Villordsutch wades through the Top 5 worst ZX Spectrum games ever…
As I’ve worked my way through the annals of Speccy games [follow my Your Sinclair Top 100 here], I’ve come across a fair few games, that in all honesty, I personally don’t feel should even be allowed into the sunlight. Granted at a point in history there has been somebody out there that has loved let’s say Gyron, but in truth now it has become little more that another ornament in my Personal Hell. The upsetting thing is that the games I deem to be poor, by the below list’s standards, make them look like gold-plated things of wonder.
I’ve found many of my own poor games in ZX Spectrum history, however when I turned to the Spectrum & Retrogaming community, asking them for the Top 5 worst games ever I didn’t expect to be delivered some truly awful pieces of rotted tripe.
5. Super Gran (Tynesoft)
Based upon the Tyne Tees television show which revolved around the elderly Scottish Superhero, here was a game which had awful gameplay, made absolutely no sense and not only this had to be purchased at full price, which was then £9.95! Scunner Campbell wasn’t the evil swine when it came to releasing this travesty!
4. Renegade III (Imagine/Ocean)
After the huge fan and critical success of Renegade and Target: Renegade how could this go wrong? Well first you strip out everything that was brilliant about the first two games, then you give the “Renegade” an extremely limited and dull amount of poorly executed set of fighting moves and then finally you make every level appear to be the same expect you redress the enemies. Renegade III has truly no charm, no fun and no ball-crunching, high-kicking, weapon-swinging brilliance that we had been treated to in the first two parts of the saga. It was like Ocean & Imagine purposely set out to upset us.
3. SQIJ (The Power House)
With a game that has a name that was total unpronounceable, stories of the programmer being so disgruntled with the publishing house – along with his contract – that he only had to supply them with one game and he delivered a game not only programmed in BASIC, but came with a CAPS LOCK bug meaning that the players couldn’t actually play the game! In the programmer’s defence he didn’t pick up on the a) the CAPS LOCK bug when he sent the game off and b) he didn’t expect The Power House to ever publish the game with a floating pigeon in it!
2. Airwolf (Elite)
Now I have to come to the defence of this game. Albeit this game is amazingly difficult and has a number of issues, I myself don’t consider it to be anywhere near as bad as those that have come before it. However there are problems: firstly it is amazingly hard from the get go, this isn’t a game you sit down to give yourself an hours worth of enjoyment with. Then we have the graphics bug and also the fact that on occasion you can’t actually shoot the blue energy walls either. Airwolf isn’t bad, it’s just too bloody hard!
1.EastEnders
I’d never heard of this game at all, which is odd, for at the time of its release – 1987 – I was smitten with EastEnders the TV show, whereas now I won’t give any soap opera the time of day. However, in a way I’m glad I never knew of this travesty of a cash-in, as it is possibly the worst game I’ve ever seen and I had three games in the Your Sinclair Crap Games Corner! You play a nondescript person on the corner of Albert Square and it appears that you must do odd, pointless jobs for the residents of said square. However, these tasks are never explained, described, thought out or checked for bugs! Worst still is this was another full-priced cash-in, so the poor EastEnders fans across the British Isles stumped up just under £10 to weep over this travesty of a game.
So there is the list of the worst games ever to darken the cassette decks of the ZX Spectrum, do you remember playing any of these or do you remember anything worse that you think has been completely overlooked, let us know below?
This Top 5 Worst ZX Spectrum Games ever! was created with the input of the following Facebook community pages Spectrum 4ever, World of Spectrum, ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum Vega, The ZX Spectrum Hub, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Retro Games Forever & Retro Games Fan Society.
Originally published June 14, 2016. Updated October 25, 2022.
