Tag Archives: adventure game

Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Maze Invaders

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This one’s a cool addition to the Atari Flashback Classics collection: a “lost” game from the Atari archives.

Maze Invaders sadly never saw an official release either as an arcade machine or a home port, languishing in the archives until recently. The International Centre for the History of Electronic Games managed to acquire a whole bunch of old Atari goodies back in 2014, and part of that heap of fun times was Maze Invaders.

It’s kind of surprising this never got an official release for one reason or another; it’s a really interesting, unusual and highly addictive game with a ton of personality to it!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Castle Master

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The “Freescape” games released by Incentive Software were all rather interesting for a variety of reasons.

Most notably, they represented some of the earliest examples of a multi-purpose, cross-platform 3D engine at work — Freescape was so flexible that it would run on everything from the ZX Spectrum up to Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS PC, though obviously with some limitations on the less powerful platforms!

Castle Master was one of the last Freescape games to be released on 16-bit platforms, and it’s also one of the most mysterious and intriguing. Let’s go for a little explore, shall we?

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

428 Shibuya Scramble, Cover Games

428: Shibuya Scramble – Introduction and History

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Every so often a game comes along that really makes you sit up and pay attention.

Sometimes it’s because it features a beautiful refinement or evolution of some established mechanics. Sometimes it’s because it really pushes graphical technology forwards. Sometimes it has famous names attached to it.

And sometimes it’s 428: Shibuya Scramble, a title so far removed from what we traditionally think of as a “video game” that you can’t help but notice it.

Continue reading 428: Shibuya Scramble – Introduction and History →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Time Bandit

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I love it when game developers get creative. This is not an altogether unusual sight these days, of course, but back in the early to mid ’80s, it was always a real treat to see someone step outside of genre “norms”.

Such was the case with Time Bandit by Bill Dunlevy and Harry Lafnear, a top-down action adventure with elements of text adventures, role-playing games, Pac-Man and all manner of other goodness. While superficially resembling Gauntlet — which actually came out after Time Bandit was fully developed — there’s a hell of a lot of depth here, and some fiendish puzzles to unravel.

If you want a game that pretty much sums up what the Atari ST gaming experience is all about, you can do far worse than give Time Bandit the, uh, time of day.

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

One-Shots, Videos

Pete Plays Dragon World: The Real Treasure is Love

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And now the epic conclusion of the Dragon World saga!

Back when we played this in the classroom, you were doing really well if you made it to Part 2, which wouldn’t allow you to even start playing without a password. (“ogweb”, if you’re too lazy to deal with Part 1’s nonsense)

Part 2 takes you on a surprisingly unforgiving treasure hunt through the aptly-named Town of Treasures… so let’s see if we can find something to make all dragonkind happy!

Continue reading Pete Plays Dragon World: The Real Treasure is Love →

One-Shots, Videos

Pete Plays Dragon World: A Friday Night Well-Spent

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If you’re British and of a certain age, you probably have… well, if not fond memories of the BBC Micro, then certainly memories of it.

A fixture in classrooms across the whole nation, the BBC Micro played host to a variety of software packages, many of which were specifically designed to be used in the classroom.

One specialist of such software was 4Mation, best known for a funny little quasi-educational adventure called Granny’s Garden. But I have much more vivid memories of one of their lesser-known works…

Continue reading Pete Plays Dragon World: A Friday Night Well-Spent →

Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Interphase

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Today’s Atari ST game is one of my favourites from my childhood… and a cool example of a developer thinking creatively.

Interphase, developed by The Assembly Line and published by Image Works and Mirrorsoft, is a game about infiltrating a building. The twist is, you don’t control the one doing the infiltrating; instead, you are hooked into the building’s electrical systems, manipulating them from an abstract 3D representation of “cyberspace”, while your off-screen companion is doing the difficult bit of actually getting through the building.

It’s a really cool game, and one that had a decently long lifespan too, thanks to its original commercial release being followed up by the complete game being given away as a freebie on an ST magazine’s cover-mounted floppy disk — ST Format, if I remember correctly. It remains solidly playable today, and well worth a look.

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Cover Games, Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog: The Dark Age

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cropped-sonicheader-9220777This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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Declaring anything the “best thing ever” or the “worst thing ever” is a dangerous game, for a variety of reasons.

Tastes change over time. Preferences vary between individuals. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned since starting MoeGamer — well, quite a bit before that, to be honest — it’s that something getting critically panned doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth checking out.

It was with this in mind that I was greatly looking forward to investigating the much-maligned 2006 reboot of Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — a game that Wikipedia used to claim (without citation) to be “among the worst games not only in the Sonic series but also in the video game medium.” That sounds like a challenge to me.

Continue reading Sonic the Hedgehog: The Dark Age →