The winners have been announced! Click here to see them!

The entries are up! Click here to see them!

Hello! Welcome to the official site of the Millennium Experience Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Competition 2000! This year we'll be bringing all the excitement of the competition to you in conjunction with The Crapware Corporation, a company dedicated to bringing quality software to the public, software with the same exacting standards that you'd expect from all of the entrants to this yearly celebration of fine 8-bit programming.

Since it's inception in 1996, the CSSCGC has attracted competitors from all over the world eager to show off their coding prowess with dazzling displays of playability, all captured within the miniscule memory allowance of the humble ZX Spectrum. What stunning products can we expect this year, though? Only time will tell.

But while we wait for the entries to start flooding in, why don't you join me on a rose tinted trot through years gone by to have a look at some of the fantastic examples of software produced in the previous three competitions...

(Warning: Sports section may contain bile and invective)

Arcade Games

Miscellaneous

Simulators

Sports Games

Text Adventure Games

Utilities

So what's in it for you, eh? Well, apart from earning the respect and admiration of your peers (and if you're a grocer, your pears as well) you'll also receive a prize!

But what is this prize, you ask? Well, I'm afraid that until I've built the bloody thing (or rather "things" if all goes to plan) I'm unwilling to spill the beans on it. However I do promise you that it'll be something that everyone who's ever owned a Spectrum will want. Oh yes.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better outline the rules of the competition (such as they are)...

• All entries must be supplied in either SNA, Z80, TAP or TZX format. Basically, if it doesn't run on either X128 or ZX32, you're shafted.
• Any entries with the word "lawn" or "mower" in the title are less likely to win the top prize than I would be in the next Winter Olympics.
• Filenames can be over three letters in length as I feel the competition has outgrown its roots of being a rip-off of the Cascade Cassette 50.
• All entries in the future should be sent to grahamg@zedtwo.com as I don't check my Demon account as often and I'll just be forwarding them on anyway. Plus I like to draw attention to my fabby job at Zed Two as often as possible. :)
• Entries including clumsily digitised hard core pornography will not make it into the competition. Instead they'll be put into my private collection and leered at on a weekly basis. (UPDATE: Actually, one game with a nuddy lady in has made it into this year's competition, but don't worry, careful application of the ancient skill of "bad digitising" has removed anything likely to arouse - unless colour clash makes you horny, that is)

Lastly here's a few tips on how to better your chances of winning the CSSCGC2K. The one entry that really stood out for me last year was the excellent Dodgy's Castle. It wasn't the fact that it was a text adventure (a genre which I can't abide at the best of times) but it was the brilliant inventiveness of making the central character deaf, thus forcing you to type in the instructions twice. Were I the only judge of the 1999 compo then it would have won hands down.

And it's that inventiveness that I'll be looking for. I want to see games that go out of their way to be crap. Games that are so deeply flawed as to make the mind-boggle at what crap genius came up with them.

So for example, instead of writing yet another Rock-Paper-Scissors game this year, do something like Rock-Pebble-Stone! Instead of Noughts And Crosses for the regular two players, have a nine player version with the same size board! Or Chess For Pacifists where the pieces apologise for getting in each others way and refuse to take each other! Or how about more hopelessly ambitious conversions of PC titles that the Spectrum couldn't do justice to in a million years? Come on people! (btw, that was a rallying cry, not an instruction)

And above all other things... NO BLOODY LAWN MOWERS! Good luck!