Into the Eagle's Nest

Credits: Programmed and designed by Kevin Parker; graphics by Robin Chapman; Atari ST release published by Pandora (UK) / Mindscape (US), 1987; budget reissue by Smash 16, 1989. 

I do remember playing this game a few times when I first had my ST, and after a few issues with emulation, began wondering if I remembered it having the same issues back then or not - I can't convince myself whether my memory is playing tricks on me or not. I do sort of remember the game sometimes getting stuck, but that may be my imagination. In any case, I don't particularly care enough to keep trying (I found a Smash Hits disc image that worked a little better, but still did get stuck quite often.) It may well be that the game froze in very specific situations that I learned to avoid - because I do remember at least getting some way through it - but I'm too old and impatient to bother with that now!

Er... anyway, the plot. You're trying to blow up the Eagle's Nest - something about a Nazi commander using the Eagle’s Nest as HQ and having captured 3 Allied soldiers; you must infiltrate the complex, rescue them, recover stolen art treasures, and destroy the place. I'm sure the stolen art treasures are to be returned to their rightful owners and not used for personal enrichment... or not, I don't know, but they add to your score.

This is, in many ways, an odd game. It's basically Gauntlet with WWII aesthetics, but with more sedate gameplay. The graphics are okay, much more "zoomed in" than Gauntlet's view, and the whole pace of the game is more plodding and methodical than the often mad action of this genre. There is more strategy involved in finding a placement where you can shoot without being in the line of enemy fire than quick reactions, etc. 

The game has some good ideas and the map design is good, but there are two major things going against it - horrible push scrolling and occasionally baffling design choices - probably the worst being, whenever you pick up a key (which is big enough to be really obvious on the screen), the game stops to show a big message saying "You've picked up a key". A small thing perhaps, but it really kills immersion and game flow. (In fairness, I suppose the game did need some sort of messaging system... but it feels unnecessary almost every time it pops up with this.) Your enemies generally line up politely waiting to be shot, or (IIRC) damage you on contact only (no shots fired) and are brainless; however, due to the small amount of the game map on-screen at any one time, they can blindside you by suddenly appearing behind you. 

I can't say much more about the game and I don't feel any inclination to tinker with more STEEM settings to get it working better - partly because I'm not sure if the emulator or the game itself is to blame for some of the issues - but anyway, I'd rather get onto the next game. This is a bit of an oddity and I may be criticising it a little unfairly based on inaccurate memory and failed emulation. I would be interested to get comments from anyone who has stronger memories of the game - I certainly do remember it., so it clearly made some sort of impression on me. Looking at some of the screenshot confirmed that I definitely had made it to different parts of the game I haven't seen on this most recent attempt via emulation... It seems to have received largely favourable reviews at the time, anyway.

Many thanks to AtariMania for the screenshots.

International Karate

Credits: Developed by Andromeda Software for System 3; programmed by István Cseri; graphics by Zoltán Tóth (“Sultan”); game design by Mark Cale; Atari ST release 1986.

You hear the words "International Karate" or "IK+", and you instantly think of Archer MacLean... but it seems he didn't touch the ST port of his famous game (although he did later develop IK+ himself for the ST).

The chiptune is nice enough although does get monotonous fairly quickly, and the game features digitised sound effects at 3.8 kHz.  Why 3.8kHz and not 4, or even 8? Who knows... I guess it's probably due to disk space. The game came on two disks - single-sided, I think - even though the STFM could use double-sided disks. Again, there must have been a reason for that... but I don't know what it was.

Chill out in the opera house after you win. Or, after you lose.

Anyway, back to the game. I suppose the thing that stands out most is the big, well-animated sprites - since, as mentioned previously, the ST was pretty notorious for not handling big sprites very well. It helps that there is no scrolling and only two characters moving, but still, the characters and their animations look really good. The game is truly "international" in that every round is held in a different country, with nicely drawn backgrounds and some neat little animations.

