Michel Ancel (the creator of Rayman) and his team produced a video gaming classic in 2003 with Ubisoft‘s Beyond Good & Evil.
It is a pseudo sci-fi fantasy, third-person action/adventure where you control a young woman called Jade, with a pig sidekick called Pey’j, and who is battling against the sinister “DomZ”.
This MSX conversion of Don Priestley‘s classic Spectrum game, Maziacs, was released by DK’Tronics in 1985. It captures the essence of the original perfectly.
The third Freescape game, Total Eclipse, was released on 8-bit home computers first (ZX Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad CPC), and later appeared on 16-bit machines, including this excellent Amiga conversion, published by Domark in 1989.
The full title of this 1995 sequel is Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds, and it is an excellent continuation of the series.
Magic Carpet from Bullfrog was first released in 1994 through Electronic Arts. It is a DOS-based, first-person action game with you – the player character – flying a ‘magic carpet’ around a series of islands, fighting evil wizards and monsters and collecting ‘mana’ to increase your magical powers.
This notorious 1982 release for the Atari 2600 was – at the time – the most expensive movie license ever acquired by a video game company ($35 million dollars it apparently cost), and it also undoubtedly hastened the demise of Atari Inc. (as it was back then), and was also a major contributing factor to the video game market crash of 1983.
This 1983 action game sees you playing as Chuck Norris – the infamous action hero of the 1970s – and it really is quite bad.
Raid Over Moscow was a controversial release for Access Software in 1984. The game depicts a fictional nuclear war scenario between the USA and Russia and involves US forces fending off nuclear attacks, then flying into the Russian capital to attack what is supposed to be The Kremlin.
Red Dead Revolver was first published by Rockstar Games in 2004. It is the first title in the Red Dead series.
It is a Wild West style third-person shooter, with RPG and adventure overtones. In it you play the lead – a bounty hunter called ‘Red’ who must track down various outlaws and collect the reward on them. Of course there’s more to the story than simply bounty-hunting, and this becomes clear as you progress.
Denton Designs made this smart little POW game for Ocean Software in 1986. It basically re-enacts the risky life of being a Prisoner of War during the Second World War, with a planned escape being top of the list of things to do, and is loosely-based on the 1963 film starring Steve McQueen.
The King of Grabs 