Golden Axe II is a sequel to the classic Sega arcade game, Golden Axe, and was released exclusively on the Megadrive/Genesis* in 1991 in Japan and 1992 in North America and Europe.
*= It was eventually released as an arcade game using ‘Mega Play’ hardware, which is essentially a Megadrive/Genesis in an arcade cabinet, but the game was initially marketed as a ‘killer app’ on Sega‘s famous home console.
This conversion of the classic Sega arcade game was first released on the Megadrive/Genesis in 1989 and is a reasonably accurate port of the famous hack and slash action game.
Atari‘s classic arcade game, Paperboy, has been converted to a wide variety of different platforms. We recently played through them all to see which were the best, and here’s our list…
TIE Fighter was first released in 1994 and is the sequel to the smash hit space combat game, X-Wing, which are both of course based on spacecraft from the Star Wars universe. This time, though, you get to fight on the side of The Empire, who are widely seen as the ‘bad guys’ in the Star Wars series, so in this game you are blasting Rebels and their collaborators out of space, and not the other way around.
Alongside Donkey Kong, Sega‘s Zaxxon was another ColecoVision arcade conversion that wowed gamers back in 1982 when they first saw it. And it was so close to the original that it drove sales of the console itself, because gamers wanted the arcade experience in their own homes.
The 1983 Parker Bros. release of Gottleib‘s Q*bert was a reasonable success on the ColecoVision.
***CANNED GAME***
A game that should need no introduction: Pac-Man is one of the most popular video games, and one of the most popular video game characters, of all-time. Unfortunately, this ColecoVision port of Pac-Man never made it market and was cancelled before release. Thankfully a completed prototype of the game exists and has been leaked online, and it’s better than most other ports on competitor machines.
Konami‘s classic arcade game, Frogger, was first released for the ColecoVision in November of 1983 and it immediately became one of the console’s biggest-selling cartridges.
The 1983 MS-DOS version of Beam Software‘s classic text adventure, The Hobbit, allows you to choose between 40 or 80 column display for the text parser, and whether you want to play the game with pictures or not.
The NES/Famicom version of Maniac Mansion was developed and published by Jaleco in 1990 and is still worth playing today. It’s a fine port of a great game and translates well enough to Nintendo‘s machine that it arguably plays even better than the C64 original (although many will cry “Sacrilege!” to that).
The King of Grabs 