I must admit this is a little bit of a cop-out, since most anyone who ever touched a real ST will know about this game. Its like doing a game of the week and mentioning World of Warcraft. Still, as I’ve been working on OutcaST for Pandora and Wiz this week, you will have to forgive me not doing my homework and picking a more obscure title. (To be sure, I will hit up Midwinter, Virus and the Sentinal later; also to be sure I will hit up the classics like Super Sprint, Nebulus, Time Bandits and Carrier Command all in due time.)

My selection process is a trifle more complex than you might think — while certainly targeting some of my personal favourites from back in the day, I am also using this project to encourage myself to fiddle with games I did not play much or at all back then and to this discover ‘new games’ — anyone whose done their time on ebay will be familiar with the term “NOS” – New Old Stock, meaning something old but that is in new condition — and this is no different. It is further complicated by the question — am I restricting msyelf to games that are ‘playable’ on the handhelds and sites I’m frequenting, or trying to raise awareness in some small way to the platform as a whole? Am I avoiding games that just don’t work in my emu but that work in other emus? Anyway, my goal is really to have a bit of retro wankery myself and to help provide some options or long lost friends to you guys as well, so I’ll try to keep them well rounded… though I may avoid a few trouble genres — I will have to mention Falcon and F29 Retaliator every other week, but as they are unplayable on handhelds and possibly on beefy desktops as well (with such modern 3d, it is hard to go back to 5 fps 3d right? :)

Read more…

These last few weeks while writing up the “Game of the Week”, I’ve encountered many interested people are less familiar with the old ST, or who just assume it is the venerable “Atari 2600 VCS” 8-bit game console everyone had back in the day. I thought I might demystify things just a touch this round before breaking into my game suggestion.

Atari certainly was known for the “VCS”, but also for their many 8-bit consumer oriented computers — the “Atari 400″ line, the “Atari 800″, or you may know XE, XL, XEGS, or other acronyms. I was a Commodore Vic-20 kid who wanted an Amiga, but our family went to the mighty ST as it was in the same class as Amiga yet infinitely cheaper.

What was the Atari 520ST? (and subsequent machines, 1040, Mega, STacy, ST Book, TT030, Falcon, etc)

Atari wanted to enter the 32-bit consumer general purpose computer market with a machine that could also play games. They knew their brand was a strong home computer and strong gaming brand, so they wanted to marry them and build a machine to combat the Mac at its weakest point — price. The Mac was also Motorola 68000 based, but very expensive and targetting business and education. Atari had recently picked up an ex-Commodore leader and wanted to repeat that companies success  story — keep or grow the home market right out from under lazy market leaders.

Anyway, all told the ST went from concept to production in around 6-months time; the hardware, operating system including Atari specific modifications, and launch titles all built in 6 months simultaneously, is quite an achievement. (Some fantastic stories of this stressful time can be found over at Coder Dad blog, who was in there working on the OS at the time.) The overall quality of the hardware design under such constraints is also pretty good. Sure, its not a strong gaming machine (no special video hardware like a SNES game console might have), no super strong audio hardware (instead, they used cheap parts TI was trying to dump), and few custom chips (compare to the Amiga which is full of them.) Looking at it another way, Atari designed day zero to have a very powerful base with few things in there to impede, and comprised of mostly off the shelf parts. The CPU to memory bus is very efficient, the OS although admittedly goofy was not ‘in the way’ too much and was extremely easy to use, and highly advanced for its time. This is a machine full of firsts — one of the earliest fully mouse driven graphical interfaces with windows and pulldown menus at is core, and including applications even my mom figured out how to use. We looked down our nose at those poor bastards learning to read their Word Perfect keyboard templates, while we had our clicky clicky interfaces.

So it lacked custom graphic hardware, it made up for it with typical Atari spirit and fast hardware, so the games were pretty good until they got eclipsed later by the Amiga. (The Amiga, while slightly slower to start with, was an expandable hardware design and so new models and new options really drove it onward, whereas years later the ST models were still more or less similar to the launch machine. Later beefier machines were much less popular and so their new hardware was never used beyond the original specifications. Few developers made use of the STE wider colour palette or blitter hardware and simply fell back to treating it like a regular ST.)

