“Oh, sorry — you weren’t using that prefrontal lobe for anything special, were you?” Scientist Dr. Curien has discovered a way to artificially sustain life forms (in other words, create zombies). Blast your way in this gory horror rail-shooter, ported from arcade to Sega Saturn by Tantalus.
A Sega Saturn port by Tantalus, Manx TT SuperBike is a motorcycle racing game based on the famous Isle of Man Tourist Trophy (TT) race and features FMV content of the track.
Torus Games’ Game Boy port of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is a two-on-two basketball game featuring NBA teams and their star players. Tournament Edition ups the ante of a regular basketball game with its ultra sped-up “Juice Mode” and power-ups that incite “monster dunks” and bombs that send players to the ground.
Collector Michael Davidson – I’ve always had an interest from a young age in computers and videogames and I’m old enough to have grown up during a period when both were new and exciting. I own several items of interest from a New Zealand point of view.
What was your local arcade like? Tell us about it. Were the machines new, with their own artwork? Or were they generic cabinets, converted from other games?
“1986” is a challenging Donkey Kong clone. You have to attempt to get through the screens by climbing ladders in a maze, avoiding hazards and racing the clock.
“Afos” is an arcade-style centipede game. It is a very funny game that looks like a clone of “TRON” or “Centipede”.
“Astro” is a quality arcade game that faithfully reproduces the (then) popular arcade game “Asteroids”.
“Burglar Bill” is a level-based “Jet Set Willy” style game,based on “Manic Miner”, for the Spectrum. Burglar Bill breaks into a haunted mansion that is filled with monsters and traps. You have to guide Burglar Bill through the mansion’s many cellars, collecting treasures as he goes through the rooms. Each room is guarded by a monster and contains poison-tipped objects.
“City Lander” is an arcade action game. To score points, you have to land the spacecraft in the underground city on landing pads.
“Dinky Kong” is a “Donkey Kong” clone, written by Mark Sibly during his school days. It has 10 Levels, all in 3.5KB. Sibly did the cover artwork using Letraset, and his father got copies of the cover art printed, to go inside the plastic bag.
This is an arcade game that is bound to make anyone smile. You are a knight flying on a magic emu and you joust with the dreaded vulture knights. You flap your emu’s wings to fly and you must pounce upon a vulture knight from above face-on. He turns into an egg. If you don’t eat the egg, it hatches and turns into a more cunning knight.
“Halloween Harry”, according to creator John Passfield’s blog, was ‘inspired by “Ghostbusters”‘. The game is set in the 21st century, and features Harry, a ghost hunter, facing off against all sorts of evil across 13 levels. Essentially, it is a platform shooter with some puzzle-solving elements, set on a single screen.
Your home planet is a peaceful world that possesses a unique technology, a perpetual energy generator that is pollution free. It powers the whole planet and is the only major energy source used. The key to it is an energy crystal that was devised some hundreds of years ago by your ancestors. Unfortunately, the secret died with them, although the crystal will last forever. The crystal has been stolen by an envious race of Metroids, who have taken it home with them. Intelligence reports state they have disassembled the crystal into its 5 component parts and hidden each beneath a different planet in their solar system.
“Horace Goes Skiing”, released in 1982, was a spin-off from the successful “Hungry Horace”. “Horace Goes Skiing” is initially similar to the arcade game “Frogger”. In this instance, Horace has to negotiate a busy and dangerous road, in order to get to the ski shop, to rent a pair of skis.
“Hungry Horace” was programmed by William Tang, but Alfred Milgrom contributed to the design of the inimitable Horace, a character created using minimum grid available. Milgrom sent a copy of the game to Psion Software in the UK. It was Psion’s close relationship with Sinclair Research which saw the Horace Games packaged with ZX Spectrum making it one of the first home computer game experiences for many people.
In “Hoards of the Deep Realm”, you are the hero who must retrieve stolen treasures hoarded in the underground caverns of the Deep Realm. During play, you must dodge and out-manoeuvre the fiery wraiths that guard these treasures
“Laser Hawk” is a “Scramble” clone. It was inspired by “Tail of Beta Lyrae”. The game has 5 stages, and at the end of each stage a command center must be destroyed (earning an extra helicopter). These are the headquarters of rival computer companies of the time, namely Apple, Amstrad, BBC, Commodore and Spectrum.
“Necromancer 2” is an isometric arcade adventure. It is a clone of Ultimate’s classic 3D games, such as “Knightlore”. The game runs on C64 and also runs on a Vic 20. It was, during its day, an advanced amateur game, being an isometric 3D game.
The tastefully named “Penetrator” was one of Beam Software’s earliest games. Designed for the ZX Spectrum by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler the game is a clone of Konami’s popular 1981 arcade game “Scramble”. A sideways scrolling shooter “Penetrator” recreates “Scramble”’s challenges of flying and shooting…
“ShootOut” is an arcade-style, shoot’em up game. You have to shoot the baddies as they appear from the buildings of the western town. Be careful not to miss, as you will shoot up the town.
“Splat” is a “Frogger” clone.
“Trojans” is an arcade-style game, loosely descended from “Pac- Man”. You have to shoot the ice cubes at the ghosts, as you negotiate the maze in this game.
“Vortex Blaster” is a shoot ’em up game with speech. It is one of only two Sega SC-3000 games to feature digitised speech.