Tag Archives: shooting

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, PC

The 1991 sequel to the promising Wing Commander takes the space opera theme even further, with more cockpit-based space combat, dramatic cut scenes, and glorious 320×200 VGA graphics.

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, as the title hints, is the “Empire Strikes Back” of the Wing Commander series. The second game in the series had to be much better than the first to keep it going. And it was much better, although the mission structures are more linear in this sequel.

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Wing Commander, PC

Wing Commander was developed by Chris Roberts and his team at Origin Systems and first released for PC MS-DOS in 1990. It’s a classic cockpit-based space combat game with cinematic cut scenes, and it developed into a long-running series. The Wing Commander series.

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Snare, Commodore 64

Snare is a game show of the future where the contestant puts their life at risk trying to crack the secrets of a deadly maze inside the temporal cavity of a dead billionaire’s garden. The game was written by Rob Stevens and was first published by Thalamus in 1989.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Bionic Commando: Elite Forces, Game Boy Color

Developed by an American company, called Nintendo Software Technology, Bionic Commando: Elite Forces is the only game in the Bionic Commando series to be developed and published by Nintendo (and not the franchise owner, Capcom). It first came out – exclusively for the Game Boy Color – in the year 2000, and is a sequel to Bionic Commando on the Game Boy.

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Deliverance: Stormlord II, ZX Spectrum

Deliverance: Stormlord II is the sequel to Stormlord and was published by Hewson Consultants in 1990. Programming and art were once again handled by Raffaele Cecco and Hugh Binns respectively, with game design by Paul Chamberlain and Barry Simpson.

It’s a single-player platform game where you once again take control of Stormlord to rescue kidnapped fairies from the evil forces of the defeated Black Queen; fighting from ‘Hell’, all the way up to ‘Heaven’.

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