Hawaiian  beaches aren't great places for karate competitions, are they? Wouldn't the sand get everywhere?!

The game itself plays well and is fairly fluid, the controls are varied enough to allow for different strategies, and the AI opponent is a decent challenge - you can usually win as long as you pay attention and your timing is on point. 2-player is more fun of course, as is always the case! Some moves - flying kick, roundhouse kick - are immensely satisfying when you manage to pull them off perfectly, but there are some less impressive though very effective moves you'll probably tend to fall back to a lot of the time.

Fantastic use of colour in this scene.

There are mini-games between some stages - avoiding weapons that someone is kindly hurling at you or breaking boards with your head (which you can see me fail at in the gameplay video, because when I reached that part, I completely forgot what I was supposed to do!). Perhaps not quite as memorable as the mini-games in IK+, but they do helps add variety to what is otherwise a repetitive (but still fun) gameplay loop.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a classic, but International Karate is a memorable game in its own right and holds up surprisingly well today.

As you can see, I have perfectly mis-timed my flying kick here.

An interesting little snippet from my research for this post:

International Karate was a huge success beyond Europe; in the US it was published by Epyx as World Karate Championship, became the first European-developed game to top the Billboard software charts, and reportedly sold over 1.5 million copies there. This also created a legal battle between Epyx and Data East over similarities to Karate Champ. The lower court initially ruled against Epyx, but that decision was later reversed on appeal in 1988.

I lost... but the Beefeater guards remain unmoved.

Here's a quick gameplay video - look, it's been a long time, okay? Also I reached a mini-game and completely forgot what I was supposed to do for it. The joy of revisiting old games!! 🤣🤣

Enduro Racer

Credits: Sega’s off-road arcade racer was converted to the Atari ST by Ian Morrison for Giga Games, with graphics by Saul Marchese and Stuart Hibbert of Focus Creative Enterprises, music by David Whittaker, and publishing by Activision.

Time to get ready and... hey wait, why are those other guys in front of the start line?!

Enduro Racer was quite a cool racing game, I remember playing it a few times in the arcades. With its emphasis on jumping mechanics as well as pure racing, it didn't quite offer the same adrenaline rush of, say, Super Hang On, but still worked pretty well from the illusion of speed point of view. (Admittedly the sit-on component of Super Hang On gave that an even greater edge, as you hunched over looking at the screen, and actually ducked when you went under the checkpoint sign - I distinctly remember doing that as a kid! But... I digress...)

The ST port was a good conversion, given the constraints of the system - obviously playing with a joystick doesn't emulate the motorcycle handle controls of the arcade version (at least if I'm not remembering incorrectly here). When you press the fire button to start it brings up a GEM-like menu at the top with options, which has always seemed a bit odd... but anyway, onto the game.

Press fire and get... a menu. Er, okay.

Graphically it's quite a nice game with big, bold sprites that hold up pretty well (the ST was not exactly renowned for its handling of large sprites...), colourful graphics and a decent illusion of speed. The music is chirpy and well presented; sound effects are minimal (the explosion when you inevitably crash your bike is good enough, but the "phut" sound effect when you hit another bike is weak). Gameplay is your standard "try to keep accelerating whilst staying on the track" with the added bonus of doing wheelies when there are jumps so that you 1/ don't crash on landing and 2/ get a little speed boost after landing (I think...)

Maybe doing this right behind another racer isn't the best idea... oh well...

The scoring system is also madness - you rack up over a million points for lasting about 30 seconds I think. I'd actually forgotten that this sort of wild scoring metric was pretty common in a lot of arcade games in the mid-late 80s. Each stage had its own unique look and tune, which made reaching each new stage feel like a nice little achievement. 

I don't remember playing it a great deal - IIRC it was very, very tough to get past Stage 3 - but I definitely wheeled it out (groan) every so often. It had a slightly different vibe to most racing games of the time, and definitely a worthwhile addition to the Summer Pack.

