Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, Game Gear

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap is a platform action game developed by Westone and published by Sega in 1992. It is considered to be one of the best games on both the Master System and the Game Gear.

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The Official Father Christmas Game, Amstrad CPC

A game not often mentioned in online ‘Christmas video game’ lists, The Official Father Christmas Game is one of the better Christmas-themed video games that I’ve found so far. It was developed by Enigma Variations and published by Alternative Software for the Amstrad, Spectrum and C64 in 1989. All proceeds from the game went to the famous children’s charity, Save The Children.

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The Official Father Christmas Game, ZX Spectrum

Although you may laugh at the title of this Christmas-themed game, it’s not called that because the publisher (Alternative Software) went to Lapland to buy an official license from Santa… It’s called that because it is an official tie-in with the famous children’s charity, Save The Children. The game was sold (for a reasonable £2.99, for the Spectrum, Amstrad and C64) in 1989 and all profits went to Save The Children.

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The Official Father Christmas Game, Commodore 64

Created in association with Save The Children, The Official Father Christmas Game was developed by Enigma Variations and published by Alternative Software for the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad in 1989. Profits from the game went to the aforementioned children’s charity.

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Santron, Commodore 64

Santron is a Christmas-themed vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up created by Sarah Jane Avory and first released for the Commodore 64 in 2019.

Sarah programmed the game and created all the graphics and sound herself, and it is very good. Santron is actually a variation of Sarah‘s previous game, Neutron.

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Neutron, Commodore 64

Neutron is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up created by Sarah Jane Avory and first released for the Commodore 64 in 2019.

It was created for the 2019 RGCD C64 16KB cartridge game development competition, and is actually a re-coding of a game Sarah created in the 1980s but that went unreleased (because the publisher she was tied to at the time went out of business, before the game’s release), and was eventually lost (she regrettably threw away the disks with the source code after moving house years later).

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F-Zero GX, GameCube

F-Zero GX is the successor to F-Zero X (Nintendo 64) and is a fast-paced, futuristic racing game featuring 3D graphics and challenging gameplay. It was also the first significant video game collaboration between Nintendo and Sega, having been developed by Sega‘s famous Amusement Vision (AV) team (with Shigeru Miyamoto acting as producer) – the same team who made the brilliant Super Monkey Ball series. In fact, F-Zero GX uses an enhanced version of the 3D engine that powered Super Monkey Ball.

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Starquake, BBC Micro

Steve Crow‘s classic Spectrum game, Starquake, was converted to the BBC Micro by Kenton Price and published by Bubble Bus in 1987.

Graphically, the game is rather chunky because it uses a low-resolution screen mode (presumably so that more colours can be used on-screen at the same time), but the gameplay is mostly the same as the original.

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Golvellius: Valley of Doom, Sega Master System

Developed by Compile and originally released for the MSX in 1987 Golvellius was converted to the Master System by Sega in 1988. It is an action RPG with overhead, flick-screen exploration, Zelda-like sword-based combat and scrolling sections through caves.

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Grabbing amazing video game screenshots one game at a time.