Revenge of the C5 (ZX Spectrum)

While the ZX Spectrum was one of the most popular affordable microcomputers embraced by the early U.K. video game industry, the founder of the company who made them, Clive Sinclair, had his heart in more than computing. Many fans of the video game system soon learned of the man behind the machine and discovered an eccentric and friendly individual who seemed to be more interested in development than pure profit, and in his chasing of new ideas, Clive Sinclair would go on to create a peculiar vehicle known as the C5. A battery powered electric tricycle that topped out at 15 miles per hour and had the rider lay back and place their legs over the handlebars to reach the pedals, what was meant to be an independent driving revolution flopped hard even though Clive continued to drive his personal C5. It seems this unusual and whimsical aspect of Clive tickled the independent coders of the time, because Revenge of the C5 was developed for the ZX Spectrum to poke some playful fun at Sinclair’s failed vehicular venture.

According to the box, in Revenge of the C5 Clive Sinclair is eager to have his recumbent tricycle validated as a safe alternative vehicle and so enters it in a British cross-country race with the player as the driver. There are no other participants in this race seemingly, but there is a high chance of flunking out of the race entirely as the C5 will crash on any contact with the edges of the road, traffic, or any hazards that lie in the electric trike’s path. You do have four lives to complete the race with though, and depending on the difficulty a collision will set you back a different amount. The game consists of 41 zones, this being the term the game uses for unique screens, and on Learners difficulty a crash in one zone will you have start again from the previous zone. Posers is a far more difficult and unforgiving affair though, not only speeding things up but a single crash requires you to restart from the very beginning with the only holdover from any progress being the now diminished amount of lives and the points you’ve earned so far.

The single screen zones always have the C5 enter from the bottom of the screen with the seemingly simple goal of needing to drive safely to the top, the player always moving forward a bit automatically but able to control their left and right movement as well as pushing the pedal harder if they want to speed ahead. There are also keys used to head to the left or right much faster allowing for the kind of quick and precise movement the game absolutely demands, the actual play area only making up about two-thirds of the screen as the bottom is devoted to showing your lives, current zone, and an unmoving first person view of someone driving the C5. When entering a new screen you will often have to quickly move your vehicle into the right direction or risk an immediate crash, this sometimes unfairly designed specifically to cause a collision if you haven’t previously memorized the areas ahead. Some stages will stick dangers like cross traffic so close to the bottom of the screen the only way to slip through them safely is to actually have been driving in the right area on the previous screen, but the only way to know of this upcoming danger is to have lost a life to it before. Similarly, there are forks in the road where one path will have you pop up on the next screen at a dead end with no clue beforehand on which fork would be safe.

Memorization is thus an incredibly important factor to overcoming the game’s unkind approach to trying to end your run, but knowing what’s on the screen ahead isn’t the only worry. Revenge of the C5 features a lot of moving hazards, some making sense in the context of the seemingly grounded story set-up like the lines of motor vehicles or bikes going back and forth and others being outright fanciful like the ghosts and robots who patrol small paths. The fact the game box says that newspapers eager to make the C5 look bad employed these enemies makes the game even more absurd, but the main danger of the hazards that move is that your constantly moving vehicle often only has one safe path to get from one end of the screen to the other and it will require memorizing the movement paths of everything up ahead. You must weave the C5 through with expert precision, the game placing many tight spaces where it is easy to make contact with some danger while avoiding another. This can be at its roughest when there’s a small gap in traffic that you need to slip through by moving gradually to the left or right to match their pace, but there are also many moments where you have to abruptly veer hard in the opposite direction after slipping past a baddie.

Revenge of the C5’s difficulty comes from its unforgiving placement of moving hazards where it’s hard to eyeball the safe path until you have prior knowledge of what’s ahead, especially since the patrols of each enemy type can be different between screens. It doesn’t help that the inevitably common deaths as you learn are accompanied by loud and obnoxious noises, but since there are no random elements and the screens are relatively small and short, you can eventually train yourself up a fair bit to clear a long stretch without incident. The process isn’t particularly entertaining as you’ll run into the game’s cheap tricks to try and catch you unaware on a screen you haven’t seen before, but Revenge of the C5 is at least a game you can grow more capable at once you have become familiar with it.

Every few zones there is a bonus level that at least provides a break from the demanding design of regular stages. In the bonus levels a bunch of litter has been scattered about in front of a set of increasingly thin garages. To earn extra points the player is incentivized to enter the thinner garages, but if you do crash here you simply miss out on a chance to get a higher score rather than losing a life. That is a fortunate element of these brief diversions as the one random element in the game is how that litter is spread out, meaning that going for the best garages can sometimes be unfeasible due to your starting point and automatic forward movement. At the same time you’re often funneled into garages that are fairly easy to enter due to that distribution so the bonus loses its excitement as a skill challenge and high score hardly seems like the biggest concern when even finishing the race is going to require a lot of focus. In fact, the bonus stage breaking from it might even disrupt focus, something the game even recognizes since if you die on the next screen that does sometimes feature an immediate danger to dodge you will be set back to the stage before the bonus and are not made to repeat it.

THE VERDICT: Revenge of the C5’s constant forward movement of the titular electric vehicle leads to a litany of issues with how the gameplay unfolds. When traveling the 41 screens of the single contestant race you will find screens where you can immediately lose if you didn’t enter from the right area on the previous screen with the game providing no hints on how to do so. The hazards in the road can require quick and perfect positioning with even a slight bit of extra movement to the left or right after causing an immediate crash. A tepid bonus game doesn’t break up the frustration of the memorization heavy affair, and while the screens keep the dangers limited so you do have a chance of actually learning what’s ahead so a future attempt can go better, the constant failure required to know enough to win makes this game less about active participation and more about remembering what to do.

And so, I give Revenge of the C5 for the ZX Spectrum…

A TERRIBLE rating. Compared to other games where the process of finally winning comes from pure memorization, Revenge of the C5 at least keeps any unexpected monkey wrenches from throwing off the driving of its electric vehicle. The only element that is inconsistent between attempts is the layout of the punishment-free bonus stage, meaning that if you know which fork in the road is right or where you need to exit to safely enter the next screen that info will remain useful in future attempts. However, since the attempts are more about charting out the required mental map to overcome hazards that you rarely have the time to react and adjust to on first sight, foreknowledge is the main thing being tested and your participation as a player mostly comes down to making sure you don’t steer a little too far or hit the pedal too hard when slipping through tight spaces. Wiggle room is rare but not entirely absent but Revenge of the C5 still could be boiled down to being a set of inputs you learn through crash after crash, and thanks to the obnoxious sound design you go from the quiet driving to a sudden loud siren-like sound when you do fail. A fair amount of ZX Spectrum games seem to extend their lives by requiring memorization to make further progress and Revenge of the C5 doesn’t even hide that aspect well with the dangers sometimes waiting at the bottom of the screen for an immediate inevitable collision for those who aren’t in the know, and even being in the know just means you avoid the hazard properly when you play it again. However, the moving traffic that you need to keep pace with is actually an interesting bit of interactive danger since it requires attention in the moment and can be overcome without prior knowledge, but small moments like that are made irritating since their tight requirements put a limited life pool at risk that will likely be lost if you don’t know the layout of every zone from 1 to 41.

Revenge of the C5 isn’t the only ZX Spectrum game specifically built around Clive Sinclair and his ambitious but flawed electric vehicle meaning even its unusual angle of being based on the console’s creator isn’t a unique draw, and unfortunately the gameplay isn’t exactly welcoming either. Revenge of the C5’s difficult and precise movement has a few moments where it’s an actual skill challenge, but too often the game expects a perfect performance based on knowledge you’ll have to gain by colliding with things first. The game lays out what amount to unfair traps meant to end the run of players who haven’t played before, and getting to new zones only to have to learn them through failure so you can get back to them next time and have a hope of succeeding doesn’t make the prospect of replaying it too thrilling. There is a bit of mild satisfaction to finally charting that perfect path, but the grueling process of doing so certainly isn’t worth the payoff that mostly amounts to finally being done with it. Whether or not the C5 is truly a good vehicle wouldn’t matter much here as any vehicle would come up short if the driver was constantly blindsided by new information they had no hope of anticipating unless they had met an unfortunate end to it before.