Well, as you can see from the length of this page it's been a bumper crop this year (nothing to do with me taking ages to drag my arse into gear and finish the compo, oh no!) and the standard is as low as ever. Now, at this time (Monday, 3rd February) I've just upped the page and I'm going to give you lucky sausages 2 weeks to get any more entries to me that I've either lost or you're just finishing off. Golly.

Also please note that in my haste to type this up I may have stupidly included some entries from previous years (though I don't think I have) so if some kind person could quickly cross reference and check whether I did that'd be real sweet.

Finally, I'm missing the author's names for a few of the entries, so if you know who did them, please do forward the details to me so I can properly attribute blame to them.

So, see you in 2 weeks for the results and final update. Oh, and if you want to download all these cracking programs together with a text-only representation of the guff on this page, just click here for a zip-file!

Quake 3 Arena - By Matthew Wilson

Ah, another crappy type-in adaption of an action title, lovely. This time, however, up to four excited Spectrum owner's can join in the fun and while away literally minutes of their time in a titanic battle to be the one who captures the flag.

Tasword 2000 - By Matthew Wilson

As the advertising blurb says, this is "Everyone's favourite Spectrum word-processor, brought up to date with modern office software standards."

It's also easily the funniest entry to this year's CSSCGC and I'm damn tempted to give it the top prize for just that fact.

2001: A Spec Odyssey - By Hajo Spuunup

After a not-quite-out-of-tune-enough rendition of the music from 2001 (not the blue danube, but the other one) this game rapidly starts to show signs of the kind of competance that just isn't welcome in this competition. Not only does it broadly stick to the plot of the film, but it has IT'S OWN FONT (sickening!) and what can only be described as QUALITY SOUND EFFECTS! It's also got three (count 'em) THREE different types of gameplay! Joystick waggling, lunar landing and light-cycles!

This isn't E3, y'know!

Apocalyptic Asteroid Bombardment Death 2: Cosmic Radiation - By Alan Maxwell

Well, with a name like that, how can this fail to be excellent? By being utterly tedious, that's how! Hurrah! The "gameplay" such as is it boils down to moving a pixel from the left of the screen to the right of the screen as it moves along at a painfully slow speed. Occasionally spikes of cosmic radiation appear which you must avoid and which needlessly make a tedious game even more tedious. Well done!

Granny's Garage - By Chris Young and Phillip Lake

Lovely, this is everything the first game should have been - shite.

Horrid nasty BASIC presentation and a completely linear quest with little or no reward at the end. Quite why they spent ages doing Granny's Shed is beyond me...

Poke-A-Num Cyan - By Philip Bee

The Pikachu-inspired licensing phenomena continues apace with this latest iteration marking the nadir of the little electric mouse's games. In this game you need to randomly POKE the Speccy's memory until you accidentally hit a soft spot and cause your rubber friend to keel over. Now, I'm sure there are certain people (nerds, I believe their called) who'll know exactly what address to POKE but I'm damned if I'm sitting here all day poking addresses in an attempt to see how good the completion effect is.

Poke-A-Num Magenta - By Philip Bee

See above.

147 Adventure - By Andy Kavanagh

Well done to Andy Kavanagh by sticking possibly the most awkward of all interfaces (the type-in adventure jobbee) onto a card game. At least I think it's a card game, I couldn't really get anywhere to find out. Couldn't even remember how to break into games from an INPUT statement. I think you've got to delete the dooblies and then type in STOP or something but all I could find was RANDOMIZE.

Anyway, it's certainly crap, so well done.

147 Adventure 128 Enhanced Edition - By Andy Kavanagh

Well, it seems to be the same as above but with blue text. Maybe it has 128k sound as well but I certainly didn't hear any... Bloody hell, I hope my soundcard isn't fritzed. John'll kill me...

Advanced Advanced Simulator Simulator - By Joe Mackay

Well now, this is just crap! Okay, so that's the point of the exercise I guess but this was just infuriatingly crap. I think there's some keyboard waggling or summat and after that there might be something else but to be perfectly honest I couldn't be arsed finding out. I do have other things to do you know!

Like, um... Farting and stuff.

