Torneko no Daiboken: Fushigi no Dungeon (translating as “Torneko’s Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon“) is the first game in the Mystery Dungeon series from Chunsoft, the developer known for creating the Dragon Quest series. It is a ‘Roguelike‘ dungeon-crawler, with randomised maze-like dungeons and was first released in 1993.
Continue reading Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon, Super Nintendo
Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord on the Sega Master System is a very simple turn-based RPG that looks terrible but is surprisingly absorbing when you get into it. It was developed by Kogado, initially for the PC-88, then later it was ported to the MSX, Famicom and Master System. The SMS version was first released in 1987 by Sega.
Continue reading Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord, Sega Master System
I was hoping that the Atari 8-bit version of Rogue might be better than the other 8-bit versions (or at least a balance between the awful C64 version and the half-decent Amstrad version), but I was hoping for too much – especially as it’s another Mastertronic “special” (ie. a good example of a publisher not giving a sh*t about what they released).
The Amstrad CPC version of Rogue is arguably the best of the 8-bit conversions from Mastertronic, although it’s not without its problems. It was developed by Icon Design and first published in 1988.
Rogue on the ZX Spectrum was developed by Icon Design and published by Mastertronic Added Diminsion in 1988. And it’s a pretty poor conversion of the classic dungeon-crawler.
The Commodore 64 conversion of Rogue was developed by Icon Design and published by Mastertronic in 1988, and it is a bugged, incomplete, and un-finishable version of the game that demonstrates the utter contempt for which Mastertronic held for both the game, and for gamers who paid money for it.
The Atari ST version of the classic dungeon-crawler, Rogue, is arguably the best conversion of the game out there. It was developed by A.I. Design and published by Epyx in 1986 and combines the best bits from the original with new graphics and a few new features of its own.
Rogue is an influential dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Game originally created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (with later contributions by Ken Arnold) for Unix-based mainframes in 1980.
The original version of Rogue used the ASCII character set (text symbols) to create the world, and that is what you can see here in this first commercial version of game, published by Epyx in 1985.
Magician Lord is a bit of a rarity on the Neo Geo – it’s a scrolling action game based on fantasy characters. It’s like a run-and-gun game with magic, basically. Not the kind of game you see very often on the Neo Geo, and it’s a decent game to boot.
Developed by Produce! and published by Enix in 1995, Mystic Ark was only ever released in Japan for the Super Famicom, although an English fan translation does exist, making the game playable to Western audiences. And it is a very good RPG, well worth playing now.
Mystic Ark has been described by some as “The 7th Saga II“, and while it does share some similarities with The 7th Saga (by having a circular monster radar and also featuring some of the same monsters) it is not really a sequel as it plays quite differently.
The King of Grabs 