Tag Archives: snakes

Adventure Island II, NES/Famicom

Adventure Island II is the sequel to Adventure Island, although whereas the first Adventure Island was an adaptation of the Wonder Boy arcade game, this second title in the series is an original game in its own right and features a number of improvements over the first Adventure Island. Adventure Island II was developed by Now Production and first published by Hudson Soft in 1991.

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Adventure Island, NES/Famicom

Hudson Soft‘s Adventure Island on the NES/Famicom is an adaptation of Sega‘s Wonder Boy arcade game, although subsequent Adventure Island games were original titles and the series went on to become a relatively popular ‘spin-off’ in its own right. Adventure Island was initially released in Japan in 1986, then in North America 1988, and finally in Europe in 1992.

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Frankenstein, Commodore 64

Frankenstein for the Commodore 64 was developed and published by Zeppelin Games in 1992 and in it you play Egor, Professor Frankenstein‘s hunchback assistant, on a humorous and satirical quest to collect dead bodies for his master’s experiments.

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Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, Atari Jaguar

Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a scrolling platform game that is both a reboot of the original Pitfall! by David Crane and the fourth game in the Pitfall series. It was ported to the Atari Jaguar by British company Imagitech Design and published by Activision in 1995, having been released for the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Nintendo the previous year.

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Venture, Arcade

Venture is an early fantasy maze shooter developed and distributed into arcades by Exidy in 1981. In some respects it is similar to Stern ElectronicsBerzerk (and its sequel, Frenzy), with simple bitmap graphics, an overhead viewpoint, and extremely challenging gameplay.

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Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, PC

The first game in the Ultima series was initially released for the Apple II in 1981 by California Pacific Computer and was later completely re-coded and re-named as “Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness” for a re-release through Origin Systems. The 1987 MS-DOS re-code – shown here – is still available to buy as part of an Ultima 1+2+3 package on GOG.com (at the time of writing).

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Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, Commodore 64

Although the first Ultima game was an Apple II original, the Commodore 64 version of this early RPG is arguably the best-known. Re-made and released in 1986, the C64 version of Ultima [one] features colourful graphics and absorbing gameplay that is pretty much identical to the Apple II remake.

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Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, Apple II

This first game in Richard Garriott‘s Ultima series was initially released for the Apple II in 1981 by California Pacific Computer and was originally called just “Ultima“. It was later re-named as “Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness” when it was re-made and re-released by Origin Systems in 1986. This 1986 re-code features improved graphics and gameplay, with a number of significant changes made to bring the game up-to-date with market conditions in the mid 1980s, and that is the version I’m featuring here. If you want to see the original 1981 version (and an explanation of how to play the game), click here.

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Ultima, Atari 8-Bit

Released in 1983 by Sierra On-Line, Ultima on the Atari 8-bit is more archaic and frustrating than the original Apple II version. And it looks pretty awful too, with a real lack of colour – especially in towns where the game is in monochrome unless you play on a machine (and monitor) that supports “artifacting“. In artifacting mode the dungeon and town graphics look similar to Apple II graphics, but they don’t really take advantage of the Atari‘s superior graphics capabilities.

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Ultima, Apple II

The original 1981 Apple II version of Richard Garriott‘s Ultima was the first version of Ultima ever released. It was published by California Pacific Computer and is a stripped-down version of the more widespread re-release version put out by Origin Systems in 1986 (which can be seen here).

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