Tag Archives: Sprites

Chiller, ZX Spectrum

The 1985 ZX Spectrum version of Mastertronic‘s Chiller was coded by Richard Wright, and is pretty much the same as the original C64 version, except that it doesn’t have any music (which was probably a good thing, from a legal standpoint), and the graphics are even worse.

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Chiller, Commodore 64

Chiller is a simple platform game set over five different screens, and the aim is to rescue your girlfriend who is located in a haunted house at the end of the game. You jump around and collect ‘magic crosses’ to transition to the next screen. An energy bar indicates the player’s health. Touching enemies, or red mushrooms, depletes health, and collecting pink mushrooms increases it. If the bar reaches zero it’s game over – you only have one life.

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Kid Icarus, NES/Famicom

Developed by Nintendo R&D1 (with assistance from Tose Co. Ltd.), and first released for the Famicom Disk System by Nintendo in 1986, Kid Icarus is a cult classic scrolling platform game that is known for its high level of difficulty. The original Japanese title for the game is “Hikari Shinwa: Palthena no Kagami“. An NES cartridge version, with a different ending, an English language title screen and staff credits, was released in 1987.

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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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Flimbo’s Quest, Commodore 64

Flimbo’s Quest is a scrolling platform shooter that basically recycles the gameplay from the classic C64 game, Hawkeye. Designer/programmer Laurens van der Donk was a member of demo scene coders Boys Without Brains (who created Hawkeye), which explains the connection. From what I can tell, though, van der Donk was not involved in creating Hawkeye, so I’m not entirely sure how or why Flimbo’s Quest came to be.

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Galaxian, ColecoVision

The Galaxian conversion for the ColecoVision was first released in 1984 by Atarisoft, and it is a decent port of the classic 1979 arcade game from Namco. A secret message in the game credits James D. Eisenstein for writing the graphics and program (he also dedicates the game to his then wife/girlfriend, Jeneane).

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Duke Nukem, Game Boy Color

Duke Nukem on the Game Boy Color is a conversion of the classic MS-DOS game and was developed by Australian company Torus Games and published by GT Interactive in 1999. It is based on both Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II although it plays more like the second game than the first.

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Duke Nukem II, PC

Duke Nukem II is the sequel to 1991’s Duke Nukem and is another side-scrolling, platform-based shooter, only this time with larger, bolder graphics and jerkier scrolling. It was once again developed and published by Apogee Software, and was first released in 1993.

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Duke Nukem, PC

The first Duke Nukem game is a simple side-scrolling platform shooter, developed and published for PC MS-DOS by Apogee Software in 1991.

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