The real joy of this game, though is using the vehicles to explore its vast map. Finding a new vehicle to experiment with was a joy. Some were more useful than others, however. I mean, do you want to raid the enemy territory on a push bike or windsurf? Perhaps stick to the heavily armoured and armed tanks and helicopters, eh?
Learning how to take advantage of the vast array of weaponry at your disposal is great fun. Can I take out an enemy tank with land mines? Or is it best to stand back and use an RPG? The game is full of little touches to make you smile. Watch out for sharks as you swim in the water, and the game will deduct points if you accidently run over a duck in your tank.
You can bribe suspect individuals with food and money, and the enemy AI is both malicious and believable. There really was a sense of wonder when playing this game. That frisson of excitement that you got when discovering something new is something that I will remember for a long time to come. I cannot tell you how delighted I am that this game has made it so far up the list. Not only is it great to see a game released as shareware charting so strongly, but the amount of love weaved into this game by its creator Jeff Minter is evident for all to see.
At its heart, Llamatron is a clone of the brilliant Robotron , the seminal twin-stick arena shooter from the genius that is Eugene Jarvis. A lot of the appeal of the Williams arcades think Robotron , Defender , Joust and Sinistar was how bombastic, kinetic and loud they were. Llamatron emulates the feel of those games brilliantly. Thankfully, Jeff is a little gentler to us than Eugene and progress is won a little easier than the arcade original. It is possible to improve on perfection!
The slow, Bruce Lee style, chess match duels of the original are long gone, replaced by the frantic, heart-pounding brawls more often seen in Jackie Chan movies. The control system here is great. Each direction of the joystick gives a move and then each direction combined with the fire button gives another, giving the player a huge repertoire of moves to choose from. Add into all this the great sprite work and animation, a plethora of hidden secrets T for trousers, anyone? We were blown away by how similar to the arcade it was, and loved the sound effects and speech samples.
The back of my exercise books at school would be filled with imaginary dungeon layouts populated by grunts, lobbers, keys and dragons. The game felt like an adventure.
What would we discover next? The role-playing aspect of the game might have been minimal, but still, it was there. My friend always played the bit burly warrior, so would charge in on point, and I, who always played the wizard would hang back like the coward I was, but always making sure to grab the potions for those screen clearing magic blasts. The other characters had their strengths too, with the super quick firing elf and the great hand-to-hand combat of the valkyrie.
Games stick in your memory for a long time when they illicit strong emotions, and one of the strongest emotions I remember feeling in a video game was the terror we would feel upon being assaulted by a Death and that truly excruciating sound effect. My love of science fiction grew exponentially in my early teens. I would get lost in novels written by Arthur C.
Clarke and Isaac Asimov, would watch Red Dwarf and Star Wars obsessively, and it was games like Frontier: Elite 2 that would let me feel like I was living out those fantasies for myself. The gorgeous big box that it came in was crammed with information that I devoured. The gazetteer and novella so perfectly set up the world that I was going to spend hour upon hour in for the foreseeable future.
The rest is up to you. Become an interstellar postman, a miner, a courier or taxi driver or just join the navy: the choice is yours. As your reputation improves, more career opportunities are opened up to you, more dangerous, less honourable career opportunities maybe, but a lot more lucrative and exciting. I wonder if being a hitman comes with healthcare benefits? A lot of the fun in Frontier comes from learning its systems. How can you maximise the profit of your limited cargo hold?
Is it best to take on the most well-payed jobs, or do they just bring a little too much attention? How much can I get away with bending the rules before the fines become unprofitable? How can I tell where this ship has hyperspaced to?
Cute, colourful cartoon graphics are suitably matched by a wonderfully whimsical soundtrack, both of which suit the theme of the game perfectly. Fans of Bubble Bobble may have been disappointed to see hide nor hair or should that be scale nor tail of the dinos that were such a joy to control in the original. Fear not, Bub and Bob may have lost their theropod form, but have lost none of their effectiveness.
