Shinobi II: The Silent Fury is the sequel to the first Shinobi on the Game Gear and it was first published by Sega in 1992.
It’s a scrolling platform action game where you control Joe Musashi on a mission to retrieve five elemental crystals that have been stolen by the enemy and hidden across different locations in the game.
The game’s full North American title is Arena: Maze of Death, but it was released as just Arena in Europe so that’s what I’m going to call it. It’s an isometric shoot ’em up with you playing a “pro-democratic freedom fighter” called Guy Freelander who must fight his way through a variety of industrial locations in order to reach a television station to broadcast proof of an evil corporation’s wrongdoings.
One of the better Atari 8-bit homebrew Ultimate conversions, Gunfright was ported by Mariusz, Jose Pereira, Emkay and Saul Cross in 2017. It plays pretty much the same as the ZX Spectrum original and looks similar to the Commodore 64 homebrew release of 2017. In fact there may be a connection between them since one of the people who worked on the C64 port also worked on this.
An Atari 8-bit homebrew conversion of Ultimate‘s classic Spectrum shooter, Lunar Jetman, made by Fandal and Irgendwer in 2014, that is even more frustrating to play than the original…
Another Retrospec remake of a classic Ultimate game. This time: Lunar Jetman. This one was released in 2002 and unfortunately is another flawed piece of software.
This remake of Ultimate Play the Game‘s ZX Spectrum classic, Cookie, is unfortunately completely unplayable on modern PCs. It just runs way too fast to be playable and the only way to slow it down is by using a throttling app, like Advanced Game Launcher. But even then it’s still not very playable, so is a bit of a lost cause. Your only option would be to play it on very old, slow hardware to get it going at the right speed.
***CANNED GAME***
There is a story behind the Commodore 64 conversion of Bubbler, but to condense it into just a few sentences: the game was being converted in 1987 by an intermediary company for Ultimate, called Lynsoft, but was canned before release because it wasn’t fast enough.
The 1987 MSX conversion of Bubbler is arguably better than the Spectrum original because the speed is more consistent during play, which makes it more playable. In fact, it’s a game that borders on being superb, which is unusual for the later US Gold/Ultimate games which are generally considered to be inferior to Ultimate‘s earlier titles.
The Amstrad version of Ultimate Play the Game‘s Bubbler benefits from some extra colour, but plays pretty much the same as the ZX Spectrum original (ie. it’s playable, but insanely difficult).
Bubbler is an isometric action game that was published in 1987 under the Ultimate Play the Game banner, but in reality is a US Gold game that wasn’t developed by the original Ultimate team. And it is an insanely difficult, but playable, game.
The King of Grabs 