Pengo was an arcade game released by Sega in 1982. Kind of a cross between Pac Man and Space Panic, Pengo was a maze game with a twist. Rather than being constrained by the maze, you could use the blocks of the maze walls to flatten the chasing monsters. Your hero Pengo was pitted against…
The first survival horror game? 3D Monster Maze was a 1982 computer game for the Sinclair ZX81, one of the first home computers to be launched in the UK. At this time the closest thing to a “scary” video game was Atari’s Hunted House (also 1982), on the 2600 console. Haunted House was however very…
In the same way that Operation Wolf blew away the arcade competition with it’s 2D light gun game in 1987, Time Crisis did the same but in full 3D in 1996. Released after Virtua Cop, the first real 3D light gun game, Time Crisis featured vastly superior graphics, an engaging storyline and a killer feature…
Tron: Made for the Arcade Most of people of a certain age (35 and over) will remember the Disney film, TRON, and the arcade game that it inevitably would have to spawn, given the film’s game-based storyline. One of the scenes involved a deadly game of Frisbee, where combatants battled to the death with electrically…
PSSST! was one of my first experiences of a really slick and addictive Spectrum game. It was launched by publisher Ultimate! around the time of Jet-Pac, prior to the later and more popular isometric games. I remember cutting out the coupon in Sinclair User to order the game, paid for with a postal order for…
In my retro games reviews I’ve covered a few arcade conversions including , so won’t repeat what I’ve aleady said about some of the liberties taken in the early days by developers like Acornsoft. But if they hadn’t stretched the boundaries of IP infringement we would not have arcade perfect conversions such as Arcadians (a…
