Tag Archives: American

H.E.R.O., Apple II

The Apple II version of John Van Ryzin‘s classic H.E.R.O. of course lacks the colour of other ports, but it still plays well enough. The game was converted by Charlie Heath (of Microsmiths) and published by Activision in 1984.

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Salmon Run, Atari 8-bit

Written by Bill Williams (the writer and designer of Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, among other games), for the Atari Program Exchange, and first released in 1982, Salmon Run is a clever, and uniquely different, video game based upon the life cycle of a fish – a salmon, specifically – that is trying to swim upstream to its spawning ground.

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Trog, Arcade

Trog is an arcade maze game developed by Midway Manufacturing and distributed on their Bally Midway label in 1990. It caters for up to four simultaneous players and features “Claymation” characters and cut scenes (although they call it “PLAYmation” on the title screen, probably because the word “Claymation” is trademarked). Claymation is when all the characters are made of, and animated with, plasticine or coloured clay (think Wallace & Gromit and you’ll get it).

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Rocky Super-Action Boxing, ColecoVision

Developed and published by Coleco Industries in 1983, Rocky Super-Action Boxing is based on the 1982 film, Rocky III, and was the first licensed video game based on the smash-hit series.

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Ghosts ‘N Goblins, PC

The 1987 PC MS-DOS version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins, I’m sorry to say, is a bit of a travesty. It looks terrible, and also plays like a lame duck. In fact, unless you can get the game set up properly in DOSBox (which took me some time to do), then it’s pretty much unplayable*.

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The Horde, 3DO

Developed by Toys For Bob, Inc. and published by Crystal Dynamics (in North America and Japan) and BMG Interactive (in Europe) in 1994, The Horde is an isometric fantasy action game where you have to defend a village from attacking ‘Hordlings‘ – red gremlin-like creatures that attack in waves and try to eat and destroy everything in the province.

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Dungeon Master, Apple IIgs

The 1989 Apple IIgs conversion of FTL‘s Dungeon Master was created by the original developers and is therefore a perfect port of this classic Role-Playing Game. The game requires a minimum of 1MB of RAM to run, like the Amiga version, and a processor running at 2.8MHz or above makes it playable at the right speed.

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