If so it would be no different than today. It's not a direct bribe and more of a "oh we're running a big ad campaign on your website and it would be a shame if something were to change our minds", or "we have a lavish press junket lined up in Las Vegas for our next game launch and all our favourite reviewers will be invited".
Tim Tregear was the writer of the original Driller game from Macmillan software. He was my teacher at Gossops Green Junior school and we had to test it, he also wrote survival and helped on Mercenary, please show Mercenary it was cool Signed Dave
@@SebsPlaceYT Tim Tregear died in a car accident in his Spitfire, big guy tall, voice like thunder , clever as you like. He refined my science antics into something far safer. Sad end to a clever guy
Great video! I was a regular reader of all three of these magazines, but I haven't even heard of the top 2 games, and I was playing Spectrum games from 1982, all the way up until I got a Megadrive in 1991!
Thankyou! Spent a little too long sat on the loo hiding from the wife and kids perusing this upload. I’ll put some quality time in some point soon! You’ve gained a subscriber
Excellent video! Probably the best ‘ best of’ speccy vids I’ve seen(take note Kim justice) couldn’t help but chuckle at the voice overs of the different magazine reviews! Good stuff. 👌👍
@@SebsPlaceYT my watch later list is 1,300 videos at the mo, which is about 2 months delay HOWEVER i'll try and remember that when it appears in my subscriptions list i'll add it to the much shorter "Urgent Watch" list 🙂 So odd that "Three Weeks" gets the best marks overall when I don't think it sticks in many peoples memories.
Ha - thank you! I do get why people find them annoying and if I was to redo the video I would do things differently now but it's all about learning as you go. Thank you for letting me know they worked for you. It's nice that someone liked them! 😍
Interesting video, never owned or played a Spectrum, so it’s a mystery why I’m so interested in the computer. Don’t play games now, so not likely to play them. The distorted voices of the review quotes annoyed a bit.
Appreciate the feedback. I wasn't sure what to do with the reviews as wanted a different voice to mine to separate them but couldn't convince anyone to read them for me :-)
Weird. I was born in 1991, in a country where the Spectrum was only a minor competitor in front of the Atari 8-bit computers and the 2600, and where most people only met video games in the '90s through Nintendo consoles, Sony and MS-DOS/Windows games. Only recently I cared about the Spectrum, and the few games I think are still worth playing today that made it to the list were between 43 and 20. Only Exolon and Skool Daze made it to the top of the list.
Yeah it's a strange list that goes to show there was a big difference between what that magazines all thought were good and what the rest of us thought.
@@SebsPlaceYT I must admit though, some of those top 20 games that I don't consider worth playing today without the nostalgia factor, are indeed good, specially if the Spectrum was your main or only gaming machine and arcade games were anchored to gigantic cabinets. But, today we live in a world where one can get mutant 64-bit IBM PC-Compatibl-ish laptops on steroids for cheap, where most phones are portable ARM Unix-like computers, and both of those can emulate the most popular arcade machines from the 80s effortlessly and even sprinkle the screen with pretty resource-intensive visual effects to simulate CRT displays over fricking liquid crystal displays. In the current scenario, getting a Rainbow Islands port with only 7 colours doesn't look like the best christmas gift. But Cybernoid!? That game seems blessed/cursed to be the greatest it can be on the Spectrum. The NES, the CPC and the C64 versions are cool, sure, but if anything, a bit generic. The uniqueness and psychedelia of the Speccy one makes the experience immortal. It's one of those Spectrum games I play without CRT shaders, just some soft bilinear interpolation at most, the more blocky and colourful it looks, the better.
Three Weeks was a great game, especially considering how many licences and arcade ports are in the list. The Speccy games that are still playable today are the original ones.
Hi - Yeah, not the usual suspects but all great games. It's got me interested in the Wally games too, quite a cool set of games although it's a stretch to say that is the best Speccy game :-)
That "criticism" in the Crash review of Dan Dare is peculiar- that is to say it's strange they called it such- leading me to think the editor didn't actually know the meaning of the word.
Wow a response from the man himself! I did not expect that @SebsPlaceYT . Thank you very much and I loved that fact you gave Target Renegade and Skool Daze special mentions. Skool Daze is my favourite ever Spectrum game despite never completing it. I also remember saving my pocket money to buy Target Renegade when back then £8.99 (If I remember correctly) was a lot of dosh. I loved the video so many memories. My rule back then was if I couldn't figure out a game in under five minutes it was rubbish so was never a fan of text adventures or isometric games. I think the magazines missed a trick with Renegade. Amazing work well done.
Thanks Stephen, you picked some great games there mate. I think Target Renegade is my all time favourite. Such a great game and not bettered on any other system!
Wow some real surprises there! No Dizzies at all, no Don Priestley, no Monty Moles, no Jack the Nipper, no Deathchase (maybe that was too early). I thought Saboteur might make an appearance too. Oh, and no one heard of a little game called Elite? Ah well, we all know Rock Star Ate My Hamster was the best anyway
Haha. I used to love that game! I played it more recently and it was definitely a game that fed the imagination as a kid. It's a bit boring now, I was surprised how little to do there is in it. Cheers!
Thank you - You are not the first to mention the "experimental" voices. It didn't work really but I'm learning as I go😀 . FYI - I'm working on a similar video across C64, Speccy and CPC magazines to see if any games got awards everywhere! Stay tuned and cheers for watching.
