This obscure Japanese action game is a prototype of one of the first ever real-time strategy games – Herzog Zwei on the Sega Megadrive – and it is also one of the best games you can play on an MSX.
Herzog was developed and published on disk for the MSX2 by Techno Soft (nee, Tecno Soft) in 1988.
Mercs is a classic arcade shooter from 1990. It was jointly developed by Sega and Capcom and features simultaneous three-player cooperative gameplay.
Released ten years after the original Salamander, Konami‘s 1996 sequel – Salamander 2 – is more of the same horizontal/vertical scrolling blasting action, but with a different style of graphics, bigger, better weapons, and more spectacular events.
R-Type Leo is a spin-off from the famous R-Type series and was released into arcades in 1992. It was the last R-Type game to be made as an arcade game and was developed by Nanao, the parent company of Irem.
A side-scrolling beat ’em up released into arcades by Capcom in 1989, Final Fight was originally intended as a sequel to Street Fighter, but was eventually changed after the success of Double Dragon.
This obscure 1987 arcade game from Data East was a big influence on many games that came after it, in particular Manfred Trenz‘s Turrican series. It is obviously itself influenced by Nintendo‘s 1986 game, Metroid.
It also displays some similarities to Karnov, another Data East arcade game released the same year.
And, while you may have never heard of this game, it’s safe to say that it’s a bit of a ‘hidden gem’ in terms of old arcade games still worth playing today.
Sega‘s 1990 arcade hit, Alien Storm, is a one, two, or three-player action game with side-scrolling and first-person shooting sections.
Created by Williams Electronics in 1988, Narc is a side-scrolling run-and-gun shooter that attracted a lot of controversy when it first came out.
Atomic Robo-Kid is a horizontally-scrolling, progressive weapons shooter, designed by Tsutomu Fujisawa and manufactured by UPL in 1988.
It’s not a very well-known arcade game, but does have its fans. It also managed to get converted to a number of home systems too (including for the Sega Megadrive, but it never appeared on the SNES).
Developed by Apex Computer Productions, in association with Transmission Software, and published by Thalamus in 1989, Retrograde is a side-scrolling, progressive weapons shooter written by the same guys who made Creatures.
Retrograde came before Creatures, though.
The King of Grabs 