When the Spectrum was my current computer (which it was, for a long time), I had a lot of games. Not even a pile of C60 cassettes with a load of pirate games on (although like all computer owning kids in the 80s, I obviously had some of them too), just stacks of cheap games from cover tapes and car boot sales and so on. Loads of them.
Thing is, I completed very few. One, I recall, was the text adventure Red Door, and that was only as a result of following a guide printed in Your Sinclair. I think I finished Castle Master once, and one of the Seymour games, but that’s pretty much it.
Oh yeah, and Saboteur! The game comes with 9 difficulty settings, which was quite big news for games at the time. These days, most games come with at least two difficulty settings, but in the 80s not so much, and certainly not in this way: In Saboteur! the higher difficulties make your route through the game to the helicopter much harder by blocking off certain pathways and removing platforms, rather than just chuck more or harder enemies at you. I know I’ve completed it on every setting up to about 6 or 7, and I’m pretty sure I’ve done it higher too, but I could be misremembering. How high can you go?
[includeme src=”http://torinak.com/qaop#128#l=https://lofi-gaming.org.uk/tools/speccygames/SABOTEU1.TAP” frameborder=”0″ width=”440″ height=”330″]
The emulator used is Qaop/JS – a rather spiffy HTML5 Spectrum emulator.
Completing most of the games you buy is quite a recent thing, isn’t it? I’m not sure if it’s because games are easier these days, but they’re certainly less of a faff. You don’t have to wait five minutes for them to load, for one thing, and permadeath is much less common: “Oh, you died? Here, go back to where you were 30 seconds ago with all your equipment fully intact and have another shot at it, eh? Off you trot…”
I’m fairly sure I could count the number of games I completed in my first 20 years of gaming – roughly 1981-2001 – on my fingers. One handed, probably. (Tau Ceti, Mercenary, Dark Side… um… definitely struggling now…)
Saboteur certainly isn’t one of ’em, though. I always get it confused with a rather excellent ZX81 game by Don “gigantic sprites” Priestly called Sabotage.
I don’t think I complete most of the games I buy at all. I did manage to complete about 30% of the games I bought last year though, which is the best I’ve ever done, so that’s something.
I’ve completed Mercenary, but on the Amiga, not the Spectrum. Came close to finishing Total Eclipse on the Speccy, but I think it crashed or something.
But yeah, games these days are, generally, designed more to be do-able than they used to be. Not necessarily easier, but less frustrating, less reliant on lives and having to start right from the beginning when you die. They’re also a hell of a lot longer, on average, too. Most Speccy games can probably be finished in under an hour – glitches aside, you ain’t going to be completing many current titles in that sort of time.
I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re dead right. They seemed longer because you basically had to start from scratch every time you played. No saves back in the tape days. (Or very few, anyway. Elite springs to mind, and there was odd one that gave you a code.)