In 1984 Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore (a.k.a. The Ghostbusters) burst on to the big screen and took the world by storm.  6 years later the franchise was still going strong and Sega developed and released a game based on Ghostbusters for its 16-bit Megadrive (or Genesis for the yanks) system.  The game is modeled on the 1987 Activision game released for the Atari 2600 and the Apple II, with a major graphical overhaul and improved sound.

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Way back in the deepest, darkest depths of 1992, Sensible Software (those of Sensible Soccer fame) released Mega-lo-Mania for the Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive, SNES and PC.  In a nutshell, Mega-lo-Mania is a RTS-God game, casting you as one of four gods battling for supremacy of the world, which is achieved by destroying them over 10 epoch’s (era’s in time) ranging from 9500BC all the way to 2001AD.  Each epoch has it’s own visual style and set of offensive and defensive weapons, and is cleared when you have claimed all 3 islands on the level.  This was easily one of the most accessible and addictive god games released for home video game consoles in the early 90’s, especially when compared to Powermonger!

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Released in 1993 on the Amiga, and then later on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis, ‘Wiz ‘n’ Liz: The Frantic Wabbit Wescue’ is a frantic platform based game that sees you dashing around saving rabbits against a time limit.  Made by Raising Hell Software (now known as Bizarre Creations), and published by Psygnosis (those of Lemmings fame), it largely slipped under the radar of most people, which is a shame as it is excellent fun and seriously addictive…  And even includes a cameo by those lovable green haired, blue jumpered Lemmings! Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the deep, dark depths of 1994, Microprose released Colonization for the PC, the spiritual sequel to Sid Meier’s classic Civilization.  Much like it’s more famous cousin, Colonization is a turn based strategy based on the European colonisation of the New World (America), and see’s the English, Spanish, French and Dutch battle and negotiate their way to dominance with the native tribes and the monarchies back in Europe between the years of 1492 and 1850.  The ultimate goal is declare independence from the state and repel the expeditionary forces sent to destroy you when you do this.

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In honour of this weekends 24 Heures du Mans this weeks Game that Time Forgot is the classic C64 racing game, Pole Position. Released by Atari in 1983 on the C64, 1982 in the arcades and almost every other format under the sun at the time, it was one of the first racing games released for home systems, and widely regarded as popularising the genre. It is a real old school arcade racing affair here, you race to complete laps before the timer runs down and the game ends, every completed lap extends your timer until you complete the required amount of laps to finish the race.

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Way back in 1994 EA dropped Skitchin’ on an unsuspecting Megadrive market. For those that don’t know, skitching is the art of being pulled along by a car when wearing rollerblades or on a skateboard. The game was very much like the Road Rash games in both looks and gameplay, the difference being your on rollerblades and not a motorbike. The game largely slipped under the radar of most gamers at the time, as the concept was not the greatest, but the gameplay was as good as anything Road Rash had to offer.

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This weeks dive into the retro vault take us back to 1994 and SimCity’s shunned little brother, SimTower: The Vertical Empire. The idea of the game is to create a completely self sustaining tower spread over 109 floors, using condos, hotels, offices, shops, restaurants and more. The game itself was not actually made by Maxis like all the other Sim games, but rather it was made by a company called OPeNBooK Co., Ltd in Japan under the name The Tower, Maxis then bought the rights and relabeled it SimTower for a western audience.

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For this weeks dive into the vaults of gaming history I am going back to 1994 for Alien vs Predator for the ill-fated Atari Jaguar. Developed by Rebellion Software, the same team who went on to make the PC versions of the AvP series, this game was a true diamond that was missed due to the obscurity of the platform. The game is set in deep space on board a colonial space marine ship which had been boarded by both an Alien ship and a Predator ship, you can choose which of the three forces you play as, each with their own storyline and gameplay style.

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Hi everybody. My name is Penge and I have been given the great honour of being able to write some sort of piffly nonsense on Team Teabag that I can pass off as decent constructive writing. Please stay with me, I promise to improve as time goes on.

It took me a while to decide what to write about. There’s a fair bit of pressure to be as good as Messrs OwningXylophone, Evoroth and… the other one, forget his name now. After looking through the contents of the site, the theme seemed to be mostly regarding gaming and geekery, so posts about how to produce an excellent sugar-free flan or the best approach to dealing with stubborn weeds were immediately chucked out.

Then I spied this post on the Guardian’s blog website. It seemed to tick all the boxes, so here is a tasty link. The topic? What was the weirdest, most ridiculously trippy game you ever played? Looking through a few of the responses triggered my memory but nothing realyl sprang to mind, until I remembered…

How to be a complete bastard, for the Spectrum. A game that was so aimless, directionless and pointless that one of the main elements was to put cling film over the toilet seat so that drunk people suffered catastrophic sprayback. As far as I recall, me and my friends couldn’t figure out what to do after that, so we’d always open the fridge, drink lots of lager and kill ourselves through massive alcohol misuse.

So there’s my contribution to the most foolish game I’ve ever played. Have a look through the comments, you might see games in there that you wasted hours of your life playing, which, now you’re older and wiser, you can look back on in regret and sorrow.

Geekboy here, your resident retrogaming-and-shooter mastermind. And let’s face it, you can’t say you know anything about retro PC gaming or First Person Shooters without having experienced Apogee’s 1995 cult classic, Rise Of The Triad, or to give it it’s full, official title, Rise Of The Triad: Dark War.

The game, known simply as ROTT to it’s fans, was revolutionary considering that it (the shareware demo, at least) was released only 1 year after DOOM, and yet it brought so many impressive new technologies to the genre. It had crazy particle effects like blood splats and fire, flamethrowers, sampled voices, multi-level platforms, the ability to look up and down, and of course the now-infamous LUDICROUS GIBS.

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