Popular games for platform Acorn Archimedes

Dune II is often considered the first mainstream modern real-time strategy game and established many conventions of the genre. Even though set in Frank Herbert's famous Dune universe, the game is only loosely connected to the plot of any of the books or the films based from them. Controlling either of the three Houses, the player must fight a number of battles against the other Houses. In the early levels, the goal is simply to earn a certain number of credits, while in the later missions, all enemies must be destroyed. The single resource in the game is the Spice, which must be collected by harvesters. The spice is converted to credits in a refinery, which are then spent to construct additional buildings and units. There are two terrain types: buildings can only be constructed on stone, while the Spice is only found on sand. However, units moving on sand attract the large sandworms of Dune, who are virtually indestructible and can swallow even large units whole. As levels progress, new and more advanced buildings and units are made available, including structures like a radar station, a repair facility or defense turrets and, for units, various ground troops, light vehicles and tanks. Each House can construct one unique special unit, and, after building a palace improvement, can unleash a unique palace effect.

SimCity, later renamed SimCity Classic, is a city-building simulation video game, first released on February 2, 1989, and designed by Will Wright for the Macintosh computer. SimCity was Maxis's second product, which has since been ported into various personal computers and game consoles, and spawned several sequels including SimCity 2000 in 1993, SimCity 3000 in 1999, SimCity 4 in 2003, SimCity DS, SimCity Societies in 2007, and SimCity in 2013. Until the release of The Sims in 2000, the SimCity series was the best-selling line of computer games made by Maxis.

Zool is a fast-paced side-scrolling platformer. The protagonist can run, jump, climb walls, and shoot enemies. Power-ups for Zool are scattered across the levels. These include life-spending hearts, smart bombs, shields, more powerful jump-skill and a twin Zool. This "twin" makes imitates the original's motions a few seconds after he performs them.

Throughout the 20th century, an unprecedented political and economic crisis afflicted Earth, leading to the systematic disabling of it's programme to conquer outer space through lack of funding. The highest priority now was to carryout research into new energy sources, preservation of the enviro- ment and maintenance of the cultural heritage. However, at the dawn of the 21st century, provision of considerable funds from an unknown source released by the politicians of the new, unified government, permitted a return to the space research programme. The conquest began gradually with the construction of huge, manned artificial satellites. Several lunar bases were created with the view to becoming future Earth colonies within the solar system. The considerable advancements made together with the supply of increasingly greater sums of money allowed man to explore, even as far as the planet Titan. You play the part of Conrad Hart, controlling his every move through the 6 levels of the game. During your quest, you will come across many different friends and foes whom you may wish to help or vanquish using your gun. you will have to complete many challenges in order to restore your lost memory. Each level features its own unique graphics and hazards, linked by cinematic animation sequences.

Simon the Sorcerer is an adventure game that was released by Adventure Soft on 2 January 1993 for Amiga and DOS formats. The game's name comes from the account of Simon the Sorcerer in Acts 8. The game includes parodies of various popular books and fairy tales, including Rapunzel, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Jack and the Beanstalk and the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Cannon Fodder is an action-strategy shoot 'em up game developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin Interactive. The game is military-themed and based on shooting action but with a strategy game-style control system. The player directs troops through numerous missions, battling enemy infantry, vehicles and installations. Cannon Fodder has a darkly humorous tone which commentators variously praised and condemned. Its creators intended it to convey an anti-war message, which some reviewers recognised, but the Daily Star and a number of public figures derided the game. In other respects, reviewers highly praised the game, which widely achieved scores of over 90% in Amiga magazines. Amiga Action awarded it an unprecedented score, calling it the best game of the year.

Who would have thought that a man would be so foolish or so daring as to accept a challenge set down by the Gods? And yet one came forward to claim the right to test his skills and strengths against a city so legendary its name alone struck fear in the hearts of all who heard it spoken.

Elite is a space trading video game, written and developed by David Braben and Ian Bell and originally published by Acornsoft for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers in September 1984.Elite's open-ended game model, and revolutionary 3D graphics led to it being ported to virtually every contemporary home computer system, and earned it a place as a classic and a genre maker in gaming history. The game's title derives from one of the player's goals of raising their combat rating to the exalted heights of "Elite". Elite was one of the first home computer games to use wire-frame 3D graphics with hidden line removal. It added graphics and twitch gameplay aspects to the genre established by the 1974 game Star Trader. Another novelty was the inclusion of The Dark Wheel, a novella by Robert Holdstock which gave players insight into the moral and legal codes to which they might aspire.

