Of all his Spectrum games, Firefly was the one that programmer Jonathan Smith said really “came together” during development.

Firefly is an eight-way scrolling shooter with light puzzle elements that was first released by Ocean Software in 1988.

Every game features a randomly-generated grid of nine by five tiles, each one representing a different sector in space that you can move to. Except that you can’t move onto tiles that are heavily defended by the enemy (the Mechanoids) – you have to sneak in to the more lightly-defended sectors and take them over by disabling the local alarm system and destroying four ‘energy points’. Yes, that is rather a lot of blather for what is essentially a lot of rotating, thrusting, and shooting, but it works as a game none the less.

Firefly was a critical and commercial hit for Special FX and Ocean, and was one of Jonathan Smith‘s last Spectrum games.

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