Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
Shoot 'em ups are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of character movement, while others allow a broader definition including characters on foot and a variety of perspectives.
M.U.L.E. is a 1983 multiplayer video game written for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers by Ozark Softscape. Designer Danielle Bunten Berry took advantage of the four joystick ports of the Atari 400 and 800 to allow four-player simultaneous play. M.U.L.E. was one of the first five games published in 1983 by new company Electronic Arts, alongside Axis Assassin, Archon: The Light and the Dark, Worms?, and Hard Hat Mack. Primarily a turn-based strategy game, it incorporates real-time elements where players compete directly as well as aspects that simulate economics.
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, known as Zoom 909 in Japan, is a pseudo-3D rail shooter released as an arcade video game by Sega in 1982. The player controls a spaceship in a third-person perspective, adapting the three-dimensional perspective of Sega's earlier racing game Turbo (1981) for the space shoot 'em up genre. It used the Buck Rogers license, referencing the space battles, though Buck himself is never seen.
Descent II is a 1996 first-person shooter game developed by Parallax Software and first published for DOS by Interplay Productions. For the PlayStation, it is known as Descent Maximum. It is the second installment in the Descent video game series and the sequel to Descent. The base of the gameplay remaining the same, the player controls a spaceship from the pilot's perspective and must navigate extrasolar underground mines to locate and destroy their reactors and escape being caught in their self-destructions, while engaging and surviving infected robots, which will attempt to destroy the ship. Unlike other first-person shooters, its six-degrees-of-freedom scheme allows the player to move and rotate in any three-dimensional space and direction.
FreeSpace 2 is a 1999 space combat simulation computer game developed by Volition as the sequel to Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War. It was completed ahead of schedule in less than a year, and released to very positive reviews, but the game became a commercial failure, and was described by certain critics as one of 1999's most unfairly overlooked titles.
Combat flight simulators are vehicle simulation games, amateur flight simulation computer programs used to simulate military aircraft and their operations. These are distinct from dedicated flight simulators used for professional pilot and military flight training which consist of realistic physical recreations of the actual aircraft cockpit, often with a full-motion platform.
The Space Bar is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Boffo Games and published by Rocket Science Games and SegaSoft. A comic science fiction story, it follows detective Alias Node as he searches for a shapeshifting killer inside The Thirsty Tentacle, a fantastical bar on the planet Armpit VI. The player assumes the role of Alias and uses his Empathy Telepathy power to live out the memories of eight of the bar's patrons, including an immobile plant, an insect with compound eyes and a blind alien who navigates by sound. Gameplay is nonlinear and under a time limit: the player may solve puzzles and gather clues in any order, but must win before the killer escapes the bar.
Steam-Heart's is a shoot 'em up and eroge developed by Giga and published by TGL. The story follows two siblings as they fight off a virus that is possessing the people in their world. The game features shooter gameplay paired with ample erotic cutscenes with scantily clad women. Steam-Heart's was initially released on PC-98 personal computers in 1994. It later made its way to the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² System in 1996 and then the Sega Saturn in 1998. All releases have been limited to the Japanese market. Critics generally found the gameplay to be average, with the erotic content being the sole distinguishing feature.
The Terminator: Future Shock is a first-person shooter video game based on The Terminator fictional universes developed and published by Bethesda Softworks in 1995. It was one of the first games in the first-person shooter genre to feature true, fully texture-mapped 3D environments and enemies, and pioneered the use of mouse-look control.
Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon is a 1989 graphic adventure game by Sierra On-Line, and the third game in the Space Quest series.
Frogger, also called Frogger: He's Back!, is an action video game remake and expansion of Konami's 1981 Frogger arcade game. It was developed by Sony Computer Entertainment's SCE Cambridge Studio and published by Hasbro Interactive in November 1997 for PlayStation and Windows. It has large maps, 3D graphics, and new gameplay moves. Critical reaction was mixed, with frequent criticism of the gameplay, controls, and difficulty, but the graphics were received positively. It was a commercial success, becoming one of the best-selling PlayStation games.
Astro Warrior is a vertically scrolling shooter developed and manufactured by Sega for the Master System in 1986. Set in space, the player flies a spaceship shooting enemies and collecting power-ups to reach the mother ship of an invasion force. It was originally a bundled game that came with the console in Europe.
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is a 1993 role-playing video game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games for MS-DOS, the NEC PC-9801, and FM Towns. It was the first installment of the Lands of Lore series. The player travels around various environments, collecting items and battling monsters in an attempt to save the kingdom from a witch named Scotia, who has acquired shape-shifting abilities.
Virtuality is a line of virtual reality gaming machines produced by Virtuality Group, and found in video arcades in the early 1990s. The machines deliver real time gaming via a stereoscopic visor, joysticks, and networked units for multi-player gaming.
Gearheads is a strategy video game developed by R/GA Interactive and Philips Media, and published by Philips Media for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS in June 1996. The player deploys wind-up toys to get them across an arena while attempting to prevent toys from crossing from the other side. Players can play against the computer or another player. Single, customisable games can be played, or the player can play a series of games with set rules and a limited number of lives in a tournament.
Apache is a video game released by Digital Integration in 1995 for DOS and Macintosh. The game is a combat flight simulation of the American AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter. A successor, Hind, was released in 1996.
Inferno is a space combat simulator video game developed by Digital Image Design and published by Ocean Software in 1994 for the PC. It is a sequel to the 1992 game Epic.
Blue Max 2001 is a diagonally-scrolling shooter written by Bob Polin for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Synapse Software in 1984. A Commodore 64 version was released the same year. Blue Max 2001 is the sequel to 1983's Blue Max, also by Polin, with the player piloting a futuristic hovercraft instead of a World War I biplane. Critics found the game disappointing compared with the original.
Wall Street Wizard is a 1988 German video game later published in 1990 by Data Liberation in English.
