Simulations

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3D DEATHCHASE
(Micromega - 1983)
During 1983, the term '3D' probably appeared in the title of more games than any other. Infact, it was used so freely that it ended up being seen as a sorry gimmick to mask a poor game. There were some exceptions though, none more so than Mervyn Escourt's Deathchase. There's a perfunctory storyline - something about mighty warlords battling for the forests - but never mind all that because this is one of the most instantly playable games ever. You must steer your motorbike through a forest and destroy two enemy bikes in order to progress onto the next level, where the forest becomes denser. Between each level there is a night section where the trees are seen slightly later (I think). The 3D effect is astounding and creates the sort of frantic excitement that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Just brilliant.

CHEQUERED FLAG
(Sinclair/Psion - 1984)
The road racer game was still waiting for a hero at the time Chequered Flag. When most people were probably hoping for an arcade-style game, what it delivered was a technically accurate Formula One experience. You can race round ten of the world's most famous tracks - but sadly on you own. And this is the game's only real drawback - the fact that you are only ever racing against the clock. That said, the graphics are good, there are plenty of hazards to avoid and a myriad of dials to watch. A consumate simulation and because it was virtually the only worthwile racer at the time, one that found great popularity.

TOMAHAWK
(Digital Integration - 1985)
After months of adverts, Tomahawk, DI's follow up to their ground-breaking Fighter Pilot, finally reached the shops for Christmas 1985, complete with the appalling Lenslok security system to prevent piracy. Uck! The game was sublime though. It puts you in control of an attack helicopter on a series of deadly missons over enemy territory. The graphics are vector style and work very well. As you'd expect from DI, the handling is extremely realistic, and there is a grin-inducing variety of weapons to play with. You'll have great fun popping up over a mountain ridge to despatch a tank with a Hellfire missile.

TURBO ESPRIT
(Durell - 1986)
This is not just a plain old racing game, but also includes elements of shoot 'em up too. You are a secret agent at the wheel of your Lotus Esprit Turbo with a mission to foil a gang of nasty drug dealers. They are equipped with four delivery cars who stock up with heroin from a van that roams the streets. It's your job to stop them by tracking them down and ramming or blasting them off the road. The baddies also have a number of hit cars who are out to do you damage, so watch your tail. The graphics are great and there is a choice of four different cities to explore. Be careful how you drive though - any damage to civilians and you'll pick up penalty points. Because of this latter feature, you can even play the game as a sort of Carmageddon, causing as much chaos as possible!

FIGHTER PILOT
(Digital Integration - 1984)
Until this game was released, the only flight sims available involved light aircraft and painfully slow, simple graphics. The thrill of flying was certain not something that the Spectrum appeared to excel at. Then Digital Integration, a company who create military flight simulators, decided to turn their hand to the new home computer market. Their first effort was Fighter Pilot, based on the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. The landscape is virtually featureless and there are no fancy missiles to fire off, but the dogfighting is fast and furious and there is some tricky taking-off and landing to get the hang of. Although it looks somewhat basic compared to later games, it was a first on the Spectrum and one of the most technically realistic flying experiences available for years.

Simulations

One of the joys of playing computers is being able to do something that you'd probably never have the chance to in your normal life. Let's face it, a dish washing simulator doesn't sound too attractive (lest we forget Your Spectrum's spoof Advanced Lawnmower Simulator), but simulating a supersonic dogfight or a high speed road race does.

The simulator made its first appearance in the arcades in 1975 with Atari's Night Driver. This used scrolling pillars of diminishing size to create the impression of movement and perspective. By the early Eighties enhanced sound and graphics had improved games immeasurably and some classic titles were storming the arcades, most notably Pole Position.

The other popular type of simulation to come to prominence around this time was the flight sim. The first home computer version was Sublogic's cleverly titled Flight Simulator, released for the black-and-white TRS-80 in 1980. Bill Gates liked it so much, he bought the company and developed the game into the successful Microsoft Flight Simulator series. The Spectrum got in on the act in 1982, with the ingeniously named Flight Simulation. It was quite a staid affair, concerned with landing and taking off in a light aircraft, but at the time the very fact that this black box of tricks could present a crude representation of flight on your TV, was nothing short of sorcery.

