Head Over Heels was just this big, contiguous, charming world full of puzzles, all contained in my tiny Spectrum. It was a pretty rare feat in the 80s to conjure a huge world so effectively. The whole game just shone. And so few pixels!
I was talking to a friend recently about the hours spent playing these games, and how we'd tape or glue pieces of graph paper together to make large hand-drawn maps of the games. I wish I still had those!
I have so much love for those games, and so many good memories of them. Also, I loaded them up in an emulator recently and I'd forgotten how hard they are! No save games, very limited lives, so many ways to die, so much skill needed to get jumps and moves just right, and often no time to think. And when you die, you lose everything.
Yeah, games get more brutal the further we go back.
Never had microtransactions in my day, bah! I say spending a lot of my childhood money in Arcade machines haha. Which are equally brutal in giving you maybe 1 minute of game play for your coin
For those who weren't around in the 80s(!) and are wondering what this is about, you can play Head over Heels online[1] and there's also a Retrospec remake for PC and Mac by Tomaz Kac[2]
This comment inspired me to go to archive.org and play Nebulus (which I remember buying from a shop on Tottenham Court Road). I'm even worse at it than I remembered :)
Head over Heals is my all time favourite computer game, closely followed by Batman.
I discovered them from a writer who used an Amstrad CPW, and those were two of the small number of games available for that machine. He was very good at them — I think he must have played them whenever writers' block was in effect.
We later bought the games for the hand-me-down ZX Spectrum that was the first computer in our house. When I finally gave away all my Spectrum stuff five or six years ago, I still kept those two cassettes!
I'm one week into Z80 assembly development for the Spectrum. Surely these folks were extremely capable to obtain great games from such a limited hardware.
And Sir Clive Sinclair only two months ago too. Sadly it is only going to get worse, with a lot of the old developers reaching the kinda age where death isn't entirely a surprise.
For me names that I'll miss will be Julian Gollop, Matthew Smith, Jon North, and the Oliver Twins.
So many hours playing Batman and Match Day 2 as a kid. Decades later I still remember Batman turning to you and tapping his foot impatiently if you did not move for a bit.
