The 1985 ZX Spectrum version of Mastertronic‘s Chiller was coded by Richard Wright, and is pretty much the same as the original C64 version, except that it doesn’t have any music (which was probably a good thing, from a legal standpoint), and the graphics are even worse.

You play a boy who is supposedly on a quest to rescue his girlfriend at the end of five different screens, and must collect ‘magic crosses’ on each screen to reach the next one. You have a health bar that reduces when you touch monsters or pink mushrooms. Touching blue mushrooms will increase your health. You can fall from any height, though, without damage. You only get one life, so when the health bar is completely reduced to nothing, it’s ‘game over’.

ZX Spectrum Chiller has dodgy collision detection, crummy graphics, and the animation of the main character is poor. Unlike in the C64 version you aren’t given control of the girl when you finally reach her on the fifth screen, which makes the game kinda pointless.

In fact, “pointless” is a good word to describe Chiller. Playing it is not much fun and this kind of unfinished, budget ‘shovelware’ defines a good proportion of Mastertronic‘s output.

More: Chiller on World of Spectrum