C5 Clive, written by Barry Jones and published by Scorpio Gamesworld Ltd., pays tribute to (ie. satirises) Sir Clive Sinclair‘s infamous “personal automotive vehicle“, which was released onto the UK market as the Sinclair C5 in 1985.

The aim of the game is to ride your “electrically-assisted pedal cycle” through a number of screens, in order to reach your home. You must avoid contact with ghosts, dogs, cats, vacuum cleaners, walls, bicycles and other C5s – and collect batteries to keep the C5 going.

Occasionally you have to jump over cars, people and tanks on bridges, but the main aim is to avoid colliding with anything.

C5 Clive has horribly flickery sprites, terrible colour clash, repeated screens, and awful sound, and it really is a throwback to the bad old days of Spectrum gaming. Other than the connection to the Sinclair C5, the only value I can think of, in playing this game today, would be the nostalgia factor. Although that is not much of a reason to want to play an old game, in my opinion.

If you do play C5 Clive, and manage to get home safely, the game says “Press ‘P’ to play again or ‘S’ to stop,” and if you press ‘S’ then the game freezes (crashing, presumably), which is a novel way to end a game…

C5 Clive was a budget game, priced at just £1.99, so we shouldn’t expect too much from it. That said, it was still a complete waste of money for anyone other than the very easily pleased.

More: C5 Clive on World of Spectrum