You play a small green guy who needs to blow up eight towers, because their presence is somehow poisoning the water of planets which could potentially be ideal colonies. Unfortunately you need to get to the top of these towers to blow them up. You make your way up to the top of the tower via walkways around the outside of the towers. You need to jump over, kick, and run from various enemies in your journey to the top. Most vertical movement is achieved by jumping onto moving ledges at the right moment. The game was considered revolutionary in its time for its graphic technique. As the main character walked around the outside of the tower, the character was fixed in the middle of the screen while the tower itself rotated. This gave it a pseudo-3D effect. Towers are linked together via a voyage through the sea in your trusty MK.7 submarine. This plays out as a side-scrolling collect-'em-up in which bonus points can be obtained.

The game is largely based on the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Set in 1945, British agent Rick Dangerous travels to the Amazon jungle to search for the lost Goolu tribe. His plane crashes in the jungle, and Rick must escape from the enraged Goolu. When the game starts Rick finds himself in a cave running from a rolling boulder, a famous scene from the Indiana Jones movie. Armed with a pistol and dynamite, Rick must fight hostiles and evade countless traps in three more levels. The second level is set inside a pyramid in Egypt. In level three, Rick must venture to the Nazi stronghold of Schwarzendumpf castle to rescue captured Allied soldiers. The rescued soldiers tell him that the Nazis are planning a missile attack on London. Therefore, in the last level Rick must infiltrate their secret missile base.

A unique mindboggling game of multiple skill levels. Take command of the wackiest collection of misdirected rodents ever seen on your screen.

No-one likes a and loser. And no-one comes more universally despised than Xenites. For a thousand years they have been plotting revenge for their humiliating defeat in the last Galactic Conflict. Now the very fabric of time is in danger. The Xenites have planted five Time Bombs through history. Only you can save the day - not to mention the Universe. The last time you met it was a playground scrap. This time it is war.

Miracles are child's play. Earthquakes are serious fun. The all-powerful can perform miracles in their sleep. But omnipotence isn't what it used to be. These days, it takes awesome natural disasters to dominate a world. You give them good land. You tell them when to farm and when to fight. You make them content beyond their wildest dreams. But then they become raging arsonists. What's a deity to do? Disasters are your divine prerogative - volcanoes, quakes, swamps. For stubborn non-believers, nothing beats a flood for spring cleaning. Cruel ice, lush grassland, parched desert... With 500 worlds, a deity's work is never done. Populous is the original god-game, a strategy title that lets you shape the isometric isometric world and the fates of its inhabitants. Be sure to check out one of Bullfrog's earliest classics, from the mind of Peter Molyneux!

Alone in the Dark is one of the first survival horror games and the first to utilize 3D models superimposed on pre-rendered backgrounds, which would become a key inspiration for upcoming horror games at the time, like the Resident Evil franchise. The player can use various weapons, such as pistol, rifle, swords and knives, though it is possible to kill most enemies with melee attacks. Some opponents can be beaten by solving a particular puzzle, while a significant number of opponents cannot be killed at all or only with certain weapons.

Battle Chess was developed by Interplay as their first project after severing ties with Electronic Arts. They designed it for the Amiga in 1988, and it was released on the majority of the other systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well. It was widely successful, and resulted in two follow-ups, many copy-cat games, and a remake for Steam on PC. The only significant criticism the game received was the weak chess AI, as it was not until the mid 1990s that chess ai began to consistently win against strong opponents.

Speedball is a futuristic football-like game which takes place on a steel walled floored pitch, 160 feet long by 90 feet wide. There are two teams, and the team scoring the most goals wins. There is a goal at each end of the pitch and a ball warp tunnels in each side of the wall. The warp tunnels can warp a ball from one tunnel to another. The ball is launched from the center of the pit by the automatic launcher in a random direction. There also bounce domes, off of which the ball will be deflected, but over which players are free to move. This version of the game comes with a much better VGA graphics and Sound Blaster sounds. The game-play is also greatly enhanced.

