The 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum will have many veteran gamers swooning into a reverie of eighties nostalgia – here are five of the best Spectrum games

It is, of course, an impossible task to root through the many hundreds of ZX Spectrum titles to deliver a definitive Top Five. But we’ve had a bash anyway. I’ve concentrated on titles that appeared originally on Spectrum, so no arcade conversions (goodbye R-Type) and no translations from Apple II, BBC or Vic-20 titles (so long Elite). For some reason, I also neglected Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. And Chuckie Egg. And Chaos.

For a more comprehensive round-up, you should head immediately to the Your Sinclair Official Top 100 Spectrum Games of All Time, which was persuasively and entertainingly written by Stuart Campbell. He put the motorbike-riding-through-forest thriller Deathchase at number one.

Jet Set Willy (1984)

This early flip-screen platforming adventure featured surreal locations and bizarre enemies, burning itself onto the minds of impressionable gamers who had, until this point, possibly only controlled spaceships and racing cars. Creator Matthew Smith became a bedroom coding enigma when he disappeared in the mid-eighties, spending several years in a Dutch commune before returning to the UK.

Lords of Midnight (1984)

This prototype role-playing game allowed players to explore a vast kingdom as they gathered armies to fight the evil witchking, Doomdark. Designer Mike Singleton managed to provide the look and feel of a 3D world by creating thousands of still images, which could be viewed from multiple perspectives.

Knight Lore (1984)

Created by prolific UK developer Ultimate: Play The Game, this was the first title to use the studio’s filmation engine, resulting in lush isometric visuals. It was created by Tim and Chris Stamper, who would go on to found Rare – still one of the biggest development studios in the world, and most recently responsible for Kinect Sports.

Tau Ceti (1985)

Pete Cooke’s revolutionary 3D space adventure pitted the player against a malfunctioning mainframe computer and its robot killers on the abandoned colony world of Tau Ceti III. Respected for its deep varied gameplay as well as visual innovations such as a functioning day/night cycle.

Skool Daze (1985)

One of the first games to actually attempt a replication of real-life experience, Skool Daze had players rampaging around a school building, scrawling on blackboards and trying to locate the combination for the headmaster’s safe. Later spawning a superior sequel, Back to Skool, it was like an interactive Grange Hill – with the added bonus of letting you change all the teacher and pupil names. Rude word hilarity ensued.

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The place to talk about games, even if you’re not at work and you’ve eaten your own body weight in creme eggs

It’s Easter Monday, but on the off-chance there are still a few Gamesblog regulars loafing about hoping to discuss games, the Chatterbox is open!

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An intriguing interactive theatre project from Goat and Monkey looks set to bring alternate reality gaming to the great gardens of Sussex

Theatre is and always has been interactive, from the city-wide mystery plays of the middle ages, to the modern era’s improvised comedy nights and experimental promenade performances. And though it may seem strange to draw parallels between this ancient artform and the world of video games, it’s the sense of interplay between audience and spectacle that can unite them.

This summer, the young theatre company Goat and Monkey is running a performance and alternate reality gaming (ARG) project named, The Seed. Based around the stories of Victorian botanists who would travel the world seeking rare seeds, the project starts on 28 May at a dedicated website, where viewers will read the blog of a fictitious researcher at the Millennium Seed Bank who is on a quest to find a ‘missing’ seed. As she investigates its whereabouts, she’ll write about the histories of Plant Hunters and also asks players to help, both by answering questions and by deciphering a range of puzzles.

The ARG story then culminates with a series of performances in great gardens around Sussex, including Wakehurst Place, High Beeches Gardens and finally at Borde Hill Gardens. For some of these, audience members are given wireless headsets and must follow instructions and story fragments, through the landscape. The narratives revolve around different tales of Victorian seed hunters and explorers, and participants will be able to pick up clues to the whereabouts of a hidden prize.

“Each of the four performances is a different story and takes a different form,” explains Goat and Monkey spokesman, Martin Shippen. “Two of the four are short promenade pieces where the audience will wear wireless headphones and follow a trail from one scene to the next. The Wakehurst performance takes place in a yurt but will involve problem solving and the final performance is a promenadepageant piece told in the style of traditional Mummers.

“Within each performance there are clues to help the players solve the mystery of the missing seed and find the treasure buried in the real world. Our ARG heroine will be in attendance at several performances allowing the players to talk to her. The final run of performances at Borde Hill Gardens also has more obvious game qualities as it involves audience members hunting for clues/scenes unguided by performers in a dark wood!”

