Retro Gaming Museum
  • Home
  • The Collection
  • Hardware
    • Commodore
    • Sinclair Research
    • SpectraVideo
    • Nintendo
    • Amstrad
    • IBM
  • Software
    • Sierra Online
    • Infocom
    • Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)
  • Gallery
  • Video
    • Complete Video Walkthrough
  • Donations
  • Contact
  • About

The Collection

Three beautiful cover artwork by Roger Dean

4/30/2016

Comments

 
Picture
The English artist William Roger Dean (born 31 August 1944), better known as Roger Dean, is best known for his work on posters and album covers for musicians, which he began painting in the late 1960s. The artists for whom he did the most art are English rock bands Yes and Asia. And those who are familiar with these bands can see the resemblance of the artwork above. 

​Beginning in 1985 with the software company Psygnosis, Dean has been responsible for the cover artwork for several video games like the three we just got here but also Shadow of the Beast, Tetris Worlds as well as a redesign of the Tetris logo.

Here we take a look at these games individually
​Obitus is a role-playing video game developed and released by Psygnosis in early 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST and DOS systems. It was also ported for the SNES by Bullet-Proof Software. Obitus combines several graphics styles and perspectives in a labyrinth-base game. Though nearly every piece of a forest or catacomb looks indistinguishable from the next screen, this can be dealt with by the player making physical maps, using the compass. The game is heavily focused on the need to make maps. Without them, the player will die long before making it to the end. There is very little food and time cannot be wasted walking around trying to find a way forward.
Picture
​Terrorpods is a 1987 shooting game with simple business simulation by Psygnosis. Originally developed for the Amiga and Atari ST, it was later ported to the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and MSX. It casts the player as an industrial spy in a science fiction future, assigned to halt an evil Empire's production of fearsome war machines called Terrorpods. To win the game, the player must manage colonies with specialised industries to produce a Terrorpod of their own, while fighting off enemy forces like in a traditional shooting game. ​The appearance of the Terrorpods was conceived from a rejected design by Psygnosis cover artist Roger Dean for the Martian fighters in Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.
Picture
​Barbarian is a 1987 computer platform game by Psygnosis. It was first developed for the Atari ST, and was ported to the Amiga, Commodore 64, DOS, MSX, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. The Amiga port was released in 1987; the others were released in 1988. Like most early Psygnosis titles, the cover artwork (part of "Red Dragon" figure/landscape)  by Roger Dean.

The game spawned a 1991 sequel, Barbarian II, released alongside Leander, and Ork, other platform-based action-adventures from Psygnosis.

Both the Terrorpods game and Barbarian are still sealed in their original packaging and haven´t been opened for almost 30 years. 
Comments

Game and Watch Series : Fire

4/28/2016

Comments

 
Picture

Game & Watch is a line of handheld electronic games produced by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. Created by game designer Gunpei Yokoi, each Game & Watch features a single game to be played on an LCD screen in addition to a clock, an alarm, or both. This console inspired Nintendo to make the Game Boy. It was the earliest Nintendo product to garner major success. In 1977, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on the Shinkansen, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time.

Picture

​The game we go here is Fire wich is a Game & Watch game released as a part of the Silver series on July 31, 1980, and as a part of the Wide Screen series on December 4, 1981. It is a single-screen single-player Game & Watch.

The player controls two firemen who carry a trampoline and must catch people who fall from a burning building and bounce them into a waiting ambulance. The player is awarded 1 point for each person who reaches the ambulance, and loses one of their three lives for each person who hits the ground.

Here is also a very cool link to a site that let´s you play come of these games online : 
http://www.pica-pic.com/#

Comments

Double Dragon on ZX Spectrum

4/27/2016

Comments

 
Picture

Double Dragon is undoubtedly one of the most popular fighting games of the eighties, it was first released as an Arcade game and long lines of gamers stood in lines waiting to play it at arcades around the world. You begin playing either Billy or his twin brother Jimmy, while the two of you are working inside your garage, Billy´s girlfriend gets kidnapped by "The Black Warriors" gang. After you discover what has happened you and your friend need to bash your way through 4 different levels with a whip, a baseball bat and various other weapons. When you have finished of the boss and saved Mariam (girlfriend) then the brothers have to fight each other to determine who wins her love :) This all sounds like a bad 80's film, but the game was released in 1987 so that only makes it even more fun to play today. Even though it might not be fair to compare the arcade version and the ZX Spectrum version you get a somewhat similar gameplay. For example, this version includes a co-op mode so you can play with your friends, something that, for example the NES version could never do. So while the graphics on the Spectrum are perhaps the worst of all the different versions of the game, the gameplay was pretty good :)
​
Picture
Picture
Comments

