ & ‘crash’ magazines, and makes me wish they hadn’t gone in the bin about 20 years ago 😂
Man, I really appreciate these series about Spectrum conversions. It was the computer of my childhood and they always bring a smile to my face when I see them coming. Thanks a lot for the hard work.
100% buddy, I'm an old man and these videos give great memories.
Kim does a great delivery on the videos. I've watched many of them dozens of times.
If you typed in a Spectrum game, but didn't change the name of the author in the code to your own, have you really typed in a Spectrum game?
I adore all things Speccy!
I'll post a link to the paperboy section to Steve and Tony. Will bring a smile to them!
Who came on here just to debate the over 40 year argument that Speccy Paperboy is 'better' than C64 Paperboy conversion ?
🤣
You'll focus on that just to avoid mentioning that the CPC version was the best 😛
@@computersforeveryone2598 we all know that Amstrad arcade ports where just Speccy ports with more colours and better sprite collision
@@RolandoRatas wow those are some big words (also sadly true too many times)
@@RolandoRatas
Doesn’t that make them better games then?
1:04:45 gauntlet 3 was co-composed by tim and geoff follin. Geoff's works (including most of plok's legendary ost) are often mistakenly misattributed to Tim, and unfortunately Geoff passed away earlier this year. Gauntlet 3's title theme is one of my favorite works of the follin brothers, especially the c64 version.
I am a simple person
Kim Justice makes a new Arcade video.
I pour myself a glass pf Dr. Pepper.
Fix a bowl of BBQ Crisps.
Sit myself down on the couch.
And have a blast watching!
It is never ever 'time for Klax'. About as interesting as sorting your sock drawer.
I love Klax, but I also love this putdown.
I always loved those explosions in Missle Defence; the way they slowly expand before dissipating. Majestic.
Oooh nice timing Kim. Frickin need a destraction in my hostile life.
You utter legend with such a topic.
Much love
I got the Bottom reference during Pong. Great reference
The spectrum was a great computer that could do a lot with such little power
Absolutely love these videos - superb stuff... Will be binging this later with wee dram!
Just watched this via you tube revanced. Great that you have released a video to coincide with the release of TheSpectrum. Looking forward to revisiting these games in November. Especially with the licensed pre installed Horace games. It's gonna be a mega success.
I like this video format, nice background to have on while doing some other stuff - also pledged for the new book btw!
Great job (as usual) what a brilliant trip down memory lane...I had completely forgotten about the Sam...!
great video ,good work kim .
That hard driving port is much better played on the Next with the cpu speed increased.
Kim, you are spoiling us with another video. Great stuff for a bank holiday weekend. Thanks a lot once more for all your sterling efforts.
Never had a spectrum, (C64 kid here) but the 8 bit war even reached us in NZ. I remember feeling particularly hostile to the Amstrad machines for some reason :) Thanks for another great vid Kim :)
Great to see some Road Blasters love, I have always loved it and still play it today. Usually it gets iffy scores but you seem to love it as much as me. Great stuff.
Wow, Telly Tennis at the beginning, I never did see what that game looked like at the time as I could never get it running at all! Also loved the Bottom reference, great days.
Wow, you really put a lot of effort into your videos, this is another awesome one!
Well done, this is fantastic ❤
Perfect for a Saturday evening
Kim, I have two ideas for firepro tournaments! One is all legendary managers and announcers that weren't wrestlers (so no Lawler, Dibiase, or Ventura types) just guys like JR, Shiavoni, Paul Bearer, Lord Alfred Hayes, etc., and the other one is arcade game characters like Pacman and DigDug, if you can find any skins 😂😂😂 both would be a whopping fun time to gamble channel points on!! I have a feeling you could hold some really oddball ones!
Love the bottom reference on telly tennis
Another great video to work through
New from TH-cam best channel
Ok im watching this while on the toilet, but i will save the whole video for the treadmill in the gym ..
Awesome video
Gamedevs these days, whining about overtime and bad wages... Back in my day, we made 10 games for £100! And they all were original!!
I love these type of videos chill for a while and nostalge
Superb work, Kim!
Cheers Kim ❤ and thanks, Ledbury! 😊
Another top video and I'm sure your book will be superb too (already backed).
21:35 Star Wars wasn't released on cartridge for "the 17" Timex/Sinclair 2068 users 😤, but was intended to be released on an Interface 2 cartridge, hence it being a 16k game-the hardware restriction on said interface. Paul Farrow (current maintainer of the EightyOne emulator) has an article about it on his Interface 2 webpage.
The slow sales of IF2 cartridges was the reason for Parker Brothers to drop their 7 cartridge games releases.
As always Kim, great stuff and I enjoyed the video immensely. I'm usually broadly in agreement with you but in this case I must make the case for The Empire Strikes Back as the superior vector game. It has AT-ATs! That you can fly under or take out with guns or toe-rope. It's a bang up job and I love it dearly
Will enjoy this tonight! I've learnt so much from KJ!
