Rare‘s R.C. Pro-Am is a classic isometric racing game that was published by Nintendo on the NES in North America and Europe in 1988.
In it you race remote controlled cars around tracks in order to win points and stay in the championship. If you drop too low in the rankings then you are eliminated from the game and must start again.
Developed by Time Warp Productions and published by Rainbow Arts in 1988, the Amiga version of The Great Giana Sisters is maybe the best-looking and most playable version of this infamous and arguably overrated platform game, but it isn’t anything special.
The BBC Micro conversion of Peter Liepa and Chris Gray‘s classic Boulder Dash was programmed by Andrew Bennett and published by Tynesoft in 1988. And I don’t know what it is about this port, but there is something wholly unsatisfactory about it.
This arcade conversion of Data East‘s 1987 coin-op was highly controversial at the time of release, because it was viewed as a “lazy, direct port” of the ZX Spectrum version, which was not what Commodore 64 owners wanted to see.
John Phillips‘ Commodore 64 classic, Nebulus, is very good on the Amstrad, although it is quite slow and doesn’t have the intermission challenges of its parent. It doesn’t ruin the game, though. In fact: it may be easier to play than the original due to it being slower.
In 1987 Konami released the hugely successful run-and-gun shoot ’em up Contra in arcades, and Gryzor is the localised European conversion of that game, published by Ocean Software in 1988.
The sequel to the classic Amstrad adventure, Get Dexter, is more of the same isometric puzzle-solving, and weird futuristic adventuring, except that this time the game world is comprised of interlinked exterior screens rather than a simple maze of rooms.
Dark Chambers is a one or two-player maze/action game that was directly influenced by Dandy, in that it was originally written by John Howard Palevich – the creator Dandy – to further expand (or in this case: simplify) the concept of a multiplayer fantasy action game.
Before playing this game I’d read that the Apple II conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game Gauntlet was a bit of a mess, but that didn’t quite prepare me for quite how bad it actually is…
The MS-DOS version of Gauntlet was published by Mindscape in 1988 and I’m not entirely sure who developed it, but it isn’t very good, the truth be told.
The King of Grabs 