Greatest videogame device (was Re: An option - Re: the beginning of the end for floppies)

Yes, the Spectrum was a great machine. I had the 128K +2 model. Gameswise I had a mixture of homebrew stuff (M. Batty and &e7 (Andy Severn)) spring to mind, but most of the big games I bought were arcade ports. Soundwise, it had a unique music style which I still love today and the few games that seemed to have digitized sound effects showed what could be done with the sound chip. In a similar vein that Robocop Vs. Terminator showed that the Megadrive/Genesis could produce decent quality (digitized) speech compared to what most games had (poor quality speech which was often just mumbling something you struggled to understand). You do have to get used to the controllers for each machine, but today's controllers have come a long way. Racing games are excellent when played with a steering wheel or a controller (usually with the trigger buttons as break and accelerate, and one analogue stick for steering). Many first-person games use two analogue sticks for movement (one for the direction you face and the other for your movement), leaving the other buttons for special moves and weapon select. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 4:34 PM Subject: Re: Greatest videogame device (was Re: An option - Re: the beginning of the end for floppies) On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: in honour), with Although it was never really intended as a pure games device, I'd argue for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It is often constraint that brings out greatness - Hawking would never have become the world's greatest physicist if not for his MND forcing him to retreat into his own mind, for instance. The Spectrum offered the basics - colour graphics, just; sound, just; a fairly-generous-for-the-time 48KB of RAM; a keyboard for input. The C64 and VIC20 were /designed/ for games, with dedicated hardware for games graphics and sound. The Atari 8-bits were the same. The Speccy had none of this, not even, at first, the ubiquitous GA-Y-8912 sound chip that /everything/ else offered if it didn't have something better like the SID chip. The Speccy was the bottom of the line, the lowest-end machine in the market, but it sold millions because it was cheap, kids could justify it to their parents as an educational tool because it was a "proper computer" not a games console, and it had thousands of games titles. It also had a semi-serious BASIC and programming tools, not the half-assed efforts of Commodore and so on, without even graphics or sound commands. This wasn't a toy machine with built-in joystick ports (always a dead giveaway). It wasn't an elitist expensive educational thing like a BBC Micro, either. It was computing for the everyman. [*snip*] The humble Speccy had a vastly bigger variety of games, as full native apps, than any console before or since, from big companies to tiny one-man-in-his-spare-bedroom efforts. It was what started Codemasters, Rare and the like. I reckon one could argue persuasively that no other single machine had such an influence. The consoles did some clever stuff, but it was all the same sort of game, and only professionals in big companies could develop for it. It didn't interest me then and it doesn't now, really. I have an Xbox to run XBMC and a PS2 to run Guitar Hero and play DVDs, and that is all they ever do. Console games are all samey and dull to me, and always were, and the controllers are horrid and always have been. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508