Jumping Jack was released for the Spectrum early in it’s lifetime in 1983, and was one of my earliest experiences of Sinclair gaming in colour. Looking at it now, it would barely pass muster as a free flash based app, given it’s basic graphics and incredibly simple gameplay. But if you consider that the ZX Spectrum was for many people their first colour computer, and that they had previously had to make do with the blocky black and white graphics of the Sinclair ZX81, Jumping Jack was still a revelation.
Jumping Jack – ZX Spectrum Screenshot
Playing Jumping Jack on the Spectrum
The premise of Imagine’s game is simple. Jack must reach the top of the screen by jumping through moving holes in the 8 platforms above him. Time the jumps correctly and you pass through the hole onto the next level, time it badly and collide with the platform and you are momentarily stunned. You could also be stunned by falling through one of the holes that move beneath you – fall far enough back to the bottom level and you lose a life.
To complicate the challenge further, every jump would create a new random hole somewhere, increasing the potential risk. The holes themselves would travel in both directions, and rise up the levels as they wrapped around the screen, requiring some quick thinking in order to progress. Fortunately Jack could also wrap around each level, giving you an extra escape route when the holes start to close in.
Once you reach the top the level is complete, and you progress to the next which has more holes, and then monsters that inhabit the platforms and must also be avoided, including planes, buses, snakes and strangely what appear to be angry shotgun wielding farmers.
Basic Graphics of Jumping Jack
The graphics used could hardly be called cutting edge, with Jack being a crudely drawn but well animated stick man, and the monsters simple coloured sprites. The fast pace however made up for any graphical weaknesses, and resulted in a surprisingly addictive game which took time to master.
Jumping Jack Legacy
Magazines at the time lauded the game for it’s playability, despite the basic graphics which hardly compared with other games released in 1983. Remember this was the year that Ultimate released the excellent Jet Pac, and Quickskilva introduced 3D isometric gaming with Ant Attack. Jumping Jack therefore represents the last of it’s kind, a simple Spectrum game that whilst good, would not cut it amongst the new wave of developers pushing the Sinclair machine to its graphical and gaming limits.
The game was also released on the Atari 800XL and the Dragon 32 as “Leggit”.
I’ve always been partial to a bit of a flutter, and I was particularly drawn to the fruit machine and casino game simulations on the early home computers. Due to the relatively simple graphical requirements of these early games, they would often appear as listings in magazines – I can remember spending hours typing in a BASIC listing for a really very mediocre offering.
The Spectrum had its fair share of commercial fruit machine and casino games, which were launched 20 years before the availability of online gaming sites and dedicated apps. Home computers really were the place to be if you wanted this kind of gaming experience outside an arcade or Bingo Hall.
Back in the early 80’s the arcades were not only full of great games, but also the more traditional slot machines which had to become more exciting in order to retain the attention of their shared audience. As the fruit machine developed more features and become more game-like, rather than just repeatedly spinning reels waiting for a win, it was only natural that home computers would be the natural target for fruit machine simulators. The home computers at the time were owned by a much wider demographic than that of the equivalent consoles, which were targeted at the under 18’s, and unlikely to release these kinds of games.
Fruit Machine Simulator
My first experience of these games was Codemasters Fruit Machine Simulator, a popular distributor of budget games, this one being available for £1.99, which was probably about right for a niche game of this kind. The game attempted to recreate the feeling of a fruit machine of the time, which started to feature special bonus games as well as just matching fruit. The simulation centred around the usual Fruit Machine formula – match fruits to win, or hold fruits with numbers on to light up the bonus letters until full, unlocking the bonus game. Once unlocked the bonus game could earn you extra cash through features such as a skill stop, my personal favourite, where you had to time a key press to stop a flashing light at the right time and increase the cash prize.
The game received mixed reviews at the time, ranging from tedious to brilliant depending on your perspective – I loved fruit machines so I loved the game, I am sure there are other who just wouldn’t get it. Play it in isolation of a real Fruit Machine and it just wouldn’t be the same.
Looking back, the game seems representative of a time when we were still working out what home computers were for, people would experiment with different programs to see what worked and what didn’t, as we didn’t really have a frame of reference, and everything was a first. I’m sure you would struggle to get interest in this kind of game as a free browser based application today, but in the 80’s it was yet another reason to fire up the Spectrum and try something new. Plus you didn’t risk losing your pocket money to the one-armed bandits.
What was the best version of the Chuckie Egg Computer Game?
