Tag Archives: 8-bit

Technician Ted: The Megamix, ZX Spectrum

Technician Ted: The Megamix is a special version of the game, created for 128K Spectrums, which contains many more screens than the original release. It’s also been improved visually, and has some new AY-based music. Technician Ted: The Megamix was released by Hewson Consultants in 1986.

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Bruce Lee: Return of Fury, Commodore 64

Released in 2019 by Megastyle, Bruce Lee: Return of Fury is another great homebrew fan tribute sequel to Ron J. Fortier and Kelly Day‘s classic action platformer, Bruce Lee.

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Bruce Lee II, Commodore 64

I’ve already covered the PC version of Bruno R. Marcos‘ marvellous homebrew sequel, Bruce Lee II, on this site, but unfortunately the game download has been unavailable for some time. I was surprised and delighted, therefore, to discover that Bruce Lee II had been ported to the Commodore 64 by Jonas Hulten, and remains available to download and play to this day (at the time of writing, at least).

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Technician Ted, Amstrad CPC

The 1984 Amstrad CPC conversion of the ZX Spectrum game, Technician Ted (aka The Chip Factory starring Technician Ted), is pretty much identical to the original, except that it has a rather garish colour palette.

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Starglider, ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum version of Argonaut‘s classic Starglider is actually surprisingly good. Or, rather: the 128K version is very good (the 48K version plays well enough, but it lacks the digitised speech and other enhancements, so is a little plain). And the main reason Starglider on the Speccy is respectable, is because it was converted by Realtime Games Software, who were pioneers in the field of Spectrum-based 3D games, having created the legendary Starstrike, Starstrike II and Carrier Command (among others).

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Chase HQ, ZX Spectrum

There’s no doubting that Ocean Software‘s 1989 Spectrum conversion of Taito‘s classic Chase HQ is impressive. Programmed by John O’Brien, with graphics by Bill Harbison, and sound by Jonathan Dunn, this 8-bit chase game really pushes the Spectrum to its limits, and puts pretty much every other third-person driving game on the Speccy to shame, with its amazing road movement and exciting gameplay.

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Double Take, Commodore 64

Created by Denton Designs and published by Ocean Software in 1987, Double Take is a weird fantasy shooter/puzzle game, and is one of those games where – even if you read the manual – you’re still unlikely to know about what the f**k is going on! I spent a few hours recently trying to work this game out, and came away just as confused as when I started…

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Stunt Car Racer, Atari 8-bit

Geoff Crammond‘s classic Stunt Car Racer was converted to Atari 8-bit systems by homebrew coders Fandal and Irgendwer in 2018. And it is an excellent port that plays identically to the C64 version it is based upon.

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Conan, Commodore 64

Datasoft‘s 1984 release, Conan, is a curious game. It doesn’t seem to be directly related to either of the two Conan films released in the early ’80s (although it does use artwork from the sequel, Conan the Destroyer), so my guess is that it was a quick cash-in on the popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger by the developers.

The game was originally written for the Apple II by Eric Robinson and Eric Parker, and the Commodore 64 version was created by Ron J. Fortier and John Butrovich.

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RoboCop, Amiga

Ocean Software‘s Amiga port of RoboCop was fairly impressive when it first came out in 1989, but – playing it now – it hasn’t stood the test of time particularly well. It’s a scrolling run-and-gun shooter that is loosely-based on the Data East arcade game of the same name (although the arcade game and the home computer versions were developed in parallel).

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