Which Spectrum ports or otherwise technically poor games did you still enjoy?

[MartinJSUK]

There's a massive gap between the most technically advanced Amstrad games, and the least advanced - generally later games beat early ones on this level, but not always. Today, it's easy to focus more on technical merit than gameplay quality. We've all seen very pretty, fast-scrolling, sonically-stunning games that ultimately suffer from unoriginality, repetitive gameplay, bad collision detection, uneven difficulty curves etc.

Conversely, plenty of games (often Spectrum ports) make very poor use of the Amstrad's strengths, or play too closely to its supposed limitations - but can still be great fun to play. Early Spectrum games especially were often a heyday of original, imaginative, balanced and clever games which worked within that machine's limitations - many of which the Amstrad has never had (Cookie, Valhalla, Alchemist, Avalon) or only got as homebrew games decades later (Skool Daze, Jetpac, Ant Attack, 3D Deathchase). Later arcade-style games (which may depend on fast visceral whizz-bang action, or on any scrolling being smooth) might suffer more glaringly from being Spectrum ports or otherwise lazy, but perhaps the fun sometimes survives?  A few blatant Spectrum ports did get great reviews on the CPC in their day - do we judge these too harshly now, if the gameplay design survives?

For some, any Mode 1 game is automatically technically unimpressive, perhaps because of the perception that it means a Spectrum port (some French-made adventures should probably be seen as exceptions?) - is this fair?

I suppose this is a corollary to my thread about games which show off the CPC's advantages over the Spectrum (I wonder if any games will be mentioned in both?)

[roudoudou]

saboteur twooooooooooooooooo

[ZorrO]

Zolyx give more joy than look.
Logik games like Minesweeper or Othello also don't have to be reach to be good game.

[cwpab]

Question for the technical experts...

Can a super cool but slower Speccy port, like Matchday 2 or Saboteur 2, be programmed from scratch for the CPC with the same graphics and the original speed?

[reidrac]

In my view ports are always tricky because people expect the same game, and different machines have different strengths, so you *want them* to be different.

One of the best examples of a speccy game converted to the CPC to use its full strengths is Phantomas 2.0 (as opposed to the Phantomas 2 that we got from Dinamic in 86, that was a not that good speccy port).

Matchday 2 or Saboteur 2 could be programmed from scratch and be good, but they wouldn't be necessarily the same game.

[Shaun M. Neary]

There were some Speccy ports that were done right... Rick Dangerous is a great example of that, it is identical to the Speccy version only the sprites were re-drawn, but the code is identical. Even the same bugs are in it!

But most speccy ports were sluggish, unplayable messes. Software Studio, I'm looking at you. Super Hang On, Peter Pack Rat, Enduro Racer... none were really that fit for purpose on the Amstrad. 

I wouldn't say Mode 1 games are unimpressive at all, the Dizzy series on the CPC look way nicer than their Spectrum counterparts (although the flickery sprites on the first Dizzy can be off putting, but that was fixed for the subsequent releases), I also really liked Strider's Mode 1 graphics on the CPC as well. Mode 1 is just fine when it's done right, but a lot of programmers used really bizarre colour mixes that made them more ugly than they could or should have been.

Question for the technical experts...

Can a super cool but slower Speccy port, like Matchday 2 or Saboteur 2, be programmed from scratch for the CPC with the same graphics and the original speed?

I've asked this to a few different people over the years, the general consensus is no because the ULA has a lot to do with the coding on the Speccy, because the CPC lacks one of these, the strain is put on the CPU and that's where the slowdown arises. I *think* that was the reasoning, however I may have gotten my terminology wrong there.

Now with all the expansions etc the CPC has since come out with, it makes one wonder if this is still the case though.

[Shaun M. Neary]

As for the games I did enjoy...

Saboteur 1 and 2 were a lot of fun, especially the second.

Super Wonder Boy In Monster Land. The tape loader was so badly bug riddled, the motor would trip randomly crashing the system and effectively ending your game. Was only able to finish it in recent years by playing the disk version.

180 Enjoyable speccy port, but it lacks the animations of the Speccy version, although that could have been 128k exclusive, never played the 48k version.

Last Ninja II Always irked me that the Amstrad never got the first one. Small playing area and awful speccy beeper speaker music and slow speed is hard to tolerate, but once you get into the game, it's quite enjoyable.

Back to The Future Part II Once I got the hang of this, I played it for quite a bit. Never could get past the band playing puzzle section though.

[andycadley]

Question for the technical experts...

Can a super cool but slower Speccy port, like Matchday 2 or Saboteur 2, be programmed from scratch for the CPC with the same graphics and the original speed?