@@SebsPlaceYT Will do! I love this kind of stuff. Much more entertaining than just plonking some footage on the screen. I mean I like gameplay footage but I like to hear thoughts on the game, what it's about etc. That extra effort you put in earnt a sub. I'm a C64 lad but I'm getting into the Speccy late in life 😁
Great vid, I didn’t mind the squeaky voices, thought it was amusing. Some surprises both in inclusion and exclusion from this list. Subscribe button clicked, thanks.
A flawed list. Starglider is one of the highest rated games of all time (and although I'm biased :D ), all the reviews were among the highest across all the magazines, and even won game of the year in Crash. Your Sinclair never reviewed it when it was originally released as they had done a mega-preview the previous month.
Haha - not biased at all :D ! Gotta get an award from all three magazines, so didn't make the list, but yeah a great game indeed ! Kinda crazy that only 52 games amongst all the games these three magazines reviewed were awarded the top award by all three!
Finally! A list that admits the best games weren't always the ones that you'd want to show off to jaded audiences 30 plus years later. As someone who didn't even know the Spectrum existed until Retro Gamer threw in a free CD, it's easy to be misled by cautiously cultivated lists that tell the same few feel good stories over and over, until it feels more like just another console library. It was so much more than that. It was a taste of everything gaming could be, sometimes decades ahead of the rest of the world.
Thank you, great comment. I agree, it's hard to do something a little different that shows off some good games that people may have missed. Glad you enjoyed this one.
You can basicaly write off most of the coin-op conversions as paid reviews. There are so many better games out there. For me, the best game of the Speccy and possibly one of the best games of all time, Doomdark's Revenge, it's a technical masterpiece.
Disappointed that my all-time favourite Speccy game, Crash Smash and Crash cover stars The Great Giana Sisters is missing. Highly regarded by SU and YS also. They even published readers' hints and tips for the game. What a classic. (Aside: what a swizz.)
😂😂 Yeah....moral of the story..... don't mess with Nintendo! Maybe one day someone will unearth a review copy somewhere........ would love to play it (if it did actually exist.....)
It just seems so wrong that Atic Atac, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Jet Set Willy weren't included - yes, I know it's down to the year of release, but still.....
I must admit that I don’t trust reviews from 1990 as I thought reviewers often overhyped and overrated any game that was half decent towards the end of the Spectrums life to try to maintain its relevance.
This reminds me of some old retro gaming drama - A few years ago, someone on a retro gaming Facebook group made a list of late era Amiga games that had got unjustified high scores by virtue of being late releases and the magazines needing to hype them. The sort of stuff that was coming out after commodore was dead and Amiga magazines had been forced to go to a direct subscriber model. The list generated a bit of discussion, with most people thinking the majority of the games weren't great but it was understandable 5hst they'd tried to hype what they could. Then, former Amiga Format reviewer Stuart Campbell (a year or so before he lost his mind over politics) came into the group, got *super* angry about the list, told a bunch of people to "f*ck off" over it and then left the group in an angry tantrum. Point is, apparently Stuart is very sensitive.
To many good original games on the speccy to make any king of definitive list, even if you made a greatest 100, there would be games missing. In no particular order: Bobby Bearing. Avalon Dragon Torc Astro Clone The entire Ket Trilogy (Text Adventures) BMX Simulator (Better than the offroad title in the list) Fat Worm Blows A Sparky. SPLAT Bugaboo The Flea (A single level of pure frustration) Empire Nether Earth (Possibly the first RTS) Arnem Wizball And the list goes on, are any of these playable today, absolutely.
A really eclectic mix in here, the top 3 are quite surprising. Strange that Elite isn't in the list at all as I remember it being the game everybody wanted and all the magazines rated it highly.
Elite came out just too early for Your Sinclair, so they only ever reviewed it as part of a compilation. Otherwise, yeah, it would have made it for sure.
100% agree for Jack the Nipper, but sometimes games got top marks but weren't awarded mega game, crash smash etc. Jack the Nipper got 5/5 in Sinclair User but no award. If you scroll down two pages. Pyracurse also got 5/5 and the Sinclair User Classic award. It often made no sense. Check it out here: archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-053/page/n36/mode/1up?view=theater
Elite never got a review on its own in Your Sinclair and Gunship should have been included but even though it got top marks, Sinclair User didn't give it an award (which sometimes happenned) so it missed out. Both games deserve to be there though 100%
Like many 70's kids i er.. had loads of backup copies of games and surprisingly enough the only games in your list i played was robocop, back to school and 3 weeks which i didnt like... great list but not my top 40
@SebsPlaceYT I really liked the vid, but found the modulated voices irritating too. Have you thought about reaching out to the community for vocal contributions?
The Sinclair magazine reviews are, alas, completely untrustworthy. They lived off the advertising of the game publishers, after all. Ghosts 'n 'Goblins is pants on the spectrum.
Having given Ghosts and goblins a whirl on the speccy the other day I have to say I dont agree it's rubbish at all. Too hard? Yes, definitely think it's not the best balanced but it's quick and enjoyable enough and quite a feat to get it on there. Why do you think it's bad?
I don’t think it’s pants but it’s missing more than half of the arcade game (if you can manage to get that far). As a single load, it’s good, but if you know the coin-op, it’s merely an impression of the first two levels and then kinda does a simplified third one.
