Game 333: Impossible Mission

Another visitor! Stay awhile. Stay FOREVER.

Thus barks Dr. Atombender in menacing SID-powered clarity as you descend the first elevator shaft into his secret underground computer lab. Sworn to revenge upon the world for ruining his video game high score with a poorly timed power outage, you must locate and enter his control room and stop him from breaking the ICBM launch codes, ensuring the security of U.S. nuclear secrets for almost another 40 years.

You have six ingame hours, and each agent that bites it will take ten minutes to replace. 30+ lives may seem like a lot - it carried me and many others through the famously difficult Contra. But this game ranks somewhere between Jumpman and Jet Set Willy in terms of ridiculous lethality. It's not uncommon to get killed ten times in the same room and still not clear it.

Smooth C64 sprite animations are recycled from Summer Games.

Atombender's lair is a semi-randomly generated maze of elevator shafts and 32 connecting rooms. These rooms' layouts are fixed, but their positions in the lair and the behavior of the patrolling Dalek-like robots are random. Most of your time is spent here, where you must search the furniture for the passcodes you'll need to progress. They look a little plain, and a few rooms are downright ugly, but Epyx makes good use of the C64's SID chip for ambiance here, with the constant hum of mad science equipment, whirring motors, buzzing electrical discharge, and occasional orders of destroy him, my robots heard spoken over the rooms' loudspeaker systems.

The main goal is to locate the 36 punchcard fragments, but you'll also find, on occasion, one-time use tokens, which can be used at the various terminals to reset the elevators, which I rarely found useful, or to freeze the robots in place, which are incredibly useful and almost too good to use, except that sometimes a robot or two is placed and programmed as such that there's no other way to clear the room. There's definitely a puzzle element to solving these rooms along with the arcade-like platforming, and the procedurally generated elements change up the solutions from game to game to some extent.

This formula would be fine, if a bit of a letdown after so much creative level design seen in Jumpman the previous year, but Agent McFlipperson here has an awkward jumping arc that can't be controlled and is hard to predict. Pixel-perfect collision detection, normally a good thing for an arcade-style game, becomes frustrating when applied to fancy animation loops, and though his death scream is legitimately hilarious, it gets old. I frequently missed platforms simply because my feet weren't facing the ground at the precise moment of passing over them. I'd sometimes get killed by a robot behind me because my sprite's feet extended too far backward in a running animation frame and touched the robot. Tiny gaps can in theory be crossed by your stride without having to jump, but success depends on your sprite's feet spanning the gap at the precise moment of crossing. Sometimes you cross, sometimes you just fall in, and it feels completely arbitrary. There's a reason why sprites in platformers usually have compact, rectangular silhouettes, or failing that, rectangular bounding boxes or tile-based collision detection over pixel-based ones.

Another unfair difficulty factor is that you can never be completely sure of the robots' behavior until you're in their line of sight, which can be instantly lethal, and you won't know until you try. A lot of them simply patrol back and forth, firing their weapon at fixed intervals (or not), and pay no mind to you, while others may detect the player based on line of sight, or proximity, or movement, or some combination, and react by turning to facing you, accelerating, and/or shooting.

Your only defense, apart from avoidance and jumping, is the use of robot snooze tokens, which are much more limited in availability than your lives. No sonic screwdrivers here. There's the constant dilemma of whether to use a token to help pass a difficult room or to save it for an even more difficult one later. Some pieces of furniture will turn out to be impossible to search without using a token, and nothing's more disheartening than dying from a bad jump after expending one, thereby wasting both it and an agent.

A gif can't properly convey how the music puzzle works, but you must sort notes from low to high.

 

Two special rooms in the lair with chess board patterned screens theoretically grant unlimited tokens by having you solve musical puzzles, but they get unsustainably more complex with each one solved, and become basically impossible to solve without a scratch pad or a good pitch ear about eight iterations in. The token type reward you get alternates, so you must solve two puzzles for each precious snooze token you wish to obtain.

 

The game is solvable, and I managed to catch Dr. Atombender after a few days of practice, memorization, and some luck. Also with quite a bit of patience for farming tokens at the music rooms, which I solved using a variant of the merge sort and some careful note taking.

I eventually learned which rooms are the most doable, which rooms are trouble, and figured out general solutions to navigate the trouble rooms, including precise footings to jump from. I learned that it's better to squander a snooze token than risk death, but better still to clear a room deathless without using a token if you can.

