Before proceeding with the review, I want to bring up the “elephant in the room” with Fallout: London. Something that bothered me throughout my first two playthroughs, and also something that can be mostly avoided with some careful planning and insight. And that is: avoiding the many bugs in the game…
Continue reading Fallout: London, PC [Part 2 – Avoiding the Bugs]
Created by Team FOLON, with the backing of gog.com, Fallout: London is a free total conversion for Fallout 4, turning the English capital city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, with various different factions warring against each other.
The entire single-player campaign – the whole game, in fact – has been modified to give you a new storyline to play through, plus loads of other extras that accent the very Britishness of it all. The mod satirises British history, culture, and British manufacturing and consumerism, and has countless unique items and locations to discover while exploring.
Continue reading Fallout: London, PC [Part 1 – No Swimming in the River Thames]
Written by Charles Goodwin and published by Virgin Games in 1984, Strangeloop is a maze-based action adventure for the ZX Spectrum with a surreal, futuristic vibe to it.
Developed by CAProduction and published by Hudson Soft in 1994 for the Super Nintendo, Hagane: The Final Conflict is a side-scrolling action/platform game in which you control a cyborg ninja – called Hagane – who is on a revenge mission against a rival clan.
Developed by Cream (aka “Creative Amusement“) and published exclusively for the Super Nintendo by Nihon Bussan Co., Ltd. (aka “Nichibutsu“) in 1993, Cosmo Police Galivan II: Arrow of Justice is the sequel to the arcade game Cosmo Police Galivan, and it is definitely one of the worst SNES games I’ve ever set my eyes upon.
Continue reading Cosmo Police Galivan II: Arrow of Justice, Super Nintendo
Often shortened to just “Galivan“, this arcade platform game from Nichibutsu first came out in arcades in 1985. Outside of Japan, the game was little-known, but it did get ported to the C64, Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC in the West, and to the Famicom in Japan, to little or no success.
When I first played Back Track, my instincts screamed at me that this was a terrible game. The graphics are messy; the enemies look awful; the explosions have a really bad horizontal raster-style visual effect; health packs are called “Band-Aids“; the weapons are unimpressive; the draw distance is masked with a solid black shadow, which is disconcerting; the environments appear flat, empty and uninteresting, and the premise of the game – to rescue kidnapped humans from inside tubes – doesn’t seem very exciting. BUT… I persisted with it and found Back Track to actually be quite absorbing and challenging, when I eventually got into it.
Converted to the Amstrad CPC by Chris Wood, from the ZX Spectrum original by Costa Panayi, Android 2 is a responsive and playable port, but doesn’t quite match up to the Spectrum version’s level of presentation.
The 1989 MS-DOS version of RoboCop is part conversion of the Data East arcade game, and partly does it own thing, with level structures that connect rooms above and below, with staircases that instantly flip the screen, rather than scroll it. The majority of levels do scroll horizontally, though, although the scrolling is very jerky.
Published by The Edge in 1987, Shadow Skimmer is an overhead scrolling shooter set on a large, maze-like spaceship. At first glance, the game looks a bit like Andrew Braybrook‘s Paradroid, but it plays much differently.
The King of Grabs 