The first Dizzy game, and featuring a walking, talking egg that would become synonymous with “cartoon adventures” on the ZX Spectrum, and also budget releases from British software house Codemasters.
Continue reading Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, ZX Spectrum
The 1987 Amstrad CPC conversion of Leaderboard was developed by Canvas – the same team who made the ZX Spectrum version. And – in truth – it’s definitely the worst version of Leaderboard available, falling massively short of the Commodore 64 original.
The more fully-featured sequel to Leaderboard on the Spectrum is better than its predecessor, but not without its problems.
The ZX Spectrum conversion of the classic Commodore 64 game, Leaderboard, was coded by Roy Gibson and Ian Weatherburn, with graphics by Simon Butler, and was published by US Gold in 1987.
While it is playable enough it’s fair to say that it is probably the most bare-bones and basic conversion of this great golf game out there.
The 1987 follow-up to the classic Leaderboard, the Executive Edition features four new golf courses with new features such as bunkers and trees. It’s essentially the same great game as Leaderboard, with the same simple control system and simulation of ball movement.
Continue reading Leaderboard: Executive Edition, Commodore 64
The 1987 conversion of Ikari Warriors is bit of an “auteur piece” on the ZX Spectrum. What I mean by that is: one guy made it on his own. He programmed the game; created the graphics, and did the sound. That man was David Shea, and the truth be told: he did an excellent job of it – managing to squeeze in most of the arcade game‘s features. Which is pretty impressive on a Spectrum.
This reworked Nintendo Entertainment System port of the MSX version of Metal Gear first came out in 1987 (1988 in North America), just three months after the original. While it’s considered (rightly) to be inferior to the original MSX version it was a major hit and went on to sell over a million units in the United States alone.
The very first Metal Gear was originally released in 1987 by Konami for the MSX2. It was Hideo Koijima‘s first fully-developed game and went on to spawn a successful series across many platforms. The hero, Solid Snake, has since gone on to become a video game icon.
FTL and Software Heaven‘s classic Dungeon Master was available on the Amiga in two different forms. Initially it was only available for Amigas with 1MB of RAM, and wasn’t available for the Amiga 500 (which only had 512kb of RAM) for quite a while, which gave Atari ST owners bragging rights for this amazing game for a few months.
This is the very first Megami Tensei game, released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1987, and it looks very basic compared to later Megami Tensei games, but was the foundation on which a successful series was built.
Based on a trilogy of fantasy novels by Japanese author Aya Nishitani, Megami Tensei was originally created as TWO distinct role-playing games. One version (this game) was developed by Atlus and published by Namco in 1987 for the Famicom. A separate version for home computers was co-developed by Atlus and Telenet Japan and published by Telenet Japan the same year.
The original game was never officially released in the West due to its use of religious themes, and Nintendo‘s sensitivity to them, but an English fan translation does exist that can be applied as a ROM hack.
Continue reading Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, Famicom