This modern notion of interactive theatre, which combines location, narrative and interaction with actors has been growing in popularity for the last five years. Protoganists such as Punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak usually take over non-theatrical venues like abandoned industrial units, shops and factories, combining traditional plays with interactive elements. In 2010, Punchdrunk put on The Duchess of Malfi at an old pharmaceutical headquarters in the Docklands, and last year terrified audiences at Salford Quays with its Dr Who-inspired interactive play about a downed alien spacecraft, The Crash of the Elysium.

Other artists and studios such as Blast Theory and Hide&Seek have blurred the boundaries even further, turning installations into ‘urban games’ complete with video game-like plots, characters and objectives. Bristol has an annual festival named IGfest, dedicated to pervasive and social games that take place in various areas of the city, often with narrative and theatrical elements.

The usual response to the concept of interactive theatre tends to be, well, aren’t British audiences too reserved to get involved? “All of our performances require the audience to ‘play along’ to various levels of involvement and they will be unable to be passive onlookers,” says Shippen. “However, we cater for a wide demographic and enable individual players and audiences to engage with the game elements to different degrees.”

The Seed is part of Ahead of The Game Festival, an arts project organised in West Sussex to mark the run-up to the Olympics. Ticket details can be found at the Chichester Theatre Festival box office.

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It’s going to be Medal of Honor v Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 this year, then, as the first-person shooter battle between EA and Activision continues

EA has announced through its Medal of Honor website that the next addition to the long-running shooter series will arrive this autumn, subtitled Warfighter. The February US edition of the Official Xbox Magazine apparently has all the exclusive details.

Right now, it seems the game will be developed entirely by Danger Close, previously known as EA LA, the studio responsible for the campaign mode in 2010′s re-boot of the MoH series. The game will use the Frostbite 2.0 engine – the same tech as Battlefield 3.

Once again, it seems the story will involve so-called Tier 1 operators, elite soldiers working on special missions within enemy territory. As with the previous title, which was largely set in Afghanistan, it’s likely the emphasis will be on real-world tactics and conflicts.

This caused some controversy in 2010, when Labour MP Liam Fox complained about the appearance of Taliban fighters in Medal of Honor – however, his comments revealed only a passing knowledge of the game content, and the Labour party distanced itself from his statement. More details on the scenario of the latest title are expected to come to light at the GDC conference in two week’s time.

2010′s instalment of MoH was a critical and commercial success for EA, shifting around 5m copies, despite some criticism of the extremely short single-player mode. However, it failed to make much of a dent on Black Ops, which went on to record-breaking sales of more than 25m.

Rumours circulating at the moment suggest that Treyarch is also preparing a sequel to its own 2010 hit, Call of Duty: Black Ops. It seems the two brands will go head to head again in 2012.

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Cult developer Double Fine productions has just raised over a million dollars in Kickstarter funds for its next game. Who would you fund in this way, and what would you like them to make?

It is, of course, the feel-good story of the year so far. Veteran developer Tim Schafer didn’t think he’d get any publisher support to create an old skool point-and-click adventure, even though fans had been requesting one for years. So he set up a Kickstarter fund and asked for $400,000 within 32 days. What actually happened was this – he hit the target within a couple of hours, and the total is now over a million dollars.

To celebrate this immense story of talent, philanthropy and the power of crowd-sourcing, today’s friday question is a simple one: which developer would YOU fund to create a new game, and what title would you want to see?

I’ve put three of my own below:Matthew Smith – MegaTreeBack in the eighties, Matthew Smith programmed two of the most important games of the era: Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. However, his third project, the mysterious MegaTree, was cancelled by his publisher and later, Smith went AWOL, moving to a commune in Holland to fix bicycles. He’s back in the UK now, but I believe the source code to MegaTree was auctioned off in aid of charity eight years ago. Still, $1m in funding might spur the idiosyncratic bedroom coding genius back into action.

Yu Suzuki – Shenmue 3Oh, okay, I know we’d need a lot more than $1m dollars, but what the heck – this would be the crowd-sourcing motherlode. Sega spent an absolute fortune on the first two Shenmue titles and as astonishing as this seamless action adventure series was, it never got close to recouping the investment. There is, at least, a large community of fans who want to see a third and final title in the proposed trilogy, so that’s a start. And perhaps Suzuki could scale down his ambition a little. Maybe form a ragtag indie studio and make it with the Unity3D engine?

Ninja Theory – Enslaved 2This beautiful post-apocalyptic shooter tanked when it was released in 2010, despite co-direction from Andy Serkis, a script from Alex Garland and a haunting score by Nitin Sawhney. Some suggested that the enemies lacked variety and that the action was muted. I just thought it was a beautifully imagined world, with appealing characters and smart dialogue. I guess there’s always a chance Ninja Theory will do another, but a Kickstarter fund of a million dollars or so won’t do any harm.