Nice little dirt kicking up behind the wheels animation going on here.

Gamplay video below - this was my second attempt and I just managed to sneak past the checkpoint before being timed out (the time actually gives you a couple of grace seconds after you hit zero, which is nice given the fine margins of the game otherwise) - but failed to reach Stage 3. I did try again and did a little better - 4 seconds on the clock when I went under the checkpoint - but then for some reason my bike got stuck, could be the controller emulation. Sorry, I didn't feel inclined to try again with this game, so this is all I can give you!

Defender of the Crown

Credits: Developed by Master Designer Software / Cinemaware. Original design by Kellyn Beeck; Mical Game System by Robert J. Mical; artwork by James D. Sachs; music by Jim Cuomo; orchestration by Bill Williams; Atari ST version released in 1987, published in Europe by Mirrorsoft.

The title screen uses colour cycling to great effect, it looks great. 

One of the most beautiful ST games of all time, Defender of the Crown being part of the Summer Pack was a great bonus. Having come from the Spectrum +2, the graphics were a revelation (that's not to criticise the dear old Speccy of course which was a great machine in its own right, but just as an illustration... imagine going from the brilliant Taipan on the Speccy to the image on the right (okay it's a still image so not exactly a fair comparison, but... when I first saw that image as a kid, my jaw dropped...)

From colour clash to this absolutely beautiful screen - young me was gobsmacked.

Merry old England is in a state of civil war! 3 Saxon Lords and 3 Norman Lords vie for the throne. As a Saxon, you hope to keep the throne warm for the return of King Richard... at least, I think that's what the aim is. My memory is a little foggy and I may have slightly conflated the different endings possible in the 2003 release Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown. In writing this article I also stumbled upon a new reboot planned for release this year - Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns.

Er... but I digress. So you start by choosing your character - each one has different ability levels in Leadership, Swordplay, Jousting. The noble dudes you can play are Wilfred of Ivanhoe, Cedric of Rotherwood, Geoffrey Longsword and Wilfric the Wild. You choose which character to play depending on your gameplay style - there are a number of different strategies. For instance, if you're good at jousting (I wasn't great at it), you could win land or fame; you could raid other castles for gold (or possibly even a wife, and with it an alliance with another Saxon Lord).

Who to choose, who to choose...

The main screen presented your options and a map of England. You could initiate various options, such as going on one of the aforementioned raids or holding a tournament, buy troops or move them. Of course, depending on where you moved your troops to, you could face opposition - either in the form or a local militia, or from the armies of whichever Lord currently owned that land. Winning a battle (or moving your army to an undefended region) would add that county to your kingdom, and importantly, this would increase your revenue per turn.

One thing I remember from the game is that it seemed basically impossible to win unless you started at a particular position (each game started you randomly in one of a small number of locations). The reason for this is that one of the counties could be obtained almost immediately and that gave you 7 gold pieces per turn, whereas others only gave you 2 or 3. I always found that control of that specific county at the beginning of the game was essential if you wanted any chance at all of winning - although that could just be me (interested in your thoughts!). You also had to hope the Norman Lords below you argued amongst themselves a bit whilst you had the chance to consolidate your position - again, that's how it seemed to me, I could be wrong.

FWIW, this is the starting position where I think you have a chance - just east of Wales.

Of course, what everyone remembers most about the game is its incredible graphics. I don't remember seeing anything quite like it again for years, and the striking beauty of the scenes is still remarkable today. What I feel sometimes gets overlooked is the quality of the music - the mediaeval tones and depth achieved with the humble YM2149 chip were quite something. I am now going to offer something of a hot take: having heard the Amiga music for this game (admittedly only on YouTube videos, so the quality may lack fidelity), I actually prefer the ST music - not something I can say about many games! The sound effects are crisp and effective too.

Has anyone who claims computer games aren't art seen this? I mean... have they?!

