Fun writing but does end up being a game by game review.
I've been taking long walks through nostalgia and revisiting my childhood days with the Spectrum, so this book looked fun.
It's well written and Dan Whitehead has a fun way of writing - very much in the ilk of the spectrum games of the day. There's a briefish introduction to the history of the spectrum that I had wished there was more and then the book goes through some of the poignant games from the 80s that ran on the speccy.
The game chapters weren't so much as reviews but a dig into what made the games interesting either from the player's perspective or a technical achievement for the day.
I would have preferred more stories from the history of the speccy, but that I guess is an entirely different book.
Still, a fun read, some bookmark worthy game titles with some useful web resources at the end.
8 Highlight(s)
And yet the Speccy was, let's be honest, a bit crap.
the Spectrum seemingly went out of its way to appear daunting and overly technical, with each key pulling quintuple duty, modified by a baffling surplus of specialist shift keys.
This was an industry in its infancy, before enough rules and accepted wisdom had accumulated to stifle creative thinking.
a miraculous lifeline for gamers in the days when the idea of "saving your game" was considered the whimsical dream of idiots and madmen.
while popular browser titles like Cubefield are remakes in all but name.
Head Over Heels, not just the best of all the isometric 8-bit adventures, but one of the best games ever made, full stop.
it becomes clear that a game this obsessed with piss and poo could only ever have come from the UK, the spiritual home of smut and toilet humour.
If you ever want to make a young gamer today appreciate just how lucky they are, sit them in front of Death Star Interceptor and let them marvel at a game that not only boldly stuck two copyright-infringing fingers up at one of the richest men in the world, but also happily killed you before the game had even started just for good measure.