I've asked this to a few different people over the years, the general consensus is no because the ULA has a lot to do with the coding on the Speccy, because the CPC lacks one of these, the strain is put on the CPU and that's where the slowdown arises. I *think* that was the reasoning, however I may have gotten my terminology wrong there.

Now with all the expansions etc the CPC has since come out with, it makes one wonder if this is still the case though.

The ULA in the Spectrum is vaguely equivalent to the CRTC/Gate Array combo in the CPC - in that it handles the display, albeit in a much more fixed fashion (all the CRTC like timing and screen address generation is fixed, for example).

Where the Spectrum really has an advantage is that, given both machines have very similar processing power, the Spectrum only needs roughly half the RAM for it's display. That means you have to push half the data every time you scroll the screen or draw backgrounds etc. Unless the Spectrum original is very inefficient or spends a lot of frame time idle, that's an inherently difficult thing to overcome.

But nothing is ever entirely straightforward. The CPC display layout is closer to linear, which is a benefit. Having multiple colours means you can often avoid needing an entirely separate sprite mask, which levels the playing field in terms of sprite data that needs processing. And some effects can be managed via palette manipulation whereas the Spectrum would require brute redrawing. Then there all the multitude of hardware tricks you simply couldn't pull off on the more rigid Spectrum design.

[MartinJSUK]

No doubt, the full-on Spectrum Ports make no use of the advantages of the CPC, but reveal all its relative disadvantages. The CPC having twice as much data to move around with a similar clock speed may explain why some games are slower than the Spectrum version, or have inferior scrolling - honestly I notice it even in some very fabled CPC games like Rainbow Islands or Chase HQ, where the Spectrum versions play a bit better as a result. Obviously those both look far better on the CPC (and might make some CPU savings by not using sprite masks - I guess it depends how optimised the code is, though in both cases the same guy write both Z80 versions so it may not be), but it doesn't seem like that's a direct contributing factor to the speed - unless programmers use that obscure Mode 3 to reduce the amount of data being calculated the system still has to calculate around a 320x200 4 colour or 160x200 16 colour screen even if only 2 or 8 colours are used. Reducing the screen window size is one compromise, but that's not always satisfactory, especially if nothing else is reduced in size to compensate - you can get the same size 'sprites' but with less space to move. We all know that all the 8-bit systems had to compromise something.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Question for the technical experts...

Can a super cool but slower Speccy port, like Matchday 2 or Saboteur 2, be programmed from scratch for the CPC with the same graphics and the original speed?

I've asked this to a few different people over the years, the general consensus is no because the ULA has a lot to do with the coding on the Speccy, because the CPC lacks one of these, the strain is put on the CPU and that's where the slowdown arises. I *think* that was the reasoning, however I may have gotten my terminology wrong there.

Now with all the expansions etc the CPC has since come out with, it makes one wonder if this is still the case though.

The ULA in the Spectrum is vaguely equivalent to the CRTC/Gate Array combo in the CPC - in that it handles the display, albeit in a much more fixed fashion (all the CRTC like timing and screen address generation is fixed, for example).

Where the Spectrum really has an advantage is that, given both machines have very similar processing power, the Spectrum only needs roughly half the RAM for it's display. That means you have to push half the data every time you scroll the screen or draw backgrounds etc. Unless the Spectrum original is very inefficient or spends a lot of frame time idle, that's an inherently difficult thing to overcome.

But nothing is ever entirely straightforward. The CPC display layout is closer to linear, which is a benefit. Having multiple colours means you can often avoid needing an entirely separate sprite mask, which levels the playing field in terms of sprite data that needs processing. And some effects can be managed via palette manipulation whereas the Spectrum would require brute redrawing. Then there all the multitude of hardware tricks you simply couldn't pull off on the more rigid Spectrum design.

To make matters even worse, the ULA got swapped out of Spectrums as often as the CRTC's got swapped in CPC's, starting with the toastrack with the ULA Rain issue.

Then when the next batch of ULA's came out, it had all sorts of backward compatibility issues with earlier games (a lot which were fixed in budget/compilation reissues)

[MartinJSUK]

Zolyx is a great shout. I love the Bally series on the Amiga, and this is basically the same game. A superb reflex test yet subtly strategic too. A shame the later levels use 'bizarre colour mixes' as Shaun puts it, I wish they'd stick to the blue / black / white / yellow schematic of the C64 version (and indeed Bally – well done to its coder for only using 4 colours despite having 4092 more to choose from). More generally, the overuse of magenta (especially for backgrounds) is one of my biggest gripes on the Spectrum, thankfully CPC versions largely avoid this. Even a blatant lazy port like SWIV at least switches to the softer red for the later part of the game. A shame Mission Genocide uses heavy magenta at times later on though.

