One of Mastertronic's "Master Adventurer" series of games, JE looks crude (well it was written in BASIC), sounds worse (uses the Speccy BEEP command to no decent effect) but it's a great three part story.

Escape from three levels of dungeon, travel across a vast country and enter a castle - not much to do then! (Except escaping from the dungeon with enough money to recruit people, then actually surviving the travelling, avoiding or defeating enemies , solving the puzzles in the castle ...). All in all, engrossing adventure fun without being too heavy.

Manic Miner crossed with an oeuf. That's Egghead. A fully refined platform game and one of Crash magazine's best reader games.Remarkablyfun to play, Egghead is refreshingly uncomplicated. Each level is set in a single static screen, yet there's been plenty of imagination and thought gone into every one of them.

It's got charming graphics, good sound effects and is seriously addictive. When you lose a life, you know it's your fault, not some idiotic programmers' idea of 'fun'. A good, solid platform game which has nothing to do with Dizzy.

Ant Attack may have been written in 1983 but it's seriously scary. Kind of like the original Speccy B movie, you have to find and rescue your sweetheart from the overgrown ants. And boy are those ants nasty!

Whenever Ant Attack is mentioned, the softsolid[c] graphics are mentioned, which are great. I would rather concentrate on talking about the terror you have being chased around Antescher, occasionally dropping bombs and trying to not get bitten.

Oddly enough, that's why people play Ant Attack. Strange, isn't it?

Elite, but on LSD (well, sort of). It's completely barmy but at the same time no weirder than rescuing your sweetheart from a city full of overgrown ants.

You play Captain Blood, who is trying to locate the five remaining clones of yourself so you can kill them and absorb them to stop yourself from dying. Pleasant isn't it? (Actually, the novella that came with the game is very funny and worth reading in it's own right).

Superior graphics, a cast stranger than Prisoner: Cell Block H and the ability to blow up planets are three reasons to commit yourself to playing Captain Blood.

Angles. The game's full of them. This could have been a science project, had Deflektor been developed on the BBC, but as Costa Panayi was a Speccy programmer we got this rather superb puzzle game.

Get the laser beam from it's starting pod to connect with it's receiver without it overloading and you're onto the next level. If it were only that easy. You've got to fathom out angles, meddling 'gremlins' and other obstacles to overcome.

Clear graphics, challenging gameplay and a 'just one more go' factor makes Deflektor worth playing with angles.

Much better than the average budget cartoon license and the only good Yogi Bear Spectrum game. An unpretentious platform game which has been pumped full of playability.

Clear graphics - even if they are blue - help to make Yogi's Great Escape a perfectly enjoyable platform romp. Like all platform games, the more times you play the easier it gets, but with this one you'll enjoy it all the more.

And game is easily more entertaining than the cartoon it's based on.

This is a really simple driving 'concept' it literally is just get from 'A' to 'B'. Thankfully the sum of the components more than make up for the simplistic objective.

Superb, fast graphics immediately warm you to Crazy Cars 2, especially when you can crash your ferrari and watch the explosion.

Or there's the unique-to-Speccy-driving-games 360 degree spin you can make the car perform. Or there's the way that the sound of the police car off in the distance going OOOOEEEEOOOOEEEOOOO quiet at first until the car is up your exhaust and the siren's blazing.

Great stuff. A boy racers' dream game. On the Speccy.

Another 'controversial' entry. Barb the first was well received so Palace created a sequel. This time they added some substance to the game. This meant that Barb 2 lost some of it's BEU purity but made it a much more wholesome game.

The fluid animation adds to the gory sections - watch the tiger thing savage your chest on level two (or cutting out the Dungeon Master's heart), not forgetting the amount of times you can behead creatures.

Barbarian 2 enhances it's core gaming experience with a seach-and-find section, ensuring that in a sea of often ropey BEUs or Arcade Adventures, Barb 2 stands high (and beheads it's opponents).

U.S. Gold were very pleased with their million-pound deal with role-playing expert company TSR. HotL was one of only two games which were officially licensed and created for the Speccy. And funnily enough, this is the good one.

Recreating a portion of the Dragonlance saga, Heroes is more action-orientated than a 'true' rpg but it manages to successfully provide a great game given the Speccy's limitations.

Role-playing is all about using the imagination and the programmers have helped as their interpretation of the Dragonlance realm comes alive as you play.

After playing this for just a short time you don't need to stretch the imagination to realise why Heroes is in the TRB Top 100.

Another driving game, but this one's on two wheels. It's also a 'beat the clock' game rather than a 'ranking' one.

As befits a coin op conversion, Enduro Racer is all about action, trying to beat your previous attempt and progressing through the game.

And all this is great fun coupled with a bit of frustration (in the 'how can I get to the next stage?' sense) ensures that Enduro Racer is played time and again,

The fact that the motorbike handles well, has the required illusion of speed and even plays a reasonable ditty is all incidental. Of course ;-)