Dan Dare

Dan Dare flies onto the screen like a fighter jet on one wing — with half a flight computer and the faith that it'll somehow work out. This is an action platformer from the eighties on ZX Spectrum, where you take on the role of the famous pilot and your pixel-art character will try to survive in an environment that looks like it was drawn by a flashlight running on dead batteries.

It's the classic formula — you move your character across various screens, collect items if there are any, and try to reach the end of the level without getting killed by anything that moves. Controls are simple: jump and move. No fancy weapons or abilities, mechanics are straightforward. The game doesn't try to be smarter than it actually is. Sometimes it works — when a level is well-designed and the pace is right. Other times you're just waiting for it to end.

Graphics, as was typical for Spectrum, work with a heavily limited palette and flickering layers. Dan Dare is recognizable, levels have their structure, but this isn't a title that'll enchant you with its looks. Animations are choppy, backgrounds are modest. This is simply a game from its era — it didn't even try for anything more than what the hardware allowed.

What keeps it alive is pure arcade spirit. There's no story to bore you with. No lengthy introductions. You just grind through levels over and over and hope you manage not to fall or miss a jump with decent precision. For some, that was enough. For others, it wasn't. Today it mainly serves as a reminder of how things were made when time was measured in kilobytes.

It's worth trying today only if you're interested in what British computer culture of the eighties was built on. It's neither an outstanding game nor a memorable one. It's simply — it exists, it works, and someone was playing it back in the nineties. The basics, nothing more.