Over to you…

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We all like it that games such as El Shaddai and Child of Eden still exist, but how many of them do we really play and thoroughly enjoy? How many do we go back to? No, really, I’m asking you…

As long as there have been video games, there have been weird video games. In the burgeoning days of the arcade scene we had the likes of Q*bert and Joust, but then weirdness really took off with the home computer era. Bedroom coders, locked away for months at a time, with no genres to work from, no sense of a development ‘community’… no wonder they came up with titles like Deus Ex Machina, Sentinel and Jet Set Willy.

Weirdness persisted into the PlayStation era with the likes of Polaroid Pete, Mr. Moskeeto and No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, and we do get glimpses today thanks mostly to Suda 51, Tetsuya Mizuguchi and a million indie devs.

But what strange games have entertained you the longest? Which have you played beyond the initial ‘wow, this is really strange’ moment? Are there any truly odd titles that make it into your favourite games of all time list? Really?

For this Friday, let’s think about the offbeat titles that we genuinely do love, rather than just sort of pretend to love so that people think we’re weird, too.

I’ll get us started…

Gribbly’s Day Out (Andrew Braybrook, 1985)

This seminal Commodore 64 title involves a character named Gribbly Grobbly navigating a surreal 2D world attempting to track down his missing children – or ‘gribblets’. The controls are wonderful, the landscapes richly detailed for the era, and the Defender-like gameplay thoroughly compelling. Braybrook would go on to write two bona fide C64 classics, Paradroid and Uridium, but this was a game I just played and played.

Incredible Crisis (Polygon Magic, 1999)

An early progenitor of the mini-game collection, this PlayStation oddity followed a Japanese family though a disasterous day, with each complication captured by a strange mini-challenge. It’s a sort of Japanese game show, rendered into eccentric interactive life complete with office dances, stressful supermarket shopping and hellish elevator rides. But all of them worked well, tied together with a decent family-in-crisis plot – and you just had to keep playing to find out which bizarre flight of gameplay fancy you’d be steered down next.

Rez (United Game Artists, 2001)

Tetsuya Mizugushi’s masterpiece has been accepted into the canon of truly great games, but back in 2001 it was very odd to be controlling a hacker’s avatar through a super computer while crafting techno tunes out of defeated enemies. Odd, but also astonishing. I’m not really sure if any other game has ever captured quite so well Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of the flow state – that sense of utterly focused immersion. Hypnotic and compelling, and still wonderful.

The Rub Rabbits (Sega, 2006)

Okay, it’s another mini-game collection, but I played this freaky take on the dating sim for hours and hours when my first son Zac was a (particularly demanding) baby – it got me through many sleepless nights. Like its predecessor, Project Rub, this crazed game uses every input facet of the Nintendo DS in a range of teeny tasks designed to get you together with the girl of your dreams. Stylish, strange yet utterly intuitive and fun. I was deranged with lack of sleep though.

Games

Keith Stuart

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2012 is set to be a year of new consoles, with the launch of Vita and Wii U and the possibility of an Xbox 360 follow-up at E3. But amid all this obsession over new machines, what are the devices we cherish from the past?

We haven’t done a Friday question for a while, so let’s remedy that right now. This year is going to be a big one for games hardware. There’s the launch of the PS Vita next month and the arrival of the Nintendo Wii U at some point later on. Plus, everyone is expecting Microsoft to announce its successor to the Xbox 360 at the E3 event in June.

It’s exciting – and it’s an excitement that tends to get lost behind the pervading notion that smart phones are going to kill dedicated gaming machines. I now have a PlayStation Vita for review and it’s a beautiful piece of consumer electronics engineering – stylish, highly specced, wonderfully ergonomic – it is all about the fetishistic qualities of good games hardware.

But what single console, arcade machine or handheld device would you like to own from the annals of interactive entertainment history, and why? I don’t mean just for the games it runs, I mean for the aesthetic appeal of the object – just the look and feel of the thing; I mean something you could almost display as an object d’art. If you’re into that kind of thing.

I’ve provided three of my own choices below. Let’s have some of yours in the comments section!

The Vectrex, 1982

This marvel of early eighties consumer electronics is utterly unique, with its vector-based graphics technology and its series of plastic overlays, which added colour to the otherwise monochrome visuals. I love the arcade-style portrait display, and the formative joypad, with its four-button layout. It looks like it belongs in a seventies sci-fi movie.

Star Wars, 1983

Yet more Vector graphics! But the beauty of this machine is the intricate cabinet design, with its gorgeous illustrations and the authentic instrument panel design inside. The sound is incredible for the era too, with a lively rendering of the soundtrack and clear digitised speech. Despite a cacophony of competing machines, I could always hear the Star Wars attract mode as soon as I wandered into any of the old coin-op arcades along Blackpool’s golden mile… Anyway, check out the video above, I like the way the guy sort of stalks the machine, like he’s about to murder it.