This time around, instead of blowing bubbles at their enemies, our cute heroes can conjure rainbows that can trap or knock out the googlies and act as makeshift platforms to reach higher areas. Skilled players will be looking to kill enemies by dropping rainbows on their heads. Doing so will make them drop one of seven different coloured gems upon death, all of which must be collected in release a big, fat, juicy gem. Sensible Soccer came in at twenty and here we have Kick Off 2 , a whole eight places above it at number There you have it.
Kick Off 2, Sensible Soccer nil. They are without doubt the two greatest football games available on the ST. Both have merits, and both achieve different things in their attempts to emulate the noble game. Whereas Sensible Soccer is about the build-up, the delicately directed passing and intricate shots, Kick Off 2 is a heavy-octane, pedal to the metal race for the goal.
To see an expert Kick Off 2 player achieve mazy dribbles is like watching a kung fu master. As a result, every single goal in Kick Off 2 must be earned through skill and graft, making it all the more satisfying when you do eventually score. Few football games before or since have matched the euphoria you feel upon scoring, and that for me is one of the key elements of a real game of football. Two unmanned aircraft carriers have been sent to colonise this archipelago of islands, but unfortunately, the second and superior carrier has been usurped by the terrorist organisation STANZA.
Decoy flares. Launch flying drones to identify targets, or deploy aquatic drones in a protective formation. These can then build a command centre that can mine, build upon or defend the island that you control.
You can also launch Manta aircraft to bomb the enemy and soften them up before you send the Walruses in. The strategic depth on offer in a game of this age is remarkable. You are free to explore the capabilities of carrier and work out the best way to take over the islands and achieve your goal. Super Sprint was an overhead racing arcade game released by Atari Games in The game was a successor to the Gran Trak 10 and Sprint series of games and built upon the excellent gameplay of those black and white machines by adding high resolution colour graphics.
This capability was thanks to the Atari System 2 arcade board, a board that had previously powered Paperboy and The arcade cabinet also featured a free-spinning steering wheel for each player along with foot pedals for accelerating.
So how on Earth would the ST host such a game? In Super Sprint , four cars are pitted against each other over eight tracks, each progressively more complex. The game starts incredibly easy with a straight forward track and very little competition from the AI racers. These hazards include whirlwinds and oil spills that spin you wildly, water puddles and cones that slow you down and moving barriers and gates that will crush your car. These spanners are an absolute must if you are going to keep up with those ever quickening drone cars.
But then… what do you choose? Better tyres for increased traction? Or a nitro boost for that acceleration? And ooh, those furry dice look very fetching. Me and my cousin would do this and then make up our own minigames to play on this level for hours.
Be the first to get the spanners and bonuses, or even play a game of in-car tig! It is just so much fun to control those cars: they handle perfectly, and mastering when to let go of the accelerator to drift around the corners is an absolute joy. When rock stars die young, they become legends. FTL are the video game development equivalent of rockstars for me. I mean, they were only making games for a short time before moving on to other pastures.
But boy, what a ten years we had. They released banger after banger after banger. Their back catalogue is all killer, no filler. Pure gold. I mean, what are we supposed to use as ammunition now? Enduro Racer? And that something is blasting. Lots of blasting. This blasting all occurs in a rather pleasant mix of Asteroids , Gravitar and Lunar Lander gameplay. The git. The aesthetic of Oids was an absolute feast for my young eyes.
I loved stuff like this. Even before I even knew this game existed, the back of my school exercise books were riddled with little alien landscapes populated by ships blowing seven shades of snot out of each other, all drawn with appropriate sound effects: pew, pew, pew!
It was like FTL had somehow got hold of my year 4 science book and made a game of it. And then they gave me a level editor so that I could make my jottings become a reality! Incredible stuff. Have you seen it? I mean, turning water into wine?
Geoff would go on from REVS to build a stunning career in digital representations of motorsports, stopping off to make Sentinel on the way. Which, incidently I have never really played properly due to a deep seated terror the game inspired in me as a youth.