My first successful run was far from perfect. I did clear most of the rooms without needing snooze tokens, thanks to my practice and a lucky avoidance of randomly bad robot configurations, but here and there I wasted lives, and a few rooms were especially bad for wasted tokens and lives. I spent a good 20 minutes farming tokens in a room near the start, and yet I still ran out as I neared the far side of Atombender's lair, forcing a time consuming refill. But as inefficiently as I played, I still finished with almost an hour to spare, and could have certainly done better than that if I had been smarter about assembling the punchcards.

Even if you know the password, you still have to assemble all nine punchcards.

 

The final challenge is to take the 36 punchcard fragments and assemble them into nine complete cards, each corresponding to a letter of Atombender's control room password. Cards can be flipped, rotated, and copied, and there's also a color-changing mechanic which only serves to waste time. You can also phone H.Q. for hints at the cost of two minutes per call. One hint option is to have them rotate two of your fragments into the correct orientation, which I decided to just do for all of my cards and then brute force them together until I found combinations that fit. The hint calls take 36 minutes to get all of the fragments into position, and I had plenty of minutes to spare.

The other option is to have them tell you whether or not a specific fragment can be completed with the rest of what you've got in your inventory, and this strikes me as nearly useless. If you've got all 36 fragments, then you can assemble cards from all of your fragments and the question is redundant. If you've got less than that, well, I estimate that you'd need 27 fragments in your inventory for there to be about a 40% chance that its three partners are located in the remaining 26. It seems far less tedious, and a more efficient use of your phone hint minutes, to wait until you have them all and use the auto-rotate hint for all of them.

Once all nine cards are attained, the control room can be entered. Hopefully you remember which room it was in!

No. No. No!

GAB rating: Average. Impossible Mission has a good overall concept, ahead of its time in ways, and some great audio aesthetics, but I didn't find it very enjoyable to play thanks to an obnoxiously unbalanced difficulty curve brought on by weird jumping mechanics and other questionable design choices.

Game 332: F-15 Strike Eagle

 

The Modern Warfare followup to Ace's Call of Duty,  F-15 Strike Eagle simulates supersonic fighter combat in the jet age, where missiles and long range radar rule the sky, where MiGs get fireballed faster than the pilot can be completely sure that someone is approaching, and missing by a mile is actually a rather close miss, and with it brings major design and gameplay upgrades. No longer is each scenario a simple dogfight over nondescript terrain that ends when one of the planes is shot down, but an operational sector of 200,000 square miles dotted with SAMs and airfields guarding mission objective targets. Machine guns, previously your only weapon, now take a backseat to a battery of guided SRMs, MRMs, airdropped bombs, and a defense array of flares, ECMs, and afterburners.

The flight model, too, is more sophisticated than its barebones, BASIC-coded predecessors, though not very comparable to Solo Flight, which simulated a conventional light plane rather than a combat jet. The manual goes into considerable detail about the aerodynamic forces that act on your F-15, explaining why it handles the way it does under different conditions, but it isn't necessary to fully comprehend it beyond understanding some general techniques. Use pitch to control altitude, throttle up before climbing or turning, throttle down and possibly use the airbrakes for steep dives, keep a very close eye on the altimeter if you're going in low, and don't ever get caught without enough fuel to return to base. There's no takeoff or landing, but you'll be grateful for that when flying a damaged, barely controllable piano back to a carrier with a squadron on your flaming tail.

This sophistication, though, comes at a terrible cost. Under the best circumstances, F-15 Strike Eagle runs at about four FPS! And the more fighters and missiles are in the air, the worse things get. The only Atari version I could find was a 1986 UK cassette release, and I don't know if the original US version ran any faster, but as it worked just fine on an emulated NTSC machine, I suspect not.

Coming from a modern perspective, it takes some getting used to, but F-15 is surprisingly playable despite the punishing strain it puts on the poor old 6502B. Hellcat-style ballistic gun dueling at visual range does seem unfeasible despite being supported by the engine, and several pages in the manual explaining how to perform jet-powered maneuvers, but your guided missiles are so effective that I hardly saw a point in using the 20mm cannon. SRM's are nearly fire-and-forget - launched just outside of visual directly at an enemy's cold nose they would hit most of the time. Launched at one incoming at a 60 degree angle, they'd still usually hit. They'd even hit enemies behind me more often than not, and misses would still force them into evasive maneuvers, buying me time to turn around and face them for a better shot. MRMs, used at the correct distance, never missed as far as I could tell.