Anyway, consider — Dungeon Master, first graphical dungeon romp using a mouse. Populous — first god game. STacy was one of the first laptops, and I think the first desktop replacement laptop — a full ST on the go, with backlit monitor and hard drive (and a good 15-30 minutes of battery life, woowoo!) Many extraordinary titles (real time 3d with Carrier Command, say), not to mention an absolutely incredible application library (including even Word Perfect, I bet you did not know that.) Fantastic desktop publishing software (second only to the Mac, in fact the ST was quite a powerhouse in publishing circles), built in MIDI (amazing for musicians, barely used by home consumers admittedly), an all around great machine.

Atari succeeded — they built a machine in the same class as Amiga and Mac, yet at a fraction of the price. For a few years, Atari was king of its class.

Later models (STFM included a floppy drive and TV-out, then the STE with enhanced graphical/memory hardware, then the Mega line with business oriented detached keyboard and hard drives, and extreme machines like the TT030 and Falcon) just got increasingly behind their competition, but were still fine machines. Still, its the original ST which simply blew everyone away at the end of 1985 and begin of 1986 that I rave about today. It was not the best in any way, but all told, it was one of the greats. I ran a BBS from approximately 1987 to 1993 or so on that little beast!

Edit: Above I was referring to Atari’s goal of a 32-bit machine; in the end, the ST is a 16/32-bit as they said (hence “ST” – Sixteen/Thirtytwo).

I’ve received a few notes regarding this ‘GotW’ effort; for one, since I mentioned I’d hoped to avoid the well-trodden path (reviewing the very best of the titles, and for the ST there are many) that perhaps I’m projecting to newbies only the mediocre games. Perhaps I should not avoid the true greats, or should do a special posting summing up a bunch of them, so that I can just point at it and say ‘therrums!’ .. I’ll leave that for a later date and instead review a title which _I_ really enjoyed back in the day. I don’t recall now if it was popular or not.  Another note questioned about genres .. as the ST was blessed with many very different kinds of games from text adventures to puzzlers to flight sims to wargames of every kind, I could easily strike gold for anyone reader only every once in awhile.. but alas I’ve not the time to knock out 5-10 of these per week to address one from each genre. Still, I’ll mull it over. There are of course a few very good ST fan sites such as Little Green Desktop, Atari Legend, Atari Forum, etc .. so feel free to hit them up :)

Inspiration for this post was drawn from a thought I had .. we all know that 3D ‘ages worse’ than 2D, and this comes quadruply so for flight-sims. While you can fire up Mario Br^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hGreat Guiana Sisters and always enjoy it regardless of how ghetto the graphics, firing up Microsoft Flight Sim 2 will be brutal nomatter how much the nostalgia. Worse still are that with flight sims using such comprehensive controls, they’ll never really be playable even if you wanted to, anymore.. at least on a handheld or games console. Still, going back in my mind to great ST gaming moments, one will never forget chasing down the train that circled the landscape in Falcon and trying to fly through the open door in one of the railcars. I’ll never forget when that realization struck that the screamers in Dungeon Master were both edible and would slowly respawn, and so could be herded into a room with a portcullus and trapped for an infinite food supply. I’ll never forget blowing the first planet in Captive, hacking the file format of Breach so I could make my characgter ‘uber’, obliterating an army with one spell in Phantasie, taking over Chicago in Roadwar 2000, and I could go on, since I was quite the ST nerd.

And I will not forget in _D/Generation_ the first or second Genoq employee I rescued who ran over to say hello, and then got shot in the back by one of the traps I had tried so hard to avoid for myself. That’ll teach those survivors to run over to their would be rescuers!

D/Generation is a proto horror-puzzler, a game with a sensor of humour and intelligence and yet was relatively unforgiving.

Platform: Atar ST featured, but also upon Amiga and PC. It is highly tempting for me to attempt a remake :)

Play Now: Any emu of merit will handle it for your platform of choice. OutcaST on the gp2x, CaSTaway on the PSP, and OutcaST on the Pandora or Wiz when I release it (soon!), among others. (Hatari runs it fine on desktops, Wiz and Pandora, as do STeem Engine and WinSTon and others.)

A note on the ROMs floating about: As always I recommend ripping your own original disks, for both concerns of legality and also since usually they provide the best experience. Of course they often back then had painful protections (looking crap up in the manual, laser burnt holes in the disks, and so on), so do as you will. I’ve collected numerous copies and cracks of this title and must note that even some of the beefier ST emus sometimes get confused during load (unpack) time due to something some of the pack groups did. Most of them don’t like my emus too much, and I never did bother to go figure out why .. still, my original disk and a very simple crack disk work fine. (If it has a scrolling or bouncy intro, its probably the one that will not work with OutcaST. If it has an intro that blinks by that you can barely notice, you’re probably in luck. Look in the ‘complete collection’ type sources..)

