Tag Archives: knives

Ice Nine, Game Boy Advance

Ice Nine was one of the last first-person shooters released for the Game Boy Advance. It was developed by Torus Games and published by BAM! Entertainment in 2005, and it was originally going to be a tie-in with the 2003 film The Recruit. However, this fell through when the film failed commercially, but the plot of the game remains mostly unchanged.

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Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Game Boy Advance

Also known as “Ecks vs. Sever II: Ballistic” in Europe, this is the second video game based on the 2002 film, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, directed by Wych Kaosayananda and starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu. The first game – Ecks vs. Sever – came out in 2001 and is one of the better first-person shooters on the Game Boy Advance. This game was developed by Crawfish Interactive and published by BAM! Entertainment in 2002.

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Back Track, Game Boy Advance

When I first played Back Track, my instincts screamed at me that this was a terrible game. The graphics are messy; the enemies look awful; the explosions have a really bad horizontal raster-style visual effect; health packs are called “Band-Aids“; the weapons are unimpressive; the draw distance is masked with a solid black shadow, which is disconcerting; the environments appear flat, empty and uninteresting, and the premise of the game – to rescue kidnapped humans from inside tubes – doesn’t seem very exciting. BUT… I persisted with it and found Back Track to actually be quite absorbing and challenging, when I eventually got into it.

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Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Nintendo 64

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person shooter, developed by Iguana Entertainment and published by Acclaim for the Nintendo 64 console and Microsoft Windows. It was initially released in 1997 in North America and Europe.

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Halloween, Atari 2600

Halloween on the Atari 2600 is another “classic” horror movie license [that was sarcasm, by the way], developed by VSS, Inc. and published by Wizard Video Games in 1983. It is based on John Carpenter‘s classic 1978 film of the same name, and in it you play as a babysitter, trying to save children from the unstoppable murderer, Michael Myers.

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Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, PC

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is a “reboot” of the Castlevania series, developed by Spanish studio MercurySteam and first published by Konami in 2010. Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear series, helped produce the title.

In Lords of Shadow you play as Gabriel Belmont, a member of the Brotherhood of Light, an elite group of holy knights who protect and defend the innocent against the supernatural. His quest is to defeat a malevolent order known as The Lords of Shadow, and to resurrect his dead wife, Marie.

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Mechanized Attack, Arcade

Mechanized Attack is a manic, one or two-player lightgun shooter that was released into arcades by SNK in 1989.

On the face of it you could argue that Mechanized Attack is a clone of Taito‘s 1987 hit, Operation Wolf. You could also argue that it’s not a very good clone.

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Switchblade, Atari ST

Created by Simon Phipps (co-founder of Core Design), and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1989, Switchblade is a platform action game that could be described as a ‘spiritual successor’ to the Rick Dangerous games (also created by Simon Phipps). Switchblade features similar gameplay and graphics to Rick Dangerous, although it is more refined, less cartoony, and is far less frustrating to play. Switchblade came out on the Atari ST first and ports for the Amiga, C64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum followed.

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Operation Wolf, FM Towns

The FM Towns conversion of Taito‘s smash hit arcade shooter, Operation Wolf, is both an authentic port of the original, and also a playable and fun game that utilises mouse controls to great effect. It was first published by Ving in 1990.

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Operation Wolf, ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum version of Taito‘s classic arcade shooter, Operation Wolf, was developed and published by Ocean Software in 1988.

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