Tag Archives: Retro Gaming History

Commodore 64, Maxis

SimCity, Commodore 64

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This classic city-building game was originally devised by creator Will Wright while he was working on the classic C64 shooter, Raid On Bungeling Bay. Wright found that he enjoyed making the overhead cities for the game – using his self-made editor – more than he enjoyed playing the game itself, so he set to work creating a game that would allow players to do the same.

SimCity was originally developed for the Commodore 64 and was initially released for that system in August of 1989, but was quickly ported to pretty much every video gaming system known to man at the time. It also spawned a long-running series, and provided a strong base from which developer/publisher Maxis would grow – specialising in “sim“-type games that would become its main market for decades to come.

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Game Freak, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, The Pokémon Company

Pokémon Black Version 2, Nintendo DS

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Pokémon Black Version 2 is a direct sequel to Pokémon Black Version (and White Version 2 is a direct sequel to White Version), and was released for the Nintendo DS in 2012 by The Pokémon Company. It was again developed by Game Freak, and takes place once more in the Unova region.

The story this time is set two years after the events of Black and White and the criminal organisation Team Plasma have returned as ‘Neo Team Plasma‘, and the player must once again thwart their plans to rule the world.

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Game Freak, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, The Pokémon Company

Pokémon Black Version, Nintendo DS [Part 2]

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What makes this game really special, though, are the new features and the incredible density of content. Few games have the sheer level of detail as Pokémon Black and White do.

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Game Freak, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, The Pokémon Company

Pokémon Black Version, Nintendo DS [Part 1]

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Released in 2010 for the Nintendo DS, Pokémon Black and White are fifth generation Pokémon games that take place in the Unova region. They were once again developed by Game Freak and published by The Pokémon Company. I tossed a coin and chose to play Black Version for this playthrough, which is what these screenshots are from.

I took over twenty thousand grabs while playing this game and whittled them down to a thousand, then to 400 of the best shots. And because I’ve got quite a bit to say about Pokémon Black Version I decided to split this article into two parts.

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Amstrad CPC, Arcade, Ashby Computers and Graphics, Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Famicom Disk System, Lists, MSX, PC, Rare, Ultimate Play The Game, VIC-20, Windows, ZX Spectrum

Complete list of Ultimate Play the Game releases

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A list of all the official Ultimate Play the Game releases, plus known, completed homebrew conversions, remakes, and unreleased titles.

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Game Boy Color, Game Freak, Nintendo

Pokémon Gold Version, Game Boy Color

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Pokémon Gold and Silver Versions were developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo in 1999 in Japan and 2000 everywhere else. They are ‘second generation’ Pokémon games and were released simultaneously as twin titles, as has become the norm with Pokémon games.

These were the first proper, full-colour Pokémon games, with graphics that have been created to take advantage of the Game Boy Color‘s extended palette (Pokémon Yellow, which preceded this game, didn’t really do that; the graphics were simply colourised from the black and white originals). And you can tell from the very beginning that the visuals in Gold/Silver are a step-up from what we saw previously.

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Game Boy Color, Game Freak, Nintendo

Pokémon Yellow Version, Game Boy Color

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Pokémon Yellow (aka Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition) is a remake of Pokémon Red/Blue/Green that was released for the Game Boy Colour in 1998.

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Game Boy, Game Freak, Nintendo

Pokémon Red Version, Game Boy

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Pokémon Red Version was the very first Pokémon game and it was released for the original black and white Game Boy in 1996.

Like all subsequent Pokémon games it came as a pair of releases, so that players could have Pokémon exclusive to their version of the game and so that trading was required between versions – if you wanted to catch every single available Pokémon. Some might view that as cynical, but it wasn’t really intended to make people buy both versions, just to encourage link-up play and trading between them. It does however mean that you can’t catch all the available Pokémon if you only have one version of the game, and have no way of trading with someone else who has the other version.

In Japan, Pokémon Red (originally titled Pocket Monsters: Red) was accompanied by Pokémon Green (Pocket Monsters: Green), but in North America and Europe Pokémon Red was accompanied by Pokémon Blue, which is basically a remake of Green.

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Sega, Sega Master System, Westone

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, Sega Master System

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Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap is a platform adventure with RPG elements and it is considered to be one of the best games on the Master System. It was developed by Westone and published by Sega in 1989.

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Acorn, Archimedes, Celebration

Acorn Archimedes Special

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The Acorn Archimedes is a family of home computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems are based on Acorn‘s ARM RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture with a 32-bit CPU (using 26-bit addressing) and were manufactured from 1987 until the mid-1990s.

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