During The Joy of Sticks livestreams over on YouTube, we started an endeavour to find the absolute tip-top, best of the best games on the Atari ST in each genre.
This hopefully will result in a list of games that represent the very best that the ST can offer, and be a great place to send people who are new to the ST and looking for the very best games.
It’s a work in progress, and collaborative, so if you’d like to influence what games make the grade, make sure you are subscribed to the YouTube channel so you know when we are live, and check out the tables below where we record what we’ve explored and decided so far.
Platform Games
| Game | In? | % | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flood | y | 84% | Banger. Early Bullfrog. Weird in the best British platformer sense. Amazing controls/traversal. Funny sound effects. Need to return to this to make serious progress. |
| Harlequin | n | Interesting. Smooth scrolling. Switch puzzles. A bit weird. Didn’t really know what I was doing. | |
| Magic Pockets | n | 49% | Great presentation, graphics and audio. Cool ideas. Very charming. Annoying difficulty spike. |
| Rolling Ronny | y | 64% | Surprisingly nice. Well coded. Good scrolling, colourful art style. Power-ups add depth. |
| Switchblade | y | 71% | Stone cold classic. Core quality. Great music. Interesting attack mechanics and fog of war reveal room by room. |
| Terry’s Big Adventure | n | Super charming. Cute, small sprites. Nice momentum physics. Very Giana. | |
| Torvak the Warrior | n | Rygar-ish. Strange attack animations take some getting used to. Different weapons, secrets. Better than I initially thought. | |
| First Samurai | y | 73% | Super cool intro, animations and sword swish. Metroid-like exploration. A little sluggish? |
Shoot ’em ups
| Game | In? | % | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lethal Xcess | y | 71% | Wings of Death sequel. Incredible Mad Max music. TRIANGLE! |
| JUG | n | 47% | Cybernoid like, explory shmup. Banging tune and a little bit Psygnosisish. Paul Shields music. |
| Red October | n | 12% | Sean says no. Floaty, sludgy momentum spoil a game that is trying something a little novel. Cinemaware-esque. |
| X-Out | y | 65% | Incredibly punishing. Buy lives to stay alive? Or power-ups? Cool shop. |
| P-45 Thunderbolt | n | 47% | Waaaaay too many bullets and enemies moving too quickly to avoid, but otherwise a decent little game. |
| Gemini Wing | y | 100% | Super simple shooter, but cool power up mechanic. Scoring is a little skewiff. You want square waves with that? |
| The Intruder | n | 43% | Great presentation and graphics from the guy who gave us Rayman. |
| Moon Patrol | n | 35% | Very basic but authentic looking conversion of the arcade. Early ST. |
| UN Squadron | y | 59% | Low framerate, but still enjoyable. Great source material. Cool shop. |
| Utopos | Unrated as we couldn’t get a single player game up and running. |
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