Review:

Now while the artwork is functional and not striking, the gameplay I humbly submit makes up for it. One of my favorite titles of all time (Time Bandits for the ST) is also … cute, but utterly fantastic. Being a retro fan yourself I trust you can look beyong what the years have done :) The game also doesn’t really have a soundtrack, so you’ll have to go with me on this one.

Suffice to say it is an isometric perspective with your character dropped onto the top of a tower to deliver a package; sadly this tower, owned by a genetic engineering company (Resident Evil anyone?), has been taken over by the experiments (the A/Generation, B/Generation, etc) and you’ve got to find yourself a way out. Essentially each screen is a mini puzzle unto itself, with a few multi-screen gimmicks (find a key here, use it there.) Initially the player starts with no weapon and your job is to figure out which things are harmful (monsters popping out the floor, rotating on the spot, bouncing around, etc, electrified walls and floors and other traps) and which things are not (computer terminals with messages, keys, pressure plates, wall switches, doors, other civilians.) Later you’ll locate a laser pistol whose shots will rebound from the walls, letting you activate certain gadgets arond corners.

Most of the gameplay is in timing — one monster will be pivoting on the spot so you’ll have to run around it in the direction of rotation to stay out of harms way, while heading for a wall to push a button, and in basic logic — do this, then that, then t’other, to open a door out of this room. Usually you have to clear a room out and activate or utilize various gizmos in order to proceed in any meaningful way.

Death doesn’t mean too much, which is good for what in essence is a puzzler more than an action game, but they do provide only a limited number of lives, which is a shame, but after a few matches you’ll have caught onto the ‘rules’ and will know where to step and where not to, and can really get into the meat of the game.

So if you’re looking for a game with arcade but not terribly difficult bits, and where you have to pause for just a few moments to think about how to proceed, this is a great oldie. It _is_ a bit tired to look at if you’ve not got the rosie glasses of nostalgia, but its a fun game that I’ve enjoyed in the past, and also recently on my mighty GP2x. Theres a certain sense of horror-comedy to it all which is pretty entertaining, so do be sure to activate (by walking into) computer terminals and plaques and so forth. Smell the roses, being careful they’re not attack-roses first :)

I made a screenshot from the first screen; notice the rotating worm-cannon on the left, and the cowering civilian on the right.

D/Generation

I posted an idea to one of my favourite hangouts (the GP32x site) and some folks showed interest. While writing a cross-platform game of the week column would be most awesome, it is not within my powers or my time limits I’m afraid, so I will stick to offering a Game of the Week for my beloved childhood platform — the almighty Atari ST (competitor to the Amiga, not the Atari 2600 if thats what you are thinking.)

Should you have any ideas or requests or reviews of your own, do let me know and we can collaborate (here or at GP32x or elsehwere.) Really, even folks want to jump in with C64 or Amiga or SNES or the like GotW’s let me know and we can do something possibly magnificent. But I do get ahead of myself.

My goal for GotW is to highlight a lesser known but still interesting title (where ‘interesting’ can mean very good, or interesting to me for some other cryptic reason that I will endeaver to explain.) So I need not delve into the richness that is Lemmings, Dungeon Master or Civilization (play them _now_ my friends!), say, when I can instead strike a deal with … well, let me step you through the many fantastic titles you might have missed week by week shall I?

SWIV

Platform: Atari ST featured, though also popular on Amiga (and to a lesser extent on the C64 and Speccy IIRC)

Play Now: Your emulator of choice for those platforms; OutcaST for GP2x and GP2x Wiz (also known as CaSTaway for the PSP) are verified, since I wrote them :)

Atari ST ROM: Comes in many options, but I have a Medway Boys crack I must admit is most handy as it lacks any protection annoyances and includes a Trainer option

SWIV is a vertical shooter (a SHMUP for fans of the genre) which is both pretty good and interesting for its technical merits. Developed, I believe, by the same folks who ported Silkworm to the ST from the Arcade, it is in my books the spiritual successor to Xenon 1 (not Xenon 2: Megablast) and Silkworm itself. What it inherited from those titles was the playability of airborn (in this case Helicopter) or ground (Tank) and a two player game where both are in play at once. Designing the levels for a single player who could be either form (chosen at start of the game) must have proven challenging but they did an excellent job — the game is not overly difficult, and is relatively lengthy.

