This week I’m going to be featuring all the early Sonic the Hedgehog games on the blog.
They’re all Megadrive/Genesis games, except for one on the Sega CD. And they’re all classics, and deserve a set of grabs, showing just show beautiful and colourful they are. And, of course, a few words about what makes them good.
Developed by Namco and released into arcades in 1984, Pac-Land is a departure for the Pac-Man series because this time it’s a platform game. And a pretty good one at that.
The 1982 sequel to the smash hit Pac-Man originally started out as a third party modification kit for Pac-Man machines, developed by General Computer Corporation, and called ‘Crazy Otto‘.
After legal action from Atari, GCC was forced to present Crazy Otto to Midway, the North American distributor of Pac-Man, who bought the game and developed it into Ms. Pac-Man.
Further complicating the story, apparently Midway did this without Pac-Man‘s original owner Namco‘s consent, which caused some licensing issues later. The truth is by no means clear, but in the murky world of video game licensing it is sometimes the case that people sell and exploit rights to products they have no right to.
Thanatos is an unusual side-scrolling action game designed by Mike Richardson and programmed by Rod Barrington for Durell Software in 1986.
The game is unusual because you play as a dragon… Yes, that’s right: a dragon! And not any old dragon, but as “Thanatos the Destroyer” – a fire-breathing behemoth with a heart.
Tir Na Nog (Irish for “Land of Youth”) is the location for this classic 1984 ZX Spectrum game, developed by Greg Follis and Roy Carter for Gargoyle Games.
You play Cuchulainn, a long-haired young man who has “departed the land of the living” (ie. died) and who finds himself walking in an afterlife patrolled by nasty creatures called Sidhe, which must be avoided at all costs.
The spiritual successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark is a brilliant, 3D, first-person shooter developed by Rare and published by Nintendo in 2000.
Portal is a legendary first-person puzzle/gravity game developed and published by Valve in 2007.
I say “gravity game” because Portal combines basic physics (acceleration, velocity, gravity, and inertia), with the ability to open up entry and exit portals, to create a game so beautifully simple-yet-complex that it is almost beyond belief…
Written by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler, The Hobbit is a legendary text adventure, with graphics, that was published by Melbourne House in 1982.
Written by Tony Crowther and published by Mirrorsoft in 1987, Zig Zag is a weird and wonderful isometric shoot ’em up where you fly a wedge-shaped ship around a maze collecting crystals.
Tony Crowther‘s 1985 release through Quicksilva, Gryphon, is a much misunderstood game. Most people don’t even get past the first stage, because they don’t know what’s going on…
The King of Grabs 