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Make yourself a very Speccy Christmas with Santa Sam Dyer’s ZX Spectrum – A visual compendium

Illuminated in a mesmerising green hue of ethereal beauty and presence, a home computer of old comes to life, leaps off a page in Sam Dyer’s latest masterpiece in the exceedingly rewarding “Visual Compendium“-series. Opening the impressive volume emulates perfectly that moment a computer is switched on, with every page impersonating the starkly coloured screen display of the titular ZX Spectrum. Sam Dyer’s “ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium” is a special experience of layered significance.

Layers of history, experience, enjoyment, insight and colour are in story for the readers of Bomb Jack and Paperboy in Sam Dyer's ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium from Bitmap Books, available at www.funstock.co.uk. Photo by Andreas Wanda.
Layers of history, experience, enjoyment, insight and colour are in story for the readers of Bomb Jack and Paperboy in Sam Dyer’s ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium from Bitmap Books, available at www.funstock.co.uk. Photo by Andreas Wanda.

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8bit terror on the Commodore 64: Terrorpods – A reconsideration

Retro Asylum, the UK’s No. 1 retro gaming podcast show, featured an outstanding episode dedicated to one of gaming industry’s most divisive developers, Psygnosis (click here to listen to RetroAsylum’s Psygnosis special). I contributed a segment on one of Psygnosis’s earliest releases, the trading-resource management shoot ’em up crossover Terrorpods.

Terrorpods by Psygnosis, C64 cassette version distributed by Melbourne House in 1988, photo by Andreas Wanda
A mysterious box bearing familiar logos from the glory days of 8/16bit computing contains the Commodore 64 version of Terrorpods, one of the first games to take advantage of the then new groundbreaking platforms Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.

In the weeks leading up to the Psygnosis-podcast’s release, RetroAsylum regular Sam Dyer kindly pointed out to me an exciting ebay offer, a sealed copy of Terrorpods for the Commodore 64. Quickly did I jump at this opportunity to come full circle and procured said 8bit conversion. Box in hand, how did the C64 incarnation fare in comparison to the 16bit classic?
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