Trans Am was a good one. Your task was to search across America for the Eight cups of Ultimate. The car was a Super Blown Red Racer which could out run the Deadly Black Turbos. You had to refuel at towns, watch your temperature and not go so fast that you'd crash into obstacles. The cups and black turbos would show up as black dots on your short range scanner, the difference being the turbos would be hurtling towards you. With simple left, right, accelerate and brake it was an easy game to get into.

The biggest game magazine of the time Computer & Video Games held it's Golden Joystick Awards at the end of the year. Ultimate won software house of the year and JetPac won them game of the year. The first four games were later made available as ROM cartridges for the Sinclair Interface 2 (costing £14.95 each!).

All the games were team efforts, Chris Stamper and John Latchbury programmed the structure of the game, while Tim Stamper and Carole Ward concentrated on the graphics.

The next games were Lunar Jetman and a month later Atic Atac. Their launch at the start of 1984 coincided with the launch of Crash magazine which praised them to the skies. These games now utilised the 48K Spectrum and showed a true jump in size and complexity. Lunar Jetman was a semi sequel to JetPac.

This time the screen scrolled and you had freedom to move about. You had to transport a bomb in his Hyperglide Moon Rover to the alien missile installation. Impacts on the planet surface made holes that the rover wouldn't go over so you had to bridge it with sections from inside the rover.

The control in this game was tricky. You had the left/right/thrust/fire of JetPac plus a key to pick objects up and one to enter the moon rover. Inside the rover was safe so it was best to travel like that. But a hole in the planets surface meant you had to exit the rover, pick up a bridging section, set it down in precisely the right place then get back in the rover.

Plenty of time for an object to scream in from the side and kill you. Sometimes it could seem unfair. This was the first of their games with a high score table. My main memory of this is that it took me two weeks to attain eighth on that table.

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