Kirby’s Pinball Land DX is brilliant ROM hack by “kkzero” that was first released in January 2022. What it does is modify the code of the original Game Boy game to make it playable on the Game Boy Color, in full colour. Which is pretty amazing.
This hack – and kkzero‘s other great Kirby hack, Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX – turn what were once monochrome games into a riot of colour, and they seriously revitalise these great classics into games that are worth playing (or re-playing) again now.
Originating on Atari 8-bit home computers in 1983, this ColecoVision port of the pioneering platform game, Montezuma’s Revenge, was developed and published by Parker Brothers in 1984.
The Commodore 64 conversion of the VIC-20 classic, Sword of Fargoal, was published in 1983 by Epyx. It features the same Roguelike gameplay of the original, with a few small enhancements.
Written by Jeff McCord of Automated Simulations, Inc. and first published for the expanded VIC-20 by Epyx in 1982, Sword of Fargoal is a simple dungeon-crawling, Roguelike action game where you play an explorer who is searching a series of randomly generated levels for a legendary sword.
LucasArts‘ classic point-and-click adventure, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, was released for the FM Towns by Victor Musical Industries in 1993, and although it was a Japan-only release it does include the English language version, which makes it perfectly playable to Westerners.
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Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is the second SCUMM game from Lucasfilm Games (aka LucasArts), after Maniac Mansion, with game development led by David Fox, and with Matthew Alan Kane as co-designer and co-programmer. It was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, and this enhanced FM Towns port was published in Japan in 1990 by Fujitsu. The game is playable in both English and Japanese.
Continue reading Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, FM Towns
Origin/Blue Sky Productions‘ classic MS-DOS RPG, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, was released for the FM Towns in 1993 by Electronic Arts Victor, Inc.*
*= Electronic Arts Victor was a joint venture between Electronic Arts and the Victor Musical Industries subsidiary of JVC, established in September 1992 in Tokyo. Electronic Arts Victor‘s mission was to translate Electronic Arts‘ library of games to Japanese language and to distribute them in Japan, as well as to create original titles for the Japanese market.
Continue reading Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, FM Towns
The FM Towns conversion of Taito‘s classic arcade game, Chase HQ, looks great and plays well, and is also considerably easier than the arcade original, which may appeal to some. It was published by Ving in 1991 in Japan only.
Originally released as an arcade game on Neo Geo MVS hardware, Viewpoint is an isometric bullet hell shooter originally developed by Aicom, ported by Sammy and published by Ving for the FM Towns in 1993. It obviously takes inspiration from Sega‘s Zaxxon, but its aesthetic owes more to Irem‘s R-Type.
Although the FM Towns port of Bullfrog‘s classic Syndicate is in Japanese, it’s still a great game to play if you know what you’re doing. Of course this is not the right version of Syndicate to play if it’s your first time (unless you can read Japanese), but it is a sharp port with crisp high resolution graphics and responsive controls.
The King of Grabs 