What can I say about Jinxster? It’s surreal. It’s short. It’s funny, at times. At other times it’s infuriatingly obscure. Which you come to expect from a Magnetic Scrolls text adventure, I guess…
Tag Archives: Pretty Pictures
The Guild of Thieves, Atari ST
The second Magnetic Scrolls game – first released in 1987 – is called The Guild of Thieves, and is another text-based fantasy adventure, set in the same place as The Pawn (Kerovnia).
The Pawn, Atari ST
The Pawn was the first Magnetic Scrolls game, and the one that set the company up, in terms of its extremely high standards.
Parasol Stars, PC Engine
Taito released Parasol Stars for the PC Engine in 1991. It is the third game in the Bubble Bobble series and features Bubby and Bobby – the two human characters from Rainbow Islands – both armed with a multi-purpose parasol and the ability to chuck water around with them.
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.
International Karate Plus, Atari ST
Programmed by Archer MacLean himself (the man behind the original Commodore 64 version), and published by System 3 in 1988, the Atari ST conversion of the classic International Karate Plus is pretty much flawless, and is also arguably the best beat ’em up on the entire system.
Highway Encounter, Atari ST
This 1990 Atari ST conversion of the ZX Spectrum classic Highway Encounter I don’t think was ever commercially released, even though it was co-created by Costa Panayi, the guy who made the original.
Costa created some wonderful games for the Spectrum, and Highway Encounter was one of them. And it has been brilliantly converted to the ST (by Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, with graphics by Costa). This is no farmed-out-to-a-third-party hack job. This is the real thing.
Super Zaxxon, Arcade
Sega wasted little time making a sequel to Zaxxon, its groundbreaking isometric shooter from 1981.
Zaxxon, Arcade
Sega‘s Zaxxon is an early arcade shooter that broke the mould. It was first released in 1982.
Defender of the Crown, Amiga
The Amiga version of Cinemaware‘s classic Defender of the Crown is both beautiful to look at, and great fun to play. Actually, pretty much every version of Defender of the Crown I’ve played has been great, but the Amiga version is probably the most well-remembered. It was also the very first version of Defender of the Crown too – all the other versions followed later.
