After we’ve pulled the emergency cord to Stop The Express and we’re praying in hope that we don’t get slapped with a £50 fine for wasting the rail network’s time, we restart our ZX Spectrum and load up All or Nothing which sits happily at No.#3 in the Your Sinclair Top 100. Now this game offers 3D graphics on the box art! So it must be brilliant! Right!?
All or Nothing arrived back in 1984 from Abbex Electronics Ltd, with the programming being handled by Paul Reynolds. In this game of sabotage your role as an undercover agent, who has been parachuted behind enemy lines, is to seek out the secret files that will give you all the details on their matter transporter. Using whatever means necessary from weaponry to cold hard cash, you need to get what you came for and get out…alive.
Here in the Top 3 of the Your Sinclair Top 100 you’d possibly be expecting a Monty Mole game, or perhaps something like Knight Tyme from Mastertronic as we haven’t seen either in this countdown as yet. What we don’t expect to see is an extremely, violently-purple landscaped game with a flat character that can only turn 90-degrees outside numerous non-descript warehouses and when he does enter the said warehouses the internal graphics are drawn amazingly sub-par to what we witnessed in The Hobbit!
There is nothing entertaining about All or Nothing – you wander around the playing field as the view flips up and down, the warehouses show no sign that you’ve visited them, the controls are awful meaning when you’re trying to line up your character, in an attempt to bribe or attack a guard, you become as subtle as a brick that has been tied to a bull which has been thrown through a china shop window who are currently having a special on faberge eggs!
I’m seriously flabbergasted on why Your Sinclair even considered placing All or Nothing so high in this chart; perhaps back in 1984 – on it’s release – people coo’ed at it, but by 1991 – 1992 when this chart was published numerous games had deservedly earned the placed to find themselves at No.#3.
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Originally published August 25, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
