Joe Blade II (1988)

Joe Blade II was released in 1988 for the ZX Spectrum. Published by Players Software, the game was developed by Colin Swinbourne, who handled code and in-game graphics, with music by Mike Brown and Andy Severn, and a story written by Simon Daniels.

This arcade adventure game supports a single player. Notable features include AY sound, integrated mini-games, and a custom screen loader. The controls accommodate Kempston and Interface 2 joysticks, as well as user-redefinable keys.

The cassette version was priced at £1.99. The title was also released on various other platforms, including Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Amiga, Acorn, and Atari ST.

The game holds an average magazine score of 72.50%. It received a Crash Smash award from Crash magazine with a 90% rating, while Sinclair User awarded it 55%.

In the USSR, the game was known as a cassette release, evidenced by five different cracked versions by authors such as Bill Gilbert and Mad Max. POKE codes for the Joe Blade series were published in the magazine Emulate. The game did not receive any TR-DOS disk versions or Russian translations.