Developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Image Works in 1988, Speedball is a violent futuristic sport game where two teams try to score goals by throwing a metal ball into openings at the top and bottom of an enclosed court.
Tag Archives: 1988
Mercenary: The Second City, ZX Spectrum
Mercenary: The Second City is an add-on for the classic game Mercenary that gives the player a new environment and new missions to solve. It was first released for the ZX Spectrum in 1988.
Summer Games, Sega Master System
Summer Games on the Sega Master System is a cut-down conversion of the classic Commodore 64 sports game from Epyx. It was ported by Sega and first released in 1988.
Snowball Sunday, Commodore 64
Snowball Sunday is a winter/Christmas-themed snowball fight game for the Commodore 64, written by Ashley Routledge and David Saunders. There isn’t much information available about it online, but from what I can tell it was given away free with various Commodore magazines in 1988. It was also freely available for download from Compunet (aka CNet) – an interactive service provider that was accessed via dial-up, that existed from 1984 to 1993.
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, PC
The PC MS-DOS version of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny was first published by Origin Systems in 1988 and it is arguably the best version of this classic RPG available for any system.
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, Apple II
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny was first released in 1988 for the Apple II through Origin Systems. It was the last Ultima game to be developed for the Apple II and it comes on eight floppy disks. It is the second game in the “Age of Enlightenment” trilogy and is similar in style to the previous game, with character creation done by answering a series of virtue-based questions. You can also import a character from Ultima IV if you have one, which is an interesting new feature in the series.
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Amiga
The Amiga version of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was ported by Bob Hardy and first published by Origin Systems in 1988. Hardy did a sterling job of converting the 16-bit versions of Ultima III, and Ultima IV is very similar to those, but arguably even better.
Ultima: Exodus, NES/Famicom
There is an NES/Famicom version of Ultima III: Exodus – called just “Ultima: Exodus” – that was developed by Newtopia Planning and first published by Pony Canyon in 1988. It has some major differences to the original, but essentially it’s the same game. The graphics are cuter but do suffer from some hideous tearing when a number of sprites are on the same horizontal line, which is a common technical fault on the NES.
Rastan, ZX Spectrum
This ZX Spectrum conversion of the 1987 scrolling hack and slash arcade game from Taito was developed by Icon Design and published by Imagine Software in 1988. And it’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
Operation Thunderbolt, Arcade
Operation Thunderbolt is the sequel to the classic 1987 arcade game Operation Wolf. It was developed by Taito and first released in 1988, and is a first-person, simultaneous two-player shoot ’em up that uses cabinet-mounted positional gun controllers to shoot at the screen.