Advanced Pro Wife Simulator

Advanced Pro Wife Simulator from 1999 is not a normal game and there is no point judging it by normal standards. It was made for CSSCGC — the Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Compo, an annual competition run by the ZX Spectrum newsgroup in which entrants compete to produce the worst game of the year. Andy Kavanagh wrote the program, that year's compo was run by Alistair Nelson and Graham Goring, and it fits in sixteen kilobytes.

The joke is in the title and the execution at once. During the Codemasters years the Spectrum was flooded with dozens of simulators — Pro Golf Simulator, Pro Powerboat Simulator, Advanced Pilot Simulator and so on — all of them straining to look more serious than their contents. This title takes that tradition to its absurd conclusion: it simulates a wife. The program asks you questions and you have to guess what your wife wants to hear. That is all.

The compo's judging comments are part of the documentation and are worth quoting. Alistair described it as essential for anybody planning to get married, adding that the responses were unfortunately far too realistic. Graham noted that the machine-code screen fade looked far too professional, but that the software emulation of a wife's AI was so realistic the whole thing could only be considered a triumph of programming design.

Is it worth loading? As a game, no — it lasts a few minutes and has no depth. As evidence that the Spectrum community was still making fun of its own past twenty years after the commercial era ended, yes. CSSCGC is still running and is one of the longest-lived game competitions of any kind.