100 Spectrum Games For Your iPhone For Six Quid

You know me, I’d rather play a Speccy game than anything else (well, apart from Journey) so the news that Elite are doing an all-in-one of their previous compilations to celebrate the Spectrum’s 30th birthday is rather good. To me.

The “100 GREATEST HITS” app, which launches today, is a penny under £6 for the iPhone version, and is based heavily on the previously dubbed Elite range, although won’t have additional purchases down the line – it’s a one off thing.

Games include Chuckie Egg, Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner and a load of others – I don’t have a handy list of every game included but it looks like all the games from the previous IAPs, so if you’ve not bought any yet this is a real saving.

I always thought the interface was a little bit ugly, but if that doesn’t bother you, this is great for retro fans. There’s auto saves on every game and iCade support too.

41 Comments

  1. looks like a great set of classic games there, though if Nofi’s list is accurate, no Target Renegade. :(

    with decent controls that could be a must buy.
    i just couldn’t imagine playing them on a touch screen though, maybe on an ipad with more real estate for the virtual controls, but on the small screen the touch has, no thank you.

    • There’s a few classics missing, of course, but there’s easily enough here for the cost. Some of those games were £6 each themselves!

  2. Chaos and Lords of Chaos – fantastic games, I used to stay up all night as a kid playing those.

  3. aahhh I don’t think the games I want are on there. Dizzy (all of them), the flintstones, space harrier, the horrace games (hungry, skiing), and roland games (roland on the ropes, roland in the caves…)

    • On a side note did anyone know how to complete the flintstones. I never quite understood the gameplay. If you quickly move from screen to screen back and forth rediculously quickly you would load a different level. Was this a bug or gameplay? Just me?

      • Don’t think I ever played it.

        Dizzy won’t ever be on a compilation like this, Codemasters are still pimping it.

    • Horace and the spiders is also missing :( Loved those games even if they were simple to the extreme

  4. manic miner its been a while since I last played that probably best part of 28 years.. classic… when will this be released for my nokia 2310 I wonder

  5. Downloaded freebie with bruce lee. Great to see a fab game getting new lease of life but it does further cement my concerns over touch screen controls. Might try it with my fling joy pad thingummybob later to see if it’s any better with that. The jury is still out over whether Im willing to fork out a tenner for the job lot. Don’t doubt the value for money but do doubt the control methods.

    • agreed.

      the joystick is terrible and the d-pad controls are just big fat keys. needs a lot of tweaking with the idaptive stuff.

      icade support though…

  6. I welcome this, even though i’m not nostalgic about speccy games and would prefer to play with a joystick. Do the same thing with C64 or Amiga games and put it on psn and nothing would stop me buying it!

  7. Bargain….I imagine the trip down memory lane for some will be worth it alone….

  8. But this is all available for free on the previously linked to World of Spectrum site. Amstrad, the owners of the system roms released them into the public domain, and WOS are good at getting permission from the owners of the games before publishing.

    Some software houses were not keen on their old games going public domain, most notably Ultimate (now Rare) and Codemasters, and so these are not available on that site. Now if these games (especially the Ultimate ones – Jetpac! Knight Lore! Sabre Wulf! etc) were in this (and they certainly would be near the top of any proper 100 greatest hits of the spectrum list) I could see the need to charge this amount of cash, but they are not.

    [But ignore me – I don’t have an Ipad anyway, just get annoyed that someone is charging for stuff that has been given to us by the authors for free]

    • Sorry to double post – but after a bit of research I see that the ‘Elite Systems’ which published this is the same company as the old ‘Elite’ who did release some of these games back in the spectrum days. So do at least have some moral right to release this!

      Apologies, but it is early, and it is always good to start the day with an ill informed rant!

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