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…
Bombuzal is a critically-acclaimed puzzle game designed/coded by Tony Crowther and David Bishop and published by Image Works in 1988.
In it you play a small, green blob whose job it is to dispose of all the bombs on a level. To explode a bomb you must be standing on top of it and hold down fire, and – once triggered – you can then walk away from it in whatever directions are available.
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.
The original 1987 C16 release of Zolyx, published by Firebird Software, is a bare bones 16K conversion of the Commodore 64 classic. It is still a great game though.
Written by Tony Kelly and published by Mastertronic in 1985, Big Mac is a highly frustrating platform/puzzle game with an interesting jump mechanic and some nice graphical effects, and is the predecessor to the much better Mr. Puniverse.
Pikmin was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2001 and was an instant hit with gamers.
Designed and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the first game in the Pikmin series introduces Captain Oilmar, an alien who crash lands on a mysterious planet and where he befriends small creatures called Pikmin who help him rebuild his ship.
This 1996 release on the Nintendo Game Boy is one of Shigeru Miyamoto‘s least known works, although it really is a hidden gem on the system and is well worth finding and playing now if you’ve never seen it.
Written by Hungarian coder Zoltán Tass and published by Firebird in 1987, Zolyx is a variation on the ‘painting game’ theme, made popular by the classic arcade game, Qix.
Q*Bert 3 was developed by Realtime Associates and released in 1992, and it was a bit of a missed opportunity in some respects.
I keep banging on about Geoff Crammond‘s The Sentinel (also known as The Sentry in North America) and will probably continue to do so until I’ve written about every version available. 🙂
The King of Grabs 