Gommy Medieval Defender (MSX)

"Let's rock!" The sampled voice at the beginning of early nineties Amiga coverdisk game Ork Attack plays in my head every time I fire up Gommy Medieval Defender. I used to play Ork Attack to an eye-bleeding extent and to see a game very similar to it appear on the MSX is exciting indeed!

There's something primevally satisfying about belting enemies on the head with a rock as they try to scale the walls of your castle. Like a hard-coded impulse in the mind to really get jollies from defending a huge pile of masonry. Maybe that's why we're such territorial dicks at times. Retroworks' Gommy Medieval Defender, which recently came fourth in this year's MSXDev coding contest, has a direct line to this ancient butthead sector of the human brain and is a clobbering good laugh.

Malaika (MSX)

Created as an entry for the MSXdev 2013 competition, Revelo Videogames' Malaika was particularly well received by the judging panel and was awarded second place in the final results. Karoshi's Shouganai may have beaten it to the top of the winners podium, but as far as I'm concerned, Malaika was the real winner. Why? Well, its simply because I LOVE Bubble Bobble, and Malaika is an MSX exclusive love-letter to Taito's masterpiece, sharing many of its mechanics with the classic and the feel isn't too far removed either as a result.

Subacuatic (MSX/ZX Spectrum)

An entry into the MSXdev'12 challenge, Subacuatic by the Mojon Twins is difficult to pigeonhole into a single category - I'd perhaps call it an "action-adventure," but I wouldn't want to give the impression that there's lots of action going on, so let's go for "underwater exploration game." Maybe that's better.

Moving along, in Subacuatic players take the role of Ferdinand W. Templeton, an archeologist who must dive underwater to rescue his 4 prized artifacts so he can marry his lover and have enough money to keep on going. He has a phobia to water as well.  This does not bode well for Mr. Templeton, as the perils of this particular undersea world are everywhere. Even the seaweed will actually kill him, as no doubt many players have already discovered the hard way.

Knights & Demons (ZX Spectrum/MSX/Amstrad CPC)

Being a retro geek and a high fantasy nerd, seeing a new game on the ZX Spectrum called Knights & Demons (from Kabuto Factory) naturally got me all aflutter. You can imagine then, my disappointment when I realised it was actually a puzzle game based on the old Light's Out toys from the 1990s. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I did have to readjust my expectations somewhat.

Light's Out was a puzzle game featuring a grid of lit tiles, where the aim was to switch off all the lights on your board. By selecting a tile on the grid you switch the status from on to off (or vice versa) as well as those tiles directly adjacent to the one you have just selected. Knights & Demons essentially takes this concept and replaces the lights with, you guessed it, knights and demons. It also introduces 'pikes', which allow you to switch off a tile without flipping any of the other tiles around it, which is useful for dealing with individual tiles when you don’t want to switch the others adjacent to it. As you progress through the game the number of pikes you possess doesn't reset, so the game becomes progressively harder as the number of pikes dwindles and you have to rely on your skill alone to clear the gameboard.

Retro News Update

It's all go here at RGCD HQ, and even with our new team members we've been unable to give all the games that have come out recently the full coverage they deserve! So, whilst we struggle to catch up with our backlog of reviews, here's a quick update on the stuff we've missed. There's quite a lot here, so get ready with that scroll-wheel...

Verminest '83 & Boxed Copies of Locomalito's Games For Sale! (PC)

Starting with the PC news first, our good friend Locomalito has not only released a special early coin-op 'coloured' version of his recent blast Verminest (it now looks even more like a suped-up version of Galaga), but he's also made the decision to make boxed copies of his back-catalogue of widely acclaimed games available to buy! The games themselves are of course still free to download - the boxed copies are offered as a 'gift' for people who make donations, with around 30 Euros for one game or 90 for all five. Grab yours today from here.

M-Tanks (MSX)

MSXDev is a great competition that injects fresh life into the MSX scene every year. It gave us Heroes Arena, a great homage to the NeoGeo and Konami; Deep Dungeon, a fun mindless roguelike; British Bob, the greatest Elizabethean arcade platformer ever; Caos Begins, a Maze of Galious inspired metroidvania; Dr. Pill, a crazy text adventure; for nearly a decade it's really been the rallying point of