The Spectrum conversion of Nichibutsu‘s classic 1980 arcade game Moon Cresta was published by Incentive Software in 1985 and it is considered to be very good, considering the machine’s limitations.
Tag Archives: stars
Santron, 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, Commodore 64
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).
Stargate, Arcade
Also known as Defender II, Stargate is the 1981 sequel to Williams Electronics‘ Defender, which was released earlier the same year.
Stargate was designed and programmed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz, for Williams, and it features the same superfast blasting action as Defender, but with subtle differences.
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.
Tau Ceti, PC
The PC MS-DOS version of Tau Ceti was coded by Derek Baker at Comtec and published by CRL Group (Thunder Mountain in North America) in 1987.
It features gaudy, four-colour, CGA graphics, but is otherwise the Tau Ceti we know and love.
Tau Ceti, Atari ST
The 1986 Atari ST conversion of Tau Ceti – by Ron De Santi of Comtec – is much faster than the 8-bit versions and therefore more challenging. And what a brilliant challenge it is!
Tau Ceti, Commodore 64
John Twiddy‘s C64 conversion of Pete Cooke‘s classic space shooter is arguably even better than the Spectrum original.
Graphically it’s a little chunkier, but the extra colours make a difference.
Elite, Archimedes
The Acorn Archimedes conversion of Bell and Braben‘s classic Elite was written by Warren Burch and Clive Gringras and published by Hybrid Technology in 1991.
It is considered by many to be the definitive version of Elite available, although that is both a matter of taste, and also a matter of actually getting the game to run in a RISC OS environment.
Elite, NES
Developed by Imagineer, the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Elite is pretty good – considering that the NES isn’t particularly suited to generating wireframe 3D graphics. Yes, the wireframe 3D is slow (like in all the 8-bit versions of Elite), but not to the point where it makes the game unplayable.
The King of Grabs 