The Bilestoad

The Bilestoad is a 1-on-1 fighting game against either an AI or a second player. You two are gladiators, each fitted with an axe and a shield, and you have rudimentary controls of rotating the axe, shield, or yourself, and walking forward so you can chop your opponent's arms off and slay him in cold blood. The depiction of gore in this game is surprisingly disturbing, looking like swelling patches of red that envelop each warriors' body.

Before Bilestoad, there was Warrior, which presented nearly the same idea, but Warriors was confided to a single arena with pits and had no shields. The Bilestoad doesn't fare much differently, but it offers opponents a chance to escape if they happen to be losing, or to seek a single power-up that increases speed and damage output. A total tally within ten rounds dictates which of the two players is the winner.

While Bilestoad has a web of controls that takes getting used to - a whole 10 buttons to micromanage, in fact, it is much more controlable than Warriors would be on modern emulators, making for decent match-ups even today, but not offering anything interesting than just a diversion for all of its 10 rounds. If the choppy framerate of the game happens to be off-putting, feel free to boost the processing speed past 1MHz.