reTHINK Pink

If you're rich, sleepwalk and reside in a mansion packed to the rafters with expensive ornaments, don't be surprised if you receive a visit from the Pink Panther, cat burglar extraordinaire. For it is his 'duty' to rob you blind whilst preoccupied roaming the extensive corridors of your home, obliviously unaware of the Panther of colour's crooked, clandestine scheme. Anyway, that's their problem. In Magic Bytes' puzzle-platformer we assume the role of the eponymous predator tasked with preventing our victims from awakening prior to pilfering their precious loot. In principle, it's a lot like Ocean's Sleepwalker, only with less virtuous objectives.

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The Vampire Strikes Back

Count Dracula is up to his old neck-chewing tricks again over in Transylvania (the Vampire's Empire) and only Doctor Van Helsing is qualified and equipped to banish him back to his box permanently. In Magic Bytes' horror-themed platformer we learn that to contain the deadly threat our doc saviour must target Dracula by reflecting magic light beams deep into the core of his soul via the precision positioning of mirrors. It wouldn't hurt to keep some gloves of garlic handy either.

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Hair today, gone tomorrow

Scientific boffin genius, Dr Bakterius, has been kidnapped by a shady terrorist organisation known as O.M.A., impelling bumbling private eye detectives, Mort and Phil aka Clever and Smart, into incisive action. If you're Spanish and have terrible taste in illustrated fiction, you may recognise the not-so-dynamic duo from a newsagent comic book stand near you. In the top-down action-puzzle game of the comic book, our goofball protagonists begin their misguided reconnaissance mission wandering about the local town armed with a magnifying glass and their limited crime-solving nous. Following their amply bulging noses, Mort and Phil descend deep into the city's manky sewer system in search of the nefarious underground organisation. Our main challenge is negotiating hazardous streets as we juggle scarce resources such as food and the money required to buy disguises and solve other simplistic puzzles. It's all about as sophisticated as the degree of care and attention dedicated to in-game consistency, grammar and spellchecking.

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On the half shell they're the heroes four...

Ultra Games' NES-powered top-down-platformer hybrid Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title was ported to the Amiga in 1990 twice, on each occasion by an independent developer separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Geography is relevant here because telephonic cabling wouldn't stretch that far, so there was a bit of a breakdown in communication. Hey, it's as good an explanation as any other I've heard.

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Soldier of Misfortune

Pick an alien-infested planet, annihilate every last critter that dares to breathe in your vicinity, jet off to the next, rinse and repeat. As a crack stormtrooper of the Federation (or Soldier of Light if you prefer) you'll casually take the Empire's feeble assaults in your exoskeleton-enhanced stride. If anyone tracks you down following retirement from active duty, just change your name to Xain'd Sleena and shrug in befuddlement.

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Dystopian blancmange

Jonathan 'Jungle' Rogers isn't a huge fan of nuclear radiation fallout, which is unfortunate since the dreaded apocalypse has transpired on his doorstep, making itself comfortably at home in Manhattan circa 2019. Asking it politely to leave has failed miserably so it's time for Plan B; race across the derelict city, dodging/slaughtering rabid dogs and psychopathic escapees from Mad Max's Wasteland to reach the relative sanctuary of the borough's outer colonies.

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Never believe it's not so

If you can imagine taking the top-down, vertically scrolling shooter, Commando, and replacing protagonist soldier, Super Joe, with a giggling schoolboy on an implausible pilgrimage to become the supreme magician, you may well have attended the same board room meeting at Infogrames that led to the development of 'Mystical'. Replace the marauding waves of Nazi foes with bizarre monsters, monks and Ents, and Super Joe's assault rifle and grenades with lightning bolts and occult spells, and you'd be halfway towards floating down a dragon-infested swamp on a pentagram-shaped raft in search of Moses. Who will be waiting to greet you with a sack of weaponised cherubs.

Our goal, embodying the wizard-wannabe is to recover all the accidentally scattered phials/scrolls and return them to the grandmaster magician's temple. What remains of them anyway, given that they serve as a substitute for live ammunition.

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Play it Again Herman

Old Nick has unleashed hordes of ghouls, zombies, vampires, and ghosts into The Munsters' mansion and kidnapped Marilyn as punishment for being too nice. Playing sequentially as Herman, Eddie, Grandpa and Lily, we're tasked with deploying our most potent spells to banish them back to the underworld and rescue Marilyn.

Alternative Software's officially licensed TV show accompaniment is a goulash of platforming and airborne, fire-breathing shmupping. The bipedal mansion-mooching segments require little explanation, whereas in the latter our services are engaged taming Spot, the family pet dragon, employed to chaperone the Munster Koach.

