My favourite computer games.Whilst I was growing up all those centuries ago, I was heavily into my computer gaming.Here are some of the games I spent far too much of my early and teen years playing, rather than doing something constructive. Like study, tidy my room, or go outside.This is not a final definitive list, I may add more games when and if I remember them...Did you play these games as well?Do you remember them?I do!#neverforget
Commodore Plus/4
My first proper computer, although most of my childhood friends had Commodore C64's and Sinclair ZX Spectrum's, I still managed to get some quality games for this system, and as it was my first, there are many more great memories available.You never forget your first one.
Jack Attack
Squashing spinning rugby balls that had faces before they squashed you sounds like cheese induced night terrors, but it was actually very good fun. My version came on cartridge, so instantly loaded when turned on.
Winter Events
Compete in the six thrilling events: Biathlon, Bobsled, Ski Jump, Slalom, Downhill and Speed Skating, complete with a short intro animation of an athlete running towards, and lighting the Olympic flame. Biathlon kept me entertained for some time.
Treasure Island
This game came with a photocopied map, but it was a bit easy as I could complete it with 100% every time I played it.
Mercenary, Escape from Targ
A whole planet recreated in wire-frame graphics, when I worked out the box with 15939 written on it was PEPSI viewed from behind I was so chuffed.
Exorcist
What a tune. But nothing more than a Pac Man clone where you had to illuminate the walls of the maze rather than eat the pills. And you are called Sparky. The in-game music is permanent etched into my brain. But it was still good fun.
Icicle Works
Another quality 8 bit tune. Controlling Santa Claus forging a path through snow collecting little gift wrapped boxes that made up a toy car or a train when enough of them were collected, while trying to avoid polar bears, falling snow balls and (weirdly) black snow storms that multiplied and spread like bacteria.
Space Sweep (and Invaders)
Not much to this game, just navigate through open (but highly repetitive) space avoiding everything and navigating to the mother-ship before you ran out of fuel, you could shoot stuff as well. The in-game music was cool.Invaders was just a rubbish Space Invaders clone.
Rockman
Almost a clone of Boulderdash, but with the worst monophonic in-game music ever and a full screen image of a sad white man in a hat when you died.
Saboteur
As I had the Plus 4 rather than the C16, I could play the enhanced version, which was the same version as other platforms, a bit easy as I could complete it every time. An annoying feature of this game was it stayed resident in memory and just restarted when the reset button was pressed, meaning you had to turn the machine off for a few seconds if you wanted to play something else afterwards.Queue white noise from the TV if you forgot to turn it down first.
Monty on the Run
I got this game for Christmas one year, sometime in the middle of the night much to my parents annoyance, although it kept me busy until mid morning. Lacking the SID chip music from the C64 due to the compatibility with the memory lacking C16 and only having simple sound effects instead, it was still a good game.
Enigma
Was one of my favourite games, a simple 'avoid everything that moves around a flip screen maze' type game. One time a short power fluctuation from the electricity supply scrambled the memory and created a bug that turned off the collision detection, so I could explore the whole game without getting killed.
Tutti Frutti
Inspired in part by Mr Do. You are Super Strawberry, collect cherries, drop apples onto, or shoot one ball at a time into the Acid Apples, all while a jolly little tune plays in the background.
Squirm
You're a funny little head moving around a maze collecting eggs laid by the Queen Worm before the workers get them, or you. Don't forget to catch the Glow worm, otherwise the lights go out!
Spectipede
A clone of Centipede, Shoot the Spectipede which moves across the screen and drops down one line when it hits the end or a mushroom, it splits in two when you shoot it, and it drops more mushrooms and sprouts fleas which drop straight down the screen.
BMX Simulator
BMX racing, around an on-screen course with obstacles and jumps. Strange control system meant you crashed a lot but it was still fun.
Big Mac
Your standard run and jump game in a power station with pistons that flattened you and switches that opened walls. The full title was More adventures of Big Mac, The Mad Maintenance Man. There was another separate game called Mr Puniverse with a different back story which was very similar in gameplay.
Prospector Pete
A game partly inspired by O'Reilly's Mine on the C64. You moved around underground collecting gold and avoiding meanies, which you could kill with dynamite. After a short while some dynamite would explode at the bottom and the underground tunnels would start to flood with water, it's a race to the top while still collecting the gold.