What people really wanted was high speed, aerobatic mayhem, preferably involving plenty of shooting. This was a little way off, but a step in the right direction came with Digital Integration's Fighter Pilot (1984). To play this game today, you'd probably be bored rigid, but as a technically accurate representation of how a fighter aircraft handles, it was a triumph. Within the next few years the realm of airborne combat really hit its stride with the likes of Durell's Combat Lynx, the first real helicopter simulator, Spitfire 40 from Mirrorsoft and Sid Meier's excellent F15 Strike Eagle. Yes, that's Sid Meier of Civilisation fame.

Meanwhile, on the racing front, a couple of early titles Grand Prix from Britannia and 3D Speed Duel by dK'Tronics had attempted to bring the genre to the Spectrum, but neither impressed. Then in 1983, Micromega released 3D Deathchase, a first-person racer set in an increasingly dense forest. It was a fast, breathless, rollercoaster ride of a game - bringing breakneck 3D thrills into peoples' homes over a decade before dedicated graphics hardware would make such sights commonplace.

In 1984 came Psion's famous Chequered Flag which was graphically and technically very strong, but a little dull as you are the only car on the track. For all its faults though, it was the best looking Formula 1 game yet. Back in the arcades Pole Position was still the racing game that people were queueing up to play and an official Spectrum version was keenly anticipated. So the press and the public waited and waited, but it was not until the arcade original was virtually obsolete that Atarisoft released the conversion. It had come far too late and was not quite as good as many had hoped.

One of the Spectrum's highest quality racers arrived, not in a car, but on a bike. It was Micromega who again came to the rescue with Full Throttle (1984). Although it perhaps lacked a little colour, it made up for it by being the fastest, toughest track racing game of the time. The frustration at being reduced to a standstill by another biker bumping into you, while he speeds ahead unaffected, almost caused me to hurl my Spectrum out the window.

Much of the joy of an arcade driving game is tackling real-life controls like steering wheels and pedals. With today's PCs, coupled with some expensive peripherals, this is possible, but in the days of the Spectrum a joystick was the best that you could hope for, or worse still, a few squishes of that rubbery keyboard to guide you round the track. There was one brave attempt to offer an alternative control system with Formula One from Spirit Games and their infamous plastic yellow 'ashtray', which was supposed to be rolled over the keyboard like a steering wheel. The game was hugely hyped and much was expected, but it was a major disappointment, more due to the abominable control system than the graphics. Following controversy surrounding pre-release orders for the game, Spirit vanished into the ether, to rise again as Mastertronic.

So we've covered land and air, what about sea? A gripping representation of being aboard a World War 2 sub perhaps, or skippering a battleship in dangerous North Atlantic operations? As exciting as those prospects sound, there were precious few ocean-bound simulations on the Spectrum. Save a few early BASIC submarine games, the best of the bunch was probably Sid Meier's (yes him again) Silent Service. In the late Eighties, this genre was explored a little further with Hewson's Ocean Conqueror and Grandslam's Hunt for Red October being worth a look.

Simulators rely on realism for their impact and that in turn means graphics. Therefore, few types of game date as badly as this. But when playing Spectrum simulators, we're not strictly dealing with an attempt at realism. We know that playing 3D Deathchase is not what it would really be like to hurtle through a forest on a motorbike, but then do we honestly want to experience the real thing? If your answer is yes, then next time you play it, ask someone to hit you in the face with a spade every time you run into a tree. If you're not that keen, then just enjoy the games that are listed here for what they are: the distinguished ancestors of today's incredible simulations.

If you liked those, try these.

Here some more simulations that are worth a look.

ACE (Cascade - 1986)
Cascade were a company who made their name with the Casdcade 50 compilation back in 1983. It was a collection of BASIC games which had been submitted by home programmers. Many of the games were breathtakingly bad, some merely abysmal and others just dismal, but it had a strange charm and was advertised for so many years that countless Spectrum owners ended up with it in their collection, if only because of the idea of owning 50 games was too much to resist. This lack of pedigree makes it all the more remarkable that Cascade produced such a fast, fun flight combat simulator three years later. Unlike Fighter Pilot that went before, it doesn't give a fig for technical accuracy and is in more of an arcade style. The graphics are speedy and smooth and for those who just want to turn their cannons on some enemy aircraft, this is a good place to start. There was also a sequel which offered a head-to-head battle with another player.

