Tag Archives: influential

1942, Arcade

1942 is a vertically-scrolling bullet hell shooter from Capcom, first released into arcades in 1984. The game is loosely based on the Battle of Midway of WWII and sees you piloting an American P-38 Lightning, fighting against Japanese forces.

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Phantasy Star Online, Dreamcast

Phantasy Star Online was developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega in 2000 for the Dreamcast. The game is an online/offline JRPG in the style of the previous Phantasy Star games, and is much-celebrated. We’re looking at PSOVersion 2” here, which came out in 2001, with expanded content.

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Wings of Fury, Apple II

Designed and programmed by Steve Waldo, and first published by Brøderbund in 1987, Wings of Fury is a pioneering and influential side-scrolling shooter in which you pilot an American F6F Hellcat during World War II.

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Dune II: The Battle For Arrakis, PC

The MS-DOS version of Dune II: The Battle For Arrakis was the original, first released by Westwood Studios in 1992. The Amiga version followed shortly afterwards, in 1993.

Aka “Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty” in North America.

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Dark Souls, PlayStation 3

Considered by many to be a masterpiece of video game design, Dark Souls is an action-based fantasy role-playing game, and was developed by From Software and first published by Namco Bandai Games in 2011.

Dark Souls was so successful, in fact, that it created a succession of similar games, called ‘Souls-likes‘. Not many games can claim to have created a whole sub-genre on its own, but this game did.

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Jump Bug, Arcade

Jump Bug is a 1981 arcade game developed by Alpha Denshi, under contract with Hoei Corporation, and was distributed by Sega in Europe and Japan, and Rock-Ola in North America, and it’s still very much a fun game to play nowadays.

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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Nintendo Wii

The 2007 release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was something of a milestone for Nintendo, the game’s publisher, and Retro Studios, the game’s developer. For Nintendo this was a landmark release, showing off the Wii‘s impressive capabilities as a games console, and for Retro Studios it was the end of years of experimentation with the control system. In the end, it turned out to be a masterpiece…

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Akumajō Dracula, MSX

The MSX and Famicom Disk System versions of Konami‘s original Akumajō Dracula (aka “Vampire Killer“), were being worked-on simultaneously by developers inside Konami, in 1985 and ‘86.

The Famicom Disk System version was released one month before the MSX version. Although they are essentially the same game, there are some significant differences between them.

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Soulcalibur II, GameCube

The Soulcalibur series is a line of classic arcade fighting games, created by Namco and their dedicated development team, “Project Soul“. And this is a conversion of Soulcalibur II – from arcade to GameCube – first published in 2003.

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