F-15 Strike Eagle's campaign has seven scenarios of escalating complexity and four difficulty settings. I found the second-highest difficulty Pilot to be a bit easy - these interceptor-class MiGs and old SAM launchers are no match for the historically undefeated F-15 - but more fun than the highest Ace, where missile fire is nonstop, airfields scramble fighters instantly upon the previous one's destruction, and your countermeasures (or your ability to focus on the overcrowded radar) fail just often enough that getting hit seems unavoidable in a prolonged mission no matter how cautious you are. Unguided bomb runs, already the most challenging task in lower difficulties, are particularly punishing in Ace mode.

An Ace-mode failbomb

It's bad enough that you have to split your attention between your target and the incoming ordinance on the radar screen, but the tanking framerate makes it insanely easy to misjudge your drop timing, and passing over an undamaged SAM means your hot exhaust side is now directly facing a seeker launcher at point blank range and primed to fire, or perhaps the missed target is an airfield which will instantly scramble a fighter right behind you and gun you down with unerring accuracy.

I recorded and uploaded a playthrough of the final and most challenging mission, Persian Gulf, played on Pilot difficulty.

 

Each mission's objective is the same - take out all of the primary targets, and this generally means whittling down the defenses surrounding them first. You only carry six airdropped cluster bombs, so apart from the very first scenario where defenses are sparse and there's only one objective, you'll need to return to base to repair, refuel, and rearm multiple times.

Every flight starts with a MiG-21 spawning right in front of you - easy prey for an SRM, though a potential nuisance if it happens to miss, and at such a close range it can.

The lower-left HUD quadrant shows a strategic map.

 

The black, vaguely missile-shaped icons are SAM sites, the white crossed lines are airfields, and the outlined squares are your primary targets. Each tile represents roughly 40x40 miles of terrain, and the SAM and airfields can detect and attack you from about 80 miles away, while your long range radar is effective up to 60 miles, and ground targets only show up at 20 miles, about the same as visual range. Clearing a path to the primary targets takes some careful planning and strategy.

The southernmost airfield, I figured, had to go first, or else every sortie would begin with it launching an interceptor in endless pursuit. I flew out to the east, turned around, and made a westward strafing run, successfully taking out it and its east-flanking SAM, but took a hit from the west-flanking one, forcing me to retreat to the carrier. With my second run, I took out the SAMs to its west.

Returning to base, leaving the first target more exposed than initially.

On my third trip, I flew due north in an attempt to take out the last airfield defending the target, and as many targets further up north as possible. Countermeasures and high speed would keep me safe from the SAMs firing off to the west. I managed to get three, but missed a fourth target with my last bomb.

Airfields like this tend to spawn jets, throwing off the framerate and causing inputs to drop.

Next, I destroyed the closest primary target, and a few defenses along the coast at angles of approach carefully calculated to minimize exposure to the surrounding defenses.

This repeated a few more cycles, and not every sortie went down exactly as planned, but I eventually completed my decimation of the Iranian SAM battery and took out the final target, returning to base victorious.

GAB Rating: Above average. F-15's very poor frame rate and resulting frustration prevents me from giving it a strong recommendation, but I had fun with it despite the performance issues. Offering some of the complexity and immersion of a flight simulator, some of the immediacy of an action/arcade game, and some of the depth of a strategy wargame, Strike Eagle doesn't quite master any of these trades, but blends them well and offers an experience unrealized by so many games that only focus on one.

Game 331: Solo Flight

I guess calling it "MicroProse Flight Simulator" would fly too close to the sun.

 

I've said this before, but I'm just not the right reviewer for this kind of game, and recalling my miserable experience with SubLOGIC's Flight Simulator, I had to mull over whether this would even be included in my MicroProse retrospective at all. Ultimately, its importance to the company's early history and anticipation of F-15 Strike Eagle's more simulation-oriented aspects (despite the former not being a combat sim) moved me to include it, but not without reservations.

Turns out that with practice, I actually got kind of okay at this game. Not great, mind you, but I managed to land the plane twice in a row on the most difficult Colorado map under the second-highest difficulty settings. I credit my relative success to a few things - a forgiving flight model, improved graphics (still with a lousy framerate, sadly), a zoomed-out perspective that helps judge runway alignment and touchdown height (while decidedly not helping to judge distances or topography), and vastly improved instrumentation, including VOR navigation and ILS landing guides.