Silkworm itself is a decent port of an excellent Arcade title; in that game (a horizontal SHMUP) the players move right; the chopper can only fire foreward and the jeep can fire any direction but of course has limited movement options.. these limitations added teamwork strategy, but did make the level design a little painful. SWIV is this same sort of approach, though in vertical orientation.

While not the very best shooter on the platform, it garnered excellent reviews at the time for its playability and a few specific features; I admit I encountered it late in the ST game — a few years ago while developing an ST emulator in fact — but I highly recommend it to ST aficionados. It doesn’t perform too many nasty hardware tricks if I recall, but does some very interesting things in the actual code. I should not know that except that it brought out some CPU emulation issues .. so I was in the unenviable position of working through their assembly code to debug my simulated CPUs operation and witnessed some of their trickery. While playing the game you will on occasion notice the floppy disk light up, without interupting game play — they were clever with their timing to pre-cache necessary sprites and level data during gameplay to avoid large ‘level loading’ pauses. They load before needing and unload after needing to free up memory, permitting the player to tromp through enormous levels without delay. They also do some trickery to keep a large number of sprites onscreen and in motion .. the most popular ST models had no hardware sprites so this was always a weak point in the machine, but the SWIV developers pulled it off better than most others.

In summary, SWIV is not a ‘bullet hell’ type of SHMUP per se, but it certainly was working its way there — you will regularly encounter dozens of enemies on screen at once in formation, or dozens of bullets to be avoided. Its a good looking and fun to play shooter where you can play as a tank or chopper.

Good times. Of course, I am a shooter man .. Sky Shark (Flying Shark) is my poison of choice and the first arcade cabinet I picked up.

Aside: My baby girl recently started speaking in 2-3 word sentences; last night when I tucked her into bed, she said “love you daddy.” Another life achievement down, and well.. it just doesn’t get much better than that one :)

Atari was a great company in so many ways, but I’ll not go into that here. Their last real console release was the Atari Jaguar around the same time as the Sony Playstation (original), and we all know who won that race. Truly it was no competition.. the Jag was a cool platform, but it really could not compete with these more 3D oriented machines. And a lot of its software was _terrible_ (and that is being kind.) Still, it maintained Atari’s playful feal with some games being very original, and always feeling like the designer was not so much a corporation but a drinking buddy. To me as a retro collector, an Atar fan, retrogamer and coder .. the Jag was always a like-hate relationship.

I mean, it had Dragon’s Lair on CD. *heart*

But it also had Kasumi Ninja, which is not even as good as Custer’s Revenge if you catch my drift.

Anyway, through my various moves I’ve dragged my poor Jaguar around, but today I’ve sold it off. A fine seeming lad picked it up and sounds like he’ll have some fun with it, for which I’m glad. I mean — we retro guys go through a phase of wanting to collect it all but in practice we just rarely have the space and eventually have to specialize. But more .. I like to get things into a good home, and if I’m not going to fire up this classy little beast, ever, might as well move it on along to someone who will. A museum piece kept in the dark is worthless.. a museum piece on display is worthy. So I’ll miss this little machine, this indestructable black box (none of this red-ring BS in old hardware!) .. but on the other hand, my home will be forever clean of Kasumi Ninja.

Everyone knows I’ve got a mental problem when it comes to retro hardware or anything with Atari written on it; I’ve collected all sorts of ST hardware but I thought I’d take some pics of one of the rarer pieces I’ve got – the ST Book, of which only about 1000 were ever produced and likely most are damaged or lost. Really, right now I’m going through another round of ‘trim the fat’ to make room in the house, and after that.. perhaps a round of ‘trim the meat’ too (*cry*). But hey, need to reduce the amount of junk in the place, and make room for the <secret’s out>baby on the way (teehee!)

The ST Book was one of the first notebook class computers — smaller laptops. It followed the earlier Atari STacy which was a great machine, though a monster weighing in at about 15 pounds.. too heavy to carry , for sure. The ST Book trimmed down features to reduce power consumption and the physical specs, so it lacked a backlight on the display, a floppy drive, various ports you might like.. but it did slip in at around 3 or 4 pounds with a decent battery life and was essentially a full monochrome Atari ST the size of two VCR tapes side by side. With flash memory so it could shut down and start up nearly instantly. In 1990-91. Nice.

All things Atari are old of course, but this class of machine is rarer still so little information exists online aside from references to its mere existance. I’ve been debating whipping up a little wiki about rare Atari machines so threw something quickly together here, though I think I’ll move the content over to the Atari-Forums for other Atari-nerds to find easier.

