Set on an uninhabited spaceship, Chimera is an isometric adventure/puzzle game where you control a robot* that must destroy the ship before it crashes into Earth. The game was written by Shahid Ahmad and published by Firebird in 1985. The music is by Rob Hubbard.
*= The player character looks like a robot, but does in fact require food and water to survive, so there’s a bit of a contradiction going on in the story, as far as who or what the player actually is.
Castlevania: Spectral Interlude is a free-to-download homebrew Castlevania game for the ZX Spectrum, developed and published by Rewind (a Russian indie team) in 2015. The game is playable on 128K Spectrums only and is available digitally for Spectrum +3s as a disk-based game, and also as a TAP file. A limited number of physical copies were also produced for sale.
Continue reading Castlevania: Spectral Interlude, ZX Spectrum
The Commodore 64 conversion of Shadow of the Beast was developed by DMA Design and published by Ocean Software in 1990. And it’s a reasonably good port of the scrolling fighting game, with decent graphics and atmospheric music.
The 1987 Apple II conversion of Capcom‘s Commando was developed by Quicksilver Software, Inc. and published by Data East in North America only, and it is a reasonable port although the play window is probably the smallest out of the all the versions of Commando I’ve played so far.
Unfortunately the BBC Micro version of Elite‘s conversion of Commando is an absolute travesty, with terrible graphics and horrible gameplay and the only thing it has in common with the arcade original is the name of the game and the basic scenario.
Penguin Land is a cute and devilish platform puzzle game developed and published by Sega – exclusively for the Sega Master System – in 1987. The original Japanese title of the game is “Doki Doki Penguin Land Uchū Daibōken“.
The Amstrad CPC version of Commando – published by Elite Systems in 1986 – is easy to write off, due to its chunky graphics and mostly featureless backgrounds, but it’s actually one of the better 8-bit conversions.
Shatterhand is a scrolling action game in which you play a young police officer – called Steve Hermann – who has lost his arms and has had them replaced with enhanced, cybernetic limbs, and is in pursuit of a group of military renegades called “Metal Command“.
Shatterhand was developed by Natsume and originally published for the Nintendo Famicom by Angel under the title of “Tokkyū Shirei Soruburein” in 1991. That version of the game is based on the Japanese TV series “Super Rescue Solbrain“. The US and European versions, published by Jaleco, removed the licensed elements, changed the backstory, and re-titled the game as “Shatterhand” for Western audiences. One level was also completely changed – from a carnival level in the Japanese version, to a submarine level in the American version. The gameplay in both versions is identical, though.
The ZX Spectrum version of Geoff Crammond‘s classic puzzle game, The Sentinel, was ported by Software Creations (with assistance from Mr. Crammond himself) and published by Firebird Software in 1987.
Shadow of the Beast is a scrolling fighting/action game originating on the Amiga. It was enough of a success for publisher Psygnosis to convert it to various home computers and consoles. The ZX Spectrum version was developed by Gremlin Graphics and published in 1990, and it is not a bad port overall.
