SNK‘s famous arcade shooter, Ikari Warriors, was released in 1986 at a time when many Commando clones were saturating the market, but managed to stand out against the competition.
Tag Archives: tanks
Combat, Atari 2600
Combat was designed by Atari, Inc. and first released for the Atari 2600 in 1977 and was the pack-in game for the system until 1982 (meaning: you got a Combat cartridge with the console, upon purchase).
It was one of the first home video games I ever played (probably the same for millions of others) and it enthralled me. Yes, Combat is very simple by today’s standards, but in 1977 it was a revelation and was much cloned by other developers.
H.A.T.E., Atari ST
H.A.T.E. is a pretty good conversion of a well-known ZX Spectrum shoot ’em up. It was published by Gremlin Graphics in 1989.
H.A.T.E. is subtitled “Hostile All-Terrain Encounter“, which it is, being a loose sequel to Vortex Software‘s classic Highway Encounter (H.A.T.E. was made by the same guy and uses the same viewpoint).
Flames of Freedom, Atari ST
Flames of Freedom is the 1991 sequel to Midwinter – a sprawling, open-ended action/strategy game created by Maelstrom Games.
Tron, Arcade
The 1982 arcade version of Tron is well-remembered by many gamers. It was developed by ENCOM International and manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway.
It features a four-stage video-gaming challenge via some of the scenes from the famous film (ironically, about video games).
Battle Zone, Arcade
Atari‘s 1980 hit Battle Zone was one of the first ever video games to use 3D polygonal vector graphics to represent the playfield.
It’s a tank game, and you’re basically hunting down tanks, flying saucers, and other baddies. Shooting them before they can shoot you.
Team Fortress 2, PC
I remember Team Fortress 2 launching back in 2007. The wait had been immense… I forget how many years we waited; around seven or eight years after it was first announced, until finally getting to play it.
To me, the game was a bit of a let down. It was all a bit too cartoony for my liking. Nonetheless I have played and enjoyed Team Fortress 2 on occasion over the years, and took some grabs along the way.
These grabs do say what year they were taken, and do show Team Fortress 2 as it evolved over the space of a decade.
Granada, Megadrive/Genesis
Granada is an obscure-but-brilliant overhead tank shooter on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis that was developed by Wolf Team Japan and published by Renovation in North America in 1990. Granada was never given an official European release.
A-10 Tank Killer, PC
Dynamix‘s 1989 combat flight sim, A-10 Tank Killer, is fast and fluid on the PC, making it one of the first serious combat flight sims to offer more than 20 frames a second to games-players. In the early days of combat flight sims: the games were battling against weaker machine specs and lower CPU cycles. When 386 and 486 type PCs entered the market (in 1989), and VGA graphics cards became affordable, only then did the genre finally have the power to be “fast” and “fluid”.
Metal Slug, Neo Geo
Nazca Corporation‘s infamous run-and-gun blaster – Metal Slug – was first released in arcades in 1996, before following as a cartridge on SNK‘s cutting edge home console the Neo Geo AES.
The King of Grabs 