A few external photos I took of the machine are here; I will open her up (natch!) to get photos of the motherboard, drive and such in a bit — the machine has issues so hopefully its just loose cables and a bad drive, but we’ll see. I suspect the RAM is surface-mount so hopefully I needn’t get in there with precision solder gear.. eep!

• Top (notice the sweet logo!)
• open, keyboard
• back, the ports
• bottom, closed

Still, found out a few things about the history of my specific ST Book so thought I’d spew it out here. Quoting from ‘js2k’ (name changed):

I do have some history on your ST Book. It belonged to Hans Martin-Krober. Hans was in charge of the UNIX System V which was never released and in charge of the midi Music system for the Jaguar. He’s also a very cool guy. If you can get the data off that hard drive it contains some Atari HQ files including some Jaguar goodies. :)

That last bit makes me want to yank the drive (which seems dead or screwy now) and take it to a data-recovery shop.. but that is very pricey. I guess my best bet is to find another drive and try to get it going, and keep this one the shelf for attack someday in the distant future when money grows in my pockets directly.

Any hoo, I’m trying to avoid gushing about the prospects of becoming a dad in 6 months, but I’ll likely explode all over the blog soon. We’ll see.

I stumbled across this DVD-set on ebay and being the Atari-ST-wanker than I am it was only a matter of instants before my willpower broke. I’ve already acquired a prodigious collection of old ST junk and built up a respectible archive of BBS-related software in my little attempt at software preservation, but its been up to the pirates of yesteryear to have kept alive some of the great software from the platform. No one, but no one would have kept their copy of Word Perfect for the ST, so in a way the pirates (yar!) from 1986 have really achieved something. But these barrel-chested fellows didn’t archive the free software, artwork and audio that made up such a large part of that precious 16-bit culture — since it was freely available and distributed by BBS, Fidonet, and user groups already. No effort was made to especially preserve it, so only the pro-tools such as Notator MIDI-notation (still used by some few) or applications that have grown even today (Calamus graphic layout suite) and games live on. Emulation can provide a platform to fire up Gauntlet and Dungeon Master.. but <SallyStruthers>won’t someone please think of the culture?</SallyStruthers> Without effort, no one but I will remember the DEGAS Elite version of Elric some anonymous artist rendered…

A few various Atari ST collections can be had online, mostly disk images of the games for feeding to various emulators. Atari Gothica is a collection that (from my quickly looking through it) is not made up of that — instead it is SIX DVD’s of Atari software, music files, picture files, textfiles and other jetsam from the era. This my friends, is Atari gold! Atari nerds among you will know you can head over to a few FTP sites that existed back in the day through to now, but how long will they remain?

I do have some complaints about this collection; sure, its obviously DVDs burnt in someones basement.. fine, thats how the homebrew and retro communities survive. The disks themselves (arrived very promptly from the seller on ebay.. likely the guy who assembled them?) aren’t well liked by my laptop’s DVD drive, so each file will take a few minutes to copy. One of these days I’ll read all the files off and burn new DVDs myself, but so far I’ve not had errors reading the disks.. just speed problems.

Further, the content is all in self-extracting .exe files — and I don’t know about you, but I never run .exe’s from some guy on ebay. Still, feeding them into an unzip tool has worked fine, since .zip format keeps its header at the end so one can just unzip them and go, without running the .exe’s themselves.

Aside from these nits are the good bits: These disks are each 4 gigabytes of late 1980’s media and programs and tools for the Atari ST, TT and Falcon platforms. If you want crappy techo music made by kids using .MOD ‘Tracker’ programs, theres planty here. If you want thousands of images in formats like Degas, Neopaint, Deluxepaint including Amiga IFF files.. you’ll be in love here. From .TOS and .TTP and .PRG files to GEM Desk Accessories its here. A sweaty heady mix of Atari nostalgia.. the crap you’d find on hundreds of old hard drives (if anyone could still use MFM hard drives!) from back in the day. I ran an ST BBS with 50 whole megabyte sof this junk, and that poor drive died.. so I’m glad through the efforts of Jason Textfiles.com we have the BBS culture preserved, and through all these whacky ST collections we can still keep a small island of 16-bit crappy applications.

One thing I found amusing — I picked a random disk and opened up one of the zip files on it and it had a few thousand old image files. I scrounged for an application that could open them (to avoid firing up an emulator to do so) and voila — I had a complete 320×200 low res series of snapshots that pretty much represented the artwork my brother had on the walls in his room circa 1989. I’ll have to find those images again and post them to the blog .. it’ll take you back. Hell, finding Atari images of Max Headroom take me back. The ‘trash’ media from any given era are a very good indicator of the norm of a time, and these files are no exception.

