Game Review: Spectipede (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Presentation and Instructions

When the game has loaded, you are presented with a menu to select on whether to use the Keyboard, Mikrogen Joystick or Kempston Joystick.

Once you’ve made your choice, you will see an opening presentation screen with the programmer’s name.  Four yellow Spectipedes start whooshing from left to right across the screen.  When they hit each other head on, they turnaround and move in the opposite direction.  Once they touch the side of the screen, they move down a row.  When they reach the bottom, start travelling upwards.  This is all nice and lasts for around 20 seconds before you see the scoring page.

The good news though is that you don’t want to wait that long, pressing P skips it and asks if you want 1 or 2 players.

Pedal to The Metal

Immediately, you’ll notice is that Spectipede doesn’t hang around.  It certainly has some fast pace, so fasten your seatbelts!  There is plenty going on, with the spectipede travelling in different directions a spider bouncing around and a scorpion travelling along poisoning the green mushrooms and turning them red.  In addition, your pod can move in all directions (including diagonal).  Bugs also fall randomly at different speeds from the top of the screen too.

With all this happening, its quite amazing as the game hardly suffers from any lagging.  If you do notice lagging, it’s not all the time and looks rather smooth (although the spider does look a bit jerky at times).

With the game moving so quickly, it does mean you have to be nimble on the keys or joystick.  At first, it may seem slightly uncontrollable but after a few goes, you do adapt to it.  The difficulty level is set just right. The great thing too, is that the collision detection is perfect!

2 Player Mode, Scoring and Lives

In 2 player mode, you can’t both play on the screen at the same time.  You take it in turns and when you lose a life, there is sufficient time to pass the keyboard or joystick to a friend.  The player one or player two flashes on and off during this time and gives you around 5 seconds.  The great thing about this mode is that you can see one another’s’ score so you know what you need to beat, especially if you’re player 2!  The overall high score is in the top-right hand corner.

You begin the game with three lives.  Rather curiously though, the number of lives you have remaining isn’t displayed on the screen at anytime.  For every 20000 points scored, you gain an extra life (a maximum being 5) and each time The Spectipede has been destroyed, you’ll gain an additional 1500 points and move onto the next level.  You can tell it’s the next level as the mushrooms and spider change colour.

Graphics

Spectipede is an extremely colourful game.  The graphics look like User Defined Graphics (UDG’s).  Only one The Scorpio flickers and that is deliberately done in my opinion as it changes yellow to red rapidly, even on the scoring display page.  In effect, I’m happy to say there is no colour-clash.

Oddly though, when you do lose a life, the screen does quickly flash-up as if it has a display behind it with different characters.  I’m not sure what that is all about, but it does look a bit out of place.  It’s displayed for less than a second, but it didn’t seem to make much sense to me why they’d be there.

The loading screen for Spectipede is the Mastertronic logo (which was generally the case with their very early game releases).

Sound Effects

There is no music but there are sound effects whilst playing Spectipede.  The sound effects aren’t too bad.  The most common one you’ll hear is the tapping noise when pressing down the fire button.

Better still when you hit the spectipede, they make what I’d describe as a puck noise.  If you hear it, you’ll know what I mean.  When you collide with an enemy, there is a spring scaled noise.

Points of Interest

Spectipede was originally by R & R Software at the R.R.P. of £5.50 and then subsequently re-released by Mastertronic at £1.99.  If you weren’t aware that this was a re-release then by pressing the BREAK key followed by List command (after the first loading block on the cassette), you’ll see ©1983 R&R SOFTWARE.

Mastertronic had two different artwork covers released for Spectipede.  The instructions are the same inside. although there are for two noticeable differences inside.  The cassette cover with the red spider jumping down onto a Spectrum robot and a Spectipede is black and white inside.  This was very similar to the R&R version (but obviously without the Mastertronic logo.)

The other cassette cover which looks a bit more futuristic (mainly a red cover and orange colour and a bit space-aged) has a different logo and is printed in red inside.  The catalogue number on both remains the same, IS 0021

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