Advanced Fireworks Display Organiser Managment Simulator Professional - By Chris Young

Well, this is quite self explanitary, and it's also fulfils the prerequisite of being suitably crap, but it's not going to win because he said that fireworks which only go BANG are crap, which I totally disagree with. Things that go bang are really ace.

I remember this one time I threw a can of hairspray onto our bonfire. Blimey! It went off like a bomb. Really, really funny, it was.

Potentially lethal too, I'll grant you, but it's the funniness that stays with me.

Advanced GameBoy Color Emulator - By Andrew Owen

Just look at that! Look at it! It's looks lovely! Okay, so the only ROM that come supplied with it is the loathesome Advanced Lawn Mower Simulation but it's altogether far too professional looking to win. Plus, he even did his own font for it? What kinda' competition d'you think I'm running here, man? This standard of software JUST WON'T DO!

Bandname Generator - By Peter J Mella

Seeing as no discernable effort went into writing this, I'm not going to waste any reviewing it. Anyway, it's not even a game, is it?

Bleeding Bob Carolgees - By Andy Kavanagh

This attractive - yet still surprisingly crap - game is yet another entry from the Kavanagh-meister. It also boasts comprehensive instructions (which saves me a good ten minutes having to type the buggers out) to accompany the lame gameplay and so it makes a nicely rounded entry to the competition.

Oh, in case you're wondering the game is about stopping Bob Carolgees bleeding to death. Y'know, I'm sure I once met Bob Carolgees but the bloke concerned claimed not to be him. If you'll excuse the pun, he was the spitting image of the chubby entertainer. Bet it was him, though. Bet he just didn't want to give me an autograph, the stuck up bastard! Grrr!

Right, that it's, I'm too angry at this game to let it win now!

Bool - By Joe Mackay

Wow, this is really crap! It's a coin toss simulation that makes you provide your own coin! Genius! In fact I declare this game the winner!!!

Oh, hang on, I don't know who it's been done by. Well, guess the prize'll have to go to someone else. Blimey, the fickle finger of fate, eh?

Addendum:

Actually, it turns out that I did know who did it, but I've gone off the idea of awarding Joe the prize now. Blimey, the even more fickle finger of fate, eh?

Beat The Spot - By Andy Kavanagh

Grrr! Reaction timers really get my goat since I failed my driving test on the emergency stop (oh, and the reversing round the corner while accidentally mounting the kerb and not noticing thing) so I declare this game disqualified.

Well... okay, not disqualified but it's jolly well not winning, that's for damn sure as mustard. Hrumph!

On the bright side, again Andy excels in including instructions and thus saving me from having to type anything out. Y'know, I may let him win just on that basis. We'll see...

Commodore 64 Simulator - By Andrew Owen

Gack! Spit! Sully my Speccy emulator with C64 bobbins, will you Mr Owen? You'll not win a single pack of Rolos from me for this travesty! I'm angry at the author of Colony for the very same reason, y'know!

Quest For Some Bloke's CD - By Chris Young

Well, as you can see the game actually understood what I typed in, and if you think I'm going to let that level of programming prowess go unpunished then you've got another thing coming, oh-yes-indeedy-sir!

Mind you, bonus points for only having three locations in the entire game of which one is completely useless. Just a pity that you didn't stick a few spelling errors in the parser, Mr Young...

Professional Coat Getting Simulator - By Russ Tayles

Bah! I had to review this one at the last minute so I'm not in the best of moods!

Oh, actually I'm in a good mood now as it's a version of one of my favourite games ever, Robot Minefield! Yay! I did a *fantastic* version of this on the SAM Coupé, y'know. Had about 600 frames of animation in it or summat stupid. Sorry, Russ, but I've always been too much of a fan of this game since I first played Ian Slavin's version of it to consider it crap! Plus, the UDGs are really nice. Well done on a great game, and commiserations on a great game, too.

Crap Football - By Equin0x

IT'S GOT BLOODY FMV!

What were you thinking, man? You can't go entering things with actual FMV into the CSSCGC! This level of professionalism makes me want to puke my guts up and then jump up and down on them until all my dinner has squished out the ends of the slithery tubes!

