10 Great Arcade Clones For The ZX Spectrum

Haunted Hedges – Micromega

Haunted Hedges is a rather creative copy of Namco’s huge 1980 hit Pac-Man and also one of the very first Spectrum games I ever owned.

Apart from the attempt to make the game look 3D via some added perspective to the maze walls, this is for all intents and purposes Pac-Man. Instead of the yellow pill-popper himself we now have a little stick man, the ghosts are still here and the power pellets have been substituted for pick axes (not sure why!).

Visuals aside the way the game plays is exactly the same – you are being chased around a maze by ghosts and must munch all the dots to clear the level and move onto the next one. It’s funny, because although it plays identically to Pac-Man, the new graphics do actually make it feel a bit different and more creative than most other arcade clones out there.

In my mind Haunted Hedges is not only one of the best Pac-Man clones out there for the Spectrum but also one of the best titles that fits in the original base model’s rather meagre 16k of memory.

Aftermath – Alternative Software

The game in question here is a very blatant clone of Atari’s classic 1980 coin-op Missile Command that was released as £1.99 budget game back in 1988.

Aftermath is also a rather good effort at recreating the famous game, which is why it appears on the list. For those of you who might not be familiar with the concept, Missile Command has you trying to protect six cities from immanent nuclear annihilation by shooting down warheads from the sky above.

While Atari’s game featured three bases spread across the screen that you could shoot from, Aftermath simplifies things by having just one, much like Atari’s own 2600 port actually. This is mainly because you only have one fire button, so it makes controlling the game easier.

Although Aftermath fails to impress when it comes to either graphics or sound it gets the main thing right – the gameplay! It’s fast, frantic and keeps you coming back for more, just as any good arcade game should do.

Froggy – DJL Software

Konami’s Frogger was the game that really put them on the map when it hit arcades back in 1981 and they still remain one of the biggest players in the video game industry to this day.

The idea of the game is to guide five frogs across a dangerous road and then a hazardous river to their homes on the other side. You can move in any direction using the joystick and have a time limit in which to complete your task. Crossing the road your biggest hazard is the cars and trucks, who won’t think twice about running you over, these all move at different speeds making things trickier.

When you finally get to the river you much jump onto the moving logs and lily pads to make it home safely. But then you must watch out for the gators and lily pads that sink into the water and drown you (yes somehow these frogs can’t actually swim!). As the levels go on the game gets faster and the hazards harder to negotiate.

It only takes one play of Froggy to remind you why Frogger remains one the true arcade classics of the early eighties and this more than competent ZX Spectrum version is a very decent effort too.

Spectipede – R&R Software

First released by R&R back in 1983 with a more well-known budget release by Mastertronic a couple of years later, Spectipede is quite obviously a blatant copy of Atari’s huge 1981 hit Centipede.

For those who don’t know Centipede is a single screen shooter where you have a can of bug spray at the bottom that has full horizontal movement and limited vertical adjustments. The screen is full of mushrooms that can be shot and the centipede himself starts at the top and then moves his way down, but if he hits a mushroom it sends him straight down a level. If he hits several mushrooms in a row his descent can be very rapid and this also causes his movement to speed up too.

The centipede is made up of sections, so you have to shoot all of them to kill him and they can move independently once split up. If he reaches the bottom before you destroy him then he starts to regenerate. There are also other garden creatures like spiders, flies and even scorpions (got any of them in your garden?) that are trying to kill you too.

Spectipede is definitely one of the most playable Centipede clones available for the ZX Spectrum (and there are loads!) even if it isn’t the smoothest and most polished one out there.

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