Tir Na Nog (Irish for “Land of Youth”) is the location for this classic 1984 ZX Spectrum game, developed by Greg Follis and Roy Carter for Gargoyle Games.
You play Cuchulainn, a long-haired young man who has “departed the land of the living” (ie. died) and who finds himself walking in an afterlife patrolled by nasty creatures called Sidhe, which must be avoided at all costs.
Serious Sam’s Bogus Detour is exactly what the title of this game implies… a curveball in the Serious Sam series.
Developed by Swedish team Crackshell – in association with original Serious Sam developer, Croteam – and published in 2017 by Devolver Digital, this is an overhead shooter with pixel-based, retro-style graphics. And it is bloody brilliant! Better even than the Serious Sam games it is based upon.
Initially released in 1990 by Telenet Japan, Valis III is a CD-ROM-only platform game for the PC Engine. It was released for the TurboGrafx-CD in North America in 1992.
Created by Ian Gray and Lee Braine and published by Ocean Software in 1985, A Fistful of Bucks (aka A Fi$tful of Buck$) is a simple, scrolling cowboy shooter with you playing a bounty hunter on the hunt for cash.
Broforce is a satirical, side-scrolling run and gun shooter, with superb pixel graphics, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!
It’s a ‘modern retro’ game, in that: it’s a modern game (it came out in 2015), trying to look retro, and it works fantastically well. Broforce is so much fun to play…
Released in 1999, Star Wars: Yoda Stories is a procedurally-generated pocket adventure featuring Luke Skywalker, and – of course – Yoda, and is set in the time between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi when Luke is still undergoing his Jedi training.
The spiritual successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark is a brilliant, 3D, first-person shooter developed by Rare and published by Nintendo in 2000.
Lazy Jones is a cult classic Commodore 64 game that tries to cram as many derivative minigames into 64K as is possible – stuff like Space Invaders, Frogger, and platform game clones (one minigame is called Eggie Chuck – a direct reference to the classic Chuckie Egg).
Heimdall is an isometric adventure game developed by The 8th Day and published by Core Design in 1991.
Portal is a legendary first-person puzzle/gravity game developed and published by Valve in 2007.
I say “gravity game” because Portal combines basic physics (acceleration, velocity, gravity, and inertia), with the ability to open up entry and exit portals, to create a game so beautifully simple-yet-complex that it is almost beyond belief…
The King of Grabs 