1989 – Obsolete Gamer

Golden Axe

Anyway, on with the adventure – there are lots of different enemies to slash and if things get tough on screen, each of the protagonists can call upon their unique magic power – Tyris Flare has the coolest magic, she uses fire to incinerate everything on screen. There is finite magic power, so the player will have to pick and choose when best to use it. But wait there is more – mounted enemies riding creatures can be knocked off and the players themselves can then hitch a ride on the creatures and use them as weapons (swiping with their tail). The other neat attack is to charge and ram Death Adder’s henchmen by double-tapping the joystick right or left.

NES

Eric Bailey

Demon Sword

This can be a difficult game to master, especially some of the boss fights, but once you get the hang of the patterns of the infinitely generated hordes of enemies, it becomes a fun little romp. Victar can collect different power-ups; some that increase his life or respawn, others that change his speed or the speed of his darts, one that shortly allows him to throw darts in four different directions at one time, and keys that open special areas that reward miniboss-beatdowns with devastating special spells.

Arcade Games

J.A. Laraque

Blast Off

Blast Off was released in Japan in 1989 and is the sequel to the space shooter Bosconian which was released in 1981. Created by Namco this game is pretty much the typical vertical space shooter in where it is you versus and army of enemies, however your ship is armed with some pretty badass weapons. One thing that is a little different is your ship can switch weapons and while that in itself is not unique, what is, is the fact that dependent on the color of the laser you select you can shoot behind you.

Arcade Games

Matt McKee

WWF SuperStars

The game itself is strictly a tag-team tournament, so no solo character play here. But, as your life/exhaustion meter dwindles, you can tag in your second character to help. It’s also a 2-player game, so your buddy can be your partner or your opponents. You’ll fight through just 3 matches made up from the other 4 wrestlers before you reach the tag-team champions in Ted DiBiase and Andre the Giant (neither playable characters). After you beat them you’ll be crown champs, but have to play a couple of more matches the retain the title to be considered game-beaters.

NES

Luis Zena

Baseball Stars

This time around, Baseball Stars for the NES takes top honors as it’s a game well over due for a mention right here at Retro Gaming Life. The game itself combines the RPG elements with sports elements in a very satisfying way. You can start up with a horrible team and win games to earn money to buy steroids for your players so they will get stronger and run faster. Is this what the American past time is all about? You bet! You are also able to name your team whatever you want, as I would name mine the Chomps. We finished last in our first season of play but ended up buying enough steroids to strengthen for next season.

NES

Eric Bailey

The Uncanny X-Men

The “graphics” found in X-Men are genuinely bad. The character sprites are tiny, with only the palette colors enabling you to discern who is who, and not making any effort to showcase the famous characters with any marquee on-screen presence whatsoever. The different levels are a poorly designed, crappy-looking tile-based mess of background haziness, foreground busyness, and bizarre enemies coming from every angle. The navigation screens, like the level selection or character selection, are dull and minimalist, completely uninspired and not making even the least effort to appear interesting or like the developer cared at all about the final product.

Blog

J.A. Laraque

Act-Fancer: Cybernetick Hyper Weapon

Point blank, I suck at this game. Seriously, look at the video, that’s me. I am good at games or I was, but I could not get off of level one. Maybe I should not do videos on these types of games because it shows how far I have fallen.

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Dan Epp

SimCity: The City Simulator

In SimCity, players had to construct an entire metropolis starting from nothing but a bulldozer and random terrain. Along the way to full city status sims begin to populate your city and make demands. They may need more housing or shopping centers; perhaps crime is rampant and a police station is needed; maybe frequent brown outs are creating a demand for a new power station; perhaps your sims are bored and want a stadium…and so on. Meanwhile, the city needed just the right level of taxes to encourage growth, yet still pay for all those fire and police stations.

TurboGrafx-16

Simon Lethbridge

Energy

To be honest, I didn’t really play Energy a great deal more than that! It’s reasonably playable to a degree but it has lots of annoying quirks, some of which are frankly baffling. For example, as mentioned, this is a flick-screen game but the screen takes a full six seconds to gradually scroll the next screen into play, during which play freezes, and the exits on all the underground screens are blocked until the monsters have been killed, but it also takes six seconds after they’ve been cleared for the exits to disappear! All the intro and cut scenes are unskippable too (grrr!) but the worst thing about this game is the mystical ‘super-jump’ feature.

Sega Genesis

Simon Lethbridge

Stormlord

The action is spread over ten gruelling levels and you have a set number of fairies to rescue on each (within a time limit) which are of course dotted around in mostly inconvenient places, often surrounded by traps, enemies, or both! Luckily Mr. Stormlord can contend with both. He is able to fire magic stars or, if you hold down the fire button for a second or so, a more powerful sword. Either of these will take care of most monsters easily enough which include wizards, dragons, goblins, caterpillars, bees, skeletons, and flying fiery things. Unfortunately the traps cannot be shot. These generally consist of plants of both man-eating and pod-spitting varieties, pits of fire, rain-clouds of death, fire-breathing dragon heads and more besides.

NES

J.A. Laraque

Ninja Gaiden

Pretty much you are always running and moving forward which means you are constantly slashing at enemies and using your special weapons. Ryu can also climb ladders and can flip of walls to get to higher ledges. This may all sound easy, but trust me it is not. The first problem is like many games on the NES if you scroll from one panel to the next and back the enemy returns. What makes this horrible is when jumping from ledge to ledge and some damn bird knocks you to your death.

Arcade Games

J.A. Laraque

Final Fight

Final Fight was one of those games that after a stressful day at school you could play and release some anger on a horde of bad guys. While the graphics and animation were nothing special it did have some simple sound effects and music that kept you in the game. It also had a great “continue” screen where your character would wake up tied to a chair with a roll of dynamite ready to explode. If you put in a coin and hit start in time a knife would fall out of nowhere and cut the wick and you would magically appear back where you were knocked out.