The blue debug PlayStation, 1994

These were littered around the offices of Future publishing when I first joined Edge back in 1995 and they seemed impossibly arcane and glamorous. This is where I would have played the likes of Ridge Racer and Resident Evil for the first time. I also like the chunkier, squarer design of the original PlayStation, before the slim re-model. I liked the array of obscure ports and connection features on the back as well. I’m not sure I like them quite as much as the chap in this YouTube video, though…

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Can Crazy Dave from PopCap’s massive Plants vs Zombies reach the top of the charts this Christmas with ‘hip-hop’ single Wabby Wabbo?

Casual gaming overlord PopCap has teamed up with humanatarian charity Concern Worldwide to release a Christmas single. The song, bizarrely called Wabby Wabbo is based around PopCap’s hit title Plants vs Zombies. It’s “performed” by the game’s narrator and shopkeeper Crazy Dave, a bearded nutcase with a pan on his head. “Wabbo Wabbo is believed to be the first hip-hop single ever released to feature a yodelling solo by a Yeti zombie,” says the press release.

The single is available for download now and PopCap hopes that if enough Plants vs Zombies fans download the track this week, it can beat the inevitable favourite from X-Factor to the top spot. The (let’s say “eccentric”) video accompanying the track has already had almost 600,000 views on YouTube, and 55p from every download fee goes to the charity. And remember, there’s always the chance that it could ruin Christmas for Simon Cowell.

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Doctor Who is coming to PS3, Vita and PC courtesy of a new collaboration between BBC Worldwide and developer Supermassive Games

BBC Worldwide has announced a new Doctor Who game for PS3, Vita and PC. Subtitled The Eternity Clock, the downloadable title will be the first in a series of new interactive adventures for the Time Lord. It’s due to materialise on Earth early next year.

From the little info the BBC is handing out at the moment, players are set to take on the roles of the Doctor and River Song as they explore the universe in the Tardis. According to the press release, time travel will form the basis of the game’s structure: “Changes made in one time will impact another, creating multiple possibilities and challenging players to solve puzzles across the centuries.”

The story has been co-written by the BBC Wales team responsible for the TV series, and Matt Smith and Alex Kingston will be voicing their roles. There’s no mention yet of any other major characters from the series appearing in the game, but more announcements are planned soon.

For now, the pairing of the Doc with River rather than with Amy suggests the timeline of the game is around the sixth series or possibly after. Interestingly, you’ll get to play as both the Doctor and River, maybe swapping roles to solve different game elements. It also suggests the possibility of co-op play.

Eternity Clock is being developed by Guildford-based independent studio Supermassive Games, previously responsible for PlayStation Move titles Start the Party and Tumble. We’re promised, “photo-real graphics, television quality scenes and highly realistic characters”, which moves us on visually from the browser-based series Doctor Who: The Adventure Games – these took a more stylised approach.

Next year will be an interesting one for Doctor Who-loving gamers. It should also see the release of Doctor Who: Worlds in Time, a free-to-play MMORPG from US developer, Three Rings. Co-published with Sega, this one was expected at the end of 2011, but will surely arrive at some point in 2012.

So, a downloadable action-adventure with the Doctor, River Song and a range of multi-chronological challenges … thoughts?

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sells more than 6.5m copies within 24 hours of its launch, earning an estimated $400m in sales – and beating Harry Potter’s box office

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has set a new record for the biggest ever entertainment launch. The game’s publisher, Activision Blizzard, has claimed that in the US and UK alone, the military shooter sold over 6.5m units within 24 hours of its launch on Tuesday, raising $400m in sales revenues.

The figures are based on data from Charttrack as well as customer sell-through information.

It is a third consecutive sales record for the Call of Duty series. 2009′s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 4.7m copies in 24 hours earning $310m in revenue, while last year’s Call of Duty: Black Op hit 5.6m copies in its first day.

“We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories,” said Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick.

“Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.”

By contrast, the highest grossing movie of the year so far, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, made $80m in one day on the global box office – a record figure for the film industry.

Activision claims that 13,000 stores worldwide opened at midnight on Monday to allow queues of gamers to buy the title. Reportedly, Modern Warfare 3 has also set a record for the largest numbers of concurrent players on Xbox Live, the console’s multiplayer gaming service.

“Call of Duty is more than a game. It’s become a major part of the pop cultural landscape,” claimed Activision Publishing chief executive Eric Hirshberg. “It is a game that core enthusiasts love, but that also consistently draws new people into the medium.”

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