Each level of this abstract puzzler challenges the player to set up a network of pipes to allow an unspecified substance known as 'flooz' to flow through as many of those as possible. The pieces are offered in random order, and there are seven different types - straight lines going horizontally or vertically, corners rotating in each of the four directions, and cross-over pieces which carry the flooz straight across horizontally and vertically. Each of these can be entered from either side. When the flooz hits a gap, or a piece which the previous piece can't flow into, the pipe is finished. Before the flooz starts flowing from its randomly-selected starting position, the player has several seconds to start placing pieces. They can be put down anywhere. However a situation that can often occur is there will be a long and complex piping arrangement set up, yet a gap somewhere remains to be filled. Players are able to replace a piece with another in the same square (to make it easier to flow the flooz that way), but for a slight scoring penalty.

Terrorists have taken an embassy hostage and you have to bring in a 3 men strike team to rescue the civilians inside.

Soldiers of Fortune (Chaos Engine in the EU) is a run-and-gun overhead shooter. Sixteen levels (in four groups of four) await the players in the game. The basic gameplay is in an open air setting, with bridges across rivers and other features in the maps. The visuals are in a 'metallic and blue' style. There are six characters available in the game, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and different starting prices.

Brotherhood. Survival. Revenge. The evil Shogun Kunitoki and his henchmen have slaughtered the entire Brotherhood of White Ninja. You alone survive. The Shogun has taken possession of the Ninja Palace of Lin Fen and the sacred scrolls containing the ancient secrets of the Ninja. Only you- the Last Ninja- can avenge the Brotherhood and recapture the secrets of the Ninja. You must use all your fighting skills. Samurai warriors, masters of the martial arts, and the Shogun's guards lurk at every turn, ready to test their hand-to-hand combat skills against yours. You must be as wise as you are strong. Find your way through a magnificent landscape that unfolds in screen after screen of unparalleled graphics- from the lavish interior of the Ninja Palace to the depths of its foulest dungeons. Scale forbidding mountains; cross lakes and rivers. Master new and dangerous tasks, like Ninja magic. Search for the hidden weapons, food, and charms that you need to win the final battle- and all the battles in between. The way is long and dangerous. Start now. Kunitoki's warriors are already learning the Ninja ways.

Caveman Chuck Rock must save his wife from dinosaurs by beating down enemies with his stomach and by hurling rocks in this side-scrolling action game.

James Pond, also known as James Pond: Underwater Agent, is a platform video game that was developed by British video game developers Vectordean Ltd and Millennium Interactive, and published by Millennium Interactive and Electronic Arts for numerous home computers and consoles in 1990. The character was popular and even featured in some comic books of the time, and the game was successful enough to spawn two sequels and one spin-off game. A nefarious supervillain named "Doctor Maybe" (a pun on the name of Dr Julius No, the villain in Dr. No) has overtaken the ruthless megacorporation Acme Oil Co, and is not only filling the oceans with radiation and toxic waste but even threatening all the world from his underwater lair. The protagonist of the story and player character of the game is an intelligent, mutated anthropomorphic mudskipper who is given the name "James Pond" (after the legendary spy James Bond) and hired by the British Secret Service to protect the seas and take out the bad guys in underwater areas. He is also suave enough to seduce numerous attractive mermaids, some of whom act as double agents as is common with James Bond's love interests. The game spoofs James Bond movies with levels mimicking their titles, with level names like "License to Bubble" (after Licence to Kill), "A View to a Spill" (after A View to a Kill), "Leak and Let Die" (after Live and Let Die) and "From Three Mile Island with Love" (after From Russia with Love).

Sir Freddy is a sneaky and mean man who lives in a castle on an island. He turned green with envy when you built a better and stronger castle across the sea. He got a fleet of balloons so that he didn't get wet and then planned to bomb your castle with ease. What a cad to think of this wheeze! You in turn employed a gun crew to build a battlement with a good view to shoot down Sir Freddy in his balloon. To match your defensive intent, Sir Freddy phoned the Ship Shop and hired several Gun ships to shoot your cannon crew. You must defend your castle and shoot down the balloons and the invading ships.