Coming in hot on the heels of the Falkland's Crisis, Durell software decide to grace our speccys with a kid-friendly, home version of the war, and unleash a cheap^ and cheerful shoot-em-up with more cyan than they know what to do with.

Their first release for the home micro, it doesn't have a lot of gameplay to speak of beyond the zipping back and forth à la Defender, and can get boring very quickly.

^It wasn't cheap. The game cost £5.50 in 1983, which works out to around £17 in today's money,

Watching the demo of this shows there is more than one type of level beyond the first's FPS shooter. A side scrolling one similar to the previous games, and a 2D jetpack romp. You'll never see them without cheating however, as the aforementioned opening level is impossible to complete. Its difficulty lies with the fact that the enemies can hit you while offscreen, and they do. You'll get a brief warning like "Danger! Punks advancing!" and a flashing arrow, but by the time you reach them in order to dispense your particular brand of testicle mauling justice, they've already hit you three or four times. Oof, right in the efficiency.

A real shame, as with a bit of common sense on behalf of the creators this could have been a winner. Its polish, tunage, and graphics are quite good, as you would expect from a stalwart of the industry like Ocean Software at the end of the system's lifespan.

I won't mention the movie if you don't.

Ocean's second attempt at the Nintendo classic after 1983's Kong, and this time they've got the official license. It really shows how far they'd come, for while the gameplay is just about the same as it was three years prior, now the whole thing has a polish that elevates it to a far more professional tier.

Unfortunately I think it's a trifle too slow now thanks to all the extra garnish, and worse, the jumping is broken. Where before you could clear the barrels with ease, now Jumpman can't get the height needed and making it over them is strictly luck based rather than skill. A real hairy shame.

It's about as basic as they come, but it does the job. So what if they didn't get the license. It's fast, but the ladders are a pain to climb. It's colourful, but there's a fair bit of attribute clash. The sounds are memorable, but the barrel buzzing will drive you crazy. Oh, they've thrown in a training mode too, so you can play any of the four available levels to your heart's content. For 1983 it's a definite winner, play it forty years later however and you might be hard pressed to get the same level of enjoyment out of it.

And here it is. Claimed by many to be the final official release on the Speccy, but nobody told Codemasters that obviously. It's not horrid, granted it is a little frustrating and dare I say it, typically Spectrum in its approach. But we do at least have a credible sci-fi tie-in for once.

Behind a nice title tune are some small but recognisable characters, a confusing maze, and some artistic license. Some of the enemies are unkillable, your health is drained faster than Mr. Muscle's kitchen drain, and on its original hardware there's some brutal level loading which only adds to the frustration.

The last of the Dizzy games for the home micro computers until 2020's Wonderful Dizzy throwback, and it's an okay attempt. The controls have been perfected, the platforming designed with just enough hair-pulling to keep you trying again, but there are a few clouds hanging over it, notably the absence of original creators the Oliver Twins, and the unfortunate price jump, which undoubtedly hurt long-time fans of the franchise, used to the budget titles.

The puzzles are simple enough, and you can probably beat this in under ten minutes if you've done it before, but all in all it's a bit of a sad note in the life of the Spectrum's other mascot.

This game arrived right at the end of Uncle Clive's little experiment. A few months after the ten bells had been rung for the Speccy, and the dirt was still warm on the grave, Codemasters soldiered valiantly on, releasing the handful of games still in their arsenal before tapping out and finally calling it quits for the home computer market.

Except that Wrestling Superstars had been seen before, in 1992 in fact, as part of the Supersports Challenge compilation. Quite why they saw the need to grace us with a solo release is anyone's guess, those were crazy times. But this would arguably be the last proper Spectrum game from the Darling brothers.

I'll be honest, if Codemasters had stuck to their guns and used the rules of professional wrestling, and somehow landed an actual WWF tie-in, this would have been the crowning zenith of the Spectrum's lifespan. But it's a weird one. There's no license here despite the cover art and title screen being festooned with the gurning mug of everyone's favourite veiny racist. The aforementioned rules are also non-existent, there's no 1-2-3 count, just your opponent lying on top of your prostrate body until your health bar runs out. Aside from those debilitating cons, the game is actually pretty good. It runs smoother than most AAA titles, is colourful, fun to play, and has a jaunty chiptune playing as you wrestle.

A nice finisher. So to speak.

It was never going to be a Street Fighter 2 beater, that much was obvious. We always considered it the substitute, for when our first choice of fighting game was missing. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth playing. Mortal Kombat is a fantastic game that requires a level of perseverance beyond the casual, and with its iconic visuals and sound, it's always a draw at arcades. Unfortunately its difficulty is completely broken, with the enemy always several frames ahead in terms of counter-attacking, so without resorting to trickery and exploiting the CPU the player is doomed to fall before the end, and for that alone I chose to go with four stars instead of five.

The characters are mostly brilliant looking, with the exception of the bytes-saving obvious palette swapped ninjas. In fact the "digitised" actors have themselves gone on to achieve as much notoriety as their colourful representations. Bouyed by the endless sequels, there probably isn't a gamer out there that doesn't recognise Scorpion or his show-stopping call to prayer.

Speaking of. Each Kombatant has a series of charming moves culminating in a gruesome finisher that some might argue is the main attraction of the game. I trust I don't need to go into the history and repercussions of Midway's decision, only that in hindsight it all really does seem like a big fuss over nothing. Then again, maybe this was the genie and bottle moment, with every game that followed being offered a sense of freedom to be gratuitous and violent, free of committee interference. Should we be thankful and bow down to MK and this watershed moment? I think so. If the game didn't stand up, stand the test of time, if it was a Custer's Revenge, or Chiller say, we could point at the moment gaming faltered on the edge of an abyss, but thankfully it does play well, even thirty years later.

I'm Give Up Your Appellation's Technical Monkey

Superlative horizontal scrolling shooter, unfortunately let down by the SNES's technical limitations. The developers had the sheer cheek to call it a feature, that they were merely emulating the arcade, but there's no escaping the crippling slowdown, particularly evident on the Bubble Zone and Cell levels. In spite of this, Konami did the game a service. The controls are perfect, the soundtrack stellar, and there's tons of variety in the levels and enemies to keep you coming back for another go.

There's also a SA-1 enhanced patch by Brazilian coding genius Vitor Vilela which adds the vital oomph the game was lacking, so by all means check that out.