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My friend Wildey's coming

You are Bronson in Death Wish 3! When the game's box features a picture of legendary vigilante crime-fighter, Paul Kersey, wielding a .475 Wildey Magnum, aimed right at our forehead, who's going to argue with Gremlin? Now you need to make him - I mean us - proud by cleaning up the filth-ridden New York streets, flushing out the drug-dealers, pimps, rapists, muggers and murderers. Make an effort not to decapitate bystanding grannies and 'ladies of the night' and the police might just chip in with a scintilla of support. Not that we really need it, we're Charles Bronson! With one arm tied behind our back and ten tranks nestled snugly in our belly, we could Chuck a Norris, Damme a Jean-Claude, Snipe at Wesley, Cage Nicholas, run Vings around Rhames and feed Steven to the Seagals. Do yourself a favour; make playing this your dying wish, it's an absolute riot! ;)

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We are never ever ever getting back together

Quicksilva's 8-bit conversion of Raymond Brigg's festive classic, The Snowman, is a single screen snowman-building affair in which we embody James, the bewildered child who learns that sentient life can be generated and lost within the space of a single night, and is actually jolly rotten regardless of what he might have forgotten. We can laugh and joke and sing all we like, but, if in the morning, our only friend remains an icy puddle buoying a floating carrot and a couple of lumps of coal, it's hard to argue that life is anything other than a bit of a shoddy deal not worth 1up-ing. If you allow yourself to be sent to slumberland through collision with a fiendish sleep monster, there may be a slim chance of momentarily forgetting that human existence is futile and you may as well dissolve with a blowtorch everything you hold dear to your heart before fate takes the decision out of your knitted mitts. Happy Christmas! God bless us, one and all.

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Let the rivers run red

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is one of those obscure movies people remember fondly, looking back through tomato juice tinted glasses, yet only if they have very hazy memories of the 1978 ultra-cheap parody of classic horror B-movies. It does feature a few notable moments and I plan to put together a 50 second 'best of' video one day to showcase those assuming it hasn't already been done by some other saddo. ;)

Global Software's licensed 8-bit game has little in common with the movie aside from borrowing the eponymous vegetable meanies. It's an isometric action game in which you play as a PuraTom processing plant worker who finds himself under threat from mutating tommies. His means of defence is to either dump the gurning critters into holes in the floor or use various scavenged weapons to dispatch them. It's a race against the clock, which can be extended by collecting punch cards. 

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No Future In The Past

Renegade III, subtitled The Final Chapter, tempts players to make the inevitable joke, incorporating a sigh of relief at an apposite moment. When a franchise whips out the hackneyed 'send protagonist back in time/to space' plot device, you know fibreglass sharks have been jumped and it's game over. Renegade III's previously unknown development path and the trivia surrounding its mysterious release personally fascinated me regardless, and that's why this article exists. I can't vouch for the degree of fun you'll have playing the partially complete game.

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Ignore the pain!

For the third Rambo movie, Sly Stallone treks to Afghanistan on another perilous rescue mission. This time to emancipate his incarcerated former military commander/lifelong best friend, Colonel Trautman, drawing him into deadly conflict with his brutal captors, Soviet Colonel Zaysen and his henchman, Sergeant Kourov. Seeing as he's already deeply embroiled in fraught Afghan-Russian dissensions, Sly decides he may as well hang on a while longer to lead the Soviet armed forces in their daring uprising.

Ocean's inevitable gaming translation loosely follows suit, replicating the silver screen's explosive combat in a diluted fashion with a mixture of top-down action levels and tank-based first-person target-shooting. Whilst not quite bursting with effervescent high-octane thrills and blood spills, the cute, stunted spritework is exactly what you'd hope for from a tongue-in-cheek comic book interpretation, garnering an amiable charm beyond the sum of its parts.

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A total eclipse of the heart

Upon occurrence of a full moon, cursed by a millenarian spell, Bully is transformed into a fish, while his girlfriend, Monica, switches back from a hawk to her human self. Next cycle, the scenario is vice-versa-ed, guaranteeing that the lovers can never reunite in their human form. To reverse the spell, Bully must free Monica from her cage and together head towards the submarine temple of the sun to await a solar eclipse or Sol Negro in Spanish.

A grandiose scheme encapsulating a melancholy, tethered plight of fancy that distils to a feeble platformer, realistically completable in under fifteen minutes once the player is familiar with the layout and enemy attack routines. Sol Negro's most accomplished feature is its unofficial association with the medieval dark fantasy film, Ladyhawke, starring Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Which explains why the majority of my article focuses on that instead. Not an award-winning piece by any means, but you know, it's all relative. One of the key differences you'll notice between the two mediums is the animal substitution situation in the game; there's no sentient fish in Richard Donner's movie. Instead, Rutger Hauer alternatively appears in lupine form. Introducing an aquatic species was no doubt as an excuse to shoehorn in some underwater levels to add a splash of much-needed variety.

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Even heroes have the right to bleed

Christopher Reeve was no doubt 'The Man of Steel' in the movies. In Tynesoft's multi-system Superman game, paper mache would be more appropriate. We begin by steering Supes into the path of hordes of Darkseid's oncoming airborne aliens in third-person flight mode. And that's all most people will get to experience of the genre-mashing homage to the greatest superhero to don underpants over his leotard. A crying shame since it's meticulously illustrated and so evocative of the comic books you can't help developing a bit of a soft spot for the downtrodden puppy.

