[theme music]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh!
[typing]
Aw, yeah, it's totally time for some Spectrum games!
And we've got quite a treat for you today on Uncle Clive's epic 8-bit wonder.
Lightforce from 1986 by Faster Than Light,
and made by Greg Follis and Roy Carter.
Although this is not technically by Gargoyle Games,
It's the same guys. I don't know why they used a different name here.
This is the Hewson release
and it should work on any Spectrum 48K or higher.
The scenario: SOS. All systems alert.
There's a distress call from the colonies around Regulus.
Friggin' aliens are attacking!
So you jump in a Lightforce fighter
and go blow things up.
Well, count me in.
After a few minutes of loading and staring at the cover art,
wondering if it's going to look *anything* like that,
you are greeted with a menu
composed of yellow blocks,
the phrase "Faster than Light"
"Lightforce is for Vengeance!"
and the option to select a joystick or a keyboard.
And quite awesomely, the game starts off right from that menu.
Your Lightforce ship launches and you're right in the action,
shooting green balls
with your little white... things,
and probably dying
because it's hard to get off enough shots to kill these things.
And especially the yellow ones; they will pretty much never get blown up.
And, okay, it should be obvious by now,
but holy crap, these graphics are really good for a Spectrum.
Now, sure, there are other versions of this game
that may or may not have better graphics,
like the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC,
but for a Spectrum, this is incredible.
For one thing, there's no color bleed,
or at least not much if there is.
Color bleed was normally seen in games
where you would see one color kind of, well, bleed,
out of the edges of an object into another,
or the background or something.
But you just don't see that here.
It's just clear-looking sprites and objects
and that is awesome.
Not to mention the smooth scrolling screen,
and the fairly consistent frame rate for how much is going on.
It does slow down a little bit in heavier parts.
Especially on the second level,
where you start seeing more and more detailed backgrounds, but...
Dang, I just don't care if it does slow down a little bit, because this is awesome.
I mean, seriously, as soon as I saw this, I had to buy it.
I imported it immediately from the UK.
Because... yeah,
this is amazing for your Spectrum.
If you own a 48K Spectrum,
this is an absolute must.
And as far as gameplay goes,
it's nothing groundbreaking at all.
It's pretty much just a vertical-scrolling shooter.
Maybe I just suck or something,
but I didn't really notice any power-ups or anything like that.
So it's not like there's going to be much variety.
You pretty much just try to avoid the things that you can't hit
and blow up the stuff that you can.
and try to shoot fast enough to do that.
That's probably the biggest problem is being able to shoot fast enough.
With any joystick or gamepad that I tried,
I was not able to get shots out quick enough or reliably enough
in order to kill a lot of these objects that are moving really, really quickly,
because your ship doesn't move too fast.
So you really need to be able to belt out those shots,
but that's just not doable with most joysticks.
And it's no better on the keyboard – in fact, it's probably worse.
That bizarre membrane keyboard is not made for rapid movements.
It's not really made for much of anything.
So what I do is use one of these Sega Genesis arcade-style joysticks.
For one thing, you get the actual arcade-y joystick
that you can move with your left hand,
and you have actual buttons which can be pounded on really quickly.
And the game actually responds to that.
The game really is limited by whatever hardware you have to control the ship.
So if you have one of these little cheapo sticks, then try it out.
It's a very playable game no matter what.
The arcade stick only enhances that
and the graphics are just friggin' incredible.
Though when it comes down to it, I suppose it could be pretty boring to some people.
There's only five levels,
although each of those levels have a decent amount of variety in between them.
So I would say it's probably about 40% awesomeness
and 60% curiosity.
And of course, there are other versions, like the aforementioned Commodore 64
and Amstrad CPC ports.
I have not played those. I don't know how they are.
All I know is Rob Hubber does a completely epic theme song for the Commodore 64 version,
so that one might be worth checking, but I don't know.
All I can say is that the Spectrum version of Lightforce
is pretty friggin' awesome.