Introduction

Halfway through writing this month's Retro Round Up, my shiny new Sinclair ZX Vega arrived. "Comes preloaded," its packaging exclaims, "with 1,000 games". Oddly, though, there was no mention on the packaging or the official Vega website (www.zxvega.co.uk) of what those 1,000 games actually were... and it's fair to say I was extremely surprised to find out!

The Vega, in case you don't yet know, is a plug-and-play-via-Scart mini-Spectrum and so, after plugging it in and with some bemusement, I began paging through the on-screen menus searching for my favourite Spectrum games of yesteryear. Hunchback? Nope. Rainbow Islands, maybe? Nada. Ah well, surely Manic Miner, the game that defined the Spectrum generation and launched a thousand clones, would be there, right? Wrong, also not included.

And yet I did recognise the titles of many of the Spectrum games therein, and regular readers of this column will do too - LaLa Prologue, Zombie Calavera, Phantomas Tales, Quantum Gardening, Battery's Not Precluded... In short, the ZX Vega features practically an even split between games of the Eighties, the Nineties, the Noughties and the present day.

The experience was quite curious. Don't get me wrong - some of the very best software for the Spectrum is, of course, being written and published right now. I raved about Cronosoft's Egghead Round The Med and Splattr in Micromart #1346 - the Vega includes both. However, writing about them at that time felt like exposing to a wider audience some extremely niche software, available in quite limited supply. Until the launch of the Vega, you would also have been destined to pay out individually for most of the quality titles this column has covered (by ordering them from the likes of Cronosoft, Monument or RetroWorks). Whether by means of digital download or physical cassette, for many of these new titles, this has been the only way to get them.

However, by way of the Vega, these self-same games have suddenly gone global - they are about to be played by tens of thousands of people; everyone in fact who buys the Vega. So if you have regularly read the retro columns of Micromart but been dissuaded from playing at least the latest Spectrum game by the need to haul your Speccy out of the attic (or fire up an emulator on your PC) - not to mention pay the standard £4.99 that each game usually cost! - you can now simply invest in a Vega instead and, at a stroke, get almost every game I've thus far covered; the box may make no mention of them but practically the games from the entire Cronosoft, Monument and RetroWorks catalogues are included on the Vega in their entirety!

Wow indeed. Brand new Vegas are currently changing hands on eBay for just £100. That's the equivalent of 10p per game! I also expect that, if Argos decides to distribute it this Christmas, its price will be a lot lower. Wow again.

And yet... there's something a tad peculiar about this hand-held Spectrum including such a wealth of brand new Spectrum games. First is the blindingly obvious fact that, as I found out instantly, the games you played on your actual Spectrum as a teenager aren't there. I think it is a reasonable assumption on the part of most buyers that they should be - to have the new console without them is like publishing a "Sega Megadrive Collection" on which the bulk of games didn't even exist in the era of the Sega Megadrive.

Second, for the publishers of modern Spectrum games, I would imagine the effect on orders for their wares will be devastating. There is little point sending off £12.99 to RetroWorks for Brunilda now. A few pounds more buys it, a Vega and 999 additional games too. As for Monument Microgames, which was on the verge of releasing physical versions of Megaman X Reloaded, LaLa Prologue and Cray 5, its site (www.monumentmicrogames.com) is suddenly as empty as the Vega is full!

The Vega is certainly an amazing product, but it must surely impact whether such companies feel it is still worthwhile now to produce those games it includes on physical cassette.

Gommy, Medieval Defender

An immediate case in point is Gommy, Medieval Defender, a new cassette-based game for the Spectrum 128K only by RetroWorks. Your mission is to defend Gommy's castle by dropping cannonballs onto the marauders scaling its walls. It's a "survive-as-long-as-you-can" affair that's made significantly harder than it should be by colours that clash in that peculiar Spectrum game way.

As you clear each castle wall of would-be looters, you will move onto a slightly more difficult one. The screens are made harder by protrusions from the wall itself, meaning your enemies can shield themselves from your projectiles. In addition, as protrusions increase, you need to put a little more thought into where to launch cannonballs from in the first place.