Is he watching? Oh no!! After this he pretty much stuck to Grand Prix games and was one of the last developers to maintain the honour of having his name affixed to a game. Which is quite an honour when you consider that by the time of Grand Prix 4 , games were being worked on by teams of scores of people. So what makes Formula One Grand Prix so special? Well, the devil, they say, is in the detail. And F1GP was the most comprehensive Formula 1 simulation to date.
Nothing even came close to the lavish detail on offer here. Suits you, sir! The game was so good, it inspired one of the earliest examples of online community. Huge competitions were organised via Compuserve, and a healthy modding community grew out of that passion. Absolutely seminal. Another racing game, but quite a different beast this one. It absolutely flies. High speeds and smooth framerates make Vroom absolutely electric. Oh no. The speed that Vroom offers must be tamed like some mythical beast.
If you let it, it will chew you up and spit you out. No, the speed is there, tantalisingly within reach, but you must learn to control yourself. And control is quite a consideration here. Another thing that Vroom nails, appropriately enough given the name, is the engine sound. The ST is pretty terrible at engine sounds.
Other racing games either fart at you relentlessly, or noisily and obnoxiously buzz continuously. And there are other great touches that all play into this sense, this feel of break-neck speed.
The definitive bit racing experience, right here. Come and get it. Originality is a rare and beautiful thing, especially in the gaming world where any success is sure to be iterated upon both legitimately and illegitimately until we are all sick to death of it. But Lemmings is one of those ideas that must have sounded utterly bonkers when said out loud or written down on paper.
You can tell them to dig, build bridges, block other lemmings, climb or even, if you are sadistic enough, just explode. And it never did me any harm…. The start of the game is quite tame in a really excellently designed way.
No tutorial handholding here, just a simple level with a single obstacle and the lemming skills you need to overcome it. Bam, lesson learned, bring on level 2. The solution never feels out of reach. You know you have all the tools you need to find the solution right there in front of you. Guybrush Threepwood has dreams of becoming a pirate. He is the least pirate-like protagonist in the history of pirating, and the way he bumbles through this adventure is wholly appropriate for the appeal of this game.
Apparently, Ron Gilbert was really annoyed with how every wrong turn would kill the player in myriad different ways in contemporary adventure games so made it next to impossible for the player to kill Threepwood.
Instead of worrying about death at every turn, the player can relax and enjoy the exploration and discovery of solutions to puzzles.
Most of the gameplay takes part on beautifully rendered backgrounds upon which Threepwood must find the solution to various puzzles by talking to the inhabitants of the islands or interacting with certain objects. The real stroke of genius with the SCUMM system though is with the way you select a verb and then click on the object in your inventory or in the main window to complete a sentence action that Guybrush will execute.
It is much more accessible than the old typing and parsing methods seen in older adventure games and would go on to become the gold standard. The charm inherent in the game manifests in many ways: the superb animation, the clever writing, the great pixel art cut-scenes that all ape and honour the great traditions of high adventure cinema classics.
However, I think the biggest contributor to this sense of charm are the characters. I think insult sword fighting is my personal highlight. The Secret of Monkey Island has gone on to spawn many sequels, but arguably, the very first game represents the very best of what the series has to offer.
Everything is solid, metallic and oh, so shiny. We came to expect great graphics from Bitmap Brother releases, but even by their standards, Speedball 2 is a looker. Everything has received lots of attention to make sure it looks the business, even the little buttons you press to train up your team between rounds are magnificent.
The typically lavish intro sequence sets the scene for a brutal future sport game akin to a lawless game of handball. This is everything a sequel should be: it maintains everything that was great about the original while evolving it and adding a ton of interesting embellishments around the periphery. The core game is still very similar to Speedball in that you and your team of hard knocks must grab the ball and chuck it downfield in order to score a goal. Rules are minimal, so you can punch and kick your opponents into submission in order to do so.
So what does Speedball 2 add to the mix? An absolute shedload, as it turns out. There are many strategic spots adorning this metallic arena, most of which can be exploited for points, or help in the pursuit of points. Strewn about the arena floor you will find money to pick up and spend on upgrading your team as well as power-ups to give you an advantage for the current match.