And it gets worse! There's icons and all that kinda' gubbins as well! I've seen full price releases that look shoddier than this!

Excuse me, I'm going to have to go off and have a sit down. This is too damn disturbing!

Darklight: Tales Of Greyfell Inn - By Andrew Owen

Look at lovely loading screen? What were you thinking man! Now, badly digitised porn is one thing (see next game), but that must have taken ages to draw! I can't let stuff like that win or people will forever be thinking they can win me over with pretty eye-candy!

Mind you, at least the program seemed nice and buggy. Every time I pressed ENTER it changed my location for no reason at all. Lovely.

Erotic Pinball - By Chris Young

Phwoar! Will you look at the badly digitised nips on that! Well, maybe if you squint you can see them but it's the thought that counts. Behind this dodgy front screen lies a truly awful pinball game with possibly the least realistic ball handling (oo-er!) since, well, any commercially released pinball game on the Speccy.

Well done! This is a hot contender for the crown!

Fuel Protest 2000 - By Chris Young :)

Now that's how to badly digitise a screen! Pity about me getting half of the word "program:" in the way, though. Anyway, the game has vile graphics and near incomprehensible gameplay. Well done to all involved!

Attack Of The Mutant Furballs From Xargzl - By Derek Jolly

That's the spirit, man! Derek has so little regard for the compo that he only bothered writing this because there was a network crash, and that's the kind of off-hand laziness I like to see go into the entries for the CSSCGC. The gameplay is also about as pleasant as finding a dog-turd in your slippers so this may even win the compo!

Except it won't, because Derek won quite recently with his appalling Speccy Emulator. Ha!

And besides, I think he's Scottish so he'd only go and desecrate the 1st prize Rolos by deep-frying them along with a pizza.

Get Carter Adventure - By Andy Kavanagh

Now, I never saw Get Carter and so by basing his adventure on the film Andy has alienated me and made me feel as if I'm somehow sub-normal (actually, according to most of my teachers at school I am, but I don't want bloody strangers pointing it out as well), so he can jolly well sod off if he thinks this is going to win.

*sob*

Granny's Shed - By Chris Young and Phillip Lake

Ha! It's nice to finally play the sequel to that BBC Model B classic, Granny's Garden. Well, I say "play" but I couldn't be arsed to even get past the intro-tune (mainly because I couldn't hear it due to the whole speaker thing problem), but looking at the listing the game is flippin' huge so I advise everyone to download and play the game to make up for my complete lack of patience with it.

I might give him a prize just for pouring so much of his effort into this little number. Then again, I might not. I'm just that contrary.

Gypsy Fortune Teller Simulator - By Peter J Mella

Amazingly after giving the Gypsy 100 pounds I was told that I'd meet a "tall dark stranger". Not fifteen minutes later I was mugged while walking to the bus stop by aforementioned person and so I can't really classify this game as crap because of it's uncanny and unerring ability to predict the future.

Bad luck, Peter.

Journey To Alpha Centauri - By Chris Young

Look at the lovely loading picture! Will you people never learn! If you want to get classified as a crap game take a tip from the artist who did the Ghosts 'n' Goblins loading screen and making it utterly awful!

Okay, now at this point some of you think it might be unfair of me to review a game based solely on it's loading screen, but Sinclair User did it all the time (um, alledgedly) so bugger off!

Anyway, on further examination the game does appear to be very crap, but I just can't get over the fruitily lovely loading picture, sorry.

Janis Joplin Speech System III (I think) - By Andrew Toone

Well, seeing as I can't get any sound out of my speakers at the moment it would be utterly unprofessional of me to review this program at this time. And yet...

Oh, actually, I thought it was just a sample of some bint singing but it's actually summat to do with writing music or something. Can't actually be bothered to investigate further, and besides the loading picture is far too good. No colour clash or anything. Draw some glasses on her or something, for God's sake!

Jet Set Willy: Super Pre-School Edition - By Andrew Broad

Ha! Pure genius! Play through a total of two rooms from Jet Set Willy as a little short-arse and then complete the game with complete ease.

I now pronounce this author the winner of the CSSCGC2K!