Harbour Attack
Underwater bombs slowly move up and down in between lines, you have to navigate a tiny little submarine around them and through the gaps in the lines in a similar way to Flappy Bird. Once you got past the right hand side of the screen it went to Level 2. I always died shortly after this, so have little memory of it.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K
Is there anyone out there who hasn't heard of the Dizzy series of games, written by the Oliver Twins and published by Codemasters, You play as an egg with boxing gloves and boots that can walk, jump, roll and fall without cracking or breaking and oozing white and yellow goo. The object of the game is to collect certain objects while avoiding the hazards and put them into a cauldron and hopefully defeat the evil wizard Zaks.
Treasure Island Dizzy
The next instalment in the series, and enhanced for the 128K Spectrum with fancy music and speech. Obviously you are now on an island, which the object is to escape from. This was a more inventory based game where you had to find and move objects to where they would be more useful, and some objects would give you immunity again certain situations, like the snorkel would allow you to go underwater, whereas it's instant death without it. And on Top of all that you had to find thirty gold coins with only one life.
Fantasy World Dizzy
Some would say the best instalment in the Dizzy series. This game introduces the rest of the Yolkfolk which includes Dizzy's (I assume) girlfriend. Rather stupidly Daisy had managed to get herself kidnapped by the King Troll while walking through a forest with Dizzy, and he has to chase after them. Whilst on his way Dizzy must solve puzzles by collecting and using objects like the previous game, and also collecting 30 coins, some of which are not obvious to find.
Magicland Dizzy
The evil wizard Zaks had been a bit of a bad sort again and cast spells on the rest of the Yolkfolk, but fortunately for us not Dizzy himself, that could be a bit of a hindrance to Zaks plans. Anyway Dizzy has to find his friends and reverse the spells in a similar style to the previous games.
Dizzy, Kwik Snax
On the 128K Spectrum the title screen was the Dizzy crew as a band playing the title theme with simple animation, I thought this was cool. Interestingly the Commodore C64 version of Kwik Snax was an entirely different but fun game, I've even included a screenshot for you. Because, you know, reasons.
Bomb Jack
Defuse bombs by collecting them, avoid the baddies, progress to the next screen, the backdrops of famous world locations looked gorgeous, most people seem to remember the Sphinx.
Bubble Bobble
One of the most famous in-game music ever, and cute Japanese style graphics of dragons, bubbles and fruit. Blow bubbles to trap the baddies, then jump into them to pop them and turn them into fruit. Collect the E X T E N D letters for a surprise!
Gauntlet
A top down view of a medieval soldier progressing through a maze full of ghosts, you have to shoot everything and collect food and keys and use them to open doors.
Slightly Magic
You are Bigwiz the wizard's nephew, and he's buggered off out in a hurry somewhere without you, and without his wand or closing the lab door. A witch is involved in this, I'm sure of it. Anyway the game play is similar to the Dizzy series of games but with added spell casting, it did have very good graphics for a Spectrum, and lots of speech on the 128K.
Trap Door
One of the best looking games on the Spectrum. BERK! You have to complete tasks set by the thing upstairs and send them up in a dumb waiter, sometimes this means opening the trap door, but don't leave it open. You have some assistance by Boni, a talking skull who gives you hints and tips, and Drutt, an annoying spider who eats worms.
Jumping Jack
A very simple game that has been ported to mobile phones, you jump up through moving holes in the lines on the screen above you, but if you mis-time your jump, you'd knock yourself out for a few seconds, which usually resulted in falling back down a few levels.
Spy vs Spy
Best played with two players, move around through flip scrolling screens solving puzzles and leaving booby traps for the other player in the quest to find something important that I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up.
Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off-Road Racer
A bit like BMX Simulator, but with monster trucks. Monster trucks being uber cool at the time. I've absolutely no idea who Ivan Stewart is, or why he has given himself Ironman as his middle name, I very much doubt his parents chose it, but we'll gloss over that for now...
Commodore Amiga 500 Plus
That intro, it was just like watching the TV series. Actually not a bad game which was unusual for the time as movie and TV related games were usually rushed out before they were ready (ET on the Atari 2600 anyone?), Using a quarter to call Moe's tavern is still funny. Using the X-Ray specs would allow you to see the head-hugging aliens attached to the townsfolk, which you could jump on to kill. The object of the game is to progress through the levels by completing tasks like spray painting red paint over purple objects to ultimately rescue your family members.