In terms of gameplay, it as a little bit of a mixed bag; the strategy elements were good with the aforementioned caveat that your starting position appeared to be key to your chances of victory; the raiding sections were nice enough but the guy on the stairs could be a real pain to get past; jousting was fun but pretty tough (I do remember eventually learning the technique to win it most of the time though); besieging castles and firing the catapult was always fun and visually impressive. It is via the variety of gameplay elements, however, that the game truly enters legendary status - it felt like so much more than a strategy game. Each sequence of the game was memorable in its own right, and in keeping with the Cinemaware brand, it all felt rather like you were part of an epic movie - far more so than any other game I'd played at the time - whilst the focus remained tightly on the gameplay loops, not a never-ending series of cutscenes. (There are a couple of cool cutscenes too, of course...)

Steady.... steady... steady... now aim and click!

Shadows that even "The Adventures of Robin Hood" would have been proud of...

Overall, Defender of the Crown is rightly regarded as a classic, and definitely a game that showed off the early graphical abilities of the 16-bit machines. Having it as one of the first ST games I ever played was a real bonus - but in a sense, made other games feel somewhat disappointing from an artistic point of view!

A tournament begins, bringing joy - but also fear that you'll embarrass yourself in the jousting. Again...

Since I had difficulty getting this to run in the emulator for some reason... I am greatly indebted to Marko from AtariMania for allowing me to use their screenshots. Check out the AtariMania page for Defender of the Crown!

Only 16 colours on screen at once, but when you see screens like this, it makes you wonder... do you actually NEED any more?!

Chopper X

Credits

Developed by Paradox | Published by Mastertronic | Programming, game design, music, sound effects: Janko Mršic-Flögel | Graphics: Mungo Amyatt-Leir. The game was apparently released first on the ST before being ported to the Amiga and PC.

Just taking my helicopter for a peaceful spin on a lovely sunny afternoon.

I have to admit Chopper X wasn't a game I spent a lot of time playing, but looking back at it now, despite enduring a few crashes (which may be down to the emulator rather than the game, I have no particular memories of it crashing on the real hardware), it isn't without some merits. The fact that Janko Mršic-Flögel did everything apart from the graphics makes it a pretty impressive achievement on his part.

Taking in the sights... perfectly kept hedge rows... all good here...

As a top-down shooter, it's a bit of an oddity in that the sprites are quite large, making the range of movement feel quite limited. The collision detection is also very unforgiving, which combined with the large sprites means it is a pretty tough game - perhaps fans of the genre who are much better at playing this sort of game will disagree with me, but that's how I see it. Like all games of this genre, much relies on you memorising the attack patterns so you can position your craft (in this case, unsurprisingly, it's a helicopter) in the best way to receive each phase - sadly my brain, while good at certain things, has never been much good at this sort of memorisation. 

None can withstand my might vertical equals sign! Er I mean bullets.

Graphically the look was a bit on the basic side, even for the time, but it's generally clear what you're looking at and I wouldn't say it especially detracts from the game, just makes it look a bit less polished. Everything just looks a little... blocky (but in a 2D way). The game is quite challenging as earlier mentioned, but offsetting this, the movement controls are beautifully responsive. Firing appears to only work in short bursts, I think this is by design. So although the game is hard, it doesn't necessarily feel unfairly - if you really wanted to put the time and effort into getting good at the game, you would be able to.

Just heading out to sea, I'm sure it will be safer there...

The music side is a little bit of an oddity too. Chopper X supports playback through an external device through the MIDI port. Obviously on most devices, it plays back through the Yamaha chip. Since it's sharing the 3 channels with sound effects, this can make the music hang for a fraction of a second - just long enough to be noticeable. In a weird way, this kind of helps stop the music be quite so repetitive, since it's the same theme tune from the intro that plays throughout the game. Anyway, you're concentrating so much on staying alive that the endlessly looping music nowhere near as obtrusive as it should be, somehow!