 

Solo Flight offers three maps to traverse:

• Kansas, a flat flyover state with no obstacles except a few mountains far to the north of any points of interest.
• Washington, a Pacific state on the Ring of Fire divided by the mountainous Cascade Range.
• Colorado, a state with very complex topography of plains, plateaus, mountains, and canyons.

 

You need maps, not just for navigation, but also to determine how high you need to be flying to not crash into the ground.

 

...because most of the time the game looks like this.

Four practice modes are available, for flying under clear conditions, windy conditions, IFR conditions (i.e. flying blind on instruments alone), and landing. I spent most of my time practicing clear conditions flying and landing before attempting the real game; the Mail Run. Here, four difficulty settings may be chosen, which increase the likelihood of instrument and equipment failure as well as the frequency of adverse conditions. God help you if multiple instruments fail during IFR conditions, which is a very real possibility on the hardest mode.

In my final and most successful game, my first task was to carry mail from Aspen to Pueblo. I figured I'd fly east toward Mt. Lincoln, slip around north through Loveland Pass, and turn south at USAS Academy.

Taxiing to the east runway. Mt. Lincoln is the white triangle.

Facing east and throttled up

Takeoff!

Navigating with any degree of precision requires using the VOR readouts, which indicate the angle of orientation to two radio stations. Unfortunately, the map lines are only in 30 degree increments, so at a glance you may only be able to identify your location by the quadrilateral formed by the intersecting lines rather pinpointing the exact spot. When taking the pass between the towers, as I did, VOR navigation is pretty unhelpful; the triangulation just gives you a straight line.

My heading readout failed, VOR is of limited use here, and perspectives can be strange to judge. Is that runway distant or tiny?

Rounding Mt. Lincoln and positioned just north of Vail's airport, USAF Academy is visible to the east.

Still on course. Pueblo's airport is now visible.

As I approach, ILS helps indicate if my slope needs correction. But thanks to a rapid descent, I'm coming in much too fast.

I throttled up to gain altitude, turned around, and tried again, and this time was able to land correctly, deliver the mail, and get my heading instrument repaired.

The next goal was Denver, just up to the north, which I reached without difficulty.

A head-on approach from 1000 feet makes for an easy landing

After that, it was back to Aspen, and this is where things took a bad turn. One of the VOR indicators failed, crippling my navigation. And then, somewhere around Mt. Evans, the ground elevation very suddenly snuck up on me.

The plane climbs, but actually descends?!

 

I think I've played enough to get the idea. I didn't exactly have fun, but non-combat flight sims always had a narrow audience, which always excluded myself. CGW Magazine contrasted it with SubLOGIC's own Flight Simulator II, declaring the former to be a very good program, but FS2 to be far more comprehensive and realistic. I completely believe this.

GAB Rating: Average. Even though this isn't for me, I think I grasped enough that I can appreciate the improvements over Flight Simulator. Obviously this is hopelessly dated as a sim, but perhaps its somewhat more casual approach gives it just enough of a game factor to not be completely obsolete as one.

Games 328-330: Early MicroProse

Throughout the first decade of the 2000's, thanks to abandonware, eBay, and spotty backwards compatibility in Windows 98/XP, I had come to regard MicroProse as a titan of DOS era gaming. Landmark titles like Civilization, Master of Orion, X-COM, and Pirates! Gold had passed by me in their time, and yet consumed countless of my spare hours even in obsolescence and without the benefit of nostalgia. Their Ports of Entry list is one of the biggest I've made yet, jammed full of classics, some of them now familiar to me, many of them not.

Founded by USAF pilot Bill Stealey and his friend Sid Meier, military flight sims had been their imperative from the beginning, and remained a staple product until nearly the end, but these never appealed to me. Their first dozen or so games, all for Atari computers, are mostly flight sims, culminating in F-15 Strike Eagle, which happens to be their first whale.

For this early MicroProse retrospective, it made the most sense to focus on the evolution of these flight sims, despite being uncharacteristic of the games I'd come to think of them for, and my dislike of them besides. These are the seeds that Pirates! and Civilization grew from. I'm skipping arcade-style games from these early years like Chopper Rescue and Floyd of the Jungle, as they don't seem as relevant to the company's history, and I'm putting off NATO Commander, their first wargame, to be reviewed as an antecedent to their successful Command series.

I have also picked two ancestors that precede MicroProse itself; Atari's Red Baron, a flight combat arcade game said to have inspired their initial flight sim lineup, and Formula 1, the first commercial and earliest extant Sid Meier game.

