|
THE COMP.SYS.SINCLAIR CRAP GAMES COMPETITION 2004
World Of Spectrum lists 24,329 unique titles published on the Speccy over its lifetime, from the very beginnings in 1982, through to the end of its commercial life in 1993, and beyond to its quiet retirement in Eastern Europe, all the way through to the present day. It was a machine that anyone could program; only a few could program it brilliantly enough to maximise its full potential (48K of memory was never much to work with, after all) but it didn't stop more than just that handful having a crack at it, writing programs in their bedrooms and selling them via whatever software house dared to touch them.
So it should surprise nobody that the quality of software available varied wildly. Take two games released in 1987, for example; this was into the 128K era, and with 16-bit computers such as the Atari ST also vying for the attention of the Spectrum user, great things were expected. Auf Wiedersehen Monty is a fantastic rampage across Europe with one of the Spectrum's most iconic characters, it was the third game in the Monty Mole series so any initial problems had been ironed out, it had brilliantly colourful and precisely animated graphics, Monty could breakdance or get drunk, the puzzles were tough to crack - and, if you had a 128K Spectrum, there was a thunderous six-minute soundtrack or some "anthems" to throw the new sound chip into the mix. But then, at the other end of the scale, there's Sqij!, a howler of phenomenal proportions. It was written in BASIC and badly compiled into machine code, a cardinal sin if ever there was one, the graphics took half the screen but would have been barely acceptable in 1983 and spent half their time not being displayed at all, the game proceeded at the speed of a slug on Mogadon... but to get it to work at all, you had to break into the game, turn the Caps Lock off and re-run it! Everything that could have been wrong was wrong.
Horrors such as Sqij! were by no means isolated, and the most notorious piece of shovelware in Spectrum history is the notorious Cassette 50, released in 1983 and promising 50 games on one tape! They ranged from just about tolerable, in the case of a Frogger clone, to catastrophically terrible - likely as not rejected as a magazine type-in. One of the 50 games was a type-in - for the ZX81, and had been crudely converted for the Spectrum to add bad colour and even worse sound which made every ZX81 owner grateful for their machine's lack of either feature.
Strangely, though, this can of very nasty worms was remembered somewhat fondly by the users of the day for its sheer undiluted awfulness (ironically, maybe, if some of them had been suckered into buying it)... and so it was, in January 1996 on the corner of the primeval internet known as comp.sys.sinclair, the Crap Games Competition was born.
My programming skills weren't up to much when I was in single figures, but by the time I'd reached my twenties and was a PhD student, and knowing that I could probably write a program or two that might have been magazine type-in quality (albeit 20 years too late) I thought I'd have a crack at it when the 2004 edition of CCSCGC was announced on the World Of Spectrum forums. The host changes every year and that competition was run by Jim Langmead, who also ran Speccy Spoilers at the time (showing the endings of many, many games for those who can't be bothered to play them). I tried my best to keep to some of the guidelines (seen here on the 2005 version) - the games should actually work (unlike Sqij!), but if they're boring, repetitive, uninspired, generic and use character-square graphics and stop abruptly with 9 STOP statement, 0:1 then this will assure the requisite crap points. Jim was, of course, extremely scathing about my submissions, which told me I'd done a good job.
Unfortunately, Jim Langmead had a nine-month battle with Crohn's disease and died in 2007. Much missed by the Spectrum community, there is an obituary on World Of Spectrum.
|
