Tag Archives: Space Combat

Star Fox 64, Nintendo 64

Star Fox 64 – also known as “Lylat Wars” in PAL regions – is the sequel to the classic Star Fox on the Super Nintendo. It was developed and published by Nintendo and first released in 1997. The game was critically and commercially successful, selling over four million physical copies, making it one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 64.

Continue reading Star Fox 64, Nintendo 64

Star Fox EX, Super Nintendo

Star Fox EX is a recently-released ROM hack for the Super Nintendo classic, Star Fox, that takes ROM-hacking to another level. It was created by “kandowontu” (and a team of other contributors) and was first released in November 2022. The “EX” means “Exploration Showcase“.

Continue reading Star Fox EX, Super Nintendo

Time-Gate, ZX Spectrum

Written by John Hollis and first published by Quicksilva for the 48K ZX Spectrum in 1983, Time-Gate was the first Spectrum game I ever played and is a simple first-person space shooter – basically a Star Raiders clone with a few differences.

Continue reading Time-Gate, ZX Spectrum

Vortex, Super Nintendo

Vortex is a 3D shoot ’em up developed by Argonaut Software and published by Electro Brain in North America, Sony in Europe, and Pack-In-Video in Japan in 1994. It is one of the few games (other than Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, Yoshi’s Island, Doom, Dirt Trax FX, Winter Gold, and Star Fox 2) to use the Super FX co-processor chip to allow for faster 3D graphics than the vanilla SNES is capable of.

Continue reading Vortex, Super Nintendo

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.

Continue reading Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, PC

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.

Continue reading Wing Commander, PC

Star Fox 2, Super Nintendo

The sequel to the classic Super Nintendo 3D shooter, Star Fox, Star Fox 2 is infamous because it was actually cancelled before it was completed, way back in 1995, but was finally finished and released in 2017 on the SNES Classic Edition retro console.

Continue reading Star Fox 2, Super Nintendo

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Arcade

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is the sequel to the timeless Atari, Inc. shooter, Star Wars, and it was first released into arcades in 1985. It is, of course, based on the classic 1980 film of the same name.

Continue reading Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Arcade

Death Star Interceptor, ZX Spectrum

Looking at Death Star Interceptor now you might be surprised to discover that it was a “number one” game when it first came out in 1985.

And – while it did make it to the top of the games charts back then – the charts were not very reliable, and the game actually wasn’t that good, even though it does officially license use of the Star Wars theme, for a warbly Speccy interpretation of John Williams‘ classic music.

Death Star Interceptor was a case of style over content, and also maybe a touch of Star Wars fever as well. These are thoughts I had about the game when I first played it back in 1985.

Continue reading Death Star Interceptor, ZX Spectrum