The Man with the Golden Joystick (ZX Spectrum 2023)

A fun new Spectrum game with lots of retro references. This game was written by SloanySoft who has published several Spectrum games on itch.io. He also streams as   / sloanysoft  . This game is a tribute to another streamer, RetroHitch (  / retrohitch  ) and I found out about it via a third streamer, TinyTim (  / tinytim78  ! The Spectrum is alive and well in the streaming world it seems...!

The game has "air control" for jumping which was rather rare in the Spectrum age and also a health bar rather than lives which makes it quite forgiving. The route I take essentially involves spiralling clockwise around the map and then backtracking to go up the "shaft" of the joystick (fnarr! but seriously, the map is in the form of a joystick).

You need to collect 128 items but there are about 135 in the game so I avoid collecting some in Dark Side of the Wall and skip the Angry Bunny screen completely. I also skip one in the EU-Kola-yptus screen which is tedious to get. By the time I get to the Top of the Tree I have enough items to just go to the final Thunder? Balls! screen to complete.

Played with Speccy 5.1 and recorded live with OBS -- no cheating!