Tag Archives: Obscure

Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase, ZX Spectrum

Benny Hill’s Madcap Chase is loosely based on the infamous Thames TV show, Benny Hill, made in the 1980s and featuring Mr. Hill, and his various cohorts, running around doing funny (or rude) things in the name of comedy.

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Solstice, NES

Solstice is a neat isometric platform/puzzle game from British developer Software Creations. It was published by Sony for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 and is the (spiritual?) predecessor to the Super Nintendo game Equinox.

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Loom, Atari ST

Loom is a beautiful, but somewhat obscure, LucasArts point-and-click adventure, from before they were LucasArts. It was first released in 1990 by Lucasfilm Games.

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Amberstar, Atari ST

Amberstar is a huge, sprawling Role-Playing Game that was first released by German developer Thalion in 1992. It’s a game that certainly does owe a debt or two to Richard Garriott‘s famous Ultima series, although Amberstar is unique (and good) enough to stand on its proverbial own two feet.

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Simulcra, Atari ST

Simulcra is a cool third-person 3D shooter set on a complex series of colourful courses. The game was developed by legendary coding team Graftgold and is one of their least well-known releases, but also one of their best.

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Gorf, Arcade

Gorf is an early arcade shooter that feels like a poor relative to many of its peers of the time.

It borrows most of its features from other games (one wave is actually called “Galaxians” although I do believe that the developers properly licensed it from Namco) and doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of gameplay, but it did pioneer one thing. And that is: in the use of synthesised speech. Gorf was one of the earliest video games to use it (and although clear, it is quite robotic).

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Nox, PC

Nox is an excellent isometric action/RPG created by Westwood Studios and first released in 2000.

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Nightshade, NES

NOT the infamous 1985 Ultimate game, but an obscure action/adventure classic from Aussie developer Beam Software, first released on the NES in 1992.

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