Atari‘s classic Star Wars arcade game took the gaming world by storm back in 1983.
It gave games-players a chance to pilot an X-Wing for the first time and wowed audiences with its superfast vector graphics and amazing digitised sound.
Tag Archives: shoot em up
Xybots, Arcade
The Outfoxies, Arcade
Namco‘s brilliant arcade fighting game, The Outfoxies, is a precursor to the Super Smash Bros. series and mixes a kind of Charlie’s Angels type presentation style, with a spy-themed storyline.
Defender, Arcade
Williams Electronics‘ iconic Defender is one of the highest-grossing arcade games of all time.
Space Harrier, Arcade
Developed by a team led by Yu Suzuki at Sega in 1985, Space Harrier is a super-fast third-person, flying-into-the-screen fantasy blasting game, originally housed inside a hydraulic cabinet in arcades. This would jerk around as you moved the control stick, giving you a feeling of movement as you played the game.
Killer7, PlayStation 2
Killer7 – it has to be said – is possibly THE weirdest game of all time.
Part first-person shooter; part on-rails shooter. A full-on nightmare of strange characters, both playable and not.
Half-Life 2, PC
Half-Life 2 was first released by Valve Corporation in 2004. It was such a giant leap forward for games in general – not just first-person shooters – that its reverberations are still being felt today.
Half-Life (one) is a brilliant game, but Half-Life 2 completely blows it out of the water.
Beach Head II, Commodore 64
Soooo much better than the first Beach Head… Beach Head II is a balls-to-the-wall, digitised speech-laden action game that sees “The Allies” versus “The Dictator”. The game was developed by Access Software and first published in 1985.
Pastfinder, Commodore 64
David Lubar‘s relatively obscure 1984 classic, Pastfinder, is a weird vertically-scrolling shooter in which you control a spider-like craft that can crawl, shoot and jump, and you must explore a radioactive landscape picking up artefacts from a mysterious planet.
Mercenary, Commodore 64
Novagen‘s classic 3D exploration game, Mercenary, was first released for the Commodore 64 in 1985. It was designed and coded by Paul Woakes.
