Rare 1990
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: NES

Aliens have captured your ship and it now lays in pieces all around the galaxy, so if you want to get it back you will have to travel from planet to planet, exploring inside a capsule. A tough work, as they are not the most manoeuvrable things, nor the best for fighting back.

BMB Compuscience 1984
Genre: Action
Rating: 2/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Many great works were created by accident. Sopwith is one of them. Once upon a time, there was a Canadian software company, called BMP Compuscience. It was developing database and networking software. It was its network software, Imaginet, which is the direct reason why Sopwith was created: the game, which supported multiplayer over the Imaginet network, served as a demo to show the network's capability. Ironically, the game has built up a strong following. The networking software did not.

Apollo 1981
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: -
Licence: Commercial
System: Atari 2600

Space Cavern is the most complex Atari 2600 game I've ever seen, with a manual three times as thick as any other Atari 2600 game. There are countless different difficulty levels you can choose from when starting a game, selecting from options such as whether to have two or four enemies above you, whether or not to have any enemies from the sides, whether the enemies above are large (easy targets) or small, and whether the enemies above shoot straight or diagonally. All of these options are independant of one another, so you can mix and match.

ajf 1983
Genre: Action
Rating: 2/6
Language: English
Licence: Freeware
System: PC

When and where this game was made, I have no idea. The age is based on the file, as in "not modified since 16-1-1984". So, what's it all about? It's a...Space Invaders clone!!! Not terribly original, but then again, it's from 1984, so maybe, just maybe, it was then.

B Seiler 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Spacewar (or SpaceWar, Space War or Spacewar!) is one of the first computer games ever. Some say the very first, but even though the line between funny tinkering and actual games is of course blurry in those early days, that's not entirely true, because Oscilloscopes had already been 'misused' for simple 'tennis' games back in the 1950s. Stephen Russell wrote Spacewar for the PDP-1 in 1962 - more than 40 years ago! The PDP-1 was a luxurious computer for its time: it used a cathode ray tube as display and could be used pretty much like the PCs we know today (compared to the earlier IBM computers at least).

Noriaworks 1995
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Speed Haste is a moderate arcade racing game which features 2 different car models and 8 tracks.

From the starting menu you can choose whether you want to run a full championship, just a single race or practice a little bit. Here you can also select you race car (Formula 1 or Stock Car) and if you want a certain number of laps or a race against the clock.

Bitmap Brothers 1988
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Although there were quite a lot "simulations" of real team sports like soccer in the Amiga's days, it seemed to be nearly impossible to port such tactical games with so many players to the computer. Most companies simply didn't care and published almost unplayable sports games. But there were also the smart ones like the Bitmap Brothers who thought a bit about different concepts! The result was Speedball, the summit of team sports games.

ERE 1988
Genre: Puzzle, Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Some games are so weird that you can't help wondering what kind of drugs the designers have been taking when they came up with this. Spidertronic is such a game.

You control some kind of futuristic 'bio-mechanical' spider which - for whatever reason - is walking over isometric platforms somewhere in outer space (?). Some of the squares have a different colour than the usual blue. These have to be picked up and can be used to repair (?) the way to the next level. Only one coloured square can be carried at the same time, and the order of the colours is important.

Accolade 1990
Genre: Action, Strategy
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

This is a mix of strategy and space shooter, a well-balanced and with variety, albeit somewhat small, game where you try to conquer a region of space, attacking with real-time dogfights.

Really, the game is more about those fights than about strategy. Both factions, the Ur-Quan Hierarchy (alien slavers) and the Alliance of Free Stars (good guys) have seven different ships, ranging from small scouts to big destroyers.

Accolade 1992
Genre: Action, RPG
Rating: 6/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Born and raised in a distant colony isolated during the war you come back to Earth, bringing the ancient technology found in your planet to improve your civilization and help if the war still ravages. But it has already reached the end with the fall of the alliance and the eternal imprisonment of all those that didn't want to become slave warriors for the Ur-Quan. And humanity is among the trapped ones.