Tag Archives: influential

Cameltry, Arcade

Also known as “On The Ball” in some English-speaking regions, Cameltry is a game where you have to drop a ball through a rotating maze to reach a goal area within a time limit. It was first distributed into arcades by Taito in 1989.

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Akumajō Dracula, X68000

The 1993 Sharp X68000 version of “Akumajō Dracula” is arguably the best version of the first Castlevania game available, with improved graphics and sound, and redesigned gameplay to accomodate new and more dramatic situations.

Also known as “Vampire Killer” in Europe; also known as “Castlevania” in North America; but known in its native Japan as “Akumajō Dracula“, this is an updated remake of the first game in the Castlevania series. And it is known for being two things: 1. REALLY GOOD, and 2. REALLY HARD!

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Vampire Killer, MSX

Konami‘s “Akumajō Dracula” was first released in 1986 for the MSX2. It set the template for a series that is still going (relatively) strong to this day – the Castlevania series.

This MSX game was also the first game in the Castlevania series to be given an English language release, and it was released in 1987 in Europe under the title of “Vampire Killer“, which then changed to “Castlevania” when the North American NES version of this game was released on cartridge.

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Flashback, PC

Also known as “The Quest for Identity“, Flashback is a classic platform action game from Delphine Software International, set some time in the future, where you’re trying to piece together your memory after a recent trauma. The MS-DOS version was first published by US Gold in 1993.

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TIE Fighter, PC

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.

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Miner 2049er, ColecoVision

The ColecoVision port of Bill Hogue‘s pioneering and influential Atari 8-Bit platform game, Miner 2049er, was programmed by Mike Livesay and published by Micro Fun in 1983. It is an excellent game, but it is arguably way too difficult for its own good.

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Fortune Builder, ColecoVision

Fortune Builder is a business simulation game that was developed by Circuits and Systems, Inc. and published by Coleco Industries in 1984. Alongside Utopia on the Intellivision, from 1981, it is one of the earliest examples of a resource management video game. Fortune Builder pre-dates SimCity by five years, and is more complex – at least in some respects.

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The Hobbit, PC

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.

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