Not Andrew Broad, obviously, I mean the *real* author, Matthew Smith. Actually, I don't have his address to send the Rolos to so I shan't bother making him the winner. And besides, I saw him on that Thumb Candy show and he seemed a right nutter and no mistake!

More Sheep - By Chris Young

Well, I gave this game a full ten seconds of my time before breaking into it to find out what I was supposed to do, and I'm still none the wiser. However I can state with a reasonable degree of certainty that sheep are involved.

Anyway, I ran it again and waited a while and then some sheep appeared and then this bloke appeared and then two sheep appeared so I think it's some way of representing numbers as binary in the form of sheep (1) and men (0).

Then again, maybe not. Mind you, it's good and crap.

Mothership 1 - By Chris Young

Tsk! Another lovely loading picture, but I'll forgive it this time as the game boasts some of the most appalling spelling outside of my coursework submission for my English Literature GCSE. The game is also nigh-on unplayable cack.

Well done, I shall be putting this one forward to the elimator round, where I pit the games against each other in a blood-thirsty battle to the death in a custom constructed solid steel arena topped with razor-wire and electric cattle prods.

Or I'll just roll a dice. Y'know, whatever.

Miner Willy's Nightmare - By Matthew Smith (Yeah, right)

The popular theme of perverting other people's work in an attempt to win a prize continues apace this year (Derek Jolly, you have a lot to answer for) with the coding equivalent of tip-ex-ing out "Charles Dickens" and writing in "It wuz me" on the cover of The Pickwick Papers and expecting a Booker Prize. Actually, truth be known the person who entered this one had the decency to fore-go his/her prize if he/she won on the ground that the game "fell through a worm-hole from a parallel universe".

Anyway, what we have here is a copy of Atic Atac (which I suppose I'm breaking the law by distributing. Um, should be interesting to see if this CSSCGC entry makes it to WOS) with about 40 bytes altered. Sickening, just sickening.

Still, it plays a blinder of a game.

On further thought, based on the recent Thumb Candy programme and Matthew's admittance that he wasn't above ripping off someone else's ideas (Miner 2049'er) maybe this is by the genuine article. Cor lummy, eh? Still don't have his address for the prize, though.

Nazomi Invaders - By Andrew Owen

Tsk! I can't believe that anyone could think they'd win a CSSCGC prize from me if they went to the extreme of actually bothering to use machine code. Machine code is what proper programmers use, and therefore has no place in a competition that espouses the cause of crappy programming. Also, this cast-iron turd dates back from 1996 and so I'm somewhat offended that Andrew thought that of all the judges to date, I was the thickest and therefore most likely to let this unplayable travesty pass unnoticed. I'm half-tempted to not even include it in the csscgc2k.zip file...

Oh, and it's a dire varient on Space Invaders if you're at all interested.

Nazomi Quest - By Andrew Owen

Grrr! Not content with trying to pass off five year old shite, now he's trying with six year old shite! This isn't fine wine, Andrew. It doesn't suddenly get better if you shove it in a dark cellar for half a decade.

Mind you, it's actually quite a fun little platformer, and even the shoddy collision detection can't make it crap enough to qualify for the compo so bad luck, Andrew.

Catch The P - By Andy Kavanagh

Bah! Force me to have to type RUN to play you're cruddy little entry, would you? Well, just for that I'm not going to let you win, even though this game is complete crap. Besides, it's not very imaginative crap, is it? It's not like you've really *tried* to make it unbearably awful, have you? I'd be surprised if this little BASIC plop didn't come about after your cat accidentally slept on your keyboard, randomly pressing keys in the process. Nil points!

Actually, my cat once reset my computer. She was sleeping behind it (it was a SAM Coupé) and I stroked her side, causing her to stretch her legs, depressing the reset button. Ho ho ho, how I laughed.

We had her put down soon afterwards.

Paste - By Glenn Strong and Malcolm Tyrrell

What's with the LIST statement, boys? I don't care *how* your program works, only that it *does* work, but in a fatally flawed kind of way! Oh, hang on, I just read it. Actually, that's kinda' clever. Ha ha ha!

