Steve Hales‘ superb Fort Apocalypse is a classic American video game that originated on Atari 8-bit home computers in 1982.
The game is a multi-directional, scrolling shooter where you control a helicopter flying around a series of underground caverns looking for men to rescue.
This 1983 sequel to Bug-Byte‘s The Birds and the Bees is a simplistic maze game, but with excellent controls as you control a bee (with plenty of inertia), on the lookout for a kidnapped friend (kidnapped by ants, no less).
The Birds and the Bees is a simple, side-scrolling collect ’em up, with you playing a bee, out collecting pollen from nearby flowers. It was released by Bug-Byte Software on the ZX Spectrum in 1983.
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.
The first Crash Bandicoot game that wasn’t a PlayStation exclusive, The Wrath of Cortex is a fun platformer with varied gameplay modes, including flying, rolling balls, driving, swimming, submarines – and more.
Released in 1996, Super Mario 64 was one of the first fully-3D platform games to actually work, rather than be a struggle to play.
Looping is an old arcade game first released in 1982 by Venture Line.
In it you fly a plane across a horizontally-scrolling cityscape, doing loop-the-loops and trying your hardest not to hit the buildings.
Not a sequel, but a ‘data disk’ add-on that you load through the original Mercenary. The Second City starts off pretty much the same as Mercenary – crashing on a planet (this time the other side of the one you explored in Mercenary, and also a different colour) and having to explore to get on and eventually escape.
A 16-bit conversion of Paul Woakes‘ classic 8-bit exploration sequel to Mercenary. Well, not really a sequel – more a continuation… The real sequel came later.
The Atari ST‘s power (relative to the Commodore 64) means smoother, faster 3D graphics; more colours (useful, when colours are used to identify rooms and places underground); and more sensitive controls.
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 