The Chuckie Egg computer game caused a lot of arguments. Back in the 80’s my friend Jason and I would share time playing between my humble ZX Spectrum computer and his much more powerful (and expensive) BBC Micro. Many of the games that we played were exclusives to that platform, with few titles spanning both computers. At my house we would be playing games such as Manic Miner and School Daze, and at his house games such as Mr Ee! and Frak, There were some exceptions however, such as Yie Ar King Fu, which always gave rise to arguments about which one was best.
Chuckie Egg for the ZX Spectrum
The biggest argument debate of all centred on Chuckie Egg, the classic platform game from A&F software that featured a farmer and some very grumpy chickens, battling out for farmyard supremacy. Both versions had their fans, as both were excellent games in their own right, but which version of this classic performer really was the best?
There’s only one way to find out……FIGHT!
Round 1 – Chuckie Egg Graphics
The graphics on the Beeb were always deemed better than the Spectrum, due to the bright colour palette and lack of attribute clash on the BBC Machine.
Chuckie Egg for the BBC Micro
That said, the characters in the game were intentionally small, lending themselves to the Spectrum’s less colourful but higher resolution screen, with the Beeb version using the chunkier low resolution screen mode.
The animation on the Spectrum was incredibly smooth, with each jump forming a perfect arc, and the animation of the birds spot on, but this can also be said of the BBC version, which always managed to produce great scrolling graphics.
So for me that’s round one to the Spectrum, edged slightly into the win by the clarity of the graphics.
Round 2 – Chuckie Egg Sound
The Spectrum was always going to struggle with soudnd being it’s Achilles heel. The tiny internal beeper (speaker is probably too strong a word for it) had to fight for space with all of the Spectrum’s other internal parts, and could only emit a vague beeping noise on one measly sound channel. The BBC however had a great 4 channel sound chip and internal speaker, which allowed for great sound effects and some proper synthesised tunes.
As a consequence, many Spectrum games had no music at all, and Chuckie Egg was no exception. All the lowly Speccy could manage was a series of clicks and buzzes to accompany the action on screen. Strangely, given the greatly enhanced sound capabilities of the BBC, it was exactly the same as the Spectrum, almost as if the former had been programmed to mirror the latter.
So that’s has to be a draw, with a point for each, making the score 2-1 to the Spectrum.
Round 3 – Chuckie Egg Gameplay
Always going to be a tricky one this, as many people will have favourites based entirely on the game they played, as few people would have had access to Chuckie Egg on both machines at the time. Looking at this clinically, a replay is required of both games on the original hardware in order to make an informed judgement. I am lucky enough to possess both home computers, so no emulators for me… or at least that was the plan.
After a bit of messing around with cassettes and my trusty WHSmith tape player, which was part of the challenge of playing games back in the day, I gave this up as a bad job and fired up my PC to access the emulator software after all. Time had not been kind to the already sensitive tape and I couldn’t get either game to load via cassette.
Chuckie Egg Cassette Inlay Art
Playing the games on a PC emulator is much simpler, and at least allows me to use a keyboard to control Henhouse Harry, as nature intended on the originals. First up the Spectrum version, and it’s not long before I have Henhouse Harry leaping about. The pace of the game is frantic, but due to the excellent collision detection you could leap onto ladders half way up, and clear gaps easily without having to the jumps perfectly – unlike arcade forebear Donkey Kong which was famously difficult to time your movement.
Playing Chuckie Egg on the BBC Micro
Playing the BBC Micro version straight after the Spectrum and it definitely feels different, but difficult to immediately put your finger on why. After a while, you realise that the BBC version actually has more realistic physics – Henhouse Harry’s jumps are subject to gravity as he decelerates when jumping up and accelerates when dropping down. This may be more realistic but it actually make timing jumps more easy on the Spectrum, with Harry maintaining a regular speed regardless of how high he jumps or how far he falls.
For this reason alone I find the Spectrum version of Chuckie Egg easier to play, as you get into the zone and zip through the many screens capturing eggs and avoiding the giant chickens.
So for me the third round also goes to the ZX Spectrum.
Verdict: 3-1 to the ZX Spectrum version of Chuckie Egg!
Despite the games playing in a very similar way, with virtually identical graphics and sound, the Spectrum just edges it for me, but the 3-1 score does not really do justice to the BBC Micro version, which was an excellent game and has many fans.
Perhaps my semi-scientific approach is not really appropriate when comparing these versions of Chuckie Egg – perhaps you are always going to favour the game you played as a kid, and for me my favourite will always be the Spectrum.
