UFO-Adventure

When I first started UFO-Adventure on Spectrum, I didn't know if I was looking at a game or an attempt at a game. Black screen, a few colored squares, sound like someone trying to play a saw—and yet there was some world here pulling me forward.

It's an arcade adventure from the eighties when playing meant wandering and fighting. You control some object—probably a spaceship or a guy—you have to collect things, avoid or kill enemies, and move on. The game has no complex story; it's pure mechanics: movement, shooting, death, restart. On Spectrum, where every pixel counted, we were happy with this modest visual.

Controls are straightforward, as old computers expect. Joystick or keys, a few buttons—nothing more needed. The problem is that the game plays like a corpse. Enemy movement and shooting lack the energy of better-executed titles. Even if it's fun, you feel this isn't the work of a real creator, more like an experimental notebook on paper without passion.

Today we remember it more as a curiosity than a classic. UFO-Adventure was one of thousands of games written by someone in a garage or rented office and sent into the world. It's not bad—it's just not particularly good. In the nineties it would have ended in a half-meter stack of publisher catalogs alongside a hundred other names nobody remembers.

Today? It's worth trying just to convince yourself not everything from that era was gold. It's a fragment from when experimentation happened without profit pressure. On an emulator it takes twenty-five minutes of your life—a good self-examination to understand why some games stayed in memory and others in lists of projects nobody wants to watch.