Doom on the original Playstation

4/25/2016

Comments

 
Picture

We are always getting something new in the museum and now the day we got this classic game on the PS1. Doom was released on the Playstation 1 system in 1995 and is a combination of Doom and Doom 2 with multiplayer features, it does not include split screen mode but instead you had to connect two machines together with a separate cable, but it just made the game more true to the original version on PC. The difference between the PC and Playstation version is that the MIDI music from the PC was replaced with actual recordings of sounds. For example, there is a bee in a bottle, children crying, creepy horse breathing down the neck and more to create the perfect ambient for the game, also the rock/metal theme in the PC version was replaced with more scary and atmospheric music. The graphics, however, was not much improved upon due to limitations of the PS1, for example, there was some levels of the game was shortened and use lower resolution Textures. Otherwise this is an excellent version of the game and completely trouble-free playing with just inserting the CD and start playing without having to worry about installing drivers and whatnot like you did on the PC version. 
Comments

ZX Spectrum Games - Cookie, Pssst, Death Wish and JetPac

4/24/2016

Comments

 
Picture

We are opening a boxed donation which came to us earlier this week and these classic games were inside. Jet Pac is of course one of the most famous games on the Spectrum, it was released in 1983 on both the Spectrum and Commandore VIC - 20 ( My very first computer ) . The game spawned two other sequels, Lunar Jetman (1983 ) and Solar Jetman : Hunt for the Golden Warp Ship (1990 ) which was only released on the NES system. Also from that same developer came Pssst and it was released shortly after Jet Pac . Cookie was the third game from Ultimate Play The Game ,  but it seemed to resemble too much the Pssst game and did consequently not receive good reviews . Death Wish 3 is a game from Gremlin and was released in 1987 , was quite violent compared to other games in this era and you can see the resemblance with the first Grand Theft Auto, it was open world,  extremely voilent, and if you mistreat  the civilians the cops will show up and start chasing you :)
Cookie
Death Wish 3
Jet Pac
Pssst
Comments

ZX81 by Sinclair Research 

4/23/2016

Comments

 
Picture

​The ZX81 is a home computer produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Scotland by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and was designed to be a low-cost introduction to home computing for the general public. It was hugely successful and more than 1.5 million units were sold before it was eventually discontinued. The ZX81 found commercial success in many other countries, notably the United States, where it was initially sold as the ZX-81. Timex manufactured and distributed it under licence and enjoyed a substantial but brief boom in sales. Timex later produced its own versions of the ZX81 for the US market – the Timex Sinclair 1000 and Timex Sinclair 1500. Unauthorised clones of the ZX81 were produced in a number of countries.

We got this one with an extra 16K RAM expansion.
Picture

​The ZX81 was designed to be small, simple, and above all cheap, using as few components as possible to keep the cost down. Video output was to a television set rather than a dedicated monitor. Programs and data were loaded and saved onto audio tape cassettes. It had only four silicon chips on board and a mere 1 KB of memory. The machine had no power switch or any moving parts (with the exception of a VHF TV channel selector switch present on early "ZX81 USA" models and the Timex-Sinclair 1000), and used a pressure-sensitive membrane keyboard for manual input. The ZX81's limitations prompted the emergence of a flourishing market in third-party peripherals to improve its capabilities. Such limitations, however, achieved Sinclair's objective of keeping the cost of the machine as low as possible. Its distinctive design brought its designer, Rick Dickinson, a Design Council award.
Picture

​The ZX81 could be bought by mail order in kit form or pre-assembled. In what was then a major innovation, it was the first cheap mass-market home computer that could be bought from high street stores, led by W.H. Smith and soon many other retailers. The ZX81 marked the first time that computing in Britain became an activity for the general public, rather than the preserve of businesspeople and electronics hobbyists. It inspired the creation of a huge community of enthusiasts, some of whom founded their own businesses producing software and hardware for the ZX81. Many went on to play a major role in the British computer industry in later years. The ZX81's commercial success made Sinclair Research one of Britain's leading computer manufacturers and earned a fortune and an eventual knighthood for the company's founder, Sir Clive Sinclair.
Picture
Here is a picture of ZX81 sold as an kit which you had to assemble yourself :)
Comments
<<Previous
    Picture

    Yngvi Th. Johannsson

    Retro gaming enthusiast and all around computer collector. 

    Check out youtube site for more videos !

    Archives

    May 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    June 2019
    April 2019
    May 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015

    Categories

    All
    Amstrad
    Artwork
    Atari
    Commodore
    DOS/WINDOWS
    Fairchild
    GameCube
    Joystick
    Nintendo
    PC Hardware
    Playstation
    Playstation 4
    Pong Machines
    Retro Hunt
    Sega Mega Drive
    Sega Saturn
    Sharp Computers
    Sinclair
    Spectravideo
    Xbox

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • The Collection
  • Hardware
    • Commodore
    • Sinclair Research
    • SpectraVideo
    • Nintendo
    • Amstrad
    • IBM
  • Software
    • Sierra Online
    • Infocom
    • Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI)
  • Gallery
  • Video
    • Complete Video Walkthrough
  • Donations
  • Contact
  • About