• Tag Archives Epyx

  • Championship Wrestling (Commodore 64)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Championship Wrestling (Epyx, 1986)

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/166788662405/suspiciousbehaviorproductions-championship

    Championship Wrestling is a professional wrestling game released by Epyx in 1986 for the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari ST as well as the Commodore 16 and Plus/4. It was originally intended as a WWF license but for some reason that license fell through. This didn’t substantively affect the game, the characters are just more generically named. You can still pick out some resemblance to actual wrestlers of the time.

    The game featured eight different characters and a total of 25 moves. Two players could play at once and up to eight players could compete in the same championship. The game generally got positive reviews and if you are looking for an arcade style wrestling game than this isn’t a bad one.

    There have been no remakes of this game that I am aware of so you will have to pick up one of the originals or find a disk image for emulation. The Commodore 64 version is the one I am most familiar with and it is a pretty decent game. The 16-bit versions will have better graphics but I’m not sure if the gameplay is better or worse.

    All the screens above are from the Commodore 64 version.





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  • Epyx  – Seawolf II/Gun Fight, Star Fire/Fire One

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

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    Source: Computer Fun – April 1984

    Epyx is probably best known for the games they released on the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit line of computers though they also released some games for the PC, Atari video game systems and others as well as developed the Atari Lynx. Generally speaking, their games were very good and some of the most fun, particularly the 8-bit computer games.

    This particular ad is for some early arcade conversions they did. In my opinion these aren’t the best examples of their work. It’s not that they aren’t decent conversions, it’s just that these were very simplistic games to begin with. The ad is for four separate games: Seawolf II, Star Fire, Gun Fight, and Fire One. They were released in packs of two with Sea Wolf II and Gun Fight being in one pack and Star Fire and Fire One being in the other. Sea Wolf II and Gun Fight were available only for Atari computers (Atari 400/800) while Star Fire and Fire One were available for both the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers.

    This ad is from the April 1984 issue of Computer Fun though I believe these games were released in late 1983. They were released early enough that they were available on cassette and disk. I don’t think cassette games were very common much later than this, at least in the U.S.





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  • Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop (Atari Lynx)

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop, Atari Lynx.

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/160341038072/pixelclash-dirty-larry-renegade-cop-atari

    Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop was released for the Atari Lynx by Atari in 1992. The Atari Lynx was Atari’s first and only attempt at penetrating the portable market. It was the first color portable on the market and was really quite powerful for its time with a hybrid 8/16 bit processor. A few things kept it form being a bigger success including its larger size (it wouldn’t fit in your pocket like a Game Boy) relatively short battery life and its greater cost and fewer games compared to the game boy. Sega also tried to penetrate the market with a color portable, the Sega Game Gear, without much more success.

    Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop is a side-scrolling beat ’em up that is very similar to the likes of Streets of Rage and Double Dragon. It really isn’t as good as those games but it isn’t terrible. The software library of the Atari Lynx is not huge (only 74 titles in total) so there is not necessarily a huge range of options for a given genre. For instance, the original Double Dragon is available on the Lynx but Streets of Rage is not.

    Dirty Larry is exclusive to the Atari Lynx so there really are no other options for playing it other than on a Lynx or emulator.





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