Tag Archives: lasers

Fallout: London, PC [Part 1 – No Swimming in the River Thames]

Created by Team FOLON, with the backing of gog.com, Fallout: London is a free total conversion for Fallout 4, turning the English capital city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, with various different factions warring against each other.

The entire single-player campaign – the whole game, in fact – has been modified to give you a new storyline to play through, plus loads of other extras that accent the very Britishness of it all. The mod satirises British history, culture, and British manufacturing and consumerism, and has countless unique items and locations to discover while exploring.

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Cosmo Police Galivan, Arcade

Often shortened to just “Galivan“, this arcade platform game from Nichibutsu first came out in arcades in 1985. Outside of Japan, the game was little-known, but it did get ported to the C64, Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC in the West, and to the Famicom in Japan, to little or no success.

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Salamander, ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum port of Konami‘s classic arcade shooter, Salamander, was programmed by Andrew Glaister, with graphics by Stuart Ruecroft, and was first published by Imagine Software in 1988. While aspects of the game are very good, it is unfortunately a good example of an unfinished and cut-down game being rushed to market…

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Salamander, Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 version of Konami‘s arcade hit, Salamander, was programmed by Peter Baron, with graphics by Bob Stevenson and music by Mark Cooksey. It was first published by Imagine Software in Europe in 1988, and Konami themselves in North America in 1989. It is considered by many to be the best 8-bit home computer version of Salamander, and it’s not difficult to see why…

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Salamander, PC Engine

The PC Engine version of Salamander was first released by Konami in 1991, and it demonstrates why NEC‘s small-form console was so ahead of everything else at the time. It has great graphics and sound, smooth scrolling, large objects moving around the screen, very little sprite tearing, responsive controls, and a simultaneous two-player gameplay mode.

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Salamander, MSX

The MSX port of Konami‘s classic arcade shooter, Salamander, was first released in Japan – on cartridge – in 1987. And although it shares the name and certain elements from the arcade game, this is a completely new version of Salamander, with a new storyline, new characters, ships and levels. It is sometimes referred to as “Salamander: Operation X“.

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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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Star Wars Episode I: Obi Wan’s Adventures, Game Boy Color

Developed by HotGen and published by THQ and LucasArts for the Game Boy Color in 2000, Star Wars Episode I: Obi Wan’s Adventures presents you with the opportunity to play as Obi Wan Kenobi, the young Jedi apprentice, during the events of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

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Starglider, Apple II

The Apple II version of Argonaut Software‘s classic cockpit shooter, Starglider, was ported by Solid Image, the same developer who made the flawed C64 version. And – unsurprisingly – it retains all the flaws of the C64 version, and brings a few problems of its own to the party, just for good measure…

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Starglider, PC

The 1987 PC MS-DOS version of Argonaut Software‘s classic 3D shooter, Starglider, was ported by Realtime Games Software, who did the excellent Amstrad and ZX Spectrum ports. Unfortunately, the game is available only with four-colour CGA graphics, which does diminish the look of the game significantly.

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