Unfortunately I couldn't get the cursor keys to work with the emulator I was working (although at last the sound is working, hurrah!) so I couldn't tell how bad the game was, but looking at it I have a suspicion that it might well have been fun, which casts serious doubts over whether it's crap enough. I think it's only fair to reserve judgement until such time as I've had a chance to review the game properly. Ah, sod that, I'll flip a coin...

(Heads = crap, Tails = good)

Oh, bad luck, it's actually good (according to my fifty pence piece).

Pear-Shaped - By Equin0x

My friend's mum once described me as being "Spastic and pear-shaped", y'know. Now, I'll admit that's a terribly un-PC thing to say, but she was a school nurse so I think they're allowed make nasty comments like that because they spend their days doing icky things like searching for nits and the like. Hmm...

Anyway, the game... Well, I'm shocked to say that it's actually a lot of fun, and I played it for a full three minutes or so until my MTV generation attention span kicked in and made me lose interest (I was also trapped in the maze as well, as this screenshot demonstrates - still, I got 36 pears!). But three minutes is three minutes too many and so I'm afraid the game can't win. However I do see a promising future for Equin0x in the genuine games industry, as long as he can suppress his need to make his games playable! Ho ho ho!

Hang on, I work in the games industry! *PUNCH!* Ow!

Plastic Ray Gun - By Andrew Owen

Bah! This is just the same as Nazomi Invaders with a wider screen and enemies that shoot! As such I shan't waste any more of my precious words on it in this review.

Okay, maybe one more.

SHITE!

The Quest For The Golden Key - By Chris Young

Bloody hell, it took me ages to get a grab of that loading screen without the "Program: QGK" bit plastered over it. Cant' you put a sodding PAUSE statement in your games, man?

Anyway, this looked like it was going to be a suspiciously short quest as in most of them just about the first puzzle is to find a golden key to unlock a door. Lets see how this one measures up... Oh, actually it's not a Type In Adventure at all (phew) but a tedious search around romp which cleverly avoids being tedious by placing your goal precisely one square away from you. Ha! This is really very crap indeed and as of now in my top 5 crap games for this year... Woo!

Professional Spectrum Reset Util - By Steve Watson

Bah! Lazy, lazy, lazy. This program serves no purpose whatsoever and despite it saying you have to press a key to reset your Speccy, you actually don't need to (thus it took me three tries to get this screen shot). Okay, this is truly crap but (1) it ain't a game and (2) Derek Jolly one with something far too similar a few years back for me to even think about awarding this lump of poo anything other than a clip round the ear. Thwack!

Riptoff 2 - By Andrew Owen (levels), Rick O'Neill (programming)

Another year, another iteration of Riptoff, eh? Why this keeps on getting entered I've no idea as it's always been a far too good product to qualify, in my humble opinion. This latest one is no exception either, with 15 exceedingly well designed levels (well, I'm assuming they're well designed, d'you really think I give that much of a shit about this compo to actually bother *playing* the entries?) and a lovely little tune on the menu.

Dis-qualified!

Stock Car War - By Chris Young

Oh wow! I love Stock Car Racing, and if this game can convey even 1% of the excitement of the live event then I'll be a happy person. Lets see if it does, eh, readers?

(30 seconds later)

Well, unsurprisingly it doesn't. In fact it's so very awful (being a turn-based racing game - genius) that it's now a top contender to win the competition. Hurrah!

Sheep - By Chris Young

Hang on, haven't I already reviewed this? Yes, I bloody well have! And this version looks identical! I should blimmin' well disqualify you for trying to enter the same tat twice, Chris Young! See! See, how your greed has jeopardised the chances of Stock Car War winning the competition! Well, if there's not a very valuable lesson to be learned from this then I'll be flippin' surprised. Hmph!

SK Print - By Andrew Owen

Well blow me if this isn't a genuinely useful program! What the hell is it doing here? Basically, as far as I can tell by looking at the readme file this allows you to use the whole ASCII character set on the Speccy. Now, for me this is of very little consequence but had this been on the front of YS at some point in the late 80's I'm willing to bet at least one balding pillock would have wet his pants in excitement.

Anyway, it's not a game and the somewhat technical instructions have made me feel very inferior so it's not winning.

