''Joe Blade'' is the title of a series of budget-price platform games written by Colin Swinbourne and published by

Players Players may refer to: Art, entertainment, and media * ''Players'' (1979 film), a film starring Ali MacGraw * ''Players'' (2012 film), a Bollywood film * ''Players'' (Dicks novel), a novel by Terrance Dicks, based on the television series ''Doc ...

. All three titles were

flick-screen This list includes terms used in video games and the video game industry, as well as slang used by players. 0–9 A ...

adventures, in which the player controls the title character through a number of rooms, dispatching enemies and rescuing innocent people. The manner of this varies between the three games.

Joe Blade

The first ''Joe Blade'' title portrayed Blade as a lone commando sent into an evil mastermind's complex to release a number of diplomats. It reached the top of the UK game charts, replacing ''

Renegade Renegade or The Renegade may refer to: Aircraft *Lake Renegade, an American amphibious aircraft design *Murphy Renegade, a Canadian ultralight biplane design *Southern Aeronautical Renegade, an American racing aircraft design Games *'' Comman ...

''. In Germany, the game peaked at number 7.

Joe Blade 2

''Joe Blade 2'' took a rather different approach to the first game. Instead of being a soldier, Blade was this time a vigilante taking to the city to rid the streets of criminals, rescuing old-age pensioners along the way. Blade was no longer armed with a gun, and had to jump over villains, just touching them with his feet, to dispatch them. In order for the civilians to be successfully rescued, the protagonist was given a simple puzzle (called a sub-game level) of organizing the pattern of symbols. There were four types of these sub-games and all of them needed to be completed within 60 seconds. This almost surreal take on the game was in stark contrast to the comparatively more gritty realism of the first installment. The game was also known for being considerably easier than the first title, almost to the point where many players managed to complete the game in one hour-long sitting. The game reached the top of the UK budget games chart in late 1988. The Spectrum version of the game featured a version of

Invade-a-Load A fast loader is a software program for a home computer, such as the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, that accelerates the speed of file loading from floppy disk or compact cassette. Floppy disks Fast loaders came about because of a discrep ...

featuring

Pac-Man originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. Th ...

.Cargando… Publicado por Diego Cuevas
(in Spanish)

Joe Blade 3

''Joe Blade 3'' returned to the first title's formula, arming Blade with a machine gun. Exclusively released for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, it included

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

instructions in its inlay, but no Commodore 64 version was ever released.

Legacy

A 1991 Players game, ''Prison Riot'' plays very similarly to the Joe Blade titles and a hacked version that identifies itself as ''Joe Blade 4'' has been distributed on the internet.

References

External links

Joe Blade 2 Review
from

CRASH Crash or CRASH may refer to: Common meanings * Collision, an impact between two or more objects * Crash (computing), a condition where a program ceases to respond * Cardiac arrest, a medical condition in which the heart stops beating * Couch su ...

Joe Blade Review
from

Your Sinclair ''Your Sinclair'', or ''YS'' as it was commonly abbreviated, was a commercially published and printed British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, mainly the ZX Spectrum. It was in circulation between 1984 and 1993. History The ...

Atari 8-bit fan review of Joe Blade
*

Maps

Complete map of ''Joe Blade''

Complete map of ''Joe Blade 2''
* tp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-maps/j/JoeBlade3_2.png Complete map of ''Joe Blade 3''{dead link, date=November 2017 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes
Complete map of ''Joe Blade'' (Atari 8-bit version)

Complete map of ''Joe Blade 2'' (Atari 8-bit version)
1987 video games 1988 video games 1989 video games ZX Spectrum games Joe Blade 2 Commodore 64 games Amstrad CPC games Amiga games Atari ST games MSX games BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games Atari 8-bit family games Video games developed in the United Kingdom