In the navy, you can sail the seven seas! You can also blow seven shades of snot out of your friends, siblings and/or parents using nothing more than a pen and paper.
Or perhaps an Atari ST and a copy of Battleships by Elite, an adaptation of the classic tabletop game that aims to up the pace of things a bit by allowing you to fire “salvos” of shots all over the shop in the (usually vain) hope of actually hitting something.
It may look primitive today, but this was an enjoyable fun time in multiplayer back in the day!
Activision were a prolific developer back in the days of the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit computers, with many of their most well-regarded games making the jump from one platform to the other.
One particularly beloved example is H.E.R.O., a game that some see as a spiritual precursor to open-structure 2D platform games such as Metroid.
Whether or not you believe that, the adventures of Roderick “R.” Hero remain a jolly good time even today, so let’s go have some fun!
Today’s Atari Flashback Classic is a one- or two-player blastathon with a couple of twists: firstly, it’s paddle-controlled, and secondly, it involves firing an extendable “beam” rather than the more common shots.
Yes, it’s Demons to Diamonds, a simple but enjoyable shoot ’em up designed for younger players — but there’s still some fun to be had for a few minutes here if you give it a chance.
It may not be the most fondly regarded of all the Atari Flashback Classics, but it’s worth a blast or two — particularly if you bring a friend along for the ride!
Regular viewers and enthusiasts of ’80s microcomputers will doubtless be well familiar with Jeff Minter of Llamasoft by now.
Minter didn’t put out a ton of stuff for the 16-bit platforms, but when he did — gosh, he made that hardware well and truly sing.
A great example is Andes Attack for Atari ST which, as well as being incredibly difficult, is also a beautiful reimagining of one of Minter’s old Vic-20 games. Let’s enjoy the sight of me failing miserably at it!
Today we have a game that absolutely, definitely is not Super Sprint, so there.
Yes, it’s CodeMasters’ Grand Prix Simulator, a game that was unironically designed to be “BMX Simulator with cars” and a game that just happens to bear a passing resemblance to Atari Games’ classic top-down racer.
Featuring digitised speech, bricks on wheels and some of the slipperiest handling this side of Vanilla Lake in Super Mario Kart, this game is a good time — albeit one you’ll need a bit of practice to master!
It’s always interesting to look at a very old game and see the earliest glimmer of a subgenre that became well-established much later.
Mattel’s Dark Cavern, actually an Atari 2600 port of their Intellivision title Night Stalker, is a good example. On paper, it’s a simple maze game, but in practice, you can see just a hint of what would become stealth and survival horror gameplay in there.
We’ve got a fragile protagonist; we’ve got an emphasis on outwitting enemies; we’ve got limited resources. How long can Your Man survive in the Dark Cavern?
Modern programming competitions on classic systems often throw up some really interesting results… particularly when there are some creative restrictions put in place.
F*ck Man is the product of a competition where programmers of various 8-bit computers were allowed just 10 lines of the BASIC dialect of their choice to put something together. It was actually the work of the competition’s organiser, and came in fourth place.
As for the game itself… well, it’s understandably simplistic, but it’s actually a surprising amount of fun, and a creative twist on a classic formula. Also it has an entertaining name.
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, players of home consoles weren’t looking for “arcade perfect” — mostly because the home systems of the time weren’t up to it.
Rather, they were looking for a roughly equivalent or perhaps complementary experience to that which could be had in the arcades. This meant that sometimes games underwent a few changes in the transition from the arcade to the home.
A good example of this is Crystal Castles for the Atari 2600, which provides a surprisingly authentic-feeling approximation of the arcade classic, while working within the constraints of its host hardware.
While it’s primarily the 8-bit home microcomputer era that is associated with the “bedroom programmer”, thanks to the fact that most systems came with the programming language BASIC built into ROM, some of this still went on in the 16-bit era.
A popular platform for independent game development on Atari ST was STOS (short for ST Operating System). This was a BASIC-like language with a lot of features specifically geared towards game development: things like sprite handling, scrolling, music and sound generation, all that sort of thing.
STOS’ publisher Mandarin Software collected a bunch of impressive efforts from talented developers and bundled them together in a commercially available showcase compilation called Games Galore. One of those games was Yomo, which is the subject of today’s video!
Possibly the most ’90s game of all-time, The Bitmap Brothers’ Xenon 2: Megablast is a classic shoot ’em up with a solid Atari ST port.
Okay, we don’t get to enjoy the full digital strains of Bomb The Bass’ Megablast (Hip-Hop on Precinct 13) during gameplay, but it’s there in the intro sequence, and was enough to get my video Content ID’d on YouTube! I didn’t know anyone still cared about Bomb the Bass, least of all in 8-bit mono at a woefully low sample rate. AH YEAH.
Anyway, Xenon 2 is indeed a Megablast, and well worth checking out if you want to see how a 16-bit microcomputer handles a chaotic shoot ’em up!
The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today.
