A Gaming Diary
ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection (iPhone)
On this app’s page in the App Store it tells us that it’s a work in progress and that the developers will be dealing with the shortcomings in future updates.
As such, I’m not going to be as harsh as I otherwise would be – I won’t be swearing – but I’ve tried three of the six included games in this pack and none of them have been remotely playable.
The controls just don’t work, requiring too much thumb precision to be remotely usable. I’m a firm defender of virtual controls, simply because they can and do work in many games, but the tiny diagonals of Chuckie Egg and the thumb-twisting layout of Turbo Esprit are incredibly hard to deal with.
(The unlicensed ZX Nostalgia did a far better job with its virtual stick solution to the problem – Chuckie Egg was reasonably playable on that emulator, certainly far better than this offering. Unfortunately, being unlicensed, it was soon taken down. It’s back now, but with a set of licensed games that I’ve never heard of.)
Hopefully the developers will respond to feedback and offer, say, a virtual Kempston joystick or something. At the moment, this just isn’t worth it, even when each game costs 10p. Okay, maybe it’s just about worth it for the nostalgic joy of seeing proto-GTA Turbo Esprit running on your phone, but you’re not going to be actually playing it for very long.
Print article | This entry was posted by That Rev Chap on October 5, 2010 at 8:40 am, and is filed under iPhone. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. |
about 1 year ago
Thanks for your input “that Rev Chap”. We’re working on the control issues and our first revision will appear in Vol. 2, later this month. That volume will probably have its failings too and so we’ll continue working on the issue – potentially ‘ad infinitum’.
Regards – the ZX team at Elite
about 1 year ago
Thanks for the reply, Steve. I’m glad you’ll be working on the controls – the actual emulation appears to be top notch, at least to a layman like me. (By the way, for future reference, my name’s Owen.)