Game 328: Formula 1

Penultimate Monaco circuit. The framerate really is this bad.

 

I couldn't help but wince the moment I realized Formula 1 is BASIC. F1 is fast. BASIC is slow. Who thought this would be a good idea?

Clearly inspired by Atari's Sprint series, Formula 1 aims for more realism, offers larger courses inspired by real-world ones, and expects players to brake and downshift before entering turns and follow a smooth and consistent line. Its five courses include the classic four-cornered Indianapolis, the windier Monza Grand Prix, the even windier Watkins Glen, the narrow and sharp Monaco circuit, and the fictitious "Killer," a maze of sharp turns, constricting narrows, and deadly hazards. This is all and well, but has two areas of trouble - the atrocious ~4.5fps performance, and the controls on Atari's one-button joystick, which handles steering, braking, and throttle when the trigger is up, and gear shifting when pressed down.

I sort of got used to the low framerate and dragging lack of speed (even the stopwatch runs slowly!), but these controls lag. Push the joystick laterally and the car will begin turning sometime later, nevermind how long precisely, and when it does, turns in 30 degree increments rather than smooth curves. Pulling off a good turn is, no doubt owing to the difficulty, pretty satisfying, especially if you pass an AI opponent while doing so, but you're just as likely to steer right into the curb or miss the turn entirely.

Gear shifting is even more of an unresponsive nightmare, and makes driving in top gear pointless even in the longest straightaways before the widest turns. From fifth gear, which tops at 200mph, you have to slow down to 120mph before you can downshift, and then after that, there's no telling how long the it will take, so you've got to either start your downshift quite early or risk missing the turn because it happened too late. You might as well just drive at 160mph in fourth gear the entire time, which can handle most turns with a bit of braking. I got consistently better times this way on the forgiving Indy circuit.

GAB rating: Bad. Many famous developers' earliest works are humble, but Sid Meier's Formula 1 is borderline unplayable. The lack of polish can work in your favor in one case, though - it's actually possible to register a complete lap by driving right back across the start line and re-crossing it! That's how I did three Monaco laps in under 20 seconds, no doubt demolishing the world record.

Game 329: Red Baron

As the story goes, the idea to found MicroProse was planted in the summer of 1982 when Meier consistently outscored Stealey at Atari's Red Baron at a bar in Las Vegas, and boasted he could make a superior computer game.

Red Baron doesn't much resemble a flight simulator of any degree of realism. If anything, it feels more like a precursor to Star Fox, perhaps more so than Atari's Star Wars does. Running on an expanded version of Battlezone's vector hardware, Red Baron eschews free movement and instead puts you in a fighter flying on a preset path over a battlefield dotted with guns, blimps, pillboxes, and enemy squadrons. An analog stick lets you climb, dive, and roll to avoid gunfire, but not deviate from the endless flight path.

The vector hardware powering this game must have been expensive to operate - or perhaps Atari felt the immersive 3D visuals would sell themselves by the minute - because like Battlezone, Red Baron is capriciously difficult. You have a grace period of play where enemies don't shoot back, but once they start, it can feel pretty random whether their bullets hit home or not. Sometimes they just come flying out of nowhere faster than you can react. You can decrease your odds of getting hit by wildly spinning and weaving like a drunk missile, but you've got to hold steady to have a chance of hitting your targets with your bullets, which is made all the more difficult by Red Baron's poor framerate (I estimate Battlezone runs at 15fps and Red Baron about half of that), and jittery controls (this may be an emulation issue, but I found violently twirling the joystick at the game start helps calibrate it). The longer you hold steady trying to draw a bead on a target, the more likely it or something else snipes you.

GAB rating: Average.  Red Baron offers a convincing sensation of flight, but its simplistic gameplay doesn't compel me to come back and attain proficiency the way Battlezone did.

Game 330: Hellcat Ace

 

If you're going to play Hellcat Ace, make sure that once you've figured out the controls, you crank up the difficulty. Otherwise you'll get the wrong impression, as I initially did, that each of its 14 scenarios amount to nothing more than a turkey shoot against one (or two, if you prefer) nearly defenseless opponent(s) with no practical difference between them.

Hellcat Ace is a pretty barebones and simplistic sim, with a flight model that makes Elite look sophisticated, and an oddly structured campaign mode that consists of 14 one-on-one dogfights where it is virtually impossible to see them all in one setting because the game ends after five victories, and failure usually means death, capture, or the loss of your carrier. You can, at least, begin its campaign as late as mission 10.