Yie Ar Kung Fu started life as an arcade game released by Konami in 1985, having features that were seen for the first time in a fighting game, including multiple opponents, a health bar and multiple special moves. This really was the birth of a genre which has spawned 100’s of one on one fighters, including series such as Street Fighter, Tekken and Soul Caliber.
Yie Ar Kung Fu ZX SpectrumThe Yie Ar Kung Fu game on the Spectrum was a faithful rendition of the original game, and featured a martial arts master, Oolong, whose mission was to fight through a series of bouts against increasingly difficult competitors. Moves were achieved through the joystick and a punch and kick buttons, and included jumping attacks. With practise you could pull off moves such as leg sweeps and roundhouses, which were needed to defeat each of your opponents different fighting styles. Whilst not the first game to feature hand to hand combat, earlier games such as Kung Fu Master had a very limited move set, with basic punch and kick moves. The Spectrum version of Yie Ar Kung Fu managed to replicate all 16 special moves from the original arcade game, providing a great variety in the approach to defeating each opponent. This did however mean that playing on the keyboard required use of 9 different keys, and so a joystick really was the preferred option.
This video is the enhanced 128k version with fancy fonts and improved music and effects
Yie Ar Kung Fu advert
The winner is the first to 10 points (or hits) in a single bout, each hit reducing the opponents life bar, a feature that carried across to pretty much every fighting game that followed. Each of your 10 different opponents had unique moves and attacks, some armed with weapons such as swords, nunchaku, chains and throwing stars. A different strategy was required for each, dodging attacks and timing your strikes at a moment of weakness.
The graphics of the Spectrum version of Yie Ar Kung Fu were detailed, if a little less colourful than on other conversions, mainly due to the Spectrum’s attribute clash issues. But this didn’t stop it from being a great game, and remembered fondly by many Spectrum owners.
Along with “Way of the Exploding Fist”, this game represents the height of fighters on the Spectrum (a machine not ideally suited to the genre) and is memorable for being my first experience of a proper fighting game.
Back in 1983 the choice of Spectrum games was pretty limited, but one that stood out for me was this game – Bugaboo! Written by two (probably) Spanish zoologists (Paco & Paco) and it shows, with the game premise seeming somehow European…
Bugaboo Spectrum screenshotThe objective of the game was incredibly simple. Your frog (it was actually a flea called Bugaboo but I thought it looked more froggy) is dropped into an alien gorge, and you had to use the natural features of the landscape to jump out. Controllled using just two keys, to jump left and jump right, the game required you to time the length of the key press to make Bugaboo safely jump the right height to a ledge above him.
To complicate this, the jump meter was very twitchy, and difficult to judge accurately. There was also a time limit imposed by a dragon, who would fly in after a certain period and try to eat you. Just to add a bit more drama to the proceedings. A bit like the big chicken in Chuckie Egg.
Bugaboo Gameplay Video
Bugaboo Cassette Inlay
To help matters you could use the cursor keys to browse the playing area, which is bigger than screen, and plan your jumps several moves in advance, plotting a course through the maze of ledges.
Bugaboo featured some well defined and colourful graphics, which complimented the simple yet addictive gameplay. I can remember playing for hours at a friend’s house and getting in trouble with mum for coming home too late. I also remember copying the game using a twin cassette recorder, and for this Quiksilva I am truly sorry. If it’s any consolation the game refused to load every time, and I spent more time playing with the tone control on the cassette player than I ever did playing the (pirated) game.
A winner from Quicksilva, a novel idea very well executed the (then) fledgling Spectrum.
If you want to read more, a history of the game can be found here – useful if you an speak Spanish though
The BBC micro has some passionate fans, but it never really managed to generate the sort of passion reserved for some of the more popular home computers of the early 80’s such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
BBC Micro
Maybe it was the association with the BBC, maybe the fact that it was used in schools, perhaps the price tag put people off, whatever the reason, it just doesn’t seem to attract the kind of fanatic devotion that surrounds other home computers of the time.
I am here to set the story straight, and put my case for why the BBC was a true classic and deserves a loftier place in the annuls of home computer gaming history.
1) The Graphics
mr ee! for the BBC Micro
Whilst Spectrum owners had to put up with with a single graphics mode and some fairly horrific attribute clash (only 2 colours could be displayed in any 8 x 8 square of pixels), the BBC had multiple graphics modes, and was able to replicate arcade games of the time very accurately and in full colour. Arcade perfect clones of Frogger, Defender, Pac Man, Space Panic and Donkey Kong were therefore possible, all running at full speed and providing the closest thing to the arcade at home.
