Tag Archives: Retro Gaming

Crypt Killer, Arcade

Crypt Killer is a three-player, horror-themed lightgun shooter that was first distributed into arcades by Konami in 1995. It uses 3D polygonal graphics for the backgrounds and 2D scaled sprites for the enemies and objects. In some respects it is Konami‘s attempt at producing a House of the Dead-style shooter, although in my humble opinion it isn’t as good as Sega‘s famous horror shooter series.

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Kirby’s Pinball Land DX, Game Boy Color

Kirby’s Pinball Land DX is brilliant ROM hack by “kkzero” that was first released in January 2022. What it does is modify the code of the original Game Boy game to make it playable on the Game Boy Color, in full colour. Which is pretty amazing.

This hack – and kkzero‘s other great Kirby hack, Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX – turn what were once monochrome games into a riot of colour, and they seriously revitalise these great classics into games that are worth playing (or re-playing) again now.

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Spectre, Super Nintendo

Originally an award-winning game on Macintosh computers, Spectre is a first-person tank battle game for one or two players, initially developed by Peninsula Gameworks. This Super Nintendo conversion was developed by Synergistic Software and released in North America by Cybersoft, and in France and Germany by Gametek, in 1994. As far as I can tell it wasn’t released anywhere else, so remains relatively obscure, as SNES games go.

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Zero Wing, Megadrive/Genesis

The English language Sega Megadrive conversion of Toaplan‘s Zero Wing has gone down in history as one of the (unintentionally) funniest games of all time. The intro sequence (which was created for this version of the game and does not appear in the arcade original) features some of the most hilariously bad translations of all time, including the now iconic sentence “All your base are belong to us“, which became a meme in the early 2000s.

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Zero Wing, Arcade

Zero Wing is a side-scrolling bullet hell shooter developed by Toaplan and distributed into arcades by Namco in Japan and Williams Electronics in North America in 1989.

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Montezuma’s Revenge, ColecoVision

Originating on Atari 8-bit home computers in 1983, this ColecoVision port of the pioneering platform game, Montezuma’s Revenge, was developed and published by Parker Brothers in 1984.

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Sword of Fargoal, Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 conversion of the VIC-20 classic, Sword of Fargoal, was published in 1983 by Epyx. It features the same Roguelike gameplay of the original, with a few small enhancements.

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Sword of Fargoal, VIC-20

Written by Jeff McCord of Automated Simulations, Inc. and first published for the expanded VIC-20 by Epyx in 1982, Sword of Fargoal is a simple dungeon-crawling, Roguelike action game where you play an explorer who is searching a series of randomly generated levels for a legendary sword.

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Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, FM Towns

LucasArts‘ classic point-and-click adventure, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, was released for the FM Towns by Victor Musical Industries in 1993, and although it was a Japan-only release it does include the English language version, which makes it perfectly playable to Westerners.

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Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, FM Towns

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is the second SCUMM game from Lucasfilm Games (aka LucasArts), after Maniac Mansion, with game development led by David Fox, and with Matthew Alan Kane as co-designer and co-programmer. It was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, and this enhanced FM Towns port was published in Japan in 1990 by Fujitsu. The game is playable in both English and Japanese.

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