Tag Archives: shooting

The Empire Strikes Back, ZX Spectrum

A port of the arcade sequel to Star Wars, released into arcades in 1985; converted to the Spectrum by Vektor Grafix and published by Domark in 1988.

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Star Wars, ZX Spectrum

This port of the classic Atari arcade game, Star Wars, on the ZX Spectrum, was developed by Vektor Grafix and published by Domark in 1987.

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Time Pilot, ColecoVision

The ColecoVision port of Konami‘s 1982 arcade game, Time Pilot, is a decent attempt to bring this simple, eight-way scrolling shooter to the home. It was first released in 1983.

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Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Arcade

Based on the 1983 film of the same name, Atari‘s Return of the Jedi was first released into arcades in 1984, and the game uses 2D, rasterized graphics, instead of vector-based graphics, like the Star Wars arcade game does.

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Gauntlet, Game Boy Advance

The Game Boy Advance version of Atari‘s classic Gauntlet was released as a double-pack, with Rampart, in 2005. It was developed by EC-Interactive and published by Destination Software, and is pretty close to the arcade original, but doesn’t offer a multiplayer option, in spite of the GBA‘s link-up capabilities.

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Action Force II, ZX Spectrum

The sequel to the first Action Force, Action Force II is a game that I knew had reviewed well at the time of its original release (in 1988), so I was expecting good things from it. Having never played the game before, I sat down and gave it a go, but was disappointed with what I found…

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Action Force, ZX Spectrum

Developed by Gang of Five and published by Virgin Games in 1987, Action Force is a scrolling shooter set in the world of the Action Force toys by Hasbro/Milton Bradley (aka G.I. Joe toys in North America). Action Force was also released for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, although the Spectrum version is notably different to those versions.

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Twinkle Tale, Megadrive/Genesis

Developed by ZAP Corporation and published by Wonder Amusement Studio (a subsidiary of Japanese record label Toyo Recording), Twinkle Tale is a scrolling ‘bullet hell’ shooter released exclusively for the Sega Megadrive, in Japan only, in 1992. Fan translations into English, Spanish and Korean exist, making the game accessible to a good proportion of the world outside Japan.

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RoboCop, PC

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.

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Shadow Skimmer, Commodore 64

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.

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