Tag Archives: swords

Daikatana, PC

John Romero‘s Daikatana is one of the most infamous games of all time.

Back in 2000, when the game was first released, it was heavily hyped as “the next great shooter”. And – as Daikatana was being designed by one of the co-creators of the original Doom and Quake – everyone had high hopes for it.

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The Legend of Zelda, NES

1986 saw the release of the original The Legend of Zelda on the NES, although it wasn’t on cartridge – it was on floppy disk. Specifically: for the Nintendo Famicom Disk System (FDS).

A cartridge version, with battery backup-up saves, was released in North America in 1987.

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Shadow Warrior, PC

The original Shadow Warrior was released for PC MS-DOS by GT Interactive in 1997.

Shadow Warrior is a fast, high fun factor, oriental comedy First-Person Shooter. It was created by 3D Realms and used the Duke Nukem ‘Build’ Engine to display the world.

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Dragon Warrior, NES

Developed by Chunsoft and released for the Famicom by Enix in 1986, Dragon Quest was a landmark moment in video game history.

Dragon Warrior is the American NES release of Dragon Quest, translated into English and tweaked here and there (I say “tweaked here and there” but the US version had battery back-up saves and the Japanese version used password saves, so there was a big difference there), and released by Nintendo in 1989. These grabs are from the later North American English language release.

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Brave Fencer Musashi, PlayStation

Square‘s 1998 PlayStation release, Brave Fencer Musashi, is an entertaining single-player action/RPG, with real-time sword combat and a 3D environment and characters.

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, PC

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was first released in 2011 by Polish developer CD Projekt Red.

It is the predecessor to the smash hit The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and also follows the exploits of Geralt of Rivia – a Witcher, or monster-hunter – on a series of open-world adventures.

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Defender of the Crown, Amiga

The Amiga version of Cinemaware‘s classic Defender of the Crown is both beautiful to look at, and great fun to play. Actually, pretty much every version of Defender of the Crown I’ve played has been great, but the Amiga version is probably the most well-remembered. It was also the very first version of Defender of the Crown too – all the other versions followed later.

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Black Crystal, Commodore 64

Black Crystal is infamous for being an overpriced and under-produced RPG from the early days of home computing.

This Commodore 64 version plays pretty much the same as the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum versions, in that: it’s absolutely awful and will have you both tearing your hair out in minutes, and also wondering who on earth would make such a game…

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Black Crystal, ZX Spectrum

Black Crystal is infamous for being an overpriced and under-produced RPG from the early days of home computing.

The first version of Black Crystal was the ZX81 version, which was designed and programmed by Roy Carnell and Stuart Galloway and released in 1982. A ZX Spectrum version followed in 1983, then a Commodore 64 version later in 1985.

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Strider II, Megadrive/Genesis

Strider II is a console-only sequel to the great Capcom arcade game of 1989. It was developed by British company Tiertex and published by U.S. Gold in 1990. A Sega Megadrive version followed later in 1992.

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