Lemmings
Another game that everyone must of played as it was ported to almost every system under the sun, but the Amiga's original version was best. Who would have thought that many suicidal lemmings could make a legendary game?
Zool
Sega had Sonic, Nintendo had Mario, the Amiga had..? Gremlin Graphics thought that Zool could be the mascot, This game was a bit closer to Sonic with the speed of the character, however the in-game sponsorship by Chupa Chups (horrible boiled sweet type lollipops) was way over the top.
Monkey Island 1/2
One of the finest point and click adventure game series there is, Using the SCUMM engine like many others of the time it was filled with many jokes, some of the best were the insults during the sword fighting events. Your character was Guybrush Threepwood and the antagonist was the Pirate LeChuck, every now and again on meeting new characters Guybrush would announce 'I'm Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!' It was almost impossible to die, you just wandered around until you worked out how to solve the puzzle that was holding you back.
The Addams Family
Basically a Super Mario clone, but you're Gomez Addams rescuing other family members, ridiculously easy to complete due to well publicised cheats.
Chaos Engine
Steampunk run and gun at it's finest. The Chaos Engine which was built from future technology has gone berserk and transformed the English countryside for the worse, cut it off from the rest of the world and attacks anyone who tries to come to England to deal with the problem. So it's up to two mercenaries of your choice to correct it.
Cannon Fodder
War has never been so much fun according to the theme song, despite that bold claim Cannon Fodder was good fun, you viewed the battle zone from above, and directed your troops using the mouse. When this mission usually failed your soldiers turned into gravestones.
Turrican 3
A pretty standard run, jump and shoot everything type game, however fast gameplay and impressive visuals and audio made this game shine. Big end-of-level bosses and many power ups added to it. The game would stay resident in memory, so on a reset you only needed to put the disk in to start, then everything would be loaded from RAM, cutting down the load times considerably, more like a cartridge based gaming console.
Another World
Everybody loves a particle accelerator, and when lightning strikes one during an experiment one night, the user is transported to Another World. One of the finest games available which featured pre-rendered cut scenes during gameplay and the use of rotoscoping where actors are filled performing various manoeuvres and the individual frames are digitised to make the character's on-screen movements. It made it look realistic.
Fire and Ice
You played a blue Coyote, and you could throw projectiles at baddies to freeze them, and then smash them, occasionally they would drop parts of the key you needed to collect to complete the level.
Simon The Sorcerer
Cashing in on the success of Monkey Island was this similar game, Chris Barrie from Red Dwarf provided the voice for the original CD version of the game, it didn't really match the character who was supposed to be a young boy, but was cool anyway. The floppy disc version did not have any speech obviously.
Pinball Fantasies
Pinball, nuff said. Fast moving gameplay, bright colourful graphics, awesome tunes and sound effects and insanely high scores made this the best pinball simulator of it's time.
Superfrog
A fusion of Sonic and Mario, you are a frog that can run very fast and jump very high. The plot is to rescue the princess, who hopes that a kiss will turn the frog into a prince, however instead it turns the princess into a frog. And she looked a bit peeved about it.
New Zealand Story
A Kiwi with a bow and arrow, was around for the 8-bit generation but overhauled for the 16-bit. The objective is to rescue other kiwis that are in cages. Cute sound and graphics and easy gameplay made for a great game.
Rainbow Islands
Bubble Bobble 2, but a completely different game entirely, now instead of being a dragon, you are a human with an umbrella, and you can shoot rainbows of all things. You could use these rainbows as traps for enemies, or as temporary platforms to progress upwards, they don't last forever mind. It's a race to the top using the rainbows or platforms while avoiding or killing everything and collecting the usual powerups.
Pang
Shoot one large bouncy ball that splits into two slightly smaller balls until it's small enough to go pop, could get quite manic with loads of small balls bouncing around, obviously one touch from a ball meant instant death, however sometimes the balls would drop powerups to assist you.
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker
A game that pushed the limits of what the Amiga could do. A snooker table and all the balls rendered in 3D space, and you could move the table around to work out which shot to take next. All the calculation of where the balls would end up after the cue ball was struck was done while the cue was lining up to strike, and if you left the game alone for long enough the balls would start to pull faces at you.