Snout Dog Sorts The Alphabet - By Adam D. Moss and Snouty Dog

Isn't Snouty Dog that rapper who's in court on charges of firing a gun in a night club or summat? Well, even if he is then he should be congratulated on helping produce a truly pish educational game. However I'm afraid I'm not going to let it win on the grounds that in order to be a crap educational title it should really teach things that are wrong, and as far as I could tell during my brief play of the game, Snouty actually gets the alphabet in the right order. So close and yet so far. More thought next time, Adam!

Spectranet - By Peter J Mella

Ha! This is an accurate simulation of a search engine which somehow fits an entire web directory into a mere 48K. Having checked each and every URL that it listed I can also state that it works 100% of the time, and for that reason has failed to win the compo.

Well, there's that and THE FACT THAT IT'S NOT A BLOODY GAME! DID YOU PEOPLE EVEN BOTHER TO FIND OUT WHAT THE "G" STOOD FOR IN CSSCGC? DID YOU? EH? EH?! GAH!

Share Trader - By Lee Osborne

Now you too can enter the exciting world of Channel 4's interminable share dealing TV show (damned if I can remember the name) with little or no risk. In fact, if this is an accurate simulation of the stock market (and I assume that it is) then it's really easy to make a mint in about 4 months. I almost doubled my money by plowing nine-thousand quid into a medical firm!

If, however, this game isn't a true reflection of the way the stock market works then it could well be the least responsible release ever conceived of as it'll no doubt encourage idiots to invest their money in stupidly named companies, fully expecting a vast payback within minutes.

Either way, it plays like a shovel-load of goat-shite so I'll stick it in the top 5.

Two Player Adventure - By Chris Young

Well, this is just about the most useless entry we've had yet, as it appears to be a program that simply sends data between two computers. However, the manner in which it does so is really quite clever, so it's not really crap. Actually, I can imagine if you had two Speccies and a really long tape-lead then you could have a right laugh with this program. You could use some cardboard to cover up the borders of the telly so you couldn't see that it was loading stuff and then get an elderly relative to ask the computer questions while a friend in another room typed in the answers and sent the data across! Ha!

Wow, I wish I'd had this program when I was about ten. It'd have been amazing!

Far too much fun to win!

Trainspotting - By Chris Young

Wow! Look at that! I've actually management to snap-shot the screen in the middle of a CLS, and without slowing down the processor or anything! Sorry, but I'm far too excited about this result to bother reviewing the actual game! Ha! Look at what I did! Woo-hoo!

Oh, I suppose I should at least give the game a look... Blimey! It's well crap! All you seem to do is gawp at a screen while trains with different serial numbers scroll by. For me this game is utter crap, but alas I can imagine that actual train spotters would find it rivetting, especially if they set up their Speccy so the telly faced out of a window, because then they could sit outside in their anoraks while the rain lashed down and they supped luke-warm tea from a thermos. Actually, that sounds kinda' fun...

Anyway, on a global scale, taking said people into account, this game comes out at being slightly above crap. Not much above it, but enough for it not to win. However congratulations on the attempt, very impressive.

The Expensive Demo - By Andrew Owen

LOOK AT THE LOVELY SCREEN! It's beautiful! How can I possibly class this as anything other than an artistic masterpiece after seeing such fantastic use of the Speccy palette?

Music's effing awful, though. That Mark Alexander should be slapped with a kipper for ruining one of Rob Hubbard's tunes so decisively.

Writer's Digest Prize Draw - By Chris Young

Crivens that's a butt-ugly combination of colours! I almost burst my eyeballs trying to read the text on this one.

Almost, that is, because I didn't really bother. Bloody hell, though, pink on red? Devil's own colour-scheme, that. Anyone else sending in stuff like that is going to feel the flat of my hand across their cheek, I tell you!

If you want to know what it's about, play it yourself, there's no way I'm ruining my eyesight just to fulfil my contractual obligations as judge of the competition.

Heck, if I'm going to ruin my eyesight there are far better ways of going about it if you catch my drift... ;)

Press Y To Win - By Andy Kavanagh

No. You. Don't.