The ‘Deluxe Edition‘ of Marble Madness was released the same year as ‘The Construction Set‘ edition and it contains a new set of screens to play through, plus the Construction Set editor, and the ten screens from the earlier release. It’s still complete and utter garbage, though…
Continue reading Marble Madness: Deluxe Edition, Amstrad CPC
The Amstrad CPC version of Melbourne House‘s 1986 release of Marble Madness is more or less identical to the ZX Spectrum version, but with a bit more colour. It was coded by the same author – John F. Cain – and suffers from the same problems as the Spectrum version.
Continue reading Marble Madness: The Construction Set, Amstrad CPC
The ‘Deluxe Edition‘ of Marble Madness on the Spectrum was again written by John F. Cain and published by Melbourne House in 1986, and it contains a new set of screens to play, as well as the ten screens from the previous release, plus the Construction Set editor, as a separate load on side ‘B’ of the cassette.
Continue reading Marble Madness: Deluxe Edition, ZX Spectrum
Written by John F. Cain (who also made Booty, Moonlight Madness and Super Dragon Slayer on the Spectrum), and published by Melbourne House in 1986, the ‘official’ Marble Madness on the ZX Spectrum bears little resemblance to the classic arcade original.
Continue reading Marble Madness: The Construction Set, ZX Spectrum
The NES conversion of Marble Madness was developed by Rare and published by Milton Bradley, in North America and Europe, in 1989. I don’t think the game was ever released in Japan, though. And it’s a very good port, with some small enhancements and decent controls and playability.
The Sega Saturn port of Doom was developed by Rage Software and distributed by GT Interactive in 1997. Like the PlayStation version (on which this port is based) it contains both Ultimate Doom and Doom II, but is a little disappointing in terms of performance and presentation.
The Amstrad CPC version of Shadow of the Beast was developed and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1990 and is similar to the ZX Spectrum version (which was also created by Gremlin), but with more on-screen colours. It requires 128K of RAM to run, so is for Amstrad 6128 machines and compatibles only, and is spread over two floppy disks.
The Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast was converted by Mark McCubbin and published by Psygnosis in 1990. While it’s not a bad conversion it does lack the graphical fidelity of the Amiga original and is also missing quite a few features.
The Atari Lynx port of Shadow of the Beast was developed by Digital Developments and first published by Psygnosis in 1992. And it is surprisingly good.
The PC Engine CD version of Shadow of the Beast is – in my opinion – the best version of the game available. For two reasons: it has the most responsive controls of any version of Shadow of the Beast I’ve played (even compared to the Amiga original), and it’s also the best-looking and best-sounding version of the game too. It was developed by DMA Design and first published in 1992. In Japan it was released by Victor Interactive Software as “Mashou no Okite“, and in North America it was released for the TurboGrafx CD by Psygnosis/Turbo Technologies.
The King of Grabs 