The Saboteurs have a lovely subtle art style despite the limited colour placement. Actually I love the monochrome look of Last Ninja 2, gives the feel of a classic martial arts film (shame about the sound though).

Thrust is an obvious poster child for gameplay mattering more than graphics. As mentioned it doesn't matter so much with some strategy or puzzle games – Laser Squad. Sepulcri is pretty ugly (cute main character aside) but looks like a clever game. The Magic Knight games, Arc of Yesod and Starquake could have looked better on the CPC, but retain the classic gameplay of the Spectrum versions. Lotus plays well enough on the CPC to overcome the limited colour, though a proper CPC conversion could have kept the on-track hazards that the C64 version kept – and the title and menu screens are ghastly.

[Shaun M. Neary]

The Saboteurs have a lovely subtle art style despite the limited colour placement. Actually I love the monochrome look of Last Ninja 2, gives the feel of a classic martial arts film (shame about the sound though).



Thrust is an obvious poster child for gameplay mattering more than graphics. As mentioned it doesn't matter so much with some strategy or puzzle games – Laser Squad. Sepulcri is pretty ugly (cute main character aside) but looks like a clever game. The Magic Knight games, Arc of Yesod and Starquake could have looked better on the CPC, but retain the classic gameplay of the Spectrum versions. Lotus plays well enough on the CPC to overcome the limited colour, though a proper CPC conversion could have kept the on-track hazards that the C64 version kept – and the title and menu screens are ghastly.

Given how late in the lifespan, it's an absolute crime that Last Ninja II didn't use the AY. It came out in 87, the toastrack was out in 86. The poor beeper-speaker music is inexcusable.

I'd completely forgotten about Starquake, that was awesome on the Amstrad, including the music. I didn't know what I was doing nor did I get far in the game, but I burned a lot of hours exploring the map and trying. One of the few speccy ports that didn't lose it's speed either.

[Anthony Flack]

I think Starquake looks lovely on the CPC, and Thrust looks really good on every system - a very stylish game. The sequel tries to "improve" the graphics with a more conventional look and it ends up looking way less good IMO. 

I used to play Technician Ted on my green screen CPC and when I finally saw that one in colour I definitely preferred it on the green screen. I enjoyed Technician Ted, despite it being ludicrously difficult and cryptic. But the colours look like they came out of a random number generator. 

Other Spectrum ports like Highway Encounter were thoroughly excellent and still look superb, no complaints. 

[Shaun M. Neary]

Now that I think about it...

Toobin - I'm not sure this would have worked in Mode 0 without looking like a horrible mess, but I actually had fun with this one, although it helped that I was a fan of the arcade.

Deflektor - This is a blatant Spectrum port, but it's done so well that people forget to mention the fact that it's a Spectrum port! And it's a complete classic in the process.

SDI - Again, because I was a fan of this in the arcade, I wasted a lot of hours blasting away at this. It's significantly slower than it's Spectrum counterpart but doesn't take away from the gameplay in my opinion.

Bosconian 87 - Not an official arcade license, but it's still fun to play. My only gripe is the sprites are so big for such a small playing area, but in a warped way, that added to the challenge of the game too.

[mahlemiut]

Bosconian 87 - Not an official arcade license, but it's still fun to play. My only gripe is the sprites are so big for such a small playing area, but in a warped way, that added to the challenge of the game too.
It is officially licensed (or at least the inlay cover claims so), although sure, it's not a direct port, but "enhanced" hence the "'87" tacked on the end of the title.

[trocoloco]

Myth has to be one of those, even tho it could have been so much better in mode 0 IMO, still it is a great game

[Shaun M. Neary]

This is what made me question it. Budget labels never got arcade licenses to my knowledge.

[dodogildo]

Myth has to be one of those, even tho it could have been so much better in mode 0 IMO, still it is a great game

It's impossible to make a great game out of Myth, just by adding colors. 
IMHO, Myth's CPC version deserves a full remake, which would follow in the footsteps of the awesome C64 original.

[Anthony Flack]

This is what made me question it. Budget labels never got arcade licenses to my knowledge.

It wasn't the only Namco arcade game to have a port published by Mastertronic - there was also Motos. 

[Shaun M. Neary]

This is what made me question it. Budget labels never got arcade licenses to my knowledge.

It wasn't the only Namco arcade game to have a port published by Mastertronic - there was also Motos.

That's right! I had completely forgotten about that! And it was a damn good port too.