Tag Archives: influential

Advance Wars, Game Boy Advance

Advance Wars is turn-based tactical war game developed by Intelligent Systems and was first published in North America on September 10th 2001.

As everyone knows: the following day the world witnessed the horrific attacks on the World Trade Centre, and this tragic event resulted in the delay of Advance Wars being released to the rest of the world.

Continue reading Advance Wars, Game Boy Advance

Head On, Arcade

Head On is an early arcade game, developed by Sega and manufactured by Gremlin Industries (not to be confused with Gremlin Graphics or Gremlin Interactive) in 1979.

It was the first maze game where the goal was to collect the dots, making it something of a precursor to Namco‘s Pac-Man which came a year later in 1980.

Continue reading Head On, Arcade

Pac-Mania, Arcade

Pac-Mania is the 1987 sequel to the classic Pac-Man, and it is generally very highly-rated by those who’ve played it.

Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was involved in Pac-Mania‘s development for Namco, so the game is properly canon, totally authentic, and deviously subtle.

Continue reading Pac-Mania, Arcade

Tau Ceti, PC

The PC MS-DOS version of Tau Ceti was coded by Derek Baker at Comtec and published by CRL Group (Thunder Mountain in North America) in 1987.

It features gaudy, four-colour, CGA graphics, but is otherwise the Tau Ceti we know and love.

Continue reading Tau Ceti, PC

Tau Ceti, Atari ST

The 1986 Atari ST conversion of Tau Ceti – by Ron De Santi of Comtec – is much faster than the 8-bit versions and therefore more challenging. And what a brilliant challenge it is!

Continue reading Tau Ceti, Atari ST

Tau Ceti, Commodore 64

John Twiddy‘s C64 conversion of Pete Cooke‘s classic space shooter is arguably even better than the Spectrum original.

Graphically it’s a little chunkier, but the extra colours make a difference.

Continue reading Tau Ceti, Commodore 64

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Super Nintendo

The follow-up to one of the best platform games of all time (Super Mario World), is – unsurprisingly – also one of the best platform games of all time!

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was released by Nintendo in 1995 to much anticipation, and it didn’t disappoint.

Continue reading Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Super Nintendo

Power Drift, Arcade

Power Drift is a superfast racing game designed by Yu Suzuki and first released into arcades by Sega in 1988.

The game uses high speed scaling effects (similar to After Burner and Out Run) to generate the tracks and the cars on the road, and the speed at which you race is pretty startling.

Continue reading Power Drift, Arcade

Conqueror, Archimedes

Conqueror is a 1988 release from Superior Software, designed and programmed by Jonathan Griffiths. It’s a 3D tank game that was released as a sequel to Zarch – and it uses the same game engine.

Continue reading Conqueror, Archimedes