We return once again to The Temple of Apshai Trilogy for Atari ST, this time to explore the first “expansion” section: The Upper Reaches of Apshai.
The Upper Reaches of Apshai is noteworthy in that it takes a rather more light-hearted and experimental approach to the game’s core dungeon crawling; it has you picking berries and cleaning up rampant tomato patches rather than battling your way through vanilla-scented ant-men. And the Atari ST version is a great way to experience it!
The Temple of Apshai and its later Temple of Apshai Trilogy “remaster” are best known as 8-bit titles, but the latter actually got a port to Atari ST in 1986 — by Westwood, no less.
The ST version is, as it turns out, pretty good. It not only incorporates all the classic gameplay into a friendly GEM interface, it also includes all the room descriptions from the Book of Apshai into the game itself, making for a much more convenient way to play.
Screaming Wings for Atari 8-bit was an excellent clone of Capcom’s arcade classic 1942, complete with loop-the-loops, a Lockheed Lightning under the player’s control and some satisfying gameplay.
Screaming Wings for Atari ST, meanwhile, is probably one of the worst shoot ’em ups on the system, since it abandoned almost everything that made the 8-bit version good and instead produced a steaming pile of pap whose only real redeeming feature is its use of digitised sound effects.
Sometimes, the concept of something is sound, but the execution is disastrous. Such is the case with Impressions’ Renaissance, ostensibly a collection of classic arcade games with “enhanced” contemporary versions.
Unfortunately, an absolute mass of broken promises set by both the packaging and the manual makes this an enormously disappointing package that, quite rightly, still makes people surprisingly but understandably furious to this day.
Time for something a bit different today! The Atari ST plays host to a variety of excellent applications as well as games, many of which are still well worth your time today. So let’s take a look at some of them every so often!
Quartet is a four-channel sample sequencer and synthesiser by Microdeal. It was well-regarded for its ease of use and flexibility, and was used by a wide variety of composers in both the commercial and demo scenes. It’s not hard to see why — a little effort can produce some surprisingly excellent results that are a far cry from the ST’s usual pitiful warblings!
A lot of people forget that there’s a third Bubble Bobble game — or, as this port puts it, a second Rainbow Islands game.
But Parasol Stars from Taito is very much a thing that exists — and moreover, it got a very competent port to Atari ST thanks to Ocean Software. While the PC Engine original may be a bit smoother and slicker than this one, this is certainly not a bad effort considering how it’s running on general-purpose rather than gaming-specialist hardware.
As we’ve seen a fair few times on this series to date, it was quite fashionable for home computer developers to put together “unofficial” sequels to arcade classics.
Sega’s OutRun certainly wasn’t immune to this, and enjoyed several home-exclusive follow-ups over the years — including OutRun Europa by Probe. In this game, you’re on the run from the police — attempting to outrun them, you might say — and must speed your way across Europe in a variety of vehicles. And it’s not bad!
Arcade conversions could be a bit hit and miss on the Atari ST, largely because the computer’s built-in hardware couldn’t hope to compete with the specialist arcade units of the time.
That didn’t stop developers from trying their best to make a solid conversion, however — and The Sales Curve’s Random Access team actually managed a pretty competent job of bringing Taito’s The Ninja Warriors home for Atari ST owners to enjoy.
The design’s weady! Ergonomicawwy tewwific! We’ve conquered the sector! We’ve nuuuuked them! We’ve won!
Ah, Mega-Lo-Mania, such an iconic game — and not just for those wonderful speech samples, but also for its excellent gameplay. Many people regard this as one of the first examples of a real-time strategy game — though it does things a little differently from its fellow genre progenitor Dune 2, which came out a year later.
If you like flashing lights, boy do I have the game for you. If you have a problem with flashing lights, maybe steer clear of this one.
Llamatron for Atari ST is one of the legendary Jeff Minter’s many takes on classic arcade games. This time around, he sets his sight on the classic Robotron, which was already a fairly psychedelic experience filled with pulsing colours and flashes of light, but Llamatron takes all that to a whole other level.
