Tag Archives: featured

Sonic the Hedgehog Special

This week I’m going to be featuring all the early Sonic the Hedgehog games on the blog.

They’re all Megadrive/Genesis games, except for one on the Sega CD. And they’re all classics, and deserve a set of grabs, showing just show beautiful and colourful they are. And, of course, a few words about what makes them good.

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Amiga CD32 Special

The CD32 is a CD-ROM-based console that is basically a high-end Amiga contained within a small, grey box. It can do pretty much everything an Amiga can do, but with a few built-in extras, such as Red Book Audio (CD quality sound, streamed from the disc), CDTV compatibility, and backwards compatibility with older, 9-pin D-Sub (Atari-style) controllers of the ’80s and ’90s (including Sega Megadrive pads and existing Amiga mice and paddles).

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Tony Crowther Week

Born in Sheffield in 1965, Antony Crowther is a prolific and highly-regarded British video games designer/programmer who has had success across a number of different platforms.

Crowther is particularly well known for his Commodore 64 games, although he has worked on pretty much every gaming system known to man. He still designs and programs games to this day.

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Commodore 16/Plus4 Special

The Commodore 16 is a somewhat underrated home computer that had a relatively short lifespan and was intended as a low-cost replacement for the Commodore VIC-20.

It had 16K of RAM (thus the name) and a 6502 compatible CPU that ran twice as fast as the CPU in its older and more expensive cousin, the Commodore 64. It had a video and sound chipset called “TED” that offered a colour palette of 121 colours, and more efficient use of video memory than the C64, but it had no hardware sprites (it did however have a built-in software sprite routine with fewer restrictions than on hardware sprites).

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Jonathan Smith’s Classic ZX Spectrum Games

A British programmer/developer who made a name for himself with his very first game, Pud Pud, which was published by Ocean Software for the ZX Spectrum in 1984. Smith was just 17 at the time Pud Pud was released, but was fortuitous in that his pitch to Ocean, and them signing him up as ‘talent’, was all filmed and later broadcast on television in an episode of BBC TV’s Commercial Breaks, which gave him an instant profile to an appreciative audience. Bob Wakelin‘s ace cover art also did Smith‘s early games a lot of good.

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To Infinity And Beyond: The Infinity Engine Games

The Infinity Engine by BioWare is synonymous with great RPGs. You think Infinity Engine, you think Planescape: Torment, or Baldur’s Gate. Or Icewind Dale. All great level-grinding adventures and all published by Interplay in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

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