If you ever wanted to know who or what to blame for the endless rereleases of Skyrim on every platform under the sun… well, today I’ve got the game where it arguably all started.
Legend of Valour is a supremely ambitious first-person texture-mapped role-playing game that Todd Howard has specifically cited as being a key influence on the development of the Elder Scrolls series. Up until quite recently, I had thought it was an MS-DOS PC exclusive — but it turns out there’s an Atari ST version, too.
Well, there’s no way we’re not checking that out, is there? Let’s do just that in the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
Warriors Orochi 2 was received fairly poorly in the West, largely because the West doesn’t really know how to review Warriors games — but also because at first glance, it seems very similar to the first Warriors Orochi. Delve into it a little deeper, though, and you’ll find an interesting character progression system that can devour a significant chunk of your life if you let it!
River Raid is probably my favourite game on the Atari 8-bit. The Atari 2600 version is arguably more well-known, but the Atari 2600 version — which also appeared on the ill-fated Atari 5200 — is superior in pretty much every way.
For the unfamiliar, River Raid is one of the original vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups, and made use of some clever programming techniques to squeeze the entire game into a tiny amount of space. It’s one of Activision’s finest games of the 8-bit era, and a game I still enjoy on a regular basis today.
As we’ve seen a few times already on this series, one of the great things about the Atari Flashback Classics collection is that it provides an official way to enjoy some games that never got released back in the day.
One such example is RealSports Basketball for both Atari 2600 and Atari 5200, neither of which made it to release back in the day despite being listed on Atari’s schedules up until quite late. The great “video game crash” of 1983 probably didn’t help matters, but… well, make your own mind up.
The Oliver Twins are, it’s fair to say, probably best known for their Dizzy series of arcade adventures on 8- and 16-bit home computers. But they made a bunch of other interesting games, too.
Super Robin Hood for NES is a reimagining of the twins’ very first commercially successful game, originally released for Amstrad CPC. It’s a fun platformer that gives you a sense of freely exploring an interesting environment, despite it actually leading you on a linear path from start to finish.
Sometimes, it’s good to play a genuinely awful game just to remind yourself how good we have it most of the time. And sometimes you end up very pleasantly surprised.
Sometimes, though, a game is just irredeemably terrible and no amount of positive intention will save it. Sadly, such is the case with Karting Grand Prix for Atari ST by Anco — though I will add a disclaimer at this point. This video was based off the version of the game that Automation archived among their enormous collection of floppy disk menus, and is seemingly an incomplete or earlier version of the game; the final retail release does run slightly faster, but that doesn’t do much to rescue this absolute tyre fire.
You asked for it, and I… was going to do it anyway, but here it is! TimeSplitters 2, one of the finest console first-person shooters ever created — and indeed one of my favourite games of all time.
TimeSplitters 2 took everything that was good about the first game and provided more. Much, much more. We have a story mode that is much closer to what its spiritual predecessors GoldenEye and Perfect Dark provided on the Nintendo 64. We have a more structured single-player experience for the “arcade” mode. We have a wide variety of weird and wonderful challenges. And we have many, many, many characters to collect.
When I was a kid, I was kind of scared of trying out RPGs because they looked too complicated. Returning to them today, however, makes me feel like I would probably have been fine!
Here’s Questron from Strategic Simulations Inc, who at the time were better known for their wargaming software. This was their first RPG release and proved to be a big success for them. The company would later go on to be extremely well-known for their excellent array of licensed Dungeons & Dragons computer RPGs, so this was the just the beginning of something wonderful for them!
We’re back once again with the RealSports series, and this time we’re looking at RealSports Baseball for the Atari 5200.
While the Atari 2600 version of RealSports Baseball really struggled to provide a convincing game, particularly when played against a computer-controlled opponent, the Atari 5200 fares much better in this regard, offering the potential for a much more complex and interesting game without sacrificing accessibility and immediacy. Plus there’s digitised speech! Who’d have thought it?
Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.
The Evercade isn’t just about old games — it’s also about new games developed for old platforms. Tanglewood, one half of the eleventh cartridge in the system’s library, is a great example.
Developed in 2018 making a specific effort to use authentically ’90s-style techniques and tools that Mega Drive programmers would have used back in the day, Tanglewood is a charming puzzle platformer with a clear artistic vision and some enjoyable gameplay to back it up.
