Atlus/Mitchell Corporation‘s 1996 arcade game, Osman, is something of a ‘tribute’ to Capcom‘s Strider. It features a lone protagonist who can clamber all over the landscape and has multiple attacks and abilities at his disposal.
Some of the development team on this worked on the Strider arcade game, so Osman could be seen as a spiritual successor to Strider.
A.B. Cop is an arcade game developed by Aicom and released by Sega in 1990. The “A.B.” stands for Air Bike. So it’s “Air Bike Cop“. A.B. Cop uses the “Sega X Board“, which originated with 1987’s After Burner.
The sequel to the smash-hit Vectorman was once again developed by the talented team at BlueSky Software, and again published by Sega – this time in 1996.
Vectorman 2 expands upon the first game with more levels and more features. Graphically, it’s moodier too, with bold and very subtle use of light and dark at certain times, and even more impressive lighting effects on Vectorman himself.
Together, Vectorman 1 and 2 make a great duo. A smash hit, followed by a hit sequel. Both are still well worth playing today.
Developed by BlueSky Software of California and published exclusively for the Megadrive/Genesis by Sega in 1995, Vectorman is an extremely well-regarded platform/action game with outstanding presentation and a humorous backstory.
The year is 2049 and the Earth has been overwhelmed with pollution. It’s so bad that humans have left, to live in space, sending automated robots down to Earth to try to reverse the out-of-control climate change. After interfacing with a nuclear warhead one of the robots becomes self-aware and declares itself to be “WarHead – The Destroyer of Humanity“. WarHead reprograms all the other robots and turns them against the humans, taking over Earth. You, as Vectorman, are a weird-looking robot that is returning from a dumping mission to the sun, and has inadvertently stumbled upon this bad situation. Since Vectorman is immune to WarHead‘s mind control, he sets out to save the Earth by destroying him.
Released exclusively for the Game Gear – in Japan only – by Sega in 1992, Phantasy Star Adventure is a spin-off from the main Phantasy Star series and is a kind of RPG/adventure controlled with a simple menu system. A fan translation into English makes it playable to non Japanese speakers.
Anteform is a tiny, futuristic RPG, written for the PICO-8 development platform, and was first released in 2019. It uses the same game engine as Minima and was written by the same guy, Feneric (aka Eric W. Brown). It’ll run on Windows, Mac, Linux and Raspberry Pi.
Created by Paul Voysey and Tayo Olowu, with graphics by Yemi Olowu, PSI Warrior is an almost mythical game, released fairly early in the C64‘s lifetime (1984) by Beyond Software.
Zoids was a range of popular children’s toys during the 1980s. They were dinosaur robot-type things that fought each other and looked really cool (if you were six years old). The toys spawned TV shows and computer games, and this one – designed by The Electronic Pencil Company – is notable as one of the best.
Capcom was one of the early masters of the Super Nintendo, releasing many great titles for it. This conversion of their arcade hit, U.N. Squadron, being one of them. It was first released in 1991.
A very good PC Engine/Turbografx-16 conversion of the 1986 arcade game from Capcom, Hyper Dyne Side Arms is side-scrolling, bullet hell shooter featuring Mecha characters, fighting an invading alien empire. It was first released in 1989 and was published by NEC Avenue in Japan, and Radiance Software in North America.
