Namco‘s Galaga – the sequel to Galaxian – came out in 1981 and was an immediate hit with gamers.
Gone were the days of Space Invaders and rigid attack patterns – the baddies in Galaga danced around the screen; made circles, and flew around in distinct and fluid attack patterns. It was new and it was revolutionary!
Tempest, by Dave Theurer, is one of the first ever ‘tube shooters’. It was released by Atari in 1981.
You control a spider-like yellow craft that walks along the edge of a 3D playfield, often taking the form of a cylindrical tube. You shoot bullets down the tube at enemies that are rising upwards to get you. Thus the name ‘tube shooter’.
Designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey, Centipede is a superfast fixed-screen shoot ’em up from the arcades of 1981.
Atari‘s 1980 hit Battle Zone was one of the first ever video games to use 3D polygonal vector graphics to represent the playfield.
It’s a tank game, and you’re basically hunting down tanks, flying saucers, and other baddies. Shooting them before they can shoot you.
Phoenix is another great vertical shoot ’em up from the golden age of video gaming. It was developed by Amstar Electronics of Arizona and manufactured by Centuri in 1980, and featured even more progressive gameplay than Space Invaders and Galaxian.
The very first version of SimCity 2000 was released for Apple Macintosh by Maxis in 1993, followed soon after by a PC MS-DOS version.
The 2006 sequel to the hit RPG Neverwinter Nights was created by American developer Obsidian Entertainment and published by Atari, Inc.
In many ways Neverwinter Nights 2 improves on the original game, and uses a new game engine (actually a suped-up version of the previous engine), this one called the Electron Engine.
BioWare‘s 2002 release, Neverwinter Nights, is a bit of a giant on the RPG scene.
Not only is it a detailed and engrossing Role-Playing Game par excellence, but it also plays host to a huge modding community. It’s also well-known as a multiplayer game too and features campaigns that can be played single or multi-player, and also features Player-versus-Player (PvP) combat.
A classic first-person survival horror game from Monolith Productions and first released in 2005.
F.E.A.R. unfortunately came out not long after Half-Life 2, so was kind of drowned-out in the attention Valve‘s release was getting. It’s not as good as Half-Life 2 – to be quite frank – but is definitely up there with the best releases of that year.
Shaun Southern‘s Kikstart 2 is a brilliant and challenging split-screen, side-scrolling motorcycle trials game for the Commodore 64 that was first released in 1987.
The King of Grabs 