Maximum difficulty provided a good challenge, and in the above video, I play through a tour of six missions from August 1940 (Flying Tiger) to September 1942 (Guadalcanal) and achieve a rank of "W.G.F.P." I never felt like the world's greatest fighter pilot - I think I survived about half of my missions and it took me quite a few tries to fly a successful tour at this difficulty, but if we take this as a game meant to challenge you, as opposed to a game meant to be beaten, I think this is about the right balance.

Each scenario defines a few combat parameters - the type of plane you and your opponent fly, your starting altitudes, the time of day, and whether or not failure means losing your carrier (and therefore an automatic game over). Every scenario can optionally be flown against two planes, awarding two victory patches instead of one on a successful completion, but the game feels balanced around the one-on-one format. A select few missions can also be won by evading your opponent for some time, though most require you to shoot them down. It's odd to see famous pacific battles like Pearl Harbor and Midway reduced to solo duels, but they do play somewhat differently from each other as long as the difficulty is set above the default.

The six missions flown were:

• Flying Tiger, August 13, 1940. Pursue a medium bomber and shoot it down. An easy kill even at maximum difficulty.
• Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Pursue and destroy a floatplane spotted at high altitude. More challenging, but not unreasonably so.
• Wake Island, December 11, 1941. One of the most challenging missions in the game, pitting an F4F WildCat against a formidably nimble and durable Zero. You begin with an altitude advantage, but it doesn't last. I bailed after taking terminal damage, forfeiting a victory patch, but I lived.
• Coral Sea, May 8, 1942. Intercept a low-altitude bomber en route to the Yorktown. Staying on the bomber's tail long enough to hit it is difficult as it is, but you also have to keep a careful eye on your altimeter and be sure you don't crash into the sea. Failure means the loss of the Yorktown and the end of your tour.
• Midway, June 4, 1942. Survival is your goal, and all you have to do to win is endure the initial burst of gunfire and then keep flying away from your hunter at maximum throttle.
• Guadalcanal, September 3 1942. A nighttime dogfight against a Japanese army fighter. Easier than the dogfight against the Zero; I earned my fifth and final victory patch here.

 

GAB rating: Below average. Hellcat Ace certainly meets the low bar of being playable, and I don't mind its relaxed flight model, but it leaves me wishing for more substance and historical verisimilitude.

Spitfire Ace

Ports of Entry: Dinamic Software

Unknown lead platform:

 

Army Moves

First released for Amstrad CPC & ZX Spectrum in 1986

Ported to Amiga, Commodore 64, & MSX in 1987

 

Grand Prix Master

First released for Atari ST, Commodore 64, MSX, & ZX Spectrum in 1988

Released for Amiga & PC in 1989

 

Satan

First released for MSX in 1989

Released for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC, & ZX Spectrum in 1990

Mobygames' release notes are all over the place. They suggest that Creepsoft was responsible for Amiga, Atari ST, and C64 versions, and that Anjana Soft ported to most of the other platforms, including DOS, while the PC Booter version is only credited to Dinamic. But the credits for Amiga & ST suggest those are conversions by Marcos Jourón, and the credits for Amstrad, C64, & ZX Spectrum are also all different.

 

Select chronology: 

 

 

Title	Lead platform	Date	Contemporary ports
Saimazoom	ZX Spectrum	1984
West Bank	ZX Spectrum	1985	1986 port to Amstrad CPC
Army Moves	???	1986	Same-year releases on Amstrad CPC & ZX Spectrum 1987 ports to Amiga, C64, & MSX
Game Over	ZX Spectrum	1987	Same-year ports to Amstrad CPC, C64, MSX, & Thomson MO/TO 1988 port to PC
Navy Moves	Amstrad CPC	1988	Same-year ports to C64, MSX, & ZX Spectrum 1989 port to Amiga & Atari ST
Grand Prix Master	???	1988	Same-year releases on Atari ST, C64, MSX & ZX Spectrum 1989 ports to Amiga & PC
Satan	???	1989	Too many to fit here
After the War	Amstrad CPC	1989	Same-year ports to Amiga, Atari ST, C64, MSX, PC & ZX Spectrum
Risky Woods	Amiga	1992	Same-year ports to Amiga, Atari ST, Genesis, & PC
Hollywood Monsters	Windows	1997
Runaway: A Road Adventure	Windows	2001