What are your memories of Taito's Speccy ports? Any particular favourites? Any others you'd like to see in text adventure form? Have a shout about it here, and thanks for watching. :)
Chase HQ, Renegade, New Zealand Story, and Rainbow Islands were this American's first exposure to the ZX Spectrum's arcade catalog, and totally gave me the wrong idea about what to expect. (Not that R-Type was helping set expectations any more realistically.) Thank you for the early 2000's Retro Game nostalgia - unfortunately, it just took a few years for all that 8-bit micro goodness to reach our shores.
Oh yeah, and Renegade III would make a great text adventure. I know that's cheating, and it's not even a proper Taito game, but....well...am I the only one who really thinks that a terrible concept is at its best when fully explored?
NZ Story was an amazing game. Never understood how/why it started out as an arcade machine - it wasnt really the sort of game you'd want as an arcade game (imho). That said, I played the original arcade on mame last year during lock down.. still holds up today.. Amazing.. And speccy version was fantastic.
The number of speccy fans are dwindling. Actually I think it's probably more to do with the length of the videos. The tik tock attention span of most people now, wouldn't surprise me if the yt algorithm prefers under 20 mins.
@@cubeflinger yup. I love that the videos are long. I only like long yt content tbh. I like tik tok too - but it’s a different thing - fast (junk) food. Kim’s definitely one of my favorite content creators. Actually makes my day when she drops a video
I had the Taito Coin-op Hits compilation for Speccy, and Bubble Bobble, Flying Shark and Renegade got played to death. Also had the Arcadia collection featuring Op Thunderbolt, Chase HQ and New Zealand Story. I associate Taito games with the best of the arcade, because I could only play arcade games on my 48k rubber keyboard Speccy and so many of the Taito ports were, as you've mentioned, really damn good! Thanks for the nostalgia blast!
Just discovered this channel and spent most of the week watching your video's. I hope you appreciate how much joy your content brings to people. Re-living their youth through your amazing research and narration. This is an astonishing channel, the best out there....Thank you,thank you!
Thanks Kim, I was sitting here with Covid feeling sorry for myself and your vid has brightened up my evening immeasurably, bringing back many fond memories, not least of loading up Batty on the cover tape and being amazed at sheer quality of it. Much better than my pirated copy of Arkanoid.
Como siempre, un placer ver cada uno de tus videos! El spectrum tuvo grandes conversiones, con un encanto especial 😉. Te seguimos desde España, un saludo.
When looking back at these I’m always amazed at the speed and number of sprites on screen at once with the speccy! It’s really no surprise it was such a massive success as a games platform!
What an epic video! Your knowledge and passion for this era of gaming is so great to watch. I loved most of these as a kid, would say Rainbow Islands and Bubble Bobble are so good they’re pretty much the main reason I still have a speccy today.
Always get excited when a new Kim Justice video shows up in my feed. You can always tell you put a huge amount of work into them. Top content as always.
Goodness, it's only seeing them all together like this that I realise just how many incredible Taito ports there were on the Speccy! Cracking video as ever.
Thanks Kim. Always appreciate your work and dedication, and making entertaining and informative videos. This one covers titles that are close to my heart with games that I'll always fondly remember (and play from time to time on emulation).
Great video Kim! Really enjoy these run downs of Speccy ports from the Arcade, certainly a bunch I hadn't heard of before and as always amazing tid-bits of the development of certain games
Another superb video thanks Kim. I played the heck out of Operation Wolf, Renegade, Chase HQ and Flying Shark. I also liked SlapFight. +1 for a Players video!
Great video as usual, Kim. Just one remark - Xain'D Sleena was anything but a 'hum-drum' arcade game. Take note it was published in '86, and it was the first game to feature the double jump as well as the first jointed multi-sprite boss enemy. It was also the best looking arcade game around (Sega super scalers excluded). It had a lot of fans where I'm from.
Strange they never took off over there, any reason they never really did ? I know there was the home computer crash over there but that was when micro was booming here. Always found it a bit weird. They look pretty dire now but at the time they were incredible.
