Developer: MatGubbins
Genre: Sex Utility
Platform: Spectrum 48K
Language: BASIC

I remember borrowing a Currah µSpeech unit from one of my friends at school and having hours (Minutes, surely - Ed) of fun typing in (predominantly) rude words and laughing at the hilarious robotic mispronunciations. I suspect that Currah had more lofty ambitions in mind, such as accessibility for the visually impaired or super-interactive gaming, but that's teenage boys for you.

Apparently, when Twister was first released, the manufacturer was accused of selling 'sex in a box' and, since then, it has been the source of many a drunken party fumble!

What MatGubbins has done, however, combines these two inventions and simultaneously allows an even more intimate one-on-one game - basically increasing the chances of sex by a factor of 4.6! Phwoar!

In essence all Twister for Two does is do away with the spinning thingy and replace it with robotic calls of; "Right hand blue" and "Left foot green" indefinitely or until you press space.

(After you've 'accidentally' fallen on top of your intended mate you can either choose to silence the deeply unsexy robotic voice, or not, whatever works for you.)

The game also includes a "Like Mode" which I didn't get, at first, having not understood a word it was saying up to that point.

It wasn't until I used the "Like Mode+text" that things became a little clearer; this mode interjects random words into the mix, i.e.: "Right like hand literally blue" and "Left bruv foot y'know green innit" and is, apparently, aimed at the younger end of the market.

Browsing through the code you can see a lot of this weird looking text:

	LET s$="T(tt)wis(zh)(tt)(err)  f(or) (tt)(ouu). (bb)(ii) Ma(tt),(gg)ub bin(zh)"

By using all those brackets and repeated characters I wasn't sure if MatG was trying to make things sound better or intentionally worse.

To test the theory I created a version of the program with all the spelling 'corrected.' Not only did it sound worse but I also introduced a 'bug' where keypresses were read out in addition to the originally intended phrases.

Despite my version being accidentally crapper than his I must still congratulate MatGubbins - a pioneer, an innovator and an enabler of young love.

Who knew we could achieve so much in the CSSCGC?

Emulating Currah µSpeech

Currah µSpeech functionality is built into some Spectrum emulators including EightyOne and Spectaculator*.

EightyOne
Options > Hardware > Sinclair > 48k Spectrum > Interfaces > [tick] Currah µSpeech > OK

Spectaculator
Tools > Options > Hardware > [tick] Currah µSpeech > OK

* I thought that Spectaculator's sound representation was a bit better, however, due to the limitations of the original hardware was still, ultimately, crap!