It is a simple idea and a very playable game, spruced up by groovy background music. The colour clash means you have to squint to see it properly though, which almost makes me wish RetroWorks had sacrificed the colour and instead programmed it only in monochrome.

Gommy, Medieval Defender can be (a) downloaded for free from www.retroworks.es (where you'll also find a version for the MSX too!), (b) bought on cassette from www.sellmyretro.com (£5.00), and/or (c) played on the ZX Vega, where it comes included.

Slubberdegullion

Slubberdegullion probably isn't the first time a graphic adventure has been paired up with rotational controls, physics and inertia - but there aren't too many games in such a genre and, more surprisingly, it really works.

Your mission is to get through a cavern complex by angling your craft so its nose points the way you want to go, and then thrust in that direction. You need to avoid both everything that moves, and the bullets from wall-mounted gun turrets. Something I quite like is that you do not have to avoid the walls; so you can rest against these - very helpful when you need to take aim at everything else!

You have three separate weapons - missiles, bombs and two pinballs which can be released to ricochet around each cavern. You have to switch between each of these with one control key and fire with another. The bad guys do seem to be very adept, however, at avoiding all three of them.

Slubberdegullion is a neat, surprisingly different idea which, I think successfully fuses together two different game genres. Very smoothly done in all respects, it is available from Cronosoft (a) as a digital download (£1.99), (b) as a physical cassette (£3.99) and/or (c) can also be played on the ZX Vega, where it comes included.

Utter Tripe

I don't load games blind. I read about them first so I have an idea of what to expect. Utter Tripe has instructions but they are incomprehensible - utter tripe in fact. Thanks Cronosoft, that's two minutes of my life I can't reclaim.

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Thankfully, Utter Tripe is a lot better than its name suggests, and its befuddling instructions are part of the whole mysterious ensemble. You're not meant to know what to do when you begin, and the screen being filled with total nonsense when you do so is only meant to intrigue you further.

Which of course means that before I go any further, I have to shout "Spoiler Alert!". If you want to experience Utter Tripe at its weirdest, glorious best then you've now read all you need to. Play it and then come back only once you've gathered your thoughts.

Back already? Well, don't say I ruined it for you. As you might have guessed, Utter Tripe is a very "different" type of game - apart from the rare Dreamcast title The Typing Of The Dead, I've never quite seen anything like it. It's more of a compilation of mini-games rather than a single one - and it's actually very difficult to do it justice in print because (a) I haven't seen all of those mini-games and (b) each of these games is unique in its own right and I can't cover them all.

If you dive straight in, the first "task" you are given is to "promote a pawn" on an overhead chessboard, featuring eight of your pawns and two nasty patrolling knights. However, your pawns are labelled with words, and to move one of them you must type in the corresponding word for that piece and press Enter. Time the keypress well and it'll skip past those marauding knights and gain you a "Pass". You'll then proceed to another task.

Tasks are diverse indeed. Word-denoted footballs are lined up in front of a goal and a ducking and diving goalie. Targets hang in space and words operate fans to blow balloons into them. Maths questions need to be answered with the word that denotes the correct number. There's even the demijohn from Homebrew (See Micromart #1362) squeezed in there with words to drop the fruits instead of a barrel!

And is it any good? Yes, it's superb. Doubly so too, if you're a gamer with a limited concentration span. Don't like the current "task"? Don't stress, in twenty seconds it'll be replaced by something different. Tasks aren't always easy either - the word "Fail" will reduce one of your lives before proceeding if you're not up to them.

I've lost count of the number of new Spectrum games I've seen by Jonathan Cauldwell and the man clearly has the imagination of a superhero to keep churning these original ideas out at such rate and quality. Available from Cronosoft (a) as a digital download (£1.99) and/or (b) as a physical cassette (£3.99).

Ghost Castle Double Pack

Finally, we come to the Ghost Castle Double Pack, which is a "remastering" of two Spectrum public domain titles and comes supplied on a double-sided cassette from Cronosoft.

The original Ghost Castle is a maze puzzle game which consists of a number of themed screens. In each one, you are charged with collecting objects to make progress, and finally exiting through a blue door.

