I'm more than a bit late to the Speccy Nation party as Dan Whitehead's book is already ten years old. However, it's probably still selling well, as this "tribute to the golden age of British gaming" is unlike any other anthology of games reviews that I have read in one pretty important respect - it's very funny!

It bills itself simply as a journey through fifty Spectrum games. A glance at the contents page shows it features quite a few of the all-time Spectrum classics: the Ultimate games plus Skool Daze, Deathchase, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, for example. However, at least half of the games included are less well-known, amongst them Flunky, Survival, Chaos, Wheelie and Agent X. Crucially, the author hasn't just chosen these games at random. Instead, he has chosen certain games to put in certain sections of his book, making the sub-collections of reviews illustrative of a broader point. So, for example, we get sections like 'Never Again: The games that would never be made today', 'The Dark Horses: The games that were more interesting than you'd think' and 'The Pioneers: The games that broke the mould'. And in each section the reviews themselves tail off with some wider thoughts as to how these fit with the theme of that section.

Dan Whitehead finds at lot to like in every single one of the fifty games his book includes, and his prose is very readable, though wildly over-exuberant in a way that can only really be appreciated by quoting a few of his most imaginative opinions. In Skool Daze, he feels that "the bully wasn't just a bullet-headed sprite, but a digital version of the actual hard lad you spent every break trying to avoid". And what do you do in The Wild Bunch? Well, "you endure this blatantly unfair ordeal and fluke your way to victory, or you start over with nothing to show for your wasted hours"...! And did you think Jet Set Willy was just a platform game? Oh no no no. According to Dan, it's "an abstract Faustian fable in which the trappings of success literally eat away at your existence," and "The whole game is full of squalid, degrading imagery of the most horrific kind."

This style of writing, whilst being much more colourful than a lot of reviews I have read of the same games, is not only engaging, but, if you've actually played the games in question, cannot help but elicit a wry smile. The author's central point is that it's tempting to conclude, on such a "limited" machine as the Spectrum, that all the games are total crap and not worth playing. And the genius of this approach is that most Spec-chums are very much in agreement with this sentiment on some hidden level. They cannot understand why they fire up Manic Miner, forty years on, instead of playing a more modern game. To say to them that that might be because "the game's opening level is arguably one of the purest and most perplexing platforming challenges in gaming history" might actually make some of them wonder whether that's true for at least a few seconds. (Of course, it isn't.)

Having grown up in the world of the Spectrum, Dan Whitehead writes with a great deal of knowledge and wit, but with one foot firmly in the current day. The book is aimed at British readers, and the reviews reference everything from Grange Hill to Minnie The Minx (which I suppose is good if you're British and not so good if you're not). The Britain of the 1980's, the one portrayed in flick-screen graphic adventure Everyone's A Wally, was, according to Dan, beset by "a downbeat melancholy atmosphere; a ramshackle suburbia populated by people crushed under the weight of their everyday responsibilities". There's a common thread of self-deprecating humour running through the prose too. He makes the point time and time again that Spectrum games, with their lack of save states and/or password systems, are much more hardcore than most modern gamers would ever expect. Firefly (a game that most Spec-chums have probably not heard of), he singles out for praise as "a multi-tiered game of systems within systems, where new ideas are squeezed into every crack and random chance teases you with the knowledge that maybe you're just not good enough".

Apart from either Dan or his proof-reader not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's", each review is presented quite well. The book is quite short at just 124 pages, and I would have preferred for each review to have been illustrated by more than one screenshot, but, at just £3.95, it's a great little book. And, personally, what I liked most of all about Speccy Nation were Dan's thoughts on the more bizarre of the Spectrum games that are out there. If you pick up an old Spectrum magazine, you see reviewers of the time scratching their heads over games like Give My Regards To Broad Street, Cannibal Island and Flunky and it's tempting (or at least I find it tempting!) to think those games definitely aren't worth playing now. However, Dan's commentary, with its somewhat unique approach to them, argues that they are, actually, important games in their own right, perhaps not for their content, but for the very fact of their existence. The ability to play Paul McCartney doing little apart from hailing taxis (Broad Street), the casual racism (Cannibal) and the dismissive attitude of the Royal Family to their servants (Flunky) is, according to Dan, a biting social commentary of the era of their release. They're crap, yes, but not just crap.

Speccy Nation, obviously, was first published a long time before the recent resurgence of interest in the Spectrum. As I write this review, Crash is back on the shelves of WHSmith and Cronosoft has just announced its 75th new physical Spectrum release. So, although Speccy Nation was never intended to be an historical piece, I also found it somewhat interesting in that respect. It's one of the very few books written when it seemed as if the Speccy was fading into obscurity, and, although the book is very funny, it's tinged with a bit of nostalgia and a longing for a youth that the author felt he'd had, and couldn't be recaptured.

Obviously, it turned out that the Spectrum was a long way from being dead, and there have been hundreds of books, glossy anthologies and annuals about it written and published in more recent years, all weighing in at a considerably higher price than £3.95. I wonder whether Dan has been involved in this brave new world and enjoyed a second youth through it. One imagines that, if he has (and to quote a particularly British phrase in relation to a peculiarly British book) he must be happy as Larry. And if you buy this book, which I strongly recommend you do, you'll be as happy as the pair of them. Pocket-sized, very informative and hilariously funny to boot.

Speccy Nation is available here.