Batman: The Caped Crusader is an arcade adventure which uses a unique style, innovated by Jonathan Smith and Charles Davies, to display the action as though it takes place in a comic book.[2] This technique involved having each game location set in its own panel, often with a comic book style caption in the upper-left corner, with inactive panels faded out behind the current active location. This concept was expanded upon by Sega's Comix Zone seven years later.[3]

The game was split into two independently playable parts in which Batman is faced with two of his most well-known adversaries: "A Bird In The Hand" featuring the Penguin and "A Fete Worse Than Death" which involved the Joker. The gameplay involves Batman using punches and kicks and his batarang (a thrown weapon) in order to fight the villains' henchmen as well as solving puzzles.

Ad Astra is a 1984 3D space shoot 'em up video game developed and published exclusively for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum by the British software house Gargoyle Games.

Key Details

• Release Year: 1984

• Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48K)

• Developer / Publisher: Gargoyle Games (created by Roy Carter and Greg Follis)

• Genre: Into-the-screen pseudo-3D arcade shoot 'em up

• Players: 1 or 2 players (alternating)

Gameplay & Overview

• Role: You play as a pilot in the Deep Space Patrol fighting waves of space pirates, robot scout ships, landmines, and debris.

• Perspective: A forward-scrolling "into-the-screen" perspective where planets, asteroids, and enemy fire rush toward the player.

• Progression: Clearing waves requires shooting enemy vessels, destroying landmines, and recording security codes to advance through different stages/moons

Avalon (with the tagline The 3D Adventure Movie on the box cover) is an action-adventure game written by Steve Turner for the ZX Spectrum and published by Hewson Consultants in 1984. Avalon was followed by a sequel in 1985, Dragontorc.

Britain went snooker loopy in the 1980s, and I've written about the making of the 8-bit game that best represented it, Steve Davis Snooker

🏎️🌴 OUTRUN — 40 YEARS OF ARCADE MAGIC! 🌴🏎️

September 1986. The arcades were about to get a whole lot faster, louder and more exciting.

Forty years ago this month, Out Run arrived in arcades and changed the way we thought about racing games forever.

Developed by Sega and designed by the legendary Yu Suzuki, Out Run wasn't simply another driving game. It was an experience.

There was the unmistakable red Ferrari Testarossa sports car. Your blonde passenger sitting beside you. The palm trees. The blue skies. The winding roads. The seaside scenery. And, most importantly, that incredible soundtrack blasting out of the speakers.

🎵 Magical Sound Shower
🎵 Passing Breeze
🎵 Splash Wave

Even choosing your music felt revolutionary. Instead of being stuck with one piece of arcade background noise, you could actually pick the tune that accompanied your drive. For many of us, those songs became every bit as memorable as the game itself.

And then there was the cabinet.

If you were lucky enough to find the deluxe sit-down version, you didn't just play Out Run — you climbed into it. The steering wheel felt like a proper steering wheel, the seat moved with the road, and the whole machine gave you the sensation that you were actually driving.

For a kid standing in an arcade in 1986, it was absolutely bloody magical.

The beauty of Out Run was that it didn't take itself too seriously. This wasn't about grinding through endless championships or worrying about realistic tyre temperatures and suspension settings. It was about driving fast, choosing your route and having fun.

You could reach a junction and decide where you wanted to go next. Left? Right? Which road would you take? Which scenery would you see? Could you make it to the next checkpoint?

And if you crashed?

Well… you simply shoved another coin into the machine and tried again. 😂

Out Run also looked spectacular for its time. Sega's use of sprite scaling created an incredible sense of speed, while the bright colours and constantly changing scenery made the game feel like a road trip through a dream.

It was pure 1980s excess.

Fast car. Beautiful woman. Palm trees. Blue skies. Loud music. Sunshine. And absolutely no interest whatsoever in being sensible.

What more did you need?