Overall, Chopper X isn't a terrible game, perhaps not even a bad game, but one that hasn't lasted long in my memory. It's worth a go if you like top-down shooters and are actually good at them!

Maybe not much safer... that explosion is me...

Intro Music

Gameplay Video

High Fidelity Dreams

High Fidelity Dreams (1992) — by Aura | Code & graphics: Aeon | Additional code: Chris | Musicians: Firefox, Jester, Mantronix, Tip

High Fidelity Dreams is an ST/STE audio demo with a number of tracks pulled from previous Amiga demos. It was essentially built to show that the ST/E could replay Amiga-style tracked music at a much higher standard than people expected. Aeon, a member of Aura, later said the project was meant to show that the ST/STE could handle Amiga-style sample music convincingly, using his own replay code for Phenomena-format tracks.” It uses the STE’s 50 kHz DMA audio, which gives it a higher raw sample playback rate than stock Amiga Paula playback, typically around 29 kHz max on PAL machines. 

Back in the early-mid 90s, whenever it was I had this demo, I used to play it a lot. Hard to imagine now I suppose but back then, using your computer to just listen to music and watch stuff happen on-screen thanks to clever coding tips was very much a thing we did. The visuals in this case were4 rotating 3D graphic equalisers and a nice text spreader, with some interesting factoids about the demo's development.

There are a number of tracks, and over time I plan to record and upload all of them, and embed into this post. (I won't be the first person to do this of course - I've listened to all the tracks from the demo quite a few times over the last few years, tracker music just doesn't get old! - but I want to record each one myself as well, because I can...)

Some of the tracks will probably be instantly recognisable to anyone who owned an Amiga (or possibly ST, but I don't remember if they were used outside of this particular demo disk) or who spends time perusing the 16-bit demoscene. I think Jester is the most famous musician mentioned - I've certainly come across many of his excellent tunes before - although, not having been an Amiga owner, I'm not too sure. This demo made sure that while we ST owners were usually forced to listen to Amiga owners gloating about how much better their machine's sound was, at least on this occasion (for those of us with an STe, anyway), we could claim superiority 🤣

Anyway, enjoy the music!

Act of Impulse by Mantronix & Tip - this is an upbeat track with a great beat that makes good use of the "slide" effect or whatever musicians call it - I think you'll know what I mean when you hear the track.

Chinese Dream by Firefox & Tip is a slower, almost dreamlike piece, not really a "typical tracker tune"; tracks like this show the versatility of those old tracker programs. (Incidentally I did play around with NoiseTracker and ProTracker in my ST games, but having no music talent, I didn't create anything good...) 

Elysium by Jester is an iconic track, I seem to recognise it from a number of demos / tracker music compilation videos - at any rate, I think it's probably a track most people who were into the 16-bit demoscene will have heard it. A great tune from one of a famous and prolific composer of the time (for those were were into tracker music, at any rate - I don't think this fame has spread to the wider populace!)

Just Spank It by Firefox & Tip

This short and very peppy little tune will have you dancing on the inside. Basically, it's a musical dopamine hit.

Macrocosm by Firefox

4 minutes of pure audio groove, this is a great tune with some nice effects, although what I like most about it is the infectious, thumping baseline.

More tracks on their way over the next few days!

Arkanoid

Credits: Arcade original by Taito; Atari ST conversion published by Imagine Software, with Peter Johnson handling programming, graphics, music and sound.

When it comes to bat and ball games / Breakout clones / brickbuster games - call them what you will - to me, Arkanoid was and still remains the most iconic of them all. Sure there are more recently games with flashier graphics, slicker power up systems or whatever... but somehow, Arkanoid remains firmly lodged in my brain as the definitive game of the genre. For me, that all started with the Atari ST version that was part of the Summer Pack bundle. I was somewhat aware even at the time (I think) that this was a coin-op conversion, but I can't recall ever actually seeing the arcade machine anywhere. Apparently it used a rollerball / spinner for control rather than a joystick, which is why the mouse controls immediately felt right - and any attempt at keyboard / joystick / gamepad controls feel just as immediately wrong with this type of game.