And Bye for now always brings a tear to my eye. Have to wait for another K,J banger 😂
Thank you Kim 😊
Kim I absolutely love your work on retro gaming mate. As an ex pat of Manchester for 29yrs, now living in Australia for the last 21yrs I adore your work on the glory days of the ZX spectrum particularly. Ocean software was incredible and the love you have for Joffa Smith fills my heart always ♥️
I love your Spectrum videos.
Looks like the next Retro Games "mini" is gonna be The Spectrum (the 48k rubber key model) - a full size model.
It comes with 48 games built in - many of them really good!
I wish I had enough vision to enjoy that book, Kim. Any chance for an audiobook or is it mostly pictures?
There should be news on this pretty soon. :)
@@Kim_Justice I'd straight up buy an audiobook MP3 of it. Especially if you read it. It'd make my walks just fly by.
Awesome. Cheers Kim
Awesome as usual Kim!
Superb video Kim! Paperboy 2 was released on the Amstrad CPC, unfortunately 😂
Whoops, my bad. Thanks though matey :)
Gauntlet 1 and 2 had the best ports on average across consoles and home computers of any game ever I think.
Thank you Kim for a new video to put on while I nap.
I do the same thing lol it's how I fall asleep at nights or for naps, I thought I was weird lol 😆
Unpopular opinion, but I loved Super Sprint and Championship Sprint BUT I haven’t revisited them in over 30 years so I’ll probably have a go and see bad they are!
That said nothing beat Grand Prix simulator on the Amstrad. My mate next door had it and we played it for hours.
Brilliant video, brilliant subject matter and (as ever) thank you for the exceptional content.
Your videos are fantastic.
Spotted Ciaran Gultnieks on the credits for the Star Wars port who went on to found the Software Refinery, devs of Slipstream 5000 and Hardwar
I did enjoy this video, Kim.
Excellent as always :-)
Another great vid, thank you.
I also remember attempting to unsuccessfully input one of the games from the manual 😂 so frustrating reading through all of the lines looking for where I'd gone wrong lol
Speccy was my first PC and I always like it the best but I've played 'Paperboy' on Commodore C64 cause it was much better conversion.Too bad that Spectrum doesn't have dedicated graphics chip otherwise it would be the ultimate machine of it's time!For me it's even now (probably nostalgic opinion not realistic). ;-)
Cup of tea, bacon sandwich, and a Kim Justice vid.
Lovely.
I am pretty certain I had an Arctic computing Galaxians variant in 1982. The first game I ever bought for the Spectrum. it was one of my favourite go-to games. At least until Jet Pack came out :)
Yeah, there's a very good Artic one -- in fact, that's called "Galaxians" as opposed to "Galaxian" :). Copyright? What copyright?
I don't know Kim, I played the Thunderjaws demo and thought it was ok? I'll give it another try. Certainly looks ok.
I couldn't have asked for better
Would it be possible to look at every one of Atari's arcade games? One part could be about the 70s. The second coul be about the 80s and the last part could be about Atari games in the 1990s.
fantastic vid! Sadly my speccy died yesterday :-( I guess I'l have to go back to emulation
@@PooperScooperTroopermy condolences...
Awesome as usual Kim
Did road blasters have an ending (arcade)?
Obviously as kids we used to play it but not for long as the arcades usually are !!!
Thank you
It does end after 50 levels, yeah.
Finally got around to watching 😊
It's a shame Return of the Jedi had to be an arcade conversion really: with a blank canvas they could have done a lot more, I think. An updated Deathchase style speeder bike level would have been incredible. The death star scene with the Millennium Falcon would have been a real challenge simply because the innards of the death star are a lot more intricate than the exterior. But still, a vector approach might have been possible.
As far as Hard Drivin' goes, I'd be pretty tempted to try that out on a ZX Spectrum Next running at a higher clock speed to see if that makes it more playable. The thing with Hard Drivin' is, in the arcade it was a real technical tour de force. I remember my friends and I being blown away by it. The fact that it was paper thin with only two tracks didn't really matter if you only played it for a minute (because it was so expensive you'd generally only have one go on it). I had it on the Amiga which also isn't exactly a perfect conversion but, even if it had been, it wouldn't have mattered: it's just not a game that you can play for more than a few minutes at a time because there's so little to it. If you wanted 3D, Stunt Car Racer was a much better option, and then actually there were plenty of decent arcade racers that were more fun and would allow for longer play sessions. Impressive that they could get it to run at all on the Spectrum, but not a great game to begin with. Certainly a game that I don't find myself wanting to go back to nowadays very often whatever the version.
27:54 720 Degrees is, in my opinion, the best Skateboarding game before Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
19:12 but Moon Patrol has parallax scrolling !
I give it points for that alone.
Yeah, it is pretty treacle-y, but i was not expecting independently scrolling background layers.
