Deviants is an amazing ZX Spectrum game published by Players in 1987. I don't know for sure but looking back, I'm convinced I originally received a copy of this game via a magazine cover tape.

Deviants is a relatively simple game with a nice big map and lots of things going on to keep you interested. The premise is this; an alien spaceship that is built into an asteroid has been causing us problems for a few years. In order to remove the threat that they pose,  mankind sends a team of Star Warriors to the asteroid base to blow it up using high explosives. The team all successfully land on the asteroid and place the bombs but they all get killed in the process. Now, you are the only one left and it's your job to go and activate all of the bombs and finally destroy the aliens once and for all! To do this you tromp around the base looking for the bombs and when you find one you enter into a little activation mini-game where you have 6 valves that are either enabled or disabled. Pressing a button corresponding to one of the valves will toggle the state of that valve, but will also toggle another preset valve. Once all valves are on, the bomb is activated and you can carry on your merry way. You have thirty seconds to activate the bomb, otherwise it self destructs killing you. This results in game over, as all the bombs must be activated for victory. There are other quirks in the game like the teleporters that you can discover that all have an eight letter codename which will zip you around the map to new locations.

I cannot overstate how much I loved this game when I was young. I spent so long mapping the game out and trying to work out where all thirty of the bombs were. I spent ages trying to work out the combos for the valve activations and quickest routes to activate bombs depending on what state the valves were in when you first encounter each bomb. I built up lists of all the teleporters that I'd discovered. It truly was a game that kept me enthralled for hours in each play session. The day I realised that the word DEVIANTS was also a valid teleporter code I felt so smart to have worked it out, but also so stupid that it took me so long as it was obvious from the very beginning. 

And it was hard too. Even though the concept was simple and you could work all this information out, perfect execution of your task was still a challenge. The Deviants were still wandering around the base and you had limited ammo with which to dispatch them. I remember very clearly the day Crash magazine published its map for the game. It matched my own map pretty closely, but they also had a list of teleporter codes and there were more than a few I'd obviously missed.

Even all this time later, I still regularly played Deviants on an emulator. Then, about seven or eight years ago I was browsing eBay and saw someone was selling a bunch of original Speccy games. He didn't want a huge amount for them, but I had most of them already so wasn't really interested in bidding on them. Then I noticed that the collection contained an original (non-coverdisk) version of the game. So I messaged the seller and told him that if he was willing to pull that one game out of the bundle for me I'd chuck a tenner his way. Luckily for me he was happy to do so and I finally ended up with an original copy of one of my favourite games of all time.

This story doesn't end here though. For many years I've often wished someone would do a new version of it. Well, when I was laid off by Epic last November I finally bit the bullet and made a game heavily inspired by it, called Defiance. You can get it now on itch.io for a dollar. But this new version of the game wouldn't exist if it wasn't for my love of the original and that's why Deviants is one of the Games That Made Me.