Developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Microprose in 1993. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro Add me on Google+: http://bit.ly/1tPwL1u Games that were originally developed for home computers didn't ordinarily get ported to the major consoles of the time. Those that did got tinkered with, and, in my opinion, ended up being inferior to the original (e.g. First Samurai on the SNES). The Bitmap Brothers converted their famous Amiga shooter to both the Sega Mega Drive and SNES consoles. I've longplayed the Amiga CD32 version and it's fair to say that it doesn't get any better than that, so I was keen to see how the console versions faired. In terms of visuals, the SNES version looks pretty good. However, the AGA Amiga version runs at a higher resolution and sports more vibrant colours. The audio, too, is very good, although the Amiga version still sounds considerably crisper. Listening closely, some of the music has been altered ever so slightly, with new instruments added and minor tweaks to the arrangement; it's nice to see that some effort was made to try and spice things up a little without compromising the quality. In some respects, this version plays slightly better than the Amiga. Part of this is due to the redesigned interface where the health bars now overlay the main game window, rather than take up a large area at the bottom of the screen. I couldn't be sure, but I felt that this version had more enemies in some of the levels than the Amiga, especially the opening two levels; this could just have been my imagination. Surprisingly, the SNES version experiences a fair bit of slow-down when the screen is full of enemies and is not something I can remember happening with the Amiga version. This could simply be poor optimisation for the SNES; you only have to look at games such as Donkey Kong Country to realise just how capable the SNES was. There isn't much else to say other than this is a very faithful conversion of the original game and console owners wouldn't have been disappointed in owning the game. If I had to play a console version, it would be this one. #retrogaming ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etp8g1ObiXc

Developed by Rare and published by Nintendo in 1990 Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro Game Review: https://al82retro.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/game-review-snake-rattle-n-roll.html #retrogaming ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqpy737YmjM

A tribute to Ben Daglish, one of the best C64 musicians, whose death was announced today (03/10/2018). He was 52. Ben co-created the amazing sound track to the Last Ninja with Anthony Lees, also no longer with us. #retrogaming ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXtk0Tn7hDY

Developed by OperaSoft and published in 1987 by Ariolasoft Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro Add me on Google+: http://bit.ly/1tPwL1u Imagine going to bed one night and, instead of waking up in your bedroom, you appear to have been transported back in time several hundred years, awaking as a knight as part of the Arthurian legend in Camelot. This is exactly what happens to little Johnny and it's up to the player to help him escape back to his own time. In order to do this, the court magician has instructed Johnny to seek out a series of magical items scattered around Camelot castle. Whilst these items have mystical sounding names, they are in fact objects from the modern day - the light that burns without fire is a light bulb, whilst the elixir of life is a Coca Cola vending machine...great advertising there, guys! The game is a flick-screen arcade adventure where the player must guide Johnny around the castle, jumping over hostile enemies, traversing platforms and collecting the various items. Once an item has been found, it must be returned to one of the castle mystics who will allow Johnny to access the next area of the castle. As befitting of a knight of Camelot, Johnny is equipped with a sword with which he can despatch his foes. The one, slight problem with this is Johnny can only swing the sword at head height and at a certain angle. This means that the only enemies that can be killed are owls and a bunch of flies; foes which shouldn't be that taxing for a knight of the realm! Whereas other games of this type tend to contain dozens of screens and are maze-like, this game is both very short and completely linear. Whilst it's always obvious where the player has to go, what content there is will be exhausted very quickly. Considering that the game was originally released at £9.95 is quite shocking and there were plenty of £1.99 budget titles that offered more gameplay than this. The game also has a few annoying niggles that really should have been ironed out prior to release. Chief of these is the way it's entirely possible for the player to walk on to a new screen and straight into an enemy due to some very poor positioning; I'm talking down to single pixel-level position too, so you have to take your hands off the controls during the screen transition to make sure you don't wander into an errant wasp. I suppose the game features some reasonable graphics and animation, but this looks very much like another conversion of a Spectrum game (typical use of characters with solid primary colour outlines and no fills to avoid colour clash). The most impressive thing in the art department is the owl flight animation, but there's little else of note. Despite a basic title tune, audio in this game is restricted to a couple of ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zF6w651xI