Also, I'll always remember APB for being the game that caused me to ask my mom what hookers were.
I saw the arcade Peter Packrat and i thought "that little guy is so cute"
Then i see the speccy loading screen Peter Packrat and i think: "mom isn't gonna like this, definitely can't let dad see it either. I feel dirty"
That loading screen makes me deeply uncomfortable. I'm not body shaming or anything, but you've gotta stare at that screen for minutes while the tape loads. The art is a little too intense to feel comfortable looking at for that long.
Funny to think that premium price point on a micro game back in the day was a tenner, that's £30 in today's money. Two things woud come to our young sugar addled minds, a) "Wow! £10 it must be bloody good!" b) "Nuts! It's at least 3 months to my birthday or Christmas. Wonder if Nan needs her grass cutting or shopping getting in?! Gotta be a quid in doing that.". Ha ha!!!
Cheers Kim :)
I'm pretty sure my 48k version of Atari Star Wars was silent (apart from the title music), maybe I'm remembering it wrong?
lol I also typed in telly tennis from the basic manual and had about the same level of success 😂
lol, that Spectrum Paperboy is awful. Guru Larry said it best “It looks like the inside of a migrain!”
Omg Kim …. I love your videos, I’m a proper gamer, I play paddle games!
The adds … please cut the 60seconds one down!!!
Yes, that Moon Patrol conversion is rather sad, even the 2600 port is considerably better.
I've seen Gauntlet be a decent game on almost every platform it was released on. Well, except for the Atari 800, ironically.
Woo I kickstarted Arcade Decades!
I had Killer Gorilla on tape for the BBC Micro, the DK Jr clone that was to be the basis of the unreleased official version at 21:00.
The developer of Pit Fighter was like "Framerate? Yeah! Our game has one of those!"
How did you get sound effects on the Star Wars game? Never heard sound effects in that game, even the official release which I had back in the day was silent bar the music at the start. Its why I think 3D Starstrike is superior, because it managed to have sound effects along with some speed. I wonder if there is a hacked version, adding the sound?
Hmm. From what I can see there are 2 TZX versions of the game kicking around, and perhaps this is the 2nd with sound? I'm not sure -- this is the version I've always played on emu, so honestly I'm not sure if the sounds hacked in there or if this was a proper 2nd version or what. Alas, I can't really remember if the one I played when I was a kid had sound (I don't think it was the Hit Squad one)
@@Kim_Justice I went looking and found version 2 with the sfx. Thank you, I actually never knew it existed before this video, what a great find 😊😊
There seems to be two different versions of Star Wars, both released by Domark in 1987.
The first version has no sound.
There's a message in the game which explains why:
"Star Wars on the Spectrum is a fast, all action game. We found that the 48K sound slowed down the game to such an extent that we felt it would spoil your enjoyment. It has therefore been removed.
Instead, why not put your favourite record on the deck turn up the volume, sit back and enjoy the classic arcade shoot-'em-up - Star Wars.
May the force be the with you."
The second version (which is also the version used in the later Star Wars Trilogy compilation) does have in-game sound effects, and is lightly slower than the silent version. Presumably Domark decided that the slower gameplay was preferable to games reviewers and customers complaining about the lack of sound.
The sound on these games really put me off. My memory isn't what it was but in general I don't remember my c64 games sounding this bad. Graphics aside (there are some cracking graphics on some speccy games) it's the sound and the dreaded attribute clash that made me so happy to be a c64 owner.
The c64 had a far better sound chip. It was a lot more expensive than the spectrum
The c64 sound was way ahead of the Texas Instruments 99/4, far more expensive Apple // computer and the UK Spectrum. The SID chips in the c64 was a custom chip made at a Commodore owned factory that no other computers had.
I play A.P.B. very often on my ZX 128
Great timing considering the info about the spectrum emulator coming out. Great video as usual
Wish someone would do stuff like this for the c64.
I wonder if the Peter Pack Rat loading screen was anyone's furry awakening back in 1989.
Wgafuyb
@@THENAMEISQUICKMAN I mean... understandable. =w=
I used to have a Atari 65xe as a kid I could only afford cheap cassettes cartridges were too dear for me 😂😂
Is there a good port of Pit Fighter for any system???
Some games there where i bought or played them and felt the crash review score was too high. Espeically road runner
love it
Wiat, there's yet another British computer! How many more are there?
Hard Drivin was awful on the Sega Genesis !!! And look how far advance the Genesis was !!!
Those horrible colours, those horrible sounds... "ZX Spectrum - wherefore art thou? Deny thy existence, surrender to the superior Commodore!"
Honey don't you know I'm more than Pac-Man with a bow!
You sung this comment
Heyo, does that book have a choprune soundtrack? Perhaps a stretch goal idear.
my speccy had a pong... until i cleaned my loose sweat off of it
🎉
Excuse me why is my port of pong to spectrum missing you didn't even ask me for the tape