Although you may laugh at the title of this Christmas-themed game, it’s not called that because the publisher (Alternative Software) went to Lapland to buy an official license from Santa… It’s called that because it is an official tie-in with the famous children’s charity, Save The Children. The game was sold (for a reasonable £2.99, for the Spectrum, Amstrad and C64) in 1989 and all profits went to Save The Children.
Continue reading The Official Father Christmas Game, ZX Spectrum
Created in association with Save The Children, The Official Father Christmas Game was developed by Enigma Variations and published by Alternative Software for the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad in 1989. Profits from the game went to the aforementioned children’s charity.
Continue reading The Official Father Christmas Game, Commodore 64
Santron is a Christmas-themed vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up created by Sarah Jane Avory and first released for the Commodore 64 in 2019.
Sarah programmed the game and created all the graphics and sound herself, and it is very good. Santron is actually a variation of Sarah‘s previous game, Neutron.
Neutron is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up created by Sarah Jane Avory and first released for the Commodore 64 in 2019.
It was created for the 2019 RGCD C64 16KB cartridge game development competition, and is actually a re-coding of a game Sarah created in the 1980s but that went unreleased (because the publisher she was tied to at the time went out of business, before the game’s release), and was eventually lost (she regrettably threw away the disks with the source code after moving house years later).
F-Zero GX is the successor to F-Zero X (Nintendo 64) and is a fast-paced, futuristic racing game featuring 3D graphics and challenging gameplay. It was also the first significant video game collaboration between Nintendo and Sega, having been developed by Sega‘s famous Amusement Vision (AV) team (with Shigeru Miyamoto acting as producer) – the same team who made the brilliant Super Monkey Ball series. In fact, F-Zero GX uses an enhanced version of the 3D engine that powered Super Monkey Ball.
Steve Crow‘s classic Spectrum game, Starquake, was converted to the BBC Micro by Kenton Price and published by Bubble Bus in 1987.
Graphically, the game is rather chunky because it uses a low-resolution screen mode (presumably so that more colours can be used on-screen at the same time), but the gameplay is mostly the same as the original.
Developed by Compile and originally released for the MSX in 1987 Golvellius was converted to the Master System by Sega in 1988. It is an action RPG with overhead, flick-screen exploration, Zelda-like sword-based combat and scrolling sections through caves.
Continue reading Golvellius: Valley of Doom, Sega Master System
Pokémon Yellow (aka Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition) is a remake of Pokémon Red/Blue/Green that was released for the Game Boy Colour in 1998.
Pokémon Red Version was the very first Pokémon game and it was released for the original black and white Game Boy in 1996.
Like all subsequent Pokémon games it came as a pair of releases, so that players could have Pokémon exclusive to their version of the game and so that trading was required between versions – if you wanted to catch every single available Pokémon. Some might view that as cynical, but it wasn’t really intended to make people buy both versions, just to encourage link-up play and trading between them. It does however mean that you can’t catch all the available Pokémon if you only have one version of the game, and have no way of trading with someone else who has the other version.
In Japan, Pokémon Red (originally titled Pocket Monsters: Red) was accompanied by Pokémon Green (Pocket Monsters: Green), but in North America and Europe Pokémon Red was accompanied by Pokémon Blue, which is basically a remake of Green.
Elektra Glide is a futuristic first-person racing game written by Adam Billyard and published by English Software in 1985. Well, you could call it a “racing” game, but you’re not actually racing against other cars – just a timer.
The King of Grabs 