Safari Rally

Safari Rally is an interesting monochromatic race through an african jungle. Stark but detailed black and white graphics present a slowly scrolling landscape of suspiciously straight tree lined lanes, which you must navigate through to collect all the dots, all while avoiding running into various jungle creatures like snakes and lions, as well as suicidal drivers going the opposite way. Safari Rally is a simple game, with no powerups and no ostensible greater goal, but also a frustrating one. Your acceleration is erratic, your car's response time questionable, and the obstacles seem unfairly stacked, with many unavoidable collisions. Safari Rally was one of SNK's first games, but they thankfully recovered from the slow start of both this and Ozma Wars to later bring us the incredible and very long-lived Neo-Geo arcade hardware and respective games.

Porky

I honestly have no idea in hell what this game is even about. Ok, I'll try, for my readers' sake. Apparently you are a pig in a hoopty who must collect his fellow porkers, all while avoiding the dreaded tnt bombs and disembodied wolf heads. However, your heroic efforts will not be thwarted by wolves so much as obstacles in the road, as your car has less jumping power than Toad carrying the whole mushroom kingdom on his back. So, prepare to see this screen a lot:




Overall, this nonkosher attempt at moon patrol isn't even worth downloading for free.

Red Robin

Red Robin is not just a burger chain with a bird as a mascot. Red Robin is also an italian arcade game from 1986, where you star as the titular hero, a kleptomaniac kid in superhero pajamas, who must collect rings, gems and other precious items through pac landesque scrolling landscapes. There's an invincibility powerup, which is the only way to defeat any of the enemies, and an irritating power-down in the form of a skull, which doesn't let you collect any of the items hovering tantalizingly over your head. You make your way through flat, cheesy landscapes, from forests to castles. If you get to the end of the stage without collecting all the items, you have to run back to the left and try to nab them before the timer runs out. Just like Pac-Land, jumping is unwieldy and awkward, and there's just no there there. There's no real depth of gameplay, the controls are off, and while the graphics might have looked decent at the time, better-looking games came out in 1986, ones that didn't star ugly children in bedtime clothes pathetically grasping for both precious gems and arcade fame.

The Amazing Adventures of Mr. F.Lea

Besides the colony of Sim Ant and the pillbug protaganist of Bugdom, the video game world has a shortage of insect heroes. Most people regard bugs as obnoxious annoyances deserving of annihilation, and games have followed suit, from Stanley Bugman's Donkey Kong 3 to the Mario Paint minigame Flyswatter. The Amazing Adventures of Mr. F. Lea is an exception to all of this entymological hatred. The hero, the titular Mr. F. Lea, is a charming tophatted flea who must hop on as many dogs' backs as he can, presumably to drain them of their blood and give them all lyme disease. The game plays out on four different types of screens for each level, each with slightly different gameplay. The lawnmower stage is basically frogger, with lawnmowers replacing freeway traffic, and dogs' backs replacing the lilypads of frogger. The Dog Hollow stage is a repurposed Donkey Kong, Dogs' Tails is sort of a more vertical Jungle Hunt, and Dogs' backs involves hopping up a mountain to the William Tell Overture. Though none of these stages are particularly original by themselves, together they create a refreshingly different and varied game experience. Control is responsive and smooth, graphics are detailed and surprisingly cute, and the sound is also good, offering up catchy electronic versions of classic tunes. While The Amazing Adventures of Mr. F. Lea is derivative bordering on plagiaristic, it's still quite fun, and deserves more than to be wiped out by the bugspray of time.