2) The Sound
Simple one this, 4 sound channels on the BBC meant that some pretty good sound effects and music could be played simultaneously. The Spectrum could only claim one sound channel, resulting in the strange kind of warbling bleep and white noise mixture that accompanied most Spectrum games. There were add-on packs for the Spectrum in an attempt to address the sound limitations but nothing that really became a standard for gamers.
3) Great arcade conversions
Before copyright infringement was a major issue for games developers, it was possible to produce fairly blatant rip offs of arcade games and not even have to change the name – Defender being a great example on the BBC. The speed, sound and graphical ability of the BBC micro meant that games could be reproduced with a level of accuracy not possible on any other home platform of the time. My personal favourite is Mr Ee!, a perfect rendition of the popular arcafe game Mr Do!, and the main reason for me buying a BBC micro. It may seem basic by today’s standards, but you just couldn’t get this close to the 80’s arcades without braving a trip to Southend.
4) A proper keyboard
Anyone familiar with the Spectrum will declare their love / hate relationship with the rubber keyboard. With almost no feedback, and only a click to tell you you have managed to press a key, it also required a maddening combination of CTRL, SHIFT, ALT and CAPS to achieve the most basic of data entry. Contrast this with the BBC, with a full keyboard more like a word processor, and keys robust enough to take a hammering from unruly schoolkids, it made the perfect programming device, and allowed for great control in multi-key games such as Elite and Revs.
5) Disk drive connectivity
Unlike the Spectrum, which had to make do with temperamental cassettes to load games, the BBC had a proper disk interface. This allowed 3rd party 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives to be utilised in order to store programs or load commercial games in the (relative) blink of an eye. Remember that at this time there were no internal hard drives, so when you turned on your home computer it was like you had never used it on before, with no recollection of your previous visits.
The Spectrum had a micripodrive later in life, as well as a Rom interface, neither of which were a massive commercial success. Chalk one up to the Beeb!
6) BBC Basic
Back in the day before Visual Basic, context sensitive help and predictive typing, there was BBC Basic. A great learning tool, you could type hundreds of lines of code and store them on tape or disk for later use, with a full parser built in to trap errors along the way. Contrast this with the Spectrum and its “parse as you go” coding, and horrible keypress combinations, it took forever to enter even the most simple code. God help anyone who attempted to type in a game from a magazine (yes you could do that), 4 hours later and the code would not work, or the Spectrum would crash and you would lose the lot.
7) Educational value
The main reason for the existance of the BBC Micro was its selection as part of a national programme for education of IT in schools. Many adults in the UK today will site their first real computer experience being with the BBC Micro, learning to program using BASIC or LOGO, or solving puzzles like the Tower of Hanoi.
Beating an alternative offering from Sinclair in the selection process, the BBC Micro can claim unique educational value as a home computer. Fortunate students could convince their parents to shell out the 300-400 quid required buy a BBC Micro, purely for the educational advantage offered to them (not to play games, no that was purely a fringe benefit). Being the local “computer expert” when I was at school, I would often be asked by frustrated parents to come around and “fix” a wayward BBC for them.
I even completed my A level computing project on a BBC Master system, as it was used at my 6th form college.
8) Launchpad for some classic retro games
I have raved about the arcade clones released on the BBC, but it was also home to some classic original games. Take your pick from puzzler Repton, space trading game Elite (released first on the BBC), platformer Frak!, racing simulation Revs and shooter Strykers Run. There were some very loyal software developers for the BBC, most notably Superior Software and MicroPower, who alongside in-house team Acornsoft produced the vast majority of the games on offer.
Of course the BBC could never challenge the Spectrum for the volume or variety of games available, but it did host some unique titles that were not (or could not) be ported to other home computers of that era.
9) Grange Hill
You may think I’m just running out of reasons, but no, the BBC Micro was (probably) the only home computer to ever appear on 80’s childrens TV show Grange Hill. The program was famous for kick starting the careers of stars such as Todd “Mark Fowler” Carty, and er that teacher bloke that was the baddie in Star Wars… and many others.
Respect is due.
10) Fred Harris and Computer Live!
Whilst not a feature of the machine itself, the BBC dedicated an entire TV series to the machine, called Computer Live, featuring eccentric presenter Fred Harris. It was the BBC who commisioned the creation of the machine in the first place, as part of their educational mission to bring computing knowledge to the masses. The show highlighted the many ways a home computer could be used to manage finances, help with word processing, solve logistical problems and even play games (admittedly this was mainly chess). No other machine at the time can boast a companion TV programme!
Retro games reviewed including 80s arcade machines, classic consoles and early home computers
