Another excellent Hijong Park retro tribute game – this one possibly his best so far – Steel Alcimus is an overhead helicopter shooter with either twin-stick joypad, or keyboard and mouse controls. I played it with mouse and keys and found the control system to be really quite ingenious.
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Frantic Dimension, PC
Frantic Dimension is another great, free game, made by talented Korean Hijong Park and released on Steam in 2018.
The opening animatic in Frantic Dimension is quite funny – made even funnier by the slightly off-kilter use of English (it’s not a criticism – I like it). 🙂
Rolling Bird, PC
Rolling Bird is a modern tribute to the classic arcade game Rolling Thunder.
Graphically it looks a bit like an NES game, or an old arcade game. The colours are bold and the animation simple, but still excellent.
Rolling Thunder 2, Arcade
Rolling Thunder 2 continues on from the classic Rolling Thunder: it’s secret agent “Albatross” against the sinister agents of “Geldra”, except this time you can play the game as the rescued Leila (from the first game) from the outset. Or, you can play two-player cooperatively with a friend, which you definitely couldn’t do in the original.
Rolling Thunder, Arcade
Rolling Thunder is a side-scrolling arcade action game, developed and manufactured by Namco in 1986.
You take control of Codename “Albatross” – a highly-agile secret agent and a member of the “Rolling Thunder” espionage unit. Your mission is to rescue your partner, Leila Blitz, from a secret society called “Geldra”, and who are holding her against her will somewhere in New York City.
Hang-On, Arcade
Hang-On is a superfast motorbike racing game developed by Yu Suzuki (and his team) for Sega and released into arcades in 1985 – a year before the seminal Out Run.
Etrian Odyssey, Nintendo DS
This pioneering Japanese RPG was first released in 2007 and paved the way for one of the greatest series in the history of level-grinders… The Etrian Odyssey series.
Number three is my favourite, but one and two are excellent too (see also the Nintendo 3DS fourth instalment), and all follow the same credo. Which is: to base a game around exploration, mapping, and turn-based combat. And to make the party system flexible, so that adventurers can take out different parties and experiment with character skills.
Super Mario Bros. 2, Famicom Disk System
Super Mario Bros. 2 was initially released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1986, but was not released in North America or Europe in its original form, as you might have expected. It was instead decided that the gameplay was “too difficult” for Western gamers (and also the video games market in North America was undergoing a crash at the time), so Nintendo decided not to release it in English language territories – at least until it was later re-branded as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost levels – and released a different Super Mario Bros.2 in North America instead.
The Sentinel, Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 version of Geoff Crammond‘s The Sentinel (aka The Sentry) is just as good as the original BBC Micro version of the game, if not better – ie. it’s absolutely bloody brilliant.
Like a game of chess – but far scarier – The Sentinel is a game of strategy and cunning that is played-out on a mountainous chequerboard landscape that is overseen by the titular Sentinel.
Manos: The Hands of Fate, PC
Now this is a game I never thought I’d ever get to play… A game based on arguably the worst film of all time. A film called Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), and a film that is so bad that it has been known to reduce grown men to tears… And – believe it or not – I’ve sat though it twice. Yes: twice. Anyone who’s seen Manos: The Hands of Fate might want to congratulate me on that feat since sitting through the film twice requires a special kind of skill… Thankfully – as a lover and connoisseur of bad films – I have developed an immunity to [most of] them over the years, and it was with some excitement that I purchased this game on Steam and installed it…
The King of Grabs 