Jeff Minter‘s early grass-cutting maze game, Hover Bovver, was first released by Llamasoft in 1983 for both Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit systems. Both versions are fairly pointless points-scoring exercises with gameplay and maze layouts that don’t really make much sense.
Tag Archives: weird
Hover Bovver, Commodore 64
The original Commodore 64 version of Jeff Minter‘s Hover Bovver is just as niggly and annoying as the Atari 8-bit version, which was released as the game’s “evil twin” in 1983.
Turboflex, Atari 8-bit
Jeff Minter‘s 1982 Atari 8-bit game, Turboflex, is an interesting but frustrating bouncing ball game where the aim is for you to deliberately bounce a ball into a target inside a box by dropping flippers onto it – diagonal posts that spin the ball in different directions, depending on its position when hit by the ball. The target, depending on your game settings, moves, reverses or does other tricks, so as not to get hit/caught by you.
Sexy Parodius, Arcade
Parodius is a spin-off series from Konami‘s classic Gradius/Nemesis series. It’s a parody of Gradius, thus “Parodius“, and “Sexy Parodius” is the arcade version of it.
Heatseeker, Commodore 64
Heatseeker is a weird platform action game, written by Paul O’Malley and published for the Commodore 64 by Thalamus in 1990. It’s probably one of the strangest games I’ve ever played, and it has to be said that the game does suffer a little because of that. It’s so unconventional as to be borderline playable.
Snare, Commodore 64
Snare is a game show of the future where the contestant puts their life at risk trying to crack the secrets of a deadly maze inside the temporal cavity of a dead billionaire’s garden. The game was written by Rob Stevens and was first published by Thalamus in 1989.
Ranarama, ZX Spectrum
Steve Turner‘s classic Ranarama originated on the ZX Spectrum in 1987. The game is an overhead Gauntlet derivative where you play as a frog (actually a wizard’s apprentice, called Mervyn, whose botched spell has turned him into a frog), who must fight his way through various levels of a maze, defeating warlocks and taking their runes.
Micronaut One, ZX Spectrum
Micronaut One is another interesting game from Tau Ceti creator Pete Cooke. Mr. Cooke was known for making innovative, unusual, and technically-impressive games for the ZX Spectrum that were different to the norm. This one was published by Nexus in 1987 and involves travelling down 3D corridors and shooting weird alien insects that are infesting a biocomputer.
Amaurote, Amstrad CPC
Amaurote is an isometric action game, developed by Binary Design and published by Mastertronic in 1987. It first appeared on the ZX Spectrum and was later ported to the Amstrad CPC, and it suits the machine quite well.
Get Dexter 2, Amstrad CPC
The sequel to the classic Amstrad adventure, Get Dexter, is more of the same isometric puzzle-solving, and weird futuristic adventuring, except that this time the game world is comprised of interlinked exterior screens rather than a simple maze of rooms.
The King of Grabs 