Flat, two-dimensional graphics, usually constructed of pixels. Not three-dimensional.
Rogue is an influential dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Game originally created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (with later contributions by Ken Arnold) for Unix-based mainframes in 1980.
The original version of Rogue used the ASCII character set (text symbols) to create the world, and that is what you can see here in this first commercial version of game, published by Epyx in 1985.
Deep Fear is a Saturn exclusive survival horror game published by Sega in 1998. It’s basically a shameless Resident Evil clone, and someone obviously thought: “let’s cross Resident Evil with The Abyss” and came up with this underwater adventure.
You play an emergency chief on an underwater fuelling base and must investigate why a submarine has crashed into part of the rig, and why some people are suddenly transforming into disgusting monsters and attacking the crew.
Released into arcades in 1993 by Konami, Violent Storm is a three-player scrolling beat ’em up in the mould of Capcom‘s 1989 hit, Final Fight.
Magician Lord is a bit of a rarity on the Neo Geo – it’s a scrolling action game based on fantasy characters. It’s like a run-and-gun game with magic, basically. Not the kind of game you see very often on the Neo Geo, and it’s a decent game to boot.
Crusader of Centy is a Zelda-like action/adventure game developed by Nextech and published by Atlus in North America and Sega in Japan and Europe. The game was released in Japan first – in 1994 – and everywhere else in 1995. In Europe the game was re-named as “Soliel“.
Wonder Boy on the C64 is a conversion of the 1986 Sega arcade game. It was developed by Images Design for Activision and published in 1987.
Developed by Project Driller (an internal, dedicated team within Namco), Mr. Driller Drill Land was released exclusively for the GameCube in Japan in 2002 and is the fifth instalment in the Mr. Driller series. And it is arguably the best game in the series.
Super Skidmarks is an isometric racing game developed by New Zealand-based Acid Software and published by Codemasters for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis in 1995. It was originally released for the Amiga and Amiga CD32 and is the sequel to the 1993 game Skidmarks.
This 1992 sequel to R.C. Pro-Am was once again developed by Rare, but this time was published by Tradewest (not Nintendo), and is pretty much the same kind of game as before: a scrolling isometric racing game featuring small, remote-controlled cars.
Championship Pro-Am is an “enhanced” remake of the classic NES racing game R.C. Pro-Am. It was developed by Rare and published on the Megadrive/Genesis by Tradewest in 1992.
I’m emphasising the word “enhanced” here out of pure sarcasm, because – when you look at the game closely – there is very little that is actually enhanced over the original, other than the graphics. In fact: it is a very bare bones port and the Megadrive deserved better from Rare.
The King of Grabs 