There are further additions: Each player has their own individual statistics for things like stamina, pace and throwing strength and if you are playing in a tournament, you can spend money to train them up for the next match, or just drop them and raid the transfer market for your next star.
Speedball 2 is one of those games that uses the single fire button of the ST to great effect and you can tap the fire button for a low throw, or hold it for a lob. Software House: Tengen Author: Tengen. Software House: Ocean Author: Ocean. Software House: Prism Leisure Author:. Software House: Taito Author:. Software House: Arc Author:. The film might have been a massive disappointment, but the 16 bit and PC computer versions were excellent.
One in the nacclaimed cinema ware series of games, which aimed to blur the lines between Cinema and gaming. Software House: Loriciels Author: Loriciels.
Software House: Mindscape Author: Renegade. Software House: Microdeal Author: Microdeal. Software House: Infogrames Author: Maxis. Software House: Atari Author:. Software House: Firebird Author:. Flying saucer into the screen shooting game This title came from the estate of Robin Chapman via Andy Fel. Five great military based powers compete for domination of the planet This title came from the estate of Robin Chapman via Andy Fel.
Gold Author: Various. This is one of the many very generous packs that Atari put together to make the ST more attractive to buyers in the face of the more powerful Commodore Amiga. Software House: Atari Author: Various. Software House: Accolade Author:. Become a member of the Guild of Thieves, be guided by the Guildmaster, who will want you to do the worst, most dangerous jobs, with alomost no helps or hints on what to do next. Software House: Rainbird Author: Rainbird.
Software House: Grandslam Author:. Thunderstrike is a polygon military Olympics of the future This title came from the estate of Robin Chapman via Andy Fel. Software House: Activision Author: Activision. Software House: Infogrames Author: Exxos. Software House: Rainbow Arts Author:. Software House: Gremlin Author:. After the launch of the Voyager probe in inviting all alien life to visit Earth, get ready, company's coming This title came from the estate of Rob Chapman via Andy Fel.
Software House: Domark Author: Various. Software House: Kixx Author:. Software House: Image Works Author:. Software House: Gremlin Graphics Author:.
View all items. Since opening at the end of , over 5, children have visited the Centre. These children deserve a space which is engaging and instructive, where they can feel a sense of adventure, exploration and surprise!
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Twitter Facebook Instagram. It is not an exhaustive list of and other games may have been published. If you have any games or software that you would like to donate to our collection, please view our donations page. Date: B. Date: Carrier Command The player in sole control of a Carrier, the Epsilon, on a mission to reclaim a host of archipelagos which have fallen into enemy hands, land vehicles, and Mantra aircraft are at hand to protect the c Date: Corruption The city of London, Deals and chicanery, Porsches and profits, wild animals in hand made suits, and you outwardly, youre on the fast track to success Software House: Rainbird Author: Magnetic Scrolls.
Date: Elite Firebird Elite is the classic space trading combat title, and an early example of a sandbox game, in that the player can decide how they want to play it Software House: Firebird Author: Mr Micro. Date: Fish! Bruno Mathieu - Brume - Database.
Marcus Lindberg - Marcer - Database. Stefan Lindberg - Stefan Lindberg - Database. Thank you to everybody who has helped us out over the years.
Without you this project would not exist. Social Corner. In Loving Memory. By STG - September The future of Atari Legend We have a lot of ambition, and this project will be updated regularly. Merging with Stonish. April December Open source The code for the AtariLegend website is now open-source! August May January November Atari Legend 2. October Atari Legend demo The first signs of life.
July STonish starts a revival Brume releases his beautiful new website STonish. Donation day Because lots of people have spent countless of hours working on the AL project and this work should not get lost in time, the complete database is donated to AtariMania, another beautiful database driven Atari ST website.
Ice Ice baby After a complete burn out of all the coding, Atari Legend slowly comes to a stand still. March One big happy family The AL team is expanding drastically. Atari Legend also becomes a hackers group and starts to release special versions and cracks of games February Atari legend is done Atari Legend is created - Legends never die!
Development of Atari Legend has begun The bad news of the cancellation of both Pacidemo and Pacigame will be the beginning of something big!
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