If you know your Atari history, you’ll recognise the name Chris Crawford. He was responsible for a number of fascinating and innovative games, including the strategy title Eastern Front and the weird-ass social ’em up Gossip.
Wizard is a prototype he worked on back in the Atari 2600 days, but it never made it to release for various reasons — chief among which was the fact that Crawford crammed it into 2K, but Atari’s marketing department decided that all games from that point on should be 4K. Silly in retrospect, yet — but at least we can enjoy Wizard today.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is the reason I bought an Xbox 360. The beautifully clear visuals really sold “HD” to me, and thus it was that game, more than any other, that brought me into the high-definition age.
I held off playing the Wii game Geometry Wars Galaxies for quite some time, at least partly because I thought the game might lose some impact in standard definition. I was very much wrong, and now I am regretting not having played this much sooner!
I have a soft spot for Microdeal’s Goldrunner. It was one of the first games I played on the Atari ST, and while it’s monstrously difficult and quite annoying at times, there’s something about it that kept me coming back for more.
It was likely a combination of things: the impressive performance, the excellent Rob Hubbard music, the sampled speech repeatedly bidding you “Welcome” even when you’d been playing for hours… it all combined to make one of the best Atari ST games out there, and a game I still enjoy a fair bit today.
I’ve always known subLOGIC and Bruce Artwick for their work on bringing Flight Simulator into the world — but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that they produced one of the most impressively accurate (and customisable) pinball sims of the 8-bit era, too.
Night Mission Pinball may seem simple and straightforward on paper, since it only features a single table, but the depth of simulation on offer — plus the commitment to recreating the physicality of pinball on original hardware — is impressive stuff, particularly when you start delving into the highly tweakable “fix” mode.
Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing, particularly when the siblings in question have access to a fire-breathing dragon and flame-reflecting shields. You better hope those builders you hired did a good job on the walls this time around, otherwise you’re in for a fiery evening.
Warlords is a classic four-player take on the Pong and Breakout formula that challenges players to bat a ball back and forth between four corners of a play area, knock one another’s walls down and eventually be the last one standing. It’s a beloved classic in both its arcade and 2600 incarnations — and supposedly the 2600 version was actually developed first, despite releasing later.
Early ’80s arcade games were seriously tough to get to grips with — not necessarily from a mechanical perspective, but in terms of applying your knowledge of those mechanics effectively.
Namco’s Rally-X is a great example of this. The concept, on paper, is simple: drive a car around a maze and collect flags while not crashing into rocks or other cars. The execution, meanwhile, is the sort of thing that will have you flinging your controller out of a window before long — but you’ll still keep coming back for more.
Toaplan shoot ’em ups are pretty beloved by collectors of classic arcade and console titles — but they got a few ports to home computers, too.
Flying Shark for Atari ST is one such example. And while in some ways it demonstrates the ST’s weaknesses when compared to more dedicated gaming hardware, it’s actually a pretty competent version of the original game and certainly one that I enjoyed playing quite a bit back in the day.
One of the fun things about the modern retro community is its willingness to take on common criticisms of past classics and work on those things to make them better.
Such is the case with Moon Patrol Redux, a project which takes the already pretty good version of Irem’s classic Moon Patrol for Atari 8-bit and enhances it with a better player sprite, a colour palette that’s truer to the arcade original and a few other tweaks here and there. The result is the best version of Moon Patrol you can play on the good ol’ Atari!
Several games from the early years of the Atari 2600 were based on earlier dedicated video game hardware released by Atari — and Video Pinball is a good example.
Offering a simple but surprisingly enjoyable take on pinball — albeit one that only slightly resembles the real thing — Video Pinball is a fun game with which to while away a few minutes, especially if you don’t feel like working your brain too hard.
There’s a lot of early arcade games out there that don’t get the love and attention they deserve — but Hamster’s Arcade Archives series has been going a long way to bring a lot of these forgotten classics back from the dead.
Traverse USA from Irem is a great example. I’d never heard of it before, but it’s actually a lot of fun. Combining top-down racing with some simplistic vanishing point dodge ’em up action, it’s a delight to play — and surprisingly addictive!
