Nintendo‘s famous flying game, Pilotwings, first came out in Japan in 1990, then the following year was a launch title for the North American and European releases of the Super Nintendo.
Pilotwings uses scaling and rotation effects (known as ‘Mode 7’ in some circles) to give a visual representation of the ground, with regular 2D sprites making up everything else, and it works extremely well.
The Acorn Archimedes version of Lemmings is arguably the best version around. Everything about it is rock-solid.
The Acorn Archimedes conversion of Bell and Braben‘s classic Elite was written by Warren Burch and Clive Gringras and published by Hybrid Technology in 1991.
It is considered by many to be the definitive version of Elite available, although that is both a matter of taste, and also a matter of actually getting the game to run in a RISC OS environment.
Developed by Imagineer, the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Elite is pretty good – considering that the NES isn’t particularly suited to generating wireframe 3D graphics. Yes, the wireframe 3D is slow (like in all the 8-bit versions of Elite), but not to the point where it makes the game unplayable.
DMA Design‘s puzzle game, Lemmings, was a big hit with gamers when it was first released in 1991. The simple-but-compulsive gameplay and cute graphics won over everyone who played it.
When Sega bigwigs asked their talented designers to create a video game character that would become the company mascot, the designers rubbed their chins for a while, then came up with a blue hedgehog, called Sonic.
In fact, the designers were so enamoured with their new creation that they changed their name to Sonic Team as they developed the game.
Heimdall is an isometric adventure game developed by The 8th Day and published by Core Design in 1991.
There are currently two different homebrew conversions of Dark Side available for the Commodore 16/Plus4 – one by Tarzan, and one by Csory. Both are shown here.
Developed by Software Creations for Sales Curve Interactive, Solar Jetman is a legendary ‘lost’ game that was canned by its publisher in 1991 and has since resurfaced and been ‘preserved’ online.
Mega Man 4 was published by Capcom for the Nintendo Famicom in 1991.
Other than a new intro sequence (still not making much sense having been badly translated into English), a new set of bad guys, and some newly-designed levels, there’s not a great deal different in this game to what has preceded it.