This is a non-exhaustive list of games I played or found otherwise interesting or significant on the almighty Atari ST. Of course I physically played hundreds more, but these I found interesting or amusing enough to comment about and thought they might help give focus to folks who never had an ST or the resources (*cough* BBS piracy *cough*) to see them all personally. This is of course just my list, and so won’t include a lot of great titles other people enjoyed.. but what can you do? :)

This took *way* too much time to put together :)

Around 200 games :) For details and screenshots, head over to the very good Atari Legend site. BBS games and applications like Cubase will be in another posting someday.

Legend:

‘?’ Entries beginning with ‘?’ weren’t played by me, though I intend to fire them up in an emu soon.

‘=’ Format is ‘game title’ followed by ‘=’ (equal sign) then description; no equals present if no description added. Yes, I’ll toss this in a database someday :)

‘*’ They’re not really marked by genre or score, so its less useful than it could be. I’ll try and do that sometime. But howabout I lay in a *** for games that you should try first.

—

Alternate Reality = immersive though not so pretty an RPG. Had ‘portals’ to expansion packs that never arrived =)
? Amberstar = loic keeps pushing it on me to try; supposedly one of the best RPGs.
? Another World
*** Arkanoid = great conversions, really good audio
Arkanoid 2 : Revenge of Doh
** Axel’s Magic Hammer – A fun early platformer
** BAT = real game required ST with dongle, as sound chip was in dongle; immersive, neat story, neat graphics.
Balance of Power
Barbarian (Psygnosis)
Barbarian (Palace)
Batman: The Movie = not great, but I liked it
Battle Chess
Better Dead Than Alien = not great, but I recall loving it.. and loved the play on words
Bionic Commando = Frustrating, but always came back for more
Black Tiger
Bloodwych
Breach = great simple tactical turn based shooter
? Breach 2
* Breakers = a really good text adventure; one of the few by a poet laurieat
*** Bubble Bobble
Bubble Ghost
*** Buggy Boy
*** Cadaver = awesome graphics .. a pre-Diablo little RPG by the Bitmap Brothers.
CAD 3d
? Cannon Fodder = Supposed to be amazing; great artwork.
** Captain Blood = great music, strange game
*** Captive = Awesome .. Dungeon Master with robots.
** Carrier Command = a robotic aircraft carrier sim? Yes!
? Castle Master = some loved it; a 3d dungeon romp, in true 3d
*** Civilization
*** Colonial Conquest
Conqueror = Classic.. Virus with tanks.
** D/Generation – interesting tactical platformer
** Defender of the Crown
? Deuteros – Sequal to Millenium 2.2, but couldn’t find it back in the day
Dragon Spirit
Dragons Lair = too many swaps
*** Dungeon Master = play it now. Right now.
*** Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back – right after you play DM, dont’ even go to the bathroom
* Eliminator
? Elite – A true classic across all platforms, though I didn’t play it in the day
*** Empire = Very good early tactical wargame
? Enchanted Land = From Thalion, a bunch of demo coders gone platformer. Supposed to be one of the most impressive looking ST games, with full screen ’sync scrolling’.
Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters
? F-15 Strike Eagle 2
** F-19 Stealth Fighter
** F-29 Retaliator
** Falcon (and mission disks)
? Fate = Gates of Dawn
Fire and Forget
Flight Simulator 2
? Forgotten Worlds
? Frontier= Elite II
Gauntlet = not bad but not as good as the sequal
** Gauntlet 2 = very good; movable walls!
Gemini Wing = my brother loved it; windshield=wiper weapons =P
Ghosts & Goblins = a great conversion
Ghouls & Ghosts = Not as good a conversion as the earlier conversoin of the later sequal
? Goblins
*** GODS = Sweetness from the beloved Bitmap Brothers
? Golden Axe
Grav = a simple ‘Gravitar’ and ‘Oids’-like game
** Great Giana Sisters = a very good port; surprisingly, the C64 version is also good!
** Guild of Thieves = another classic text/graphic adventure from Magnetic Scrolls
Hacker = pretty addictive
*** Hard Drivin (and sequal) = Awesome; played them for hours
*** Heroquest = great conversion from the board-game; good all around RPG.
? Hillsfar = battle-RPG
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Hudson Hawk = I loved the movie; a decent game.
*** IK+ = Worlds greatest fighting game
? Immortal – well loved RPG
** Imperium = freakin’ great strategy game
? Impossamole
