The Mastertronic Archives - The history of Mastertronic budget games needs your help!!!

Only just last month Indie Retro News did a big feature for Player One Book's big Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for ' The Mastertronic Archives - The Ultimate Mastertronic Collector's Guide '. Both a standard volume and enhanced collectors volume were mentioned, detailing the history of the fantastic 8bit budget range such as KANE, Kikstart, Finders Keepers, One Man and his Droid, and many more. Basically if you were a gamer in that era, with an Amstrad, C64 or ZX Spectrum, the Mastertronic range were at the top of their class. But so far with all that said, it still isn't a Kickstarter success, and with 70 hours to go, and only $28,897 pledged of a $33,000 goal, they need your help!

The Mastertronic Archives - The history of Mastertronic budget games gets a classy Kickstarter!

When I was just a wee lad, I used to go into town and into a shop called Forbouys, it was packed to the brim with newsagent items, but more especially gaming magazines and classic 8-bit tapes. You know the ones, the Amstrad, C64 and ZX Spectrum, all stacked neatly against each other on the shelf, priced between £1.99 and £4.99. It was such a fantastic time for a kid of that era, and it is the Mastertronic budget game selection which is going to be given a hearty mention in their latest book Kickstarter ' The Mastertronic Archives : The Ultimate Mastertronic Collector's Guide ', by Player One Books!

Spellbound - A very classic Mastertronic ZX Spectrum review

The loading screen!

Following from the footsteps of the excellent Finders Keepers comes the equally excellent Spellbound. A far cry from the platform orientated FK, this time you were in a 'True Graphic Adventure' as the title screen suggests. This summed up the game brilliantly. This is what an adventure would look like if put into visuals instead of the standard text-based affair. The genius way to get around entering sentences or commands that, let's be honest hardly ever seem to work ('you cannot do that yet', 'I don't understand' - sound familiar?) was the excellent 'Windimation' window which you could open and select various commands, of which increased when certain objects were collected.