@@disillusionedwayne7153 the only one that I personally ever really saw here was the Commodore 64, my best friend had one and we used to play rastan and card shark and where in the war is carmen sandiego but that sadly was my expereience but by watching kim's videos I have found these micro computers amazingly interesting
@@glenhayman8722 my first ever computer was a ZX spectrum plus 2 128k . Used to have hundreds of games because everyone at school just copied them for each other or you could go to a shop and buy a game for about £5. Great times.
@@disillusionedwayne7153 The 1983 video game crash in the U.S was due to too many consoles and games of low quality over-saturating the market. Yet more home computers from the U.K would have just added to the problem.
@@CarlosElDiablo1774 I’ve seen some of them on AVGN. Some of them are just batshit crazy 😂I’m glad that kind of missed us and we got the micros instead
Renegade and Robocop are my 2 favourite speccy games. I was an avid reader of Your Sinclair back in the day and I remember spending many an hour on Batty.
I love these. I met you at the Cambridge computer show in May. I was so lame my girlfriend had to go up and make sure you were Kim Justice because I was afraid of bothering someone my misidentifying them. You were really nice and polite considering a complete stranger was annoying you when you were just going about your day :P Nice meeting you.
That was brilliant thank you. Lots of halcyon days there! The footage of rainbow islands and flying shark were almost moving 😂. Flying shark cost me 9:99! Which took me 3months to save up for!
A great video as always Kim. Toki was actually being developed by Dave & John Looker of DJL Software (they had previously programmed Nigel Mansell’s Grand Prix & Road Blasters on the Speccy). Not sure why Keith Tinman is credited on some sites, maybe he was doing the music for the game. Also CJ’s Elephant Antics is surely nspired by The New Zealand Story 😜
Yeah, music would make sense for Tinman :) shame he's the only credit on SpectrumComputing. I hope this one turns up some day, previews make it seem like it was far along (unless they were just going off the Arcade...)
A wonderful look at all these Taito Speccy games, some real classics in there that I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid. I for sure would love to see a video in all the games by Players. Or maybe a video covering all the full games out on magazine cover tapes like Batty.
My brother and me actually completed Double Dragon a few times back in the early 90s. We must of been bored, what a horrible slog! Surprising how many of these games I had. Will be humming the rainbow islands tune on my deathbed, can never forget it.
Excellent video I remember playing operation wolf on the spectrum I'm banging down the keys in frustration only to find that you can skip levels doing this if you do it the right time
It seems I wasn't aware that huge part of my favourites games from the Speccy is from Taito. Rainbow Islands, Chase H.Q., Renegade, Flying Shark and Elevator Action. Btw, thanks for the Slap Fight - I've been looking for this game for the last 30 years XD Not that it's that great a game but it was interesting and I've only played it once or twice and couldn't remember the name.
51:02 Mission Elevator was also abailable on US Gold's 'Go Crazy' compilation (which I have) alongside Desolator, Thunderceptor, Fast 'n Furious, Side Arms and Shackled. I'm not 100% sure if that came before or after the standalone Kixx budget release though.
Had a lot of these games.I got chase hq 2 with magazine subscription. Enjoyed it also had operation wolf and thunderbolt. Op wolf with light gun (came with my +2) I assume everyone's light gun made a black line flash across the screen as you shot it?
Remember Chase HQ fondly and always slightly in disbelief at how good it looks and plays. One of my favourite games in the arcade and the Speccy really does it justice.. Never saw Darius on the Spectrum, but seeing it here made me feel physically sick 😂. One of those terrible offerings that is an insult to the time you would have spent waiting for it to load! Thanks for sharing though, as always it was a very entertaining and educational experience 👍👍👍❤️
Oh wow! Xain'd Selena gets a mention! It's an obscure game that my local arcade had, and I remember it got a lot of love. I feel it doesn't get its due!
Renegade and Flying Shark were excellent games back in the day. Remember playing them for hours. Never had Rainbow Islands, but it looks great on the 128k.
After your speccy vids i´m always in awe about how those programmers got so much out of such a ´low spec´ machine not meant for gaming in the first place. Some of these games are so good, it´s almost impossible.
Finally, an explanation! After all these years of hearing you praise Renegade while I’ve been sat thinking “I had that game and either I was too young to be any good at it or your just wrong cos I remember it being complete shite”, I now realise that I had subway vigilante all along. All makes so much sense now.
