Gorf is an early arcade shooter that feels like a poor relative to many of its peers of the time.
It borrows most of its features from other games (one wave is actually called “Galaxians” although I do believe that the developers properly licensed it from Namco) and doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of gameplay, but it did pioneer one thing. And that is: in the use of synthesised speech. Gorf was one of the earliest video games to use it (and although clear, it is quite robotic).
Moon Cresta was released by Nichibutsu in 1980 and was extremely popular in arcades.
It is another colourful, fixed-screen shooter, this time with a scrolling starfield to give the impression of movement.
Galaxian is an iconic video game from the golden age of gaming history.
In fact, Galaxian was Namco‘s response to Space Invaders. It came out in 1979 and enthralled gamers with its hypnotic but brutal gameplay. Which it still does, to this day.
Space Invaders, owned and manufactured by Taito, is the best-selling video game and highest-grossing entertainment product of all time.
Taking place immediately after the events of the famous John Carpenter film of the same name, The Thing is a 3D survival horror game that aims to wallow in the sheer, dark, brilliance of Universal’s 1982 cult sci-fi hit.
Released into video game arcades in 1987, Irem‘s side-scrolling shoot ’em up, R-Type, is considered by many to be the best of its type (pun intended).
Abe’s Oddysee is the first in a quadrilogy of games that fall under the Oddworld series banner, and the first game to feature Abe – a likeable alien slave who is on the run from his captors.
This 1994 arcade game from Capcom is a ridiculously over-the-top beat ’em up in the style of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs – side-scrolling, all-action, with gigantic sprites jumping around all over the place.
There are countless versions of Another World – Delphine Software‘s 1991, sci-fi masterpiece – but the Megadrive version (shown here) is arguably the best of them.
Known as “Spiderbot” in North America, Arac is an unusual and interesting platform action game where you control a spider-like robot (called Arac) who can capture enemies and adopt their characteristics.
The King of Grabs 