Jet Set Willy, Knightlore!
Hobbit
Genre – Text Adventure
Relive Tolkien's The Hobbit as Bilbo Baggins. A piece of Interactive fiction (with graphics to illustrate locations), you follow the plot of Tolkien's book (before the Lord of the Rings trilogy), starting with an encounter with Gandalf and Thorin.
The implementation is rich enough that you can play entirely without pictures if you wish. Also, gameplay happens in realtime, uncommon for interactive fiction.
Jack the Ripper
Genre - Adventure
This game was made just short of the 100th anniversary of England's most notorious serial killer, who gruesomely murdered at least five women in 1888. After accidentally killing someone, you become a suspect. You must prove that you are innocent, without the police hauling you in as they search for a scapegoat.
Jack the Ripper is interactive fiction with occasional graphics, based closely on real events of the Ripper. The parser accepts full sentences, and instructions can be qualified with adverbs such as 'slowly' and 'quietly'. The game is split into three parts, including digitised graphics (of the author's sisters) representing Ripper victims.
Jet Pac
Genre – Action
Jetman has crash-landed on a distant planet, with ledges suspended in mid-air and populated by various nasties, and he must escape and find his way home. Your first task is to retrieve each of the three parts of his spaceship, in order, and carry them over the base part. After this, you must collect enough fuel to be able to fly away, again by picking it up and dropping it over the ship (you don't have to actually make contact with the ship in doing this). Once you've filled the ship up, you can fly on to the next level, in which you must again refuel.
Each level contains various bad guys, with different attack patterns; you have a lazer to shoot them for points, and must avoid contact with them. Diamonds can be collected for bonus points, and you get an extra life after every 10,000 points.
Jet Set Willy
Genre – Action/Platformer
Cult hero Matthew Smith followed up Manic Miner with a seminal platform game. Having struck it lucky in the first game, Willy now owns a lavish mansion with over 60 rooms linked in a 3D plane, and must tidy it all before his housekeeper will let him sleep.
Each room has its own hazards, such as spikes, revolving razors and ropes. The route through the house must be navigated carefully, due to the multiple entrances to some rooms - this is perhaps the first action game where mapping is an advantage. Another innovation, to the chagrin of players everywhere, is manual protection - a sheet of colour-coded numbers.
Knightlore
Genre – Adventure
Our hero must reach Melkhior, a somewhat eccentric wizard who is the only one who can save him. As with most Ultimate titles of the day, reaching him is a long and treacherous challenge, involving both puzzle-solving and action, meaning that each screen requires thorough planning and precise navigation.
The game uses the isometric viewpoint in a manner similar to the later Head Over Heels, using monochrome but detailed graphics and techniques to avoid flickering sprites. The game lasts for 40 days and nights - at night your character turns into a werewolf. Ultimate's individual style of eschewing straightforward instuctions in favour of feature lists and riddles is put to good use here, with the story detailed in a rhyming poem of sorts.
