Ever wanted to play a puzzle game that featured the smiling face of John Major? I thought not, but we’re going to anyway.
Ego is an interesting puzzle game based on a game that claims to be related to the classic Repton series, but which isn’t really. You control an elephant-like thing as he attempts to reassemble digitised photos of minor celebrities and public figures from the mid-’90s. And it’s surprisingly fun!
Although the Dizzy series from Codemasters and The Oliver Twins is best-known for its series of arcade adventures, it also experimented with a few other genres along the way, too.
One of these “Dizzy, but different” games was Dizzy Panic, a puzzle game all about sorting shapes. It’s extremely simple in concept but gets very, very challenging extremely quickly!
We’ve reached the end of our second spell (no pun intended) with Epyx’s wonderful Temple of Apshai Trilogy; this time we take on the final part, Curse of Ra, on the Atari ST.
Westwood’s 1986 port of Temple of Apshai Trilogy for Atari ST is one of the more convenient and enjoyable ways to play the game. The mouse controls and menus work well, the ability to get the room descriptions with the tap of a key is wonderful — it would have been nice to have the treasure descriptions, too, but I guess there was only so much text they could squeeze in!
First, there was Menace. Now, Psygnosis presents… a DMA Design game. BLOOD MONEY!
Thus ran the intro to Blood Money, spiritual successor to DMA Design’s excellent 16-bit shooter Menace, and a game that draws heavy inspiration from a variety of its contemporaries. It’s a good game with a few glaring issues that hold it back from true greatness — but it’s worth a play or two, particularly if you can bring a friend along for the ride!
Back in the day, we all knew that home ports of the most impressive arcade games were never going to match up to playing on original hardware. But we took what we could get.
Such was the case with Argonaut Software’s port of Sega’s After Burner to Atari ST. It, of course, pales in comparison to the arcade version — but when you didn’t have ready access to that arcade version, I can attest that you would absolutely find a way to be happy with this!
Although X-Out is considered to be one of the best shoot ’em ups on the Atari ST, I didn’t rate it all that much from a modern perspective; I think console-style shoot ’em ups have spoiled me!
Its sequel Z-Out is another matter, however; despite being a pretty shameless clone of R-Type, this is a much more enjoyable horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up when played today — it even has R-Type’s iconic monstrous difficulty!
Licensed games, as we’ve established pretty well by this point, can go either way. Sometimes they can be excellent games, bolstered by the “brand recognition” of what they’re based on. And sometimes they can be absolute pap that comes across as little more than a cheap cash-in.
Yogi’s Big Cleanup for Atari ST sits squarely in the middle. It’s not terrible — in fact its overall structure and design is quite likeable. But some unfortunately atrocious controls and collision detection make it a lot harder to enjoy than it perhaps could have been, which is a real shame.
The games that people consider to be “the best of all time” vary considerably according to what platforms they’ve spent the most time with — and nowhere is that more apparent than in the shoot ’em up genre.
X-Out (pronounced “cross out”) is supposedly one of the best ever shoot ’em ups for 8- and 16-bit home computers — and for sure, it has its impressive elements. But can it stand up to the heavy hitters of the console sector? You already know the answer to that, but let’s give it a go anyway.
Can you smell the Gun.Smoke? Infogrames certainly can in this vertically scrolling blastathon for Atari ST.
Wanted is actually a very competent shoot ’em up that does some interesting things that are a bit different from other, similar games on the ST. Perhaps most notably, it’s cowboy-themed, which was a rather unusual sight at the time — and still is today, to a certain extent.
It may have a ridiculous name, but if you ask any ST enthusiast what the best racing games on the platform are — hell, if you ask them what the best games on the platform are — you will almost certainly hear Vroom mentioned.
Developed by Lankhor, this is a high-speed first-person racer that effortlessly blends smooth scaling sprites with polygonal scenery to produce one of the most thrilling games on Atari ST. It was so good, in fact, that publisher Domark went and sorted out a Formula 1 license and then released an updated version called F1 a little while later!
