HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

Much as I love the ZX Spectrum series of computers, I can't deny its screen setup is not ideally suited to games. For starters, its resolution - 256x192 pixels, very firmly in the 4:3 aspect ratio of UK TVs at the time - is smaller than both of its most popular 8-bit competitors, and a fair middle ground for handling both horizontal and vertical layouts. By comparison, the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC run their screens at 320x200 in 'high res' mode (albeit just 160x200 in 'full colour mode'), giving an aspect ratio of 16:10, coincidentally rather similar to the 'widescreen' format of today . It's interesting to note, though, that the Spectrum's resolution is somewhat closer to the average arcade game of the 80s, which would have been 256x244 (or 244x256 in Tate Mode), an aspect ratio of 8:7. The Spectrum's screen is further broken down into 32x24 attribute blocks of 8x8 pixels, each of which can accommodate just two colours, design...

It must be acknowledged that the ZX Spectrum version of Reckless Rufus is neither as pretty nor as colourful as the original C64 version, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the background to each level. On the C64, a range of static backgrounds - from starfields to regular  dot  patterns, from abstract orthogonal shapes to vine-like textures, from rigid mechanical constructs to freeform scatterings of colour - sit behind the tiles the player must navigate. They are solid-looking, yet distinct enough from the tiles that the player should only need to drop off the edges  once to learn where they can safely step. The same is true for the Amstrad CPC version, though its backgrounds are largely less colourful - several appear to be shades of grey only - allowing its brighter, more vivid sprites and tiles to stand out. The Spectrum version, for some reason, ended up with a green-and-black background, made up of square blocks - 16x16 pixel bricks, boxes, interfer...

The main reason I had been upset about most of my sprites being left out of the Spectrum conversion of Reckless Rufus is that I was uncharacteristically happy with how they'd turned out. Sure, they're not as colourful as the original C64 sprites, but I felt that I'd captured their essence within the 1-bit limit of the Spectrum, while also cleaning up some of the details that didn't come across so well due to the C64's fat pixels. Looking back, I suspect this was the main reason I even considered the possibility of porting Reckless Rufus to the SAM: to make use of sprite work I actually liked, and to use MODE 4 on the SAM to further refine them. Thing is, back when I first started porting my Spectrum graphics over to the SAM, I didn't even bother adjusting the palette from the default Spectrum colours, so I ended up doing just one version of each enemy sprite. Given that the C64 version offered a range of colours for each sprite - coincidentally, like many vers...

Off the back of some of my youthful pie-in-the-sky posts on the Spectrum Computing forum, I got talking with Will Brooker (professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University and an author of several books of cultural studies) about the general concept of videogames as movie adaptations. He challenged me to create a pitch for a new game based upon The Empire Strikes Back , as it might/could have been made for the Spectrum, circa 1988, to accompany an article he was planning to write about movie adaptations on the ZX Spectrum - "A Limit Case In Adaptation: 1980s Video Games and Contemporary Movies" . Obviously, there are official Star Wars games - DoMark's conversions of the Atari arcade games for the Spectrum, not to mention those on the consoles as well - that can't be completely ignored. Also, by 1988, Lucasfilm were taking charge of their properties and either creating games in-house, or at least publishing themselves,...

While the majority of my graphic design/pixel art has been on the SAM Coupé, I started out on the ZX Spectrum, and wanted to get into game development from a very young age. At the very beginning, back in the early/mid 1980s, I used Pixel Pads , created by a Hertfordshire company named Computer Agencies Limited, which I'd acquired at a ZX Microfair. These were ideal for sketching out anything from a complete screen to individual sprite graphics, since they were designed with the Spectrum's 256x192 pixel screen in mind, with the 32x24 attribute block grid marked out using heavier lines. Most of the time, I used pencils but, over the years of using and reusing the pages of the pad, I ended up using felt-tip colouring pens on quite a lot of them, making them harder to reuse effectively in future. Eventually, however, I acquired The Artist II by Bo Jangeborg, which allowed my creativity to take flight in new ways. I wouldn't say I ever mastered The Artist II , nor OCP's Ar...