Combat Lynx (Durell - 1984)
To my knowledge, this was the first helicopter sim to appear on the Spectrum. It's not a flight simulator in the normal sense though, because you view your chopper in the third-person (ahem) rather than from the cockpit. You must defend your bases and provide support to ground forces with an array of guns, rockets and missiles. The 3D graphics work remarkably well and there's plenty of shooting to be done, so there's fun to be had even if you're not a huge sim fan. Another early classic from Mike Richardson of Turbo Esprit and Harrier Attack fame.

Dambusters (US Gold - 1985)
It's 1943 and you are flying deep into German territory to delivery the bouncing bombs that will destroy the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe dams and flood the Ruhr Valley. Don't think that you can just jump into your Lancaster and start bashing the Hun, because there's plenty of training to do before they'll let you lead your own mission. You'll need to switch between several different screens as you steer the aircraft, navigate, shoot down enemy fighters and finally release the bomb. Much more original and involving than many flight sims.

F-15 Strike Eagle (Microprose - 1986)
In 1982, before he went on to achieve fame with the Civilisation series, Sid Meier was a systems analyst in the States. He met up with a US Air Force pilot called Bill Stealey at a business meeting in Las Vegas and they discussed their shared passion for flying. They ended up forming Microprose, a company that specialised in simulations and produced some great titles. In true American spirit, F-15 Strike Eagle, allows you to shoot down fighters over Hanoi or drop bombs in Libya all in the name of freedom - or something. The ground is represented by a sort of moving grid, which detracts from the reality a little, but the flying experience is convincing enough and there's a vast arsenal of deadly weapons to unleash on all those nasty foreigners. A top class fighter sim.

Full Throttle (Micromega - 1984)
Quite possibly the most frustrating game I've ever played on the Spectrum. Nonetheless, this motorcycle racer was the best thing on two wheels to appear for years. Like Micromega's earlier title Deathchase, the author was once again Mervyn Escourt. You'd be forgiven for thinking that he was a bike nut, but apparently he had not even ridden one before he worked on this game. In Full Throttle you get to race on ten of the world's top circuits on your 500cc motorcycle, competing against 39 other riders. Should you bash into another bike, rather than both of you tumbling into the grass verge, you merely slow down, while the other guy races into the distance. This can make you blue with the sheer injustice of it! It's still a compelling racing game though, and certainly the best of its time.

Pole Position (Atarisoft - 1985)
When it finally reached the shops in early 1985, there were grumbles about the arcade classic being far too late. And plenty of kids spat out their Coke when they saw the �7.99 price tag for a game that in truth would never take up much of their time (a lot of money in those days, even if modern kids laugh in the face of today's rip-off prices). Still, it was a pretty good conversion and if it had come out a year earlier, people would have been eulogising about it. It may have had very little competition at the time, but it still holds its own in the annals of driving games.

Silent Service (Microprose - 1986)
In Silent Service you are in control of a US submarine operating in the Pacific during World War II. Like all of Microprose's games, it is an absorbing and well-research simulation and does its best to recreate the tense world of the submariner. Bizarrely, it was also a best seller in Japan.

Southern Belle (Hewson - 1985)
Who has not, as a boy, dreamt of being a steam engine driver? Well here's your chance. This game puts you in control of the Southern Belle, a steam train on an hour long journey from London Victoria to Brighton. There's not much in the way of steering to be done, but you must maintain the coal and water supplies and keep to the schedule. The graphics are good and train enthusiasts should have fun, but for the rest of us there's probably not enough to do.

Spitfire 40 (Mirrorsoft - 1985)
A classic World War II sim that puts you in the cockpit of the legendary Supermarine Spitfire as you barrel about over the Kent countryside blasting dastardly Germany aircraft out of the sky. Unlike earlier games you can create a pilot character and guide him through a career of dogfights, medals, promotions and untimely death at the hands of a Messerschmitt's machineguns.