Sqij - Crappiest Spectrum game ever gets an 'apologetic' remake

In the midst of breaking news about new versions of classics such as Puzzle Bobble, The Chaos Engine, and Tempest; Allow me to announce a remake of a game that actually played like its name sounds. I bring you Sqij!

Sqij is relatively well known for being quite simply the worst ZX Spectrum game ever. However its beginnings as a much, much better C64 game are often forgotten. Sqij was originally programmed by a 12 year old Jason Kendall; and while it will never be remembered as a classic its a very competent and refreshingly simple little shooter. Lets put it this way, for a game made by a 12 year old its fantastic, All I could do as a 12 year old was make girls cry and my only specialist skill was grifting rubes at the Arcade with my Street Fighter II: Championship Edition skills, which by modern standards are non-existent. So 12 year old Jason Kendall gets an A*.

So that was Sqij on C64. A cool, nippy little shooter with the nice premise of playing as some kind of psychotic pigeon. It was good enough to warrant a port to the Speccy, but man do we wish that it hadn't, as the port was utter, utter clown-shoes.

Like many young Speccy users. I was duped into buying Sqij because a) it was 'pocket-money' cheap, and b) it had cool as fook artwork (later I discovered it was robbed from the Psygnosis Amiga game Obitus) plus the screen shots of the C64 game on the back looked decent.

Have a read of that box-blurb. Sounds awesome right? Then you booted it up and got this shaft of shart...

...and bare in mind that this is the 'playable' version. The game, if you can call this that, wasn't even controllable unless you used Pokes (Cheat Codes to the uninitiated). Where to begin with what's wrong with this? Should we start with the bird sprite being bigger than the Sun? What about the lack of any collision detection, or that you couldn't even play it without cheats, or the absence of any actual gameplay, or THE FACT YOU COULDN'T PLAY IT WITHOUT CHEATS (sorry, I think that qualifies as a big one). On the plus side. Buying an unplayable game meant it was easy to return this to the store the next day and get something better (I think I traded it for Psycho Hopper or Street Hassle, both terrible but the frigging Mona Lisa of games compared to Sqij).

So by way of apologising for someone elses mistake, or shrewdly capatilizing on an infamous title; The good folks at Psytronik have released a brand new conversion of the C64 game for the ZX Spectrum.

Made by the talented folk at Tardis Remakes; Its available to buy here and its actually pretty damn spiffy.

First impressions are good. In fact I'll go on record as saying that "compared to the original Sqij on the Speccy this is the frigging Mona Lisa of games", you can put that blurb on the box and this time I won't be returning it to the shop.

Christmas Milling is skulking around on Twitter attempting to make games @GameInBits.