Lucasfilm Games’ brilliant futuristic sports sim, Ballblazer, was converted to the Atari 7800 in late 1984.
As a ‘no-nonsense’, one-on-one ball game there is little better, in terms of video games, and this Atari 7800 version is one of the fastest and smoothest around.
This 2002 sequel to Serious Sam is very similar to the first game. The first level even has the same monsters, but does blast through them quickly to get to the new stuff. And there is quite a bit of new stuff. Weapons, environments, enemies, bosses, et cetera.
As ‘generic’ first-person shooters go, Serious Sam is up there with the best of them.
And – let’s face it – the market is flooded with generic first-person shooters…
Monolith‘s 1997 shooter – Blood – is a first-person satire of every horror movie you ever saw, and also a few that you probably didn’t.
Doug Neubauer‘s 1979 release, Star Raiders, is a very important game indeed. Predominantly because it was so hugely influential on many other games that followed it. Some people even point to it being the spark that started the first-person shooter market, but that is probably going a little too far…
Ray Tobey‘s exciting first-person air combat game, Sky Fox, was first released on the Apple II in 1984, then converted to other systems by Electronic Arts in 1985.
A modern remake of the classic 3D Realms shooter is a great idea – the original adventures of Lo Wang (the lead character in the Shadow Warrior games, and the character you play in this) were a lot of fun.
MotoGP 2 is a great, high octane bike racing game, first released by THQ in 2003. It was developed by UK-based Climax Brighton for the original XBox, and for Microsoft Windows.
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is a spin-off from the famous Elder Scrolls series of RPGs by Bethesda Softworks. It first came out in 1997 – between Daggerfall and Morrowind – and is an MS-DOS-based action/RPG with fairly primitive 3D graphics.
A fine 16-bit conversion of the classic Mercenary by Paul Woakes, written by Woakes himself it seems. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s a great game and deserves doing right, so who better to code it than the original creator?
The King of Grabs 