It’s taken around forty years but finally I know there’s someone else out there who feels my pain, and actually a whole lot more besides – 270 full colour, premium quality hardback pages of pain, to be precise! And as such, it was a no brainer when I got wind of Graeme Mason’s Kickstarter campaign a (surprisingly!) few months ago for ZX Nightmares, “celebrating the hopeless, the hardest, and the controversial ZX Spectrum games that we loved to hate.” It was also a no-brainer to decide to review it as well, because this thing is great and deserves all the exposure it can get! By the way, before I go on, it’s available from Fusion Retro Books (direct link here) for the price of £20. And while I’m distracted, quick shoutout to my friend Gary Arnott (@GaryArnott on Twitter), who’s not only responsible for several pieces of framed artwork on the wall above the desk I’m writing at, but also provided graphical support here!

Back to the author though, and I appear to have a lot in common with Graeme Mason, albeit he’s an actual successful freelance writer specialising in retro video games rather than someone with too much time on their hands! Over the last thirteen years, he’s written over two hundred articles for the wonderful Retro Gamer magazine, and you might also have seen his work on Eurogamer and The Guardian’s website, as well as Fusion Retro Books’ revivals of CRASH, ZZAP and AMTIX magazine. At the very least I think we share a similar age though, and similar memories of some truly dreadful Spectrum games! Actually, as I write this introduction (because it was the first thing I thought to do mere minutes ago when I opened the secure cardboard packaging the book arrived in), I haven’t even checked if my own great gaming disappointments that I mentioned when we looked at 2000A.D. license Slaine here (and elsewhere many times since) are included…

Okay, Slaine definitely is because I saw it when I was just flicking through, but just to recap the others as they were all Spectrum games that should be included, there was Highlander, Street Hawk, Miami Vice and Knight Rider, most of which have several things in common that led to such disappointment, though actually it’s an arcade port, Kung-Fu Master, that will forever be my biggest gaming disappointment, and certainly my biggest ZX nightmare, so we’ll see if we come across them later! We should see fairly quickly too, because the first seventy or so pages, after the introductions, are focussed on Loathsome Licences; then we’ve got Patience of a Saint, fifty or so pages of hard as nails games; They Did WHAT?! is another fifty pages of games that stirred up a storm, and I saw my old favourite Commando in there in my flick-through so I’m intrigued by that! Finally, seventy pages of Simply Awful, and I’ve just thought of that dreadful Treasure Island game that came with my ZX Spectrum +2, as well as Jack and the Beanstalk, which I’d certainly stick in there too, so loads to look forward to!

As with all the various book reviews I’ve done here, I’m not going to go page by page but I will try to give you a taste of what’s here by picking a couple of games from each of these sections that jump out at me, either as reminders of money long-since wasted, or maybe – if I’m feeling brave – something I don’t know but would like to try in future, maybe even doing one of my regular deep-dives into; again, flicking through, I did notice Warlock of Firetop Mountain somewhere near the front, and I did love the Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own adventure books it was based on, so let’s see… Actually, that’s probably a good place to start, but first let me just mention the books’ format too. As said, it’s 270-pages, with each game getting two of its own, one for artwork and screenshots, and the other a description, obviously why it’s here, and a lovely graphical flourish featuring the kind of individual pixel design for the main character I used to spend ages transferring onto graph-paper for no apparent purpose! As said before, the quality is good, with excellent printing onto reasonably weighted paper with all the colours of the Spectrum’s rainbow beautifully represented!

Right, since we last spoke in the previous paragraph, I have now read the book properly over the course of a couple of days but I’m still going to start with a look at that Firetop Mountain game, which I remember seeing advertised by Crystal Computing in my early days of reading Computer & Video Games magazine in 1984 but – despite my attachment to the books – I’ve never even seen a screenshot of until right now, let alone played! I have to say the screenshots here don’t bode terribly well, so maybe I won’t choose this to cover in more depth without further consideration, as we’re only on page thirteen! Anyway, Puffin (the book people) wanted Crystal to put together a “vast” adventure, which they did, but this book explains was sadly at the expense of much “adventuring” even though it sounds like it was pretty competently programmed.

As you can see above, I found Miami Vice too, and while some of the other licenses I mentioned before do feature in my all-time favourite TV shows list, this one sits at number two (behind Bottom, if you’re counting) so I’m stopping off here next! There was nothing more cool than Miami Vice in 1986 (or since!) so I was sucked in by the adverts alone, although had I seen the four screenshots displayed here beneath the game’s artwork (which I also had a poster on my bedroom wall) I might have thought twice! Something I really appreciate about the book is Graeme’s talent for condensing information, and beyond getting what seems to take me a thousand words onto a single A5 page, his choice of screenshots, which feature loading screens then a selection of in-game action for everything covered, also convey what the game’s about superbly! And again, he highlights that this one came so close but the crappy controls, harsh punishment for screwing them up and often-bland areas are why my long-time existing plan to cover this one in more detail too can stay on the backburner!