I'd forgotten that horrendous Double Dragon punch noise! I will forever keep protesting that Batty might beone of the top 5 Spectrum games of all time. It's wunderbar.
The Rainbow Islands pushed the limits of 48k Speccy as well. I'm not sure if it was a different version or not (from the emulator experience I think the 128k version would load whole game at once while 48k version would require you to load level after level) but it was perfectly playable on 48k + AY chip.
I think I must have had a Taito compilation as part of my Speccy Bundle [Christmas '88 I think] because I definitely remember hating Legend of Kage and playing Arkanoid forever. There was a boxed version of Freddy Hardest in there too [2 cassettes worth] and a couple of plain white boxes of plain white cassettes with hundreds of games on.
Great video! as a commodore user since Vic20 i discovered the spectrum (and its world) just the last year.. Thanks to the emulators i played lots of speccy games and they were great! lots of arcade games were better on the speccy than the c64 conversions.. i would like to have a spectrum 128k in my collection!
I had the light gun version of Operation Wolf but always found the joystick version to be vastly superior. I'm pretty sure the Amiga port of Operation Thunderbolt was also ceosshairless but I think you could also play that with a mouse which led to much finer control.
It seems like Speccy was blessed with quite a few excellent Taito conversions. I still love Chase HQ (who doesn't?), Operation Wolf & Thunderbolt, Renegade, Rainbow Islands and Rastan. But for some reason (despite a decent port from the arcade) i never liked Continental Circus, it felt too bland imo. And the less we talk about the Double Dragon ports, the better. I didn't know "Soldier of Light" (Xain'd Sleena) had a Spectrum port. I'm curious to hear what happened to Taito in general nowadays, we don't hear anything from them so i'm not even sure if they're still around. Anyway, thanks for another excellent vid, Kim.
As an American who grew up with the NES, I always find these videos fascinating. Yeah, a lot of Speccy games look like trash if you're comparing straight across to what the Nintendo could do... but on the other hand it feels like you could have some games that really packed a surprising amount of play in a small package.
@@aliasisudonomo I got a PC as well, but that was about a decade later and cost nearly 1k. You could buy a Spectrum for not much more than the cost of a NES game, and all your friends could too. You could use your Dad's old cassettes to trade games, screens and code. There were add-ons for making music - that's how Aphex Twin got started. It's not really comparable to owning a console or the later PC scene.
@@nimbler Except, it basically was and there were comparable home computers before it. People owned C64s, and VIC20s, and Atari STs. Exactly why are you straining at this particular gnat, anyway? I'm commenting on how fascinating I find UK Speccy nostalgia and ways it's similar to my own, I'm not slagging the damn thing off!
@@aliasisudonomo I'm just trying to get across the difference. Those other computers were much more expensive than the Spectrum (and the Atari St a lot later). The modern equivalent would be the Raspberry Pi - you can plug it into your TV and start coding or playing games for the price of a big pizza.
As someone whose first computer game was on a green and black monochrome apple 2e, i can't relate to these conversions, specifically.... But i had way too much fun going through them, surprising myself. That said, while feeding my cat and listening, hearing "slap fight" and looking up to see a shmup was odd. I expected hockey or else brothers slapping each other over the TV remote or something.
Chase HQ, Operation Wolf and the 2 Renegade games(3? Only 2 exist........ Don't they? 😆) we're my absolute faves. I later had an Amiga and, believe me, they were better on the Speccy. Great vid.
7:40 The physical quality of the Light Gun was indeed average at best. But, it actually worked surprisingly well. I never had it back in the day, but I have used it recently and it's very enjoyable. Admittedly 2 out of 3 didn't work at all.
I don't want to be that guy but operation thunderbolts controller was mac 10 shaped not uzi which I think may be as it's smaller gun and that helped to fit two on the cab
If I'm correct it gave the impression of being a light gun but was actually a gun on a joystick/trackball which moved an invisible cursor around the screen
@kim justice this is a really random question, but there’s a spectrum game where you are under ground in a mine and you move around rocks that you can’t get through, your aim is to pick up diamonds. I use to play it on spectrum as a child, I can’t work out what it’s called and it’s driving me mad! It’s not manic miner.
renegade was probably my fav, the spectrum version was just so good, the sequel was good but not as good as the original. Slap fight is a close second for me, even though your comments on it are spot on.
