This 1990 Atari ST conversion of the ZX Spectrum classic Highway Encounter I don’t think was ever commercially released, even though it was co-created by Costa Panayi, the guy who made the original.
Costa created some wonderful games for the Spectrum, and Highway Encounter was one of them. And it has been brilliantly converted to the ST (by Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, with graphics by Costa). This is no farmed-out-to-a-third-party hack job. This is the real thing.
This great little platform game is actually a conversion of a Nintendo Entertainment System game, created by Tecmo in 1986. Elite Systems developed and published the Atari ST version of Mighty Bomb Jack in 1990. It is of course a sequel to the classic arcade game Bomb Jack.
Thanks to British developer Graftgold the Atari ST has an almost perfect conversion of Taito‘s arcade classic, Rainbow Islands. To all intents and purposes the ST version of Rainbow Islands is identical to the arcade original. Well, kind of…
Simulcra is a cool third-person 3D shooter set on a complex series of colourful courses. The game was developed by legendary coding team Graftgold and is one of their least well-known releases, but also one of their best.
A strange game, and Ubisoft‘s first ever video game release; the Amstrad original coming out in 1986 and this conversion in 1990.
Zombi is a clear appropriation [ie. lift] of George A. Romero‘s classic 1979 zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, although I don’t think Ubisoft actually bought an official license for it. They just changed all the names of the characters…
Known as “Be Ball” in its native Japan, Chew Man Fu is an excellent arcade-style puzzle game where the gameplay involves pushing and pulling coloured balls around a maze.
***CANNED GAME***
Lode Runner on the Atari Lynx was developed but never officially released. A prototype version was leaked onto the internet in 2008.
It’s pretty much complete in terms of gameplay – all 150 original levels have been verified as being in there and the game plays as it should, without any real problems.
Or, to give the game its full title: Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warship.
Solar Jetman is a really good gravity game in the style of Thrust or Exile, and also a spiritual sequel to the classic Ultimate games Jet Pac and Lunar Jetman – it starring the titular ‘Jetman’ of those titles.
A notch above “Monkey Tennis” in terms of great ideas, Ninja Golf was dreamt-up and released for the Atari 7800, way back in 1990.
Originally released in arcades in Japan in 1989, Quarth became a cult hit when it was released for the MSX2 in 1990.
Quarth is basically part vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up, and part Tetris.
The King of Grabs 