Archer Maclean's Pool
Exactly the same as above, but pool. BTW, Archer Maclean is not a famous pool player, he was the developer behind both Whirlwind Snooker and Pool amongst many other's. I lost count of how many people thought otherwise, and refused to believe me.
Xenon 2
A vertical scrolling shoot-em-up with an epic soundtrack sampled from Bomb The Bass - MegaBlast. Looked fantastic and had the usual powerups associated with vertical scrolling shoot-em-up's. But tuuuunnne!
Prince of Persia
One of the first games to feature rotoscoping, the object is to progress through the castle solving puzzles, sword fighting with guards and rescue the princess, all against the clock. Various potions could be drunk to give temporary powers, or kill you. First thing to do is find the sword...
Shadow of the beast 3
Many industry experts didn't like this game, but I did. Aarbron has regained his human shape but must defeat Maletoth once and for all to become fully human. Included atmospheric music and decent visuals.
James Pond 2 Robocod
Starting outside Santa's toy factory you need to navigate through 50 levels of toy themed rooms with the occasional boss to defeat. You have no weapons and to kill the enemies you have to jump onto them, a bit like Super Mario, On some levels you get to ride in toy cars or trains. One power at your disposal is your super extendable suit, that can stretch upwards indefinitely (unless hit by a baddie) allowing you to grab onto the underside of platforms to reach otherwise inaccessible areas. The UK version had in-game sponsorship by Penguin chocolate biscuits.
Great Giana Sisters
Nothing more than a Super Mario Bros rip off, featuring very similar level design, visuals and music, but an enjoyable game despite it. How they got away with it for so long i'll never know.
Gods
I loved playing this game, even though I had no idea what was going on and never got very far before dying. I remember there was switches involved, everybody likes switches in games.
Rick Dangerous 2
A funny little platform game, you had to progress through the screens avoiding or killing the baddies with dynamite before they used their blowpipes against you.
Golden Axe
Like the arcade game, you had to travel along slashing baddies with your character of choice, at the end of every level there was a goblin that dropped health potions when struck with the aforementioned character's weapon of choice.
Robocop 3
A free-roaming first person shooter on the Amiga with the occasional driving section, controlled with the mouse for accurate control. It used Amiga copper pallet tricks to give the impression of fluid movement when the frame rate was sometimes as bad as 1 frame/sec. By rotating the colour pallet for the floor and road when moving forwards it created the illusion of smooth movement without using the CPU or graphics chip, so that could get on with the rest of the screen, very clever indeed. Interestingly the film was delayed during production while the game was ready for release, so they released it before the film.
First Samurai
A bright and colourful game with lots of copper background colour effects. In this game you are the first samurai ever, (the clue is in the name) and all you have to do is survive the journey through the game collecting items that allow you to fight the end of level bosses. To assist you on your journey you can eat food, drink sake, and occasionally ring a dainty little bell that summons 'something' to remove obstacles blocking your path..
Project X
An insanely hard side scrolling shoot-em-up with many power-ups available in the lower levels, collect the power up tokens and press the space bar when the power up you wanted was highlighted, although even when powered up to the max getting past level two was almost impossible, even the developers released a patch distributed through magazine cover discs to ease up on the difficulty level a bit, and also wipe out pirated versions of the game. There is a parody of this game in Superfrog entitled Project F.
Workbench 2.0
I know this isn't a game, but I spent for ever making the perfect desktop environment with all the programmes (apps hadn't been invented at that time) I used that fitted onto an 880K floppy disc.
Deluxe Paint 2
Similarly this isn't a game, but I spent a massive amount of time using this software to create animations, and somewhere I still have the high resolution (at the time) image of the Workbench floppy disk I spent ages creating.
MED/OctaMED
One of the best music trackers ever, it was so simple to use sound samples to make decent sounding music, in fact Urban Shakedown used MED on two synced Amigas to create the track Some Justice. I once spent all evening trying to recreate Poing by Rotterdam Termination Source because I found a 'Poing' sound effect, some parts sounded ok, other parts didn't sound quite so good.