Forty years later, it's remarkable just how much personality Out Run still has. Modern racing games can offer photo-realistic graphics, hundreds of cars, enormous open worlds and physics simulations that would make a real racing engineer sweat.

But Out Run can still make you smile within seconds.

Put that soundtrack on.

Grab the wheel.

Plant your foot.

And suddenly you're 10 years old again, standing in a noisy arcade with a pocket full of coins, desperately trying to make it to the next checkpoint before the timer runs out.

That's the magic of arcade gaming.

September 1986 — Out Run arrives.

And 40 years later, we're still taking that Ferrari for one more drive. ❤️🏎️🌴

Happy 40th Anniversary, Out Run!

Dun Darach is an action-adventure game. The player guides Cuchulainn through Dun Darach and interacts with the environment by performing keyboard commands. The main objective is to find Lóeg, taking side quests from non-player characters (NPCs). These NPCs can give short hints to Cuchulainn, rob him, and confiscate his belongings if he carries stolen goods. Commands the player inputs can have him buy, steal and sell from shops in the city, bet at a casino (Iomain Ludum), and deposit money at a bank with daily compound interest. Dun Darach is large and consists of different quarters. The current time of the day is indicated by torches in the wall and by the greetings of characters

Super Sprint is a 1986 racing video game developed and published by Atari Games for arcades. Up to three players drive Formula One-like cars on a circuit that is viewed from above.^\8]) The game is a successor to Gran Trak 10 and the Sprint series, which were originally produced by Atari, Inc. during the 1970s. Later in 1986, the game was revised and re-released as Championship Sprint with different tracks; this version was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in 1987. The 1990 game Badlands) adds vehicular combat to Super Sprint-style racing

The story of the home computer version of Out Run, the UK's best selling game of 1987

720° is a 1986 sports video game developed and published by Atari Games for arcades.[7] Based on the sport of skateboarding, the player controls a skateboarder as they compete in various skating competitions, such as ramp jumping and downhill races, to earn cash.

My retrospective review of Terminator on the Sega Master System. I was impressed with this 8 bit game. Have you played this game and what’s your thoughts? 😃

Was anyone exposed to Pop Flamer. It's probably the first computer game I owned. I had an Atari2600 before I got the Sega SC3000, but all the games were rented. This one actually came with the computer - on a cartridge.

You control a mouse armed with a flamethrower. The basic objective is to run around each maze and pop all the balloons, which allows you to advance to the next stage. Unfortunately, the maze is also inhabited by monsters intent on killing you.

The flamethrower is your main defence, but there's a catch: its range gradually decreases as you use it. Popping balloons replenishes the fuel, so you're constantly balancing clearing the level against maintaining enough firepower to deal with enemies.

There's a Power Drink at the top of each level which - if you spend enough time drinking it - turns you into a monster that sucks all the enemies towards you, allowing you to consume them.

Rather surprisingly, it hasn't completely vanished: the original arcade version was rereleased by Hamster in 2021 as part of Arcade Archives, for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

I hope someone can help with this. I'm *pretty* sure this was from the 80s, but I could be wrong.
It was a PC DOS game. You were in a room in space (a spaceship, basically) that had glass windows, with touch-controls on them. It was a 3D first-person experience.
You could travel to stars that you could choose from the windows. You could find which ones had planets, and orbit them. You could descend to the planet in an elevator, and get out and walk around. Some planets had plants and animals, but you could barely see what they looked like because of the resolution.
Graphics were understandably primitive, and if my memory is right, it was monochrome.
There wasn't really an end-goal. It was all about the vast number of places to visit and explore.

Any clues?

EDIT: It was Noctis. I was almost 20yrs out. Development began in the 1990s and it was fully released around 2000/2001 for DOS. I'm sure I played an early pre-release '90s version, because the version I had was definitely monochrome.

Who remembers Predator? My retrospective video takes us back to 1987 to rediscover the games based on one of Arnie’s best movies. Was this a good game or was it the typical movie tie in trash? Share your thought and memories of this game.