#action puzzler

Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

With the success of Pac-Man World helping to keep Namco’s mascot relevant in a world of 3D platformers, it must have only seemed logical to update his wife, as well. Instead of a platformer, however, Maze Madness takes the core of ‘eat dots, avoid ghosts’ and adds a massive amount of new features on top of it. The result, while not anything spectacular, still makes for one of the best games to come out of the ‘arcade game remake’ boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. 

Three Wonders

In 1991, Capcom decided to release a very unusual coin-op consisting in three relatively short games of different genres: an action platformer, a shoot-em-up and a puzzle/maze game. It was a pretty good idea – arcade owners could get three games in the same cabinet, probably inspired by the versatility of SNK’s MVS system. Curiously enough, the first two were also related, one being the direct sequel of the other, starring the same characters and having the same art style. These “wonders” are called Midnight Wanderers, Chariot, and Don’t Pull; the game was later ported in 1998 on PlayStation and Saturn, and then again in 2006 on the second volume of the Capcom Classics Collection. 

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince

Nippon Ichi’s The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince is sort of similar to Nippon Ichi’s 2013 Vita/Windows game htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diary, in that it’s a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer with beautifully drawn character sprites. While that game leaned towards subtle horror, The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince draws its atmosphere from dark fairy tales of yore. The game was the result of an internal game pitch contest within Nippon Ichi, where web designer Sayaka Oda supplied the concept as well as all of the illustrations and character artwork. 

Kickle Cubicle

Grid-based puzzles have been around for centuries. The classic sliding-tile puzzle, often seen at infuriating moments in video games, was created in 1880. Since then, many takes on puzzles which operate in a two-dimensional space utilizing tiles and navigation towards a goal in some form have taken many shapes. One of the most influential video games utilizing this concept is Hiroyuki Imabayashi’s Sokoban.  Undoubtedly, Sokoban was inspiration for both Coreland’s 1982 release Pengo, a game utilizing some of these concepts in a more weaponized format, and HAL Laboratory’s 1985 release Eggerland, better known in the west as Adventures of Lolo in 1989. So what happens if one were to take Pengo and Eggerland and make a cold smoothie? You’d get Irem’s Kickle Cubicle. 

Kroz

Long before Apogee became the shareware giant it was known as in its later years, it was just a simple one-man operation, run by Scott Miller. He wrote a few games before, but the Kroz series were the first games to use the Apogee name, even if they hadn’t started using their shareware model yet. Scott was inspired by Zork (the inspiration was made fairly clear by the title) and Rouge. He disliked how random Rogue was, so he created his own game, using pre-made level layouts and using a more arcade-like style of gameplay 

Paganitzu

In 1990, Keith Schular released a little puzzle game for the Softdisk disc magazine. The game never became very well known, but a year later, Keith and his new company Trilobye (not to be confused with the 7th Guest guys) released a sequel. They let Apogee publish it, and it would eventually become their only puzzle game. 

Bombuzal / The Bombing Islands / Charlie Blast’s Territory

While Image Works is remembered now for publishing action-oriented fare, like Xenon 2 or The First Samurai, the games-centric offshoot of Mirrorsoft sought to capitalize on the growing computer gamer market with a wide variety of genres when the company was first formed. Mirrorsoft had found a great deal of success in publishing computer versions of Tetris early in 1988 – under their own name in Europe and under the “Spectrum Holobyte” label in the US – so it’s little surprise that, when two veteran computer programmers suddenly approached Image Works with a fresh new puzzle game they had whipped up in their spare time, they wasted no time in publishing it. 

Monster Max

In the vast library of games released for the Game Boy, Monster Max is a game that deserves so much more attention than it gets. For one thing, it has the kind of pedigree that would make competitors seethe with jealousy; it’s an isometric arcade-adventure developed by Rare, who had a reputation in the ’80s for codifying the genre with the likes of Knight Lore, Alien 8 and Nightshade back when they were known as Ultimate Play The Game, and designed by programmer Jon Ritman & artist Bernie Drummond, the two men behind the beloved games Batman for the Amstrad CPC (the first Batman game ever: fun fact!) and Head Over Heels.