Jeff Minter‘s original 1982 VIC-20 version of Gridrunner is not a bad game overall. It’s a simple Centipede variant fought on a basic grid background, with sprites zipping all over the place and insects trying to get the better of you by destroying you before you can destroy them.
Tag Archives: shoot em up
Andes Attack, VIC-20
Andes Attack was the first commercial game release from Jeff Minter and Llamasoft, and it was of course a clone of an arcade game (Defender). Andes Attack was first released in 1982 for the VIC-20 and did reasonable business, in spite of it not actually being very good.
Sexy Parodius, Arcade
Parodius is a spin-off series from Konami‘s classic Gradius/Nemesis series. It’s a parody of Gradius, thus “Parodius“, and “Sexy Parodius” is the arcade version of it.
Exhumed, Sega Saturn
Also known as “PowerSlave” in some regions, Exhumed is an Egyptian-themed first-person shoot ’em up with survival horror overtones and it is arguably the best first-person shooter on the Sega Saturn. It was developed by Lobotomy Software and first released in 1996.
Hawkeye, Commodore 64
Hawkeye is a scrolling run-and-gun platform shooter developed by Boys Without Brains and published by Thalamus for the Commodore 64 in 1988. It is considered to be one of the best C64 releases of all-time, with simple gameplay, attractive graphics, and memorable music by Jeroen Tel.
Beach Head, Apple II
The Apple II conversion of Bruce Carver‘s classic Beach Head was coded by Bryan Brandenburg of Sculptured Software Inc. and first published by Access in 1985, two years after the originals were released.
Beach Head, Atari 8-bit
The Atari 8-bit version of Bruce Carver‘s classic Beach Head came out simultaneously with the Commodore 64 version, so both are considered “the originals”, although this version was co-coded by Kevin Homer so technically could be considered a conversion.
The Dark, ZX Spectrum
The Dark is a rare first-person shooter on the humble ZX Spectrum, written by Russian coder Oleg Origin. It was originally released under the title of Quake in 1997, and was then re-worked and re-released by the original author as The Dark in 2016.
RoboCop, Arcade
Released into arcades by Data East in 1988, RoboCop is unusual because the game was licensed from Ocean Software, who had acquired the video game rights at script stage, when the case was usually arcade companies licensing to home companies. The arcade and home versions were developed simultaneously and are a mixture of run-and-gun and beat ’em up-style gameplay.
Exolon, ZX Spectrum
Designed by Raffaele Cecco and published by Hewson Consultants in 1987, Exolon is a simple-but-effective run-and-gun shooter with flick-screen levels and snazzy Spectrum-esque colourful graphics, with minimal colour clash.
The King of Grabs 