Tag Archives: puzzle

Adventures of Lolo 3, NES

HAL Laboratory‘s Adventures of Lolo 3 is a fantastic, cute and extremely playable puzzle game, first released for the Nintendo Famicom in Japan in 1991 (actually December 26th 1990, but we’ll say 1991).

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Tetris, Game Boy

It would be remiss of me to celebrate the Nintendo Game Boy and not mention Tetris.

Tetris was the ‘pack-in’ game with the original black and white Game Boy, and probably helped sell a few million units in itself.

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The Sentinel, Amiga

Geoff Crammond‘s The Sentinel (aka The Sentry in North America) is a strange chess-like game where you have to sneak up on an overseeing watcher, who is perched high on a platform, overlooking the play area, and absorb him before he does the same to you.

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Spindizzy Worlds, Atari ST

The Atari ST version of Spindizzy is arguably the best one around.

Spindizzy Worlds, which appeared on Atari ST, Amiga and Super Nintendo in 1990 – is a more compartmentalised reworking of the original Spindizzy, with branching levels and puzzles and gem-collecting in a challenging isometric world. Well, various worlds. All themed in a particular graphical style, and each with its own set of individual problems.

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Boulder Dash, Arcade

This 1990 arcade version of First Star‘s classic Boulder Dash dispenses with Rockford as we know (knew) him, and replaces him with a miner’s hat-wearing boy, although this doesn’t affect the game negatively.

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Kururin Squash!, GameCube

I only discovered this marvellous game recently, on the back of posting screenshots of its predecessor on here. But I’m extremely glad I did, because Kururin Squash! is a fantastic update of the same game mechanics that made Kuru Kuru Kururin so compelling to play: guiding a spinning stick around a series of mad, twisting mazes.

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Kuru Kuru Kururin, Game Boy Advance

Kuru Kuru Kururin is a weirdly-named but wonderful (and original) Game Boy Advance game, developed by Eighting and first published by Nintendo in 2001.

The idea is that you have to control a spinning stick, and take it around a series of increasingly twisting and torturous courses, without touching the sides, or hitting other hazards. And do it against a time limit. It’s one of those games with a simple premise, but offers quite a tough and interesting challenge.

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Gyron, ZX Spectrum

Gyron was developed by released by Firebird Software in 1985 and was something of a bolt out of the blue at the time. Nothing quite like it had been seen before.

You play as a Hedroid and roam a wireframe 3D maze, avoiding towers and spheres, while searching for the exit goal. In other words: you’re just trying not to get squished on your way out…

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