Tag Archives: Obscure

Last Resort, Neo Geo

Last Resort is a scrolling ‘bullet hell‘ shooter developed by SNK and first released as an arcade game, on Neo Geo MVS hardware, in 1992. From what I can ascertain it doesn’t seem to have been released on cartridge for Neo Geo AES home systems, but it was later released on the Neo Geo CD.

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Radar Lock, Atari 2600

Radar Lock is an air combat shoot ’em up written by Doug Neubauer and published by Atari Corporation in 1989. The game is basically an After Burner derivative that uses a modified version of the engine used in Neubauer‘s previous Atari 2600 game, Solaris.

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Shatterhand, NES/Famicom

Shatterhand is a scrolling action game in which you play a young police officer – called Steve Hermann – who has lost his arms and has had them replaced with enhanced, cybernetic limbs, and is in pursuit of a group of military renegades called “Metal Command“.

Shatterhand was developed by Natsume and originally published for the Nintendo Famicom by Angel under the title of “Tokkyū Shirei Soruburein” in 1991. That version of the game is based on the Japanese TV series “Super Rescue Solbrain“. The US and European versions, published by Jaleco, removed the licensed elements, changed the backstory, and re-titled the game as “Shatterhand” for Western audiences. One level was also completely changed – from a carnival level in the Japanese version, to a submarine level in the American version. The gameplay in both versions is identical, though.

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Golden Axe: The Duel, Arcade

Golden Axe: The Duel is the third arcade game in the Golden Axe series (after Golden Axe and The Revenge of Death Adder) and is a two-player versus fighting game based on characters from the popular side-scrolling hack and slash games. It was first released into arcades in February 1995.

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Lunar: Walking School, Game Gear

Lunar: Walking School (aka Lunar: Sanposuru Gakuen) is a Game Gear exclusive handheld RPG first released in 1996. It is a spin-off/side story from the main Lunar series published by Game Arts. This ‘Walking School‘ edition was developed by Ehrgeiz and written by Studio Alex.

Again: thanks to the efforts of fans a number of translation patches exist to make the game playable to non-Japanese speakers/readers.

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Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power, NES/Famicom

The third game in the Wizards & Warriors series was released for the NES in North America in 1992 and in Europe in 1993. It was once again developed by Zippo Games for Rare, although the game did encounter a few issues during development*, and was published by Acclaim Entertainment.

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Paperboy, Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 version of Paperboy is one of the few full-3D remakes of the game. Everything in it has been changed and turned into 3D – the streets, the characters, and the gameplay. The game was developed by High Voltage Software and first published by Midway in 1999.

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Fortune Builder, ColecoVision

Fortune Builder is a business simulation game that was developed by Circuits and Systems, Inc. and published by Coleco Industries in 1984. Alongside Utopia on the Intellivision, from 1981, it is one of the earliest examples of a resource management video game. Fortune Builder pre-dates SimCity by five years, and is more complex – at least in some respects.

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Megadrive/Genesis

The Megadrive/Genesis version of Bits StudiosMary Shelley‘s Frankenstein is a bit of a poor relation to the Super Nintendo version of the game. Mainly because the lack of colour in the visuals tends to make this version look a bit rough when compared to the SNES version. But it is what it is: a fairly bog standard platform game loosely based on Kenneth Branagh‘s 1994 film.

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