Astral Entertainment

Brian's Trip to Mars

Brian's Trip to Mars was the first "Brian" game, featuring instead of the Brian of later games, a photograph of the game's creator Brian Quarfoth atop a cartoonish super-hero's body. The game is a pretty basic platform/shoot the aliens game, but as no limit is placed on how fast you can shoot, it's actually pretty easy. Of course Brian himself would complain that this isn't how the game is supposed to be played, but you don't have to listen to him because you don't know him like we do.

This game was distributed to friends before the Astral Entertainment website was even created, and then somehow missed getting put on the website. When the application Klik & Freedom was released for some reason Garth Thompson wanted to include an example game with it, and Brian's Trip to Mars was dug up and included. Then Klik & Freedom was removed, so Brian's Trip to Mars became unavailable again until this web page was put up.

Click here to download the Genesis of all games that have "Brian" in their title - Brian's Trip to Mars (1.62 MB)

Fruit Picker '98

Fruit Picker '98 was the predecessor to Fruit Picker '99. Imagine Fruit Picker '99, but with many more bugs, only four levels, and a giant blue box around the tree and then you pretty much have Fruit Picker '98. It was well liked but received a lot of criticism because it was so buggy, so we eventually updated it. It remained on the website for a very long time alongside Fruit Picker '99, getting about 1 download every two months or so until it was finally decided to be obsolete.

Here are some fun bugs you can try to make happen, shoot a fruit just as the new ones are coming up into the tree, and see how much it messes up! Also try hitting the wall with the fruits at different angles. If you hit it just right, then the fruit will fall back down at you!

Click here to download Picker, it's not a lottery number picker it's - Fruit Picker '98 (960 KB)

Car Warriors

Car Warriors was, for a while, Astral Entertainment's most critically acclaimed game and, at the same time, the game most hated by anyone who wasn't a software critic. The Car Warriors story starts back in 1996 when all we had was Pac-Guy and Two Tail, and we needed some more games to get more people to the website. Garth Thompson quickly combined two different racing games he'd been working on and packaged it as Car Warriors. The problem was, one of these racing games was a very simple non-scrolling 2D racing game with hedgehogs to pick up and shoot as ammo (a la the 3D "Wacky Wheels") and the other was kind of like the old "Spy Hunter", which would have been fine, unfortunately it contained only two levels, the first of which was way too easy, and the second of which was way too difficult.

Nevertheless Car Warriors was placed on the main website, and it was uploaded to several Software download websites as well. For some reason the people maintaining these download websites heaped endless praise upon it, giving it 5 of 5 stars and calling it things like "a real gem". The e-mails we received from real, non-reviewer, people were a very different story, saying how Car Warriors was their least favorite game and that we should remove it. Eventually we caved under the pressure and removed all references to the game from our website, until now.

Click here to see the albatross around our necks which was - Car Warriors (1.45 MB)