When I was but a small boy I used to love Dallas. Well to be honest I didn’t care about the plotlines or the oil wells, but I did watch it every week. The reason I was such an avid viewer was Pamela Ewing…. to a pubescent boy the sight of her in a red bikini lounging around Southfork swimming pool was almost too much… almost too much. Anyway I digress so I better get back to the game called Dallas for the ZX Spectrum.

I did actually own this game back in the early eighties, well I say own I think it was on a C90 tape I possessed. To be fair the ZX Spectrum’s graphics could never do justice to Victoria Principal’s assets, but that was not the only disappointment in the game.

Dallas the game involved you setting up oil wells and drilling for black gold (oil that is, Texas tea… oh sorry that’s the Beverly Hillbillies). In essence it was a management game where you juggled your money against the number of wells you had. If you struck oil you became rich, if you didn’t you went bust. Essentially that was all there was to it.

Now it cannot just have been me that wanted a game about Dallas to be full of scheming, double crossing, sex and people being shot. Nobody watched the TV series to see if Oil Rig number 10 would strike oil, we watched it to see if J.R. would con Cliff Barnes out of millions and then get off with his secretary whilst Sue Ellen got drunk. Why I’m getting all misty eyed and nostalgic just thinking about it.

So Dallas the game was rubbish, not because it was a poor game, but because it didn’t live up to its own namesake. If you want an oil well simulator business type game then by all means load it up. If you just want to see the busty substances of Bobby Ewing’s wife then YouTube is your friend.

Thirty years on I’ve replayed the game and unfortunately there was no shower scene where it came back from the dead. It’s still rubbish.