Codemasters‘ Blade Warrior is a late-era ZX Spectrum platform game that has just enough going for it that it’s still worth playing today. Maybe… Take a look and see what you think…
Tag Archives: Obscure
Three Wonders, Arcade
Three Wonders is an unusual arcade game from Capcom that was first released in 1991. What’s unusual about it is that the game is based around three separate games – each of which you can choose to play in any order, cooperatively with a friend, and that are supposedly linked by the game’s storyline and characters.
Wiz, Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 version of Melbourne House‘s fantasy maze shooter, Wiz, unfortunately suffers from an ailment that might make the game unpalatable to many Commodore 64 fans, and that is: it has slow, jerky scrolling…
Wiz, ZX Spectrum
Created by Silhouette Software and published for the ZX Spectrum by Melbourne House in 1987, Wiz is an obscure scrolling action game where you control a wizard who must climb levels to gain magical powers so that he can break the link that joins the dark world to the light world. Whatever that means…
Operation Wolf 3, Arcade
Developed by East Technology for Taito, and first distributed into arcades in 1994, Operation Wolf 3 is – as the title suggests – the third game in the famous Operation Wolf series. It’s a lightgun shooter for one or two players, and it goes the route of using digitised graphics, which I personally think was a mistake, because the hand-drawn 2D graphics of Operation Wolf, and the sequel, Operation Thunderbolt, are much better than the dodgy visuals in this.
Gunbuster, Arcade
Gunbuster is a lightgun-based First-Person Shooter (FPS) for up to four players, first distributed into arcades by Taito in 1992. It was released as “Operation Gunbuster” in North America and as “Gun Buster” in Japan.
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.
Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible III, Super Nintendo
The third game in the Last Bible series (a subseries of the Megami Tensei games), was developed by Multimedia Intelligence Transfer and published by Atlus – in Japan only – for the Super Famicom in 1995. It is a Role-Playing Game with random encounters and turn-based combat, and features the unique Megami Tensei trait of talking to monsters to try to recruit them, calling them into your party, and fusing them together to make more powerful monsters who will fight with you. This is a Japanese-only release that currently benefits from fan translations into both English and Spanish, which makes this excellent game playable to a good proportion of the Western world.
Continue reading Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible III, Super Nintendo
Spectre, Super Nintendo
Originally an award-winning game on Macintosh computers, Spectre is a first-person tank battle game for one or two players, initially developed by Peninsula Gameworks. This Super Nintendo conversion was developed by Synergistic Software and released in North America by Cybersoft, and in France and Germany by Gametek, in 1994. As far as I can tell it wasn’t released anywhere else, so remains relatively obscure, as SNES games go.
Mysterium, Game Boy
Developed by Maxis Software and published by Asmik Ace Entertainment for the original Game Boy in 1991, Mysterium is an obscure first-person dungeon-crawler in which you play an alchemist’s apprentice exploring a maze – called the Mysterium – in order to complete a test.