In this section you’ve also got most of my own aforementioned ZX nightmares (while others do appear elsewhere later), as well as stuff like Zaxxon, Super Gran, Friday the 13th, Track and Field and Pit-Fighter. We’re going to move on to Patience of a Saint next though, and I’m going to use two of the four Spectrum-coloured ribbon bookmarks built into the book to take me straight to my pre-selected games! Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to see the 1984 all-time classic platformer, Jet Set Willy, in a book called ZX Nightmares, but this section might actually be the most interesting of the lot, with the likes of this and Spindizzy and Ghosts ‘n Goblins joined by some genuine stinkers like Action Force and Airwolf, which is way beyond even a saint’s patience! Anyway, Jet Set Willy, and I won’t hear a word said against it, even if Graeme is possibly right about infamous, game-breaking bugs and continuous death syndrome!

I’m going to come back to Airwolf next because, as well as also featuring in my top ten all-time favourite TV shows, if I were to expand my list of gaming disappointments out to a top ten it would certainly appear there too! It’s by Elite in 1985, Crash gave it a 90% review score, it’s looks great, and it’s impossible to get off the first screen because, as Graeme points out, just flying your helicopter is a nightmare in itself but throw in force fields, missiles and all sorts of other stuff meaning instant death, and it’s just ridiculous! For a game that isn’t fundamentally broken, I definitely concur with Graeme that it’s one of the most painfully tough Spectrum games of all time. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here – very blatant Star Wars rip-off Death Star Interceptor, for example – but I do admire Graeme’s honesty and bravery for some of his choices because I’m sure the locals will be out with their pitchforks in rural Essex for some of it… Lunar Jetman and Pentagram, indeed!!!

They did WHAT?! is my favourite section of the book, featuring all the stuff that stirred up a Speccy-style storm at the time, so you’ve got obvious stuff like Barbarian and Game Over for their overly-glamourous “features” as well as some really fascinating insights into why the likes of Commando and Nemesis are also present here. Plenty of lower-profile stuff too that would never see the light of day today, from the all-out chauvinism of B.C. Bill to the game I’m highlighting now, Ole Toro! I had a bit of a thing about bull-fighting after seeing it the first time I ever went abroad, which was a holiday to Spain in 1982; it was just part of the tourist experience at the time, like ogling topless sunbathers and those long-necked bottles of local alcohol they used to pour down your throat from a foot away! Anyway, despite still having never played it, this thing looked pretty authentic to me, and therein lies the problem, which Graeme explains subsequently turned into a letters page spat over views expressed in C&VG and Crash reviews!

He’s really done a top-notch job with this section in particular because while some of the rest is barely subjective, given how bad it is, it is subjective all the same, where this is all undeniable fact, much of which has been brushed under the carpet for a very long time so must have taken some serious research. What I’ve never brushed under the carpet is 1986’s Sam Fox Strip Poker, but as I’m always going on about it (see Maria’s Christmas Box example here) and will inevitably cover it in its own seedy right sometime, I’m going to go with Jack the Ripper instead because the subject is of equal if not greater fascination to me than my retro-gaming hobby – as I often tell anyone who’ll listen, my son’s called what he is for a reason! And out of everything here, if I’m picking a game from to cover next as I like to with my book reviews, then realistically ZX Nightmares is prompting me to finally get on with this one! Jack the Ripper is a graphical text adventure by CRL in 1987, and they were desperate to elevate the pioneering 15-certificate their previous game Dracula got to all-out X-rated, which led to exactly the tabloid coverage and bans of this filth they were looking for all along because none of us would have looked twice otherwise… As Graeme concludes, an important step from kids’ toy to multi-billion industry all the same though.

This is running long and I’m worried about giving away too much, so I’m going to just pick one game to highlight from the last bit, which is Simply Awful, and that game is Flight Path 737 because I’ve never played it on the Spectrum but it was a genuine favourite on my VIC-20! It’s a flight-sim from 1985, and it sounds like I had a lucky escape because, not for the first time with ZX Nightmares, I’m learning there was a big Spectrum-shaped hole in the instructions so all those complicated button presses needed to even get you off the ground were a total mystery, resulting in a game with any potential for enjoyment it had carelessly removed. Stick with the VIC-20 version is the message then, a bit like Tower of Evil or Punchy! I had such a grin of my face every time I turned a page in this section, with the screenshots alone often delivering more than adequate nightmares for some of these absolute stinkers – Krazy Kong, L.A. Swat, Rapid Fire and another of those that would make my all-time top ten disappointments (thank goodness only £1.99 of disappointment in this case though), Cage Match, the Mastertronic galactic wrestling game. In a steel cage!

I think my work is done here. Yes, that final section brought the biggest grin to my face, but there wasn’t really a single page that didn’t. Except maybe stupid Kung-Fu Master!!! Graeme knows his stuff too, and while we all have our own ZX nightmares, he’s got most of the bases covered here and then some! As much as I might envy his concise, factual and – most importantly – good bloke conversational writing style, I really don’t envy him going to the lengths he must have done researching some of these total howlers, and not least playing enough of them to get four decent, diverse screenshots out of! That’s why he’s got a super-cool book out and I haven’t though! Seriously, it really is cool, and if you’re into your Spectrum games primarily, but also retro games in general, then do yourself a favour because you’re going to get way more than £20 of fun and nostalgia from this. And with that, it looks like I’ll be seeing you around for Jack the Ripper sometime soon then!