Sinclair Spectrum Allstars: Volume 1

The Good
First a bit of background. At one point I did have the notion that playing retro games, going back towards gaming's roots where game play was more important than fancy graphics, was a good thing. To that end I bought a lot of old kit, Spectrums, Amstrads, Commodores, Amiga's and a couple of others. Suffice to say that reality soon came crashing in, a couple of afternoons trying to load a game from a tape convinced me of that. Game's with ten minute load times that had to have the volume control set just so or else they'd give an error message as they tried to run killed all the fun, and most of the games were rubbish too.

All the games played as they should, well more or less, and for me the best thing about them is that there was none of that fiddling about with tapes and volume control :-))

There's a decent selection of game types too, some adventure types, some shooters, some maze runners and some odd stuff.

The emulator does a decent job, it emulates other models of machine and supports a mouse and a joystick. It's speed can be varied too which is good for old codgers like me who have slower reactions.

The Bad
I dislike careless mistakes and there are a couple in the game's menu, for example there are two games 'Lunar Lander' and 'Lunar Lander II' both of which are called just 'Lunar Lander' in the game's menu.

The games play OK but even on the slowest setting the title screens zip by so fast they are difficult to see, not a deal breaker but I like to see the artwork.

For the aficionado there's a worry that these may not be quite the original games. They are all licensed by Amstrad so they are all pukka games but a couple have been altered to display the 'Retro Soft' name while others carry a 2005 copyright date.

The biggest problem is the game selection mechanism. The lack of any function to choose a game from a list, forcing the player to scroll through all the to find the one they want, is just poor design and while I'm having a bit of a rant why aren't the games in any kind of order?

The Bottom Line
A painless way to play some old games, enough gameplay to satisfy nostalgic yearnings without the hassle of trying to go old school.