Tag Archives: console

Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, NES

The Famicom/NES version of Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu was developed by Now Production (who made Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti and Splatterhouse 3, among others) and was published by Hudson Soft in 1990. It’s a side-scrolling beat ’em up with platforming elements based around the famous movie actor Jackie Chan.

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Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, Atari 2600

Activision‘s 1984 sequel to Pitfall!Pitfall II: Lost Caverns – was again designed and programmed by David Crane. This time, though, the cartridge had a custom display processor chip inside, which allowed for improved visuals and continuous four channel music (the Atari 2600 is normally only capable of two channel sound).

Gameplay is similar to Pitfall!, although in this follow-up the world you can explore is much bigger than previously and is made up of eight screens in width, by 27 screens in height, making 216 screens in total. When you walk from one screen to another the new screen scrolls smoothly into view.

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Microcosm, Amiga CD32

Microcosm was much-hyped upon release in 1993, but in essence is a very limited ‘rail shooter’ set inside a human body – with pre-rendered video sequences used to depict the third-person viewpoint.

The game was originally developed by Psygnosis for the FM Towns, with some investment from Fujitsu, and was later ported to MS-DOS, the Sega Mega-CD, the 3DO, and the Amiga CD32.

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Dark Chambers, Atari 7800

Dark Chambers is a one or two-player maze/action game that was directly influenced by Dandy, in that it was originally written by John Howard Palevich – the creator Dandy – to further expand (or in this case: simplify) the concept of a multiplayer fantasy action game.

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Gauntlet, Sega Master System

The Sega Master System conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game Gauntlet is surprisingly good. For starters: it’s got the fastest fire rate of any of the home versions available, and it plays with a high intensity. This does, however, make the game especially challenging because the health of your heroes does tend to go down rather quickly.

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Castelian, NES

Castelian is the Nintendo Entertainment System port of John Phillipsclassic Commodore 64 game, Nebulus. It was developed by Bits Studios and published by Triffix Entertainment in 1991.

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Impossible Mission, Atari 7800

Dennis Caswell‘s classic Impossible Mission was released for the Atari 7800 in 1988 and it is a decent adaptation of the Commodore 64 original.

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Super Turrican 2, Super Nintendo

This sequel to Super Turrican was again created by German developer Factor 5 and was published by Ocean Software for the Super Nintendo in 1995.

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Mega Turrican, Megadrive/Genesis

Mega Turrican is a Megadrive/Genesis-exclusive remake of the famous run-and-gun shooter which was popularised on the Commodore 64 by Rainbow Arts and later ported to other systems. This version was developed by Factor 5 (as were all of the later ports) and published by Data East in North America and Sony Imagesoft in Europe in 1994.

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Super Turrican, Super Nintendo

Super Turrican is an enhanced conversion of the original Turrican, created by German developer Factor 5 and published by Seika/Hudson Soft in 1993.

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