Nintendo Gameboy Classic
My first handheld gaming device, I had this when I was at school (As did many other kids.) Without blowing my own trumpet, I was the best at Tetris (in my own opinion, others may disagree.)
Super Mario Land
I loved this game although it was ridiculously easy and too short, the in-game music was cool.
Tetris
One of the most iconic games, and what a tune. I was a master at this game, I could complete Game B on level 9, high 5, if you managed to do this you were rewarded with a screen of Russian dancers on platforms then a rocket taking off. Also passing 150 lines in Game A was no problem for me.
Sega Saturn
Swapped an old TV for this system, it needed some faults fixing before it was stable enough to play on.
Sega Rally
Only a choice of two cars available, Lancia Delta or Toyota Celica (I always chose the Lancia) I could win every race and the bonus stage. Like Outrun, this game extracted an obscene amount of money from me in the arcades.
Clockwork Knight
This was a cool game, you played as a knight that had a large key stuck in his back. The objective is to rescue the princess, although when you do, she cannot wake up. Everything throughout the game is based on household items like kitchen equipment and kids toys, including the end of level bosses
Is there anyone out there who didn't play Outrun in the arcade? I did and spent many pennies doing so. This version on the Saturn is better than the arcade as the frame rate is higher than the original. Did anybody choose anything other than Magical Sound Shower? The same probably applies to the other two games, although to be honest it was all about Outrun for me.
Daytona USA
Lower frame rate than the arcade original and only rendering polygons that are visible which led to pop ups, it was a disappointing conversion to the Saturn, however it was still fun to play. Daytona, Let's go away!
Rayman
Rayman, an enjoyable side scrolling platform game, unusual for it's time as the rest of the world was obsessing about first person shooters. Oh no, someone has stolen The Great Protoon (whatever that is) and only Rayman for some reason can retrieve it, did they even try calling 999? Armed with a bizarre floating hand that can punch enemies from a distance, you have to get Rayman to the exclamation mark at the end of each level.
Sega Dreamcast
Epic could be used to describe this game, a free roaming game based in Japan in 1986. The objective is to avenge your father's death, the game is played in real-time, meaning you have night and day, summer and winter and different weather depending on the season. It also popularised QTE's (Quick Time Events.) There was fighting too, you could practice your moves in the park, or in the dojo before going into battle. Although most will remember going into the arcade and playing 1980's Sega arcade games like Hang-on and Space Harrier.
Re-Volt
Virtual R/C cars on various tracks, was great fun when playing with friends and family, or just blitzing round the stunt arena on your own.
ChuChu Rocket
This game was given away for free with the Dreamcast to promote the online experience, however get four people and four controllers and it's an ideal party game. All you have to do is rescue the most mice by directing them to your space ship, but don't let a cat in. At your disposal are arrows you place on the floor in front of the hoards of mice, these direct the mice in the direction the arrow is pointing, therefore you can guide them towards your ship. Obviously other people can redirect them to their ship instead. Every so often a special mouse with a question mark hovering over it's head will enter a ship, causing something to happen, like arrows disappearing, a cat attack or ships to swap positions. Seriously good fun but can lead to drunken punch-ups
The House of the Dead 2
Zombies, millions of them, and you can shoot them (if you have the hardware) another game best played while slightly drunk at a party.
Crazy Taxi
You are a typical British city centre taxi driver, the object is to find, pick up and get your passenger to their intended destination as fast as possible, extra points available if you get some air on the way. All with the Offspring coming in your ears.
MSR (Metropolis Street Racer)
A great racing game that should have been more popular than it was, it introduced the Kudos points system where you'd get more points for drifting and other stylish driving, and have points taken away for crashing. Many of the features of this game ended up in Project Gotham Racing.
Super Nintendo (via emulation)
There can be only one game for me on the SNES...
Super Mario World
Ok Ok, yes I know it was via emulation, firstly on my old laptop, then on my Dreamcast, eventually on my phone, (so I always have SMW with me.)But I have spent so much time playing Super Mario World across all these different platforms, that I went out and found a SNES at a car boot sale, and bought it just for this game alone. So yes, it deserves to be in this list, and it's my list, so I can make the rules up as needed!So many secrets, 96 different exits to find. Star Road. Impressive mode 7 graphical effects. It can be completed in an hour, or you can take forever.Best platform game ever? Best game ever? It could just be.
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