Known in North America as “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (complete with movie licensed characters), and “Ashura” in Japan. Also known as: “Not-So-Secret Commando“, since this is an unsubtle clone of Capcom‘s classic 1985 arcade game, Commando (and SNK‘s 1986 game, Ikari Warriors – since it has a simultaneous two-player mode and level designs that echo that game). Joking aside: it’s a pretty good clone of Commando, although it does play rather slowly.
Tag Archives: Tribute
Spheres of Chaos, Archimedes
Spheres of Chaos is a colourful and superbly-playable Asteroids tribute originally written for the Acorn Archimedes by Iain McLeod and Matt Black and self-published in 1993.
Castle Blackheart, Archimedes
Castle Blackheart is an interesting maze action game where you play a knight fighting his way through a maze of monsters, trying to find pieces of a scroll and also keys to open doors that’ll allow him to escape to the next level.
Invasion of the Body Snatchas!, ZX Spectrum
Created by Design Design and first published by Crystal Computing in 1983, Invasion of the Body Snatchas! is a super-hard Defender clone for the ZX Spectrum.
Continue reading Invasion of the Body Snatchas!, ZX Spectrum
Super Bubble Bobble MD, Megadrive/Genesis
Super Bubble Bobble MD is a bootleg Megadrive/Genesis game that was probably created to fill a gap in the market because Bubble Bobble was never officially released on the platform.
BB4CPC, Amstrad CPC
BB4CPC (meaning: “Bubble Bobble for the CPC“) is a superb modern “homebrew” remake of Bubble Bobble in 48K for the Amstrad CPC by CNGSoft. It was coded by Cesar Nicolas Gonzales and released as freeware in 2014.
Wonderful Dizzy, ZX Spectrum
Wonderful Dizzy is the eighth ‘core’ Dizzy adventure and was released in 2020 for the 128K ZX Spectrum only. It was designed by The Oliver Twins and published by Team Yolkfolk.
The game’s development was tied to the Kickstarter campaign for the ZX Spectrum Next and was first announced in 2017. The Olivers said that they would only go ahead with development of the game if the Kickstarter campaign for the ZX Spectrum Next reached its target, which it eventually did.
Quarth, Arcade
Quarth is a brilliant mixture of Tetris and shoot ’em up and was first played in arcades in Japan in 1989. Outside of Japan it is known as “Block Hole“, which – let’s face it – is a stupid name, so I’m sticking with the original name, Quarth.
Pogo, ZX Spectrum
Ocean Software‘s 1983 release, Pogo, is arguably the best Q*Bert clone on the ZX Spectrum. And there were a lot of Q*Bert clones around at the time.
It was one of the very first Spectrum games I ever bought and it kept teenage me occupied for a few days, before I eventually grew tired of it.
Pi-Balled, ZX Spectrum
Pi-Balled was published by Automata UK in 1984 and is basically a Q*Bert clone. And it’s not a bad one at that.
The King of Grabs 