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.
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Galaga: Destination Earth, PlayStation
Galaga: Destination Earth is a modern re-imagining of the classic Namco arcade game, Galaga, developed by British studio King of the Jungle and published by Hasbro Interactive for the PlayStation and Windows in 2000.
Mass Effect, PC
Developed by Canadian company BioWare and released in 2007, Mass Effect is the first part in a trilogy of futuristic RPGs featuring an elite human solder called Commander Shepard.
Thunder Force II, Megadrive/Genesis
Techno Soft‘s Thunder Force II originally came out for the Sharp X68000 home computer in 1988 and this Megadrive port followed later, in 1989. It’s official title is “Thunder Force II MD” – the ‘MD‘ of course meaning ‘Megadrive‘.
Alien: Isolation, PC
Developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega in 2014, Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival horror game that is considered a classic by many who’ve played it.
Aliens: Thanatos Encounter, Game Boy Color
Developed by an Australian company called Wicked Witch Software for Crawfish Interactive, and published by Fox Interactive in 2001, Aliens: Thanatos Encounter is an overhead shooter in the style of Team 17‘s Alien Breed. It was released exclusively for the Game Boy Color.
Alien, ZX Spectrum
Developed by Concept Software and published by Argus Press in 1984, this adaptation of the classic 1979 film, Alien, is arguably the first serious video game based on the Alien series (I certainly wouldn’t describe the Atari 2600 version of Alien as ‘serious’).
Andes Attack, VIC-20
Andes Attack was the first commercial game release from Jeff Minter and Llamasoft, and it was of course a clone of an arcade game (Defender). Andes Attack was first released in 1982 for the VIC-20 and did reasonable business, in spite of it not actually being very good.
Sexy Parodius, Arcade
Parodius is a spin-off series from Konami‘s classic Gradius/Nemesis series. It’s a parody of Gradius, thus “Parodius“, and “Sexy Parodius” is the arcade version of it.
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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