If you take the trouble to look up the various interpretations of the game on YouTube it will be well worth your time. There are multiple 2D, scrolling beat 'em up platform levels, several obstacle-dodging/blasting interludes played in outer space from top-down perspective, and best of all, the immersive comic book pages periodically inserted between the action to progress Superman's predicament and pie-in-the-sky resolution.

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Man who catch fly with chopstick, accomplish anything

If you've ever wondered how Prince of Persia would handle as a karate grandmaster, wonder no more. Jordan Mechner's earlier foray into silky-smooth, rotoscoped animation, Karateka, should offer a few pertinent clues. You might like to fill in any gaps in your knowledge by reading my retrospective review detailing its origin story, play mechanics and plot.

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Live the journey

Back when He-Man was just a flat cartoon on the small telly box, if you wanted to turn it into a live-action movie starring real, human actory type people - say in 1987 - you had to call it 'Masters of the Universe: The Motion Picture' and show it in a theatre near you. Soon. That struck me as odd even back then since we'd had 'movies' as opposed to static slideshows since about 1900. Nevermind, there's a He-Man film! It entails Skeletor teleporting around Eternia getting up to mischief of the evil variety by virtue of Gwildor's miraculous cosmic key invention. Chiefly, his royal boniness kidnaps the Sorceress of Grayskull, obliging He-Man and co. to dash to her rescue before he can sap her supreme mystical energy to become an omnipotent scary nutjob. They all end up on earth, transposing the battle to cheaper sets, but I'll get to that in good time.

I'll never forget the catchy little ditty that 'synthesizer' emitted whenever it worked its transcendental magic. Which reminds me, there's also an accompanying computer game of the movie courtesy of Gremlin Graphics. Assuming the role of He-Man, it's our duty to track down eight chords required to activate the cosmic key and return safely to Eternia. Gremlin took the game design route more commonly associated with Ocean; throwing every feasible genre at the wall and hoping what sticks hangs together nicely. So MOTU is a top-down shooter, a hover-disc-mounted fly 'em up, a first-person targeting affair, and a beat 'em up.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the disk box

Steven Spielberg's blockbuster, 1975, man-eating great white shark attack movie, Jaws, requires no introduction. "We're gonna need a bigger boat." Right, now we're all on the same page...

In 1989, the unforgettable jump-scare thriller was adapted for the second time to the medium of video gaming, on this occasion by developers 'Intelligent Design' for 8 and 16-bit home computers. Embodying police chief, Martin Brody, with support from professional shark hunter, Captain Quint, and oceanographer, Matt Hooper, it's our responsibility to race against time, juggling resources and fraught relationships to minimise the risk of shark attacks and therefore the slaughter of civilian life. Whilst deliberating over when to cordon off beaches (resulting in loss of income, inciting the mayor's wrath), we must collect four constituent components of the super-gun and mega-bullets required to slay Jaws. Complicating matters, Jaws isn't the only sea life that poses a threat; en route to gathering the scattered artillery pieces, we face all manner of lethal aquatic baddies that must be kept at bay with our standard weapon as we scavenge life-supporting oxygen supplies.

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Remember Roger Moore from his baby photos. You won't believe how he looks now!

When Roger Moore starred as James Bond for the seventh and final time (in A View to a Kill) he was 57 years old, resulting in the movie's publicity campaign being largely overshadowed by criticism of his advancing years and allusion to Moore's unfeasibility as a superspy. A shame since it's not a bad movie, featuring some memorable action sequences, Christopher Walken, the out of this world Grace Jones and a tiny cameo from Dolph Lundgren. To refresh your memory, it's the one in which Max Zorin (Walken), a psychopathic industrialist schemes to decimate Silicon Valley in order to monopolise the computer chip business, and climaxes with a scrap balancing precariously on top of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge following a failed blimp airship escape.

Softstone's accompanying 8-bit computer game of the same name, like the movie, was released in 1985. It's a multi-perspective/genre affair that attempts to mimic the pivotal events of the film. In particular, the scenes that take place in Zorin's mine, City Hall, and the streets of Paris. Some stages are navigated on foot from a side view, others shown from a split-screen, 3D 1st person/top-down vantage point driving Bond's stolen 1983 Renault 11 TXE taxi (the one that's destined to be comedically cut in two mid-chase).

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Don't think. Just let it happen.

The Living Daylights represents the first of Timothy Dalton's outings as superspy James Bond aka 007. No, wait, don't switch off just yet. Domark - in 1987 - produced a licensed 8-bit game to accompany the movie's release and together... erm... they serve to remind us that there are better James Bonds, better James Bond villains, better James Bond movies and better James Bond games. Still, there are a few highlights; Bond and Kara Milovy sledging down a snowcapped Bratislavan mountain on her instrument of choice (a cello), and the couple's precariously daring 11th-hour jeep-ejection from an in-flight cargo plane loaded with opium, right before its spectacular crash into a rockface and subsequent explosion.

Neither of which feature in the third-person action game of the same name. It's a lot like Operation Wolf, except Bond is on view so we get to see him aim his selection of weaponry whilst running and ducking across various landscapes mirroring the movie.

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