This. THIS!!!!! :-D

It was tough starting out on Wizball, but after the stability upgrades things became much easier I remember. Collecting and mixing the different colours to return the needed specific colour to each world once your pots were full with the droplets collected. You also got your cat who was the satellite similar to other shooters at the time like R Type etc, gave you a needed firepower boost!

One of my favourites has to be Platoon, a license well used and it was a damned fine game. I could never kill Sgt Barnes at the end though, always ran out of time!

!I also remember when I first started playing Paralax, I had the budget version which basically only had a paragraph of text telling you how to play on the inlay. It did not tell you though anything about landing and rescuing scientists. I just thought you flew around in the area where you started and just shoot stuff down. Then a few months later a friend came round and mentioned how to disable the gates into the next area and the fact you had to rescue people! I was clueless until that point about any of that stuff!

sounds interesting considering how big the company was in the 8 bit - 16 bit era.

I think the Robocop 3 game was even better than the movie. :) I think it was also from Ocean.

EDIT: And I mean specifically the PC/Amiga/ST version, not the Commodore 64/Sinclair Spectrum version.

PC: http://www.mobygames.com/game/robocop-3_

C=64: http://www.mobygames.com/game/robocop-3__ (I've never seen this, no idea if it is any good)

Indeed. If you didn't know what you were supposed to do, the game was just weird and frustrating. But once you figured it out (or someone told you how it worked), it was a fantastic game. It had an excellent singleplayer experience, but where it really shone was in the 2-player co-op mode, with one player controlling the Wizball and the other controlling the Catellite.

It was just a pity that all of the ports to other platforms than the C64 didn't do the game justice.

Given the technical limitations of the ZX Spectrum 48K, they did pretty good. It didn't have fancy chips dedicated to sound (at least until the AY-3-8912 was added to the 128K(and "+" ) models and sprites/graphics modes... (at least until the Sam Coupé right at the death of 8-bit systems).

Hell, I loved the little rubber-keyed fugly graphics with colour-clash. Made me care less about graphics in games, and more about gameplay and immersion.

Anyone placed a pledge yet?

I probably should - I liked their games...but come on? This close to Christmas? >.<

:D

For the record, there's an unofficial remake of Wizball for the PC made by Retrospec. It's not bad at all.

http://retrospec.sgn.net/game/wizball

Well the book is not going to be made without a little support :-)

Getting the Sensible Software book as well so not to get this would be just plain wrong! :)

Just hope someone does an Infocom and Level9 books - those would be instant-pledge :)

I never had a Spectrum but I subscribed to Retro Gamer for two years and their love for Spectrum (albeit quite biased since they neglect many other platforms) rubbed off on me a little. I mostly like it because its graphics work despite its limitations - it's nice and clean. Gameplay often leaves quite a lot to be desired though but games like Dizzy remain great fun and with Savestate in emulators, it's less frustrating.

I didn't mean the graphics and sound. But yeah, the Spectrum version completely lacked the bonus stage when completing a colour, and the sound in the Amiga version is terrible too. Mostly it is the controls in the non-C64 ports I'm unhappy with. They just don't feel right, and that shouldn't really be affected by the platform. If you code them to respond a certain way, then they will respond in that way, no matter which machine you're on.