The levels need to be completed in exactly the same way every time you play because if you do not collect objects in the correct order, you wind up unable to get any further and need to quit. If you find a yellow key, for example, it will open one of the two yellow doors before disappearing. If one room contains only one object and the other an object and another yellow key, you want to do the second one first.

The big problem with Ghost Castle though is in its terrible game controls. Patrolling nasties need to be avoided on most screens - but your character will often travel one step too many in your chosen direction. This makes the game seem clunky and basic - the nasties do not patrol as such but rather sprites "leap" from one 8x8 location to the next. The same effect also occurs if you move somewhere which scrolls the screen.

Thankfully, the second game in the pack, Ghost Castle 2 is a sequel that shares only its main sprite with the first game. You are now placed in a colourful maze frequented by two beasties per screen. If you exit left, you enter another screen on the right, and you can fire in any one of eight directions to clear the way before you.

It's rare that a sequel differs in almost every respect from the original, so fans expecting another keys and doors-based puzzle game might well actually be disappointed. Indeed, Ghost Castle 2 has more in common with Ultimate classic Sabre Wulf than its prequel. Come to mention it, the game all looks very junglesque too. I'm not sure where the "castle" of the title fits in at all!

Not that I'm complaining - Ghost Castle 2 is a lot more enjoyable than the first and a lot less frustrating. You're given three lives and an energy bar for all three of them - meaning that you can see a fair amount of the game before you inevitably bite the dust. Graphics are good and your character, instead of the plodding dufus of Ghost Castle, is very responsive. There's little not to like here in fact.

Available from Cronosoft (a) as a digital download (£1.99) and/or (b) as a physical cassette (£3.99).

Sheepoid

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Just time to squeeze in another C64 release - Sheepoid - which is available from Psytronik. Sheepoid takes place on a single screen and you have control of two "sheepoid" lasers; one at the bottom of the screen that moves left and right, and another on the extreme right that moves up and down. The catch is that the fire button operates them both, sending a blast both up and across (right-to-left) the arena they border.

This arena, known as the neon vortex, is a manic place. Empty at first, it slowly fills with enemies whose one objective is to avoid your blasts for long enough to plough into one of your "sheepoid" guns, wiping out one of your lives. Were this the only challenge, indiscriminate blasting would put paid to their plans without much thought.

The situation is complicated however by the baby sheep who also wander the vortex and who reduce your score when they come to any harm. And so, after all, that vortex is actually pretty difficult to clear because, just as you line up that vertical hand-sheepoid-cannon perfectly, a stray sheep will wander in front of the horizontal one! Bahhh, indeed.

Sheepoid is a loud bomb of a game - it even sports an epilepsy warning. Impacts cause flashes and exploding enemies beget trance-like effects, much like the celebrated Jeff Minter "Llamasoft" games of old. This inspiration could not be more clear. Llamasoft produced Attack Of The Mutant Camels, and level two's nemeses are mutant camels.

Personally, Sheepoid is a bit too mindless for my liking. Psytronik has produced better games than this and it doesn't offer much in addition to the Minter games it dutifully pays homage to. Presumably it was made by fans for fans - and they are the ones who will snap it up! That said, it all fits together quite well for just £4.99 on cassette or 5.25" disc (Both have the superb Psytronik packaging that comes as standard). If you opt for disc, you also get four bonus games that can be called up from the main menu. I don't have the space to review each of these in full but for sure Bionic Granny Returns is an interesting way to kill five minutes.

And Finally, The Vega Verdict...

The sheer number of games the Vega includes - every game worthy of an individual review in its own right - has given me a little pause for thought in relation to next month's column. I don't want the column to simply be the equivalent of a review of "yet more games on the Vega" each issue, and yet it is such a fantastically important retro product that as soon as I began to use it, it was inevitable that it would impact the column in a big way. It is a real "game-changer" product in fact, potentially introducing the Spectrum to a whole new generation. It is too early to tell if the Vega will prove commercially successful enough that other companies consider variants that bring MSX, Amstrad or Acorn games back to our television sets. If you have even a passing interest in retro games however, I think it should be considered an essential purchase.