Atlus/Mitchell Corporation‘s 1996 arcade game, Osman, is something of a ‘tribute’ to Capcom‘s Strider. It features a lone protagonist who can clamber all over the landscape and has multiple attacks and abilities at his disposal.
Some of the development team on this worked on the Strider arcade game, so Osman could be seen as a spiritual successor to Strider.
The Combatribes is a scrolling fighting game, similar in style to Double Dragon or Renegade. It was developed and published by Technos Japan in 1990. In arcades the cabinet had three joysticks for simultaneous multiplayer action.
Capcom‘s somewhat obscure 1991 arcade game, The King of Dragons, is a scrolling three-player fighting game set in a colourful fantasy world.
A.B. Cop is an arcade game developed by Aicom and released by Sega in 1990. The “A.B.” stands for Air Bike. So it’s “Air Bike Cop“. A.B. Cop uses the “Sega X Board“, which originated with 1987’s After Burner.
The Electric Yo-Yo is an obscure arcade game released by Taito in 1982. And, by the looks of it, it uses the same hardware as Qix, because there are similarities to that game.
Written by Derek Johnston and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1985, Zone X is a scrolling maze game where you play a radiation suit-wearing scientist collecting plutonium samples and dumping them into containers.
Mr. Ghost – aka “Yuureikun” – is an interesting flick-screen action game, published by System Sacom for the MSX2 in 1989. In it you play a ghost who must make his way through a series of levels, knocking out enemies along the way. An English fan translation makes the game playable outside of its native Japan.
The Addams Family for TurboGrafx-CD was developed by ICOM Simulations, Inc. and first published by NEC Technologies in 1991. It does not follow the template of all the Ocean ports of this game. It instead does its own thing entirely and takes advantage of the audio streaming from the CD by adding lots more sound and speech. Which gives it a distinctive “talkie” feel.
I would have to say that David Lubar‘s Pastfinder is one of my favourite games of all-time. Not only does it have an interesting player craft, but there’s also a compelling game buried within this seemingly impenetrable shooter.
My jaw nearly hit the floor when I first saw Venom Wing on the Amiga. It’s a late release from legendary software house Thalamus, coming out in 1990, and it’s a real stinker…