As far as I can tell, just one man - Peter Johnson - was behind the entire conversion - and what a conversion is is! (In fact his name is persistent throughout every screen in the game, so I guess it's pretty fair to say he made it solo and was - rightly - proud of the job he did.) Okay we'll ignore the feeble attempt at giving the game a background story (obviously not Peter's fault in any case) and come straight to it - from the moment you begin playing, Arkanoid is a perfect example of the old "easy to play, difficult to master" adage.

Unfortunately, what's also been difficult to master has been getting STEEM to accept mouse control on certain games  - not sure what I'm doing wrong (as I thought I remembered playing this before under emulation) but whatever settings I try, it just won't have it. Ironically, this means the perfection of the controls mean I can't currently offer you any screenshots or gameplay videos of my own. But... er, I did manage to record the short intro sequence with the aforementioned iffy storyline and video compression appears to have butchered the sound a bit, but we retro gamers are made of stern stuff and remember having to wait 5 minutes for games to load from tape on the 8-bit machines, so I'm sure we can also weather this storm.

So I'm afraid I'll have to go completely from memory. Well really, once you've played one Brickbuster game, you've played them all - to an extent. The basic aim is the same - destroy the bricks, stop the ball from dropping off the bottom of the screen - but with Arkanoid we got the perfect combination of fantastic controls, varied levels and power-ups, polished visuals and crisp sound effects. Finishing a level was always a satisfying experience as you watched your paddle... er, spaceship, "Vaus", slide off the right-hand side of the screen through a portal that mysteriously opened when all the bricks were destroyed. Conversely, losing through mistiming or poor placement was tragically heart-rending (and often led to untrue cries of "stupid controls!" or "lousy mouse..."), but this just fed into the "one more go" appeal of the game, apart from the very occasional rage-quit. 

The game had 32 levels plus a final boss level of some kind (not quite sure) in total - it is with shame to admit that I admit to never having completed it - I definitely came close a couple of times, my memory is very sketchy on this but I feel like I reached level 28 or possibly even 30 and was extremely annoyed when I lost my last life! As was fairly common with coin-op conversions, you could insert new credits when you died, so you weren't limited to 3 lives - but obviously, there was a limit to this.

Really annoyed that, for now, I can't get STEEM to recognise the mouse control as this is definitely a game I would happily play again - it's a truly of those truly timeless games.

So here's a screenshot of me... unable to move, as the ball nears the point of no return and a power-up falls aimlessly to the side... weep for me. This is all I can give you at this moment.

UPDATE 03/04/26

Well, to nobody's great surprise, it turns out that I'm an idiot. I have tried using TOS 1.02 in STEEM SSE without rolling back the hardware specs to a normal ST from STe... so obviously, it didn't work. Once I realised this, I was able to get the game working properly, mouse and all. That's the good news.

The bad news is, apparently I have become absolutely terrible at the game. In the interests of brevity I have decided not to keep playing it until I get good at it again, you'll just have to take my word for it that, once upon a time in my younger days, I was actually pretty good at the game. I also seem to have misremembered the whole "use multiple credits thing" - at least, I couldn't see any way to add more credits. So perhaps you actually did have only the three lives (plus any you picked up from capsules, and I think extra lives triggered by reaching certain score milestones).

One final thing I seem to have remembered incorrectly is the level completion thing - sliding through a portal on the bottom-right was only when you caught the capsule that allowed you to finish the level immediately, not every level. I do now, however, remember the exquisite pain that could be had by getting one of these capsules on a particularly tricky level, thinking you had time to go through before the ball reached the bottom of the screen... and finding you that, but a fraction of a second, you were wrong!

Having controls that actually worked also meant I was able to grab a few proper screenshots... only from the first 3 levels unfortunately, but you can't always get what you want. These 3 screens may just be what you need. Or not.