Infestation = some great artwork; I can’t recall the gameplay =P
** Interphase = a classic 3d sci-fi flight-shooter; ripped off ‘Drives Me Crazy’ music
Into the Eagles Nest = not so good, but I was hooked somehow..
Ishar 1 = Legend Of The Fortress (and series)
? Ivanhoe
? James Pond
Joe Blade = another game I kept coming back to, but don’t know why
Joust (Atari) = a decent arcade port
Jouse (PD) = a great remake =P
** Jumping Jack’son = great music, even
Kick Off 2 = if you’re into soccer games
Killing Game Show
Kings Quest (series) = I only played Kings Quest III
? Laser Squad (need to try it out sometime)
? Legend = always just wanted to try it
? Legend of Faerghail = Supposed to be quite a good RPG
? Knightmare (Mindscape) = An RPG like Captive
** Leisure Suit Larry 1 = In the Land of the Lounge Lizards (series)
*** Lemmings = everyone has seen this right? Truly great.
? Lethal Xcess = sequal to Wings of Death, never played it, but WoD rocks.
Llamatron = How can you be an ST fan without bringing up Minter’s Robotron-ripoff
*** License To Kill = really really good top down strategic vertical shooter, James Bond style
Lode Runner = A classy remake
? Loom = another Lucasarts game, but with a musical component; one of the first and only games ever to do such a thing.
? Lords of Chaos = sorcerous strategy game; well recommended.
*** Magic Pockets = another wicked Bitmap Brothers title, platformer
Major Motion = an alright Spyhunter rip-off; no Peter Gunn =(
? Mega-lo-mania = always wanted to try it.
** Megaroids = A demo for Megamax ‘C’ compiler, but I _loved_ it
Megatraveller – The Zhodani Conspiracy = _really_ bad, but classic because we wanted to play the pencil and paper version =P
Metal Masters = a fun beat’em’up with robots
Midi Maze = freeware, but we “LAN partied” at work long before deathmatch; really, this is the father to Doom ;) (a series apparently)
? Midwinter = raved in magazines, always wanted to try it
*** Millenium 2.2 = one of the top turn based space conquest sims ever.
Mig-29 Fulcrum = another highly rated flight-sim
Moebius = an RPG no one but me remembers; one of the first games I played to completion I suspect..
Monopoly (Shareware) = I dunno, I played a lot of this; mark me a loser.
? Mortville Manor = a game with speach as a component for play (adventure)
Moonbase = terrible, but I liked it =)
Narc = not a great conversion, but I waited for it with baited breath
*** Nebulus – a classic on many platforms
Nethack = yes, someone ported it to the ST!
? Nine Princes in Amber = I wish I had known about this at the time (and the books its based upon)
? No Second Prize = I never played it, but Earl lived it
Obliterator = another typical Psygnosis game.. gorgeous to see, not to play =)
? Obsession = For STE; supposedly really good graphics; pinball topdown.
Ogre = an ‘okay’ port of a classic board-war-game
** Oids = peope love it; not bad.. like Gravitar and Thrust
Omega = I even wrote a review; script a tank and toss him into an areana. Great for coders!
Outrun = pretty good port of the driving game; not a great port but good. (series)
* Overlander = straight forward racer with some shooting.. like Road Blasters
Pacmania = I really loved this back in the day.. isometric Pacman.
Pacific Islands = people seemed to think this was the shiz back in the day
*** Parasol Stars = a sequal to Bubble Bobble; really well done.
Pawn = another classic Magnetic Scrolls text/graphic adventure
** Phantasie (series) = one of the first RPGs to grab my soul
? Pipe Dream = everyone loved it; I never tried it.
? Pirates = Sid Meier’s.. everyone loved it, but I never tried it.
Plutos = A very primitive shooter, but it was one of the first ST games I bought I think and we played it endlessly. (1986!)
Pool of Radiance = the old goldbox series; dated, but classic.
*** Populous = what more is to say? It started the God Game. (Series, expansion discs)
Powerdrome = a 3d space-sled-racing game; I loved it!
*** Powermonger = like Populous, but for specifically for war; and for soliders to rape sheep in the forest when you’re not looking.
? Prince of Persia = everyone raved, but I didn’t ‘get’ it
? ** Rick Dangerous = a classic that never dies..
** R-Type = a respectible conversion of the classic arcade shooter
** R-Type II = another good conversion
*** Railroad Tycoon = if only I’d known it existed at the time; thankfully I didn’t =)
*** Rainbow Islands = another Bubble Bobble sequal/clone; great stuff.
Rampage = an excellent arcade conversion
Rings of Zilfin = a nasty RPG, but we didn’t have a lot back then..
*** Roadwar 2000 = a long and fun tactical wargame .. inspired by Car Wars I’m sure. Autoduel held nothing to this.
Rockstar Ate My Hampster = a rock-band sim. Fun for an hour =P
Robocop = I’m a sucker for movie and superhero games ;)
** Rolling Thunder = another great arcade conversion.
Rogue = a graphical remake of the classic unix console game
Schoolyard Slaughter (PD) = awful awful, but classic
Secret of Monkey Island = a fun LucasArts game
? Sensible Soccer = People just keep raving about it.. I need to fire it up sometime :)
? Sentinel = another game loic bugs me to try ;)
Shadow of the Beast = really really annoying; raved about, so must be over=rated.
** Shanghai = my first mahjongg.. loved it!
? Shoot’em-Up Construction Kit = Notable because the ST was _full_ of ‘construction kit’ games
Sidearms = a good conversion of a not so good arcade game, but I dug it.. it had mecha.
* Sidewinder = an early vertical shooter, wider than the screen
Silent Service = not sure if its good, but one of our first purchased games; wicked.
Silkworm = jeep or chopper, your choice.
** Sim City = one of the first games to keep me up all night.. I simply had no choice. This and Civilization.
*** Simulcra = a really great 3d level running tank/plane game. Awesome.
Sky Chase = an interesting head to head flight sim – with paper airplanes in wireframe. Fun as heck, and stupid =)
Smash TV = a decent port of the Robotron sequal
Space Harrier = not a great conversion, but okay; the title screens were simple Degas files, so I hacked them all up terribly =)
*** Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe = a great sci=fi football game
*** Spherical = a wonderful action platform puzzler
? Spitting Images = a friend of mine dug it; punch out politcal leaders!
** Star Goose! = a fun simple shooter, with elevations in the landscape
Starfleat: The War Begins = not pretty, but the classic ‘trek’ sector turn based game prettied up
** Starglider – wireframe 3d space-flight shooter
*** Starglider 2 – solid-filled 3d-space-light shooter; classic!
** Star Wars (arcade) = a great port of the arcade classic (mouse or joystick even)
* Street Fighter 2 (series) = never played it at the time as it came out fairly late for the ST; I can’t imagine playing it on a joystick with one button!
** Stunt Car Racer = Crazy 3d racer with twisty and loopy tracks; I’ve not played it much myself, but people do love it :)
? Supercars = people raved about this ‘micro machines’ type games
? Strider = Never played it much; over-rated? Everyone loved it!
** Sundog = immersive very impressive RPG-trading-space game. An ST classic.
** Super Hang-On = another great conversion translated pretty well; loved it.
*** Super Sprint = really really good arcade conversion; topdown racer.
Technocop = Amiga version was better, but I dug it all the same
Tempest = a pretty decent conversion if memory serves
Tiger Road
*** Time Bandit – looks 8-bit style, but addictive and ingenious; a true ST classic.
** Turrican 2 = very popular ‘console quality’ platform shooter
Ultima 6: The False Prophet = the ST had a pile of the early Ultima RPGs (series)
Universal Military Simulator = I don’t recall much about it, except it was one of the many “construction set” type games the ST hosted. Tonnes of mods circulated..
Universal Military Simulator II
* Verminator = giant 8-way scrolling play area; platformer. Aphyd loved it.
*** Virus = great 3d scrolling landscape; a true ST classic.
Vixen = a crappy platformer, but it was about amazons so I loved it ;)
Vroom = a well loved high speed 3d racer
Wargame Construction Set = another game maker
** Weird Dreams = not the best, but very original; a must play ST classic. Uncanny weird.
*** Wings of Death = a great primitive shooter; one of the best technical shooters on the platform.
Wonderboy in Monsterland = a great ST coin-op conversion
*** Xenon = a true ST classic vertical shooter, from the Bitmap Brothers
*** Xenon 2 = another classic shooter; really good, for the ST anyway =)
Xenophobe = don’t recall if it was good, but we played the heck out of this conversion
* Xybots = good conversion of the boring but unique arcade game
? Zany Golf = Always wanted to try out this mini=golf sim
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire = Really, how can I make a list and not include this?