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A good game was not just about the graphics technique employed, but also about using it to make a fun experience that was large enough to entertain players for a good few hours. Batman, for example, had a 150 rooms to explore of puzzles, enemies and items, requiring another set of techniques to fit the game into the confines of the Spectrum's memory. "It required some intense storage, so the maps and things were incredibly condensed," recalls Ritman. The following year he and artist Bernie Drummond surpassed even this, with Head Over Heels, another detailed, and rather surreal, isometric game. Head Over Heels also offered some impressive gameplay innovations too: enemies that homed in on the player's character as they moved, fiendish combinations of conveyor belts and enemies, and strange Prince Charles-Dalek hybrid creatures controlled by buttons within the game environment itself. Most notably, Head Over Heels had two characters with different abilities to control, the doglike Head and Heels, who could be combined into a single symbiotic organism, allowing a number of different ways to play.When new, Manic Miner, the madcap 1983 platform game which set a benchmark for early home computer games, had been celebrated for squeezing 20 two-dimensional screens of action into the 48k ZX Spectrum. A few years later, Head Over Heels managed 300 three-dimensional rooms in the same computer, a striking demonstration of maturing programming techniques. Isometric games such as these were probably the most impressive displays of how far games programmers could push the simple capabilities of the Spectrum. They were essentially miniature interactive universes created within incredibly tight computing constraints. No matter how primitive the computers seem today, it's impossible not to be impressed by the things that skilled programmers could make them do.Electronic Dreams is published on February 11, 2016. More information/purchase links at the Bloomsbury website. Follow Tom Lean on Twitter.Read on Motherboard: How Nintendo Got the Rights for 'Tetris' from the USSR