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All good things must come to an end, and so a fairly solid run of interesting obscurities and gaming greats fizzles out with an uninspired trio of new VC games. There's a new N64 game, which is usually cause for celebration, and some more offerings from the NeoGeo and TurboGrafx CD thingy but nothing that's going to have you whipping out your credit card. Ho hum.

Towards the end of their reign as The Universe's Best-Selling Spectrum Mag, the magnificent Your Sinclair began cover mounting full games with the casual abandon of a philanthropic extrovert. One such treat was Rebelstar; written, designed, produced and tenderly loved by the ingenious Julian Gollop. This game initiated the genre we now snappily recognise as Tactical-Squad-Based-RPG-Combat-Type-Thing.

Perhaps more than any other, the 8-bit era was notorious for silly plots being tacked onto a clever game. It could be a huge disservice to suggest Bobby Bearing is a prime culprit, but the evidence is rather compelling. Bobby is ... some kind of robotic sphere thing. He lives in the isometric land of Technofear with his fellow robotic sphere things. Alas, an impish cousin has led his brothers astray, beyond the family home, and onto the dangerous plains. Our Bob must rescue them before it's too late.

The walled city of Antescher is inhabited by ants. Not the teeny weenie type you find under the paving slabs in your garden, these are huge bloody things - at least 6 pixels big with vast, snappy jaws and spindly legs, which home in on you for a bite as soon as you get close.

The Hewson blurb on the cassette inlay proudly proclaims "Avalon - The 3D Adventure Movie". A bold and brash statement suggesting an interactive gaming experience comparative to playing the hero in the latest blockbuster movie.

Whilst the legendary Elite is most closely associated with the venerable BBC Micro, it was also ported to the Spectrum, swiftly followed by a selection of Elite-esque titles. And, although flying the Cobra Mk. III taught us all how profitable arms sales could be, David Webb's own foray into wire-frame space combat switched killer business instinct for pure, intellectual rigour.

Pesky Zark has only gone and done it again, he’s drained Wizworld of colour and left it as a monochrome husk. Now it's down to the titular hero and his faithful cat to restore it back to radiant glory. Thus begins one of the C64’s quirkiest arcade shooters.

Gamers today have an easy life compared to yesteryear. Tutorials, hand-holding, subtle pointers and a gradual increase in difficulty all help to ease the player into the unknowns of a new title. In contrast, Mercenary unceremoniously throws the new recruit into an adventure with little knowledge of what’s going on bar a brief overview of their ship's controls.

When Zzap publisher Newsfield decided to controversially set-up a game publishing division called Thalamus, readers had every right to be suspicious whether the mag's editorial integrity would go out of the window when it came to reviewing its own games.

Ever wanted to live your life a different way? Ever fancied seeing what might have happened if you'd have only been a bit more daring and reckless? Alter Ego lets you do all of that and more as you begin life's journey from the womb, through to puberty, middle age and old age.

After a pretty amazing début quartet of Sanxion, Delta, Quedex (and the lovely Hunter's Moon which we'll add another time), Thalamus kept up its near-flawless record of quality, original titles with this slice of action adventure loveliness.

Most of the time, the whole 8-bit budget software scene was a bit of a bad joke on those stupid enough to waste their pocket money/ paper round on them.

If the 'Super' Mario Brothers were ever to stop sodding about chasing after Princess Peach and get themselves girlfriends, they'd almost certainly be called Giana and Maria: The Great Giana Sisters.

It would be easy to slap Commodore's real International Soccer in our first team selection of C64 classics. We could quite justifiably wax on about how important it was to the development of football games (and it really was), but, well, the truth is this 1988 Audiogenic effort was about ten times better, so it gets the nod. The old grizzled warhorse with the medals and the dodgy knees gets to sit in the dugout for now.

Deflektor was never one of those games that had people jumping up and down in excitement upon its unheralded release in early 1988. But that's hardly surprising is it? If you were a keen gamer back then, you'd probably struggle to remember too many puzzle games flying off the shelves, and stood next to more graphically impressive action games of the time (and no handheld outlet for it), it got rather pushed to one side and forgotten about. But not by me. Oh ho no.

If you've ever wondered what golf games were like in days when your dad had hair (and, quite possibly, a semi-decent taste in music), then Leaderboard represents the pivotal moment where someone came up with a set of play mechanics so good that they've barely changed since.

When Frankie sang "When Two Tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score," in 1984, what Holly Johnson was actually singing about was the band's stinging 1/10 review of the latest C64 sensation Raid Over Moscow. The jolly scallies really didn't buy into the hype that Bruce Carver's latest was as good as everyone seemed to think it was, and, you know, maybe they were onto something.

Does Bruce Carver's 1984 best-seller really deserve a place on this collection of C64 classics? In many ways, no, because out of everything it has probably dated worse than anything else from this carefully selected bunch of gaming relics.

Before GTA taught us the joys of gratuitous crime, games were a lot more naïve. So when it became clear that most gamers had understandably assumed that the main character of Rollercoaster was some no-good carnie scrounging cash from a deserted funfair, a new back-story was written. Our hero became a beleaguered employer named Colonel G. Bogey trying to reclaim his takings that were stolen by a nefarious ex-employee.

Retro apologists are forever gushing over 'timeless classics' and weeping over nostalgic memories of crusty old games and the passing of their youth - but when you're talking about a title like Boulderdash, such undiluted conviction about its ageless worth is perfectly justified. EA has developed a remake, for gawd's sake.

For a few years in the mid '80s, Epyx barely put a foot wrong. Having already wowed gamers with Summer Games, Impossible Mission and Pitstop, the release of Summer Games II in 1985 showed the world's most adept C64 developer take sports games to a whole new level.

In an era when talented lone programmers could quickly churn out top-notch, technically amazing titles to order, the arrival of Stavros Fasoulas' second horizontal shooter, Delta, came as no surprise. Yes readers, we were spoiled rotten back in 1987.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? In 1984, almost everybody who owned a Speccy. Ultimate already had a reputation for quality game design, but their Sabreman series would arguably surpass these previous achievements - with Sabre Wulf alone selling a reported 350,000 copies on the eight-coloured wonder.

In 1942 (the game and the year), the world is in the throes of global conflict. Your contribution to world peace surmounts to taking on the might of the Japanese air force with a single war plane decked out with twin machine guns and a nifty loop the loop trick that baffles and bewilders the dim-witted enemy.

Of course Asteroids holds massive significance in the history of videogames, but as a game in its own right, this awesome machine demonstrated the real depths of possibility the new, and mostly frowned upon, industry had to offer.

Before Fallout came Wasteland - Interplay's masterful first stab at creating a post-apocalyptic role playing game, and easily one of the most ambitious and forward-looking games ever created for an 8-bit system.

The then fledging Sensible Software took advantage of one of Maggie Thatcher's government enterprise schemes to get this strange hybrid title off the ground. Three months down the line and armed with a demo, the duo of Jon Hare (Jovial Jops) and Chris Yates (Cuddly Chrix) went up to Manchester in the UK in the hope of getting the game signed, and came home back to Cambridge with a deal.

Robotron:2084 is the epitome of organised chaos. An unbridled jaunt into insanity and the ultimate in twitch gaming. This is a title that all shooter fans must play at least once in order to experience the finely balanced gaming perfection achieved by the legendary Eugene Jarvis.

Ever willing to take full advantage of a tenuous licensing opportunity, Ocean managed to just about capitalise on the fortunes of the humongous success of Liverpool's finest before the bubble burst for Holly Johnson, Paul Rutherford and the comedy scousers from the 118 adverts. Eh? Calm down.

A homage to arcade footy sensation Tehkan World Cup (the one with the trackball), this top-down stab at the beautiful game was, in effect, the original Sensible Soccer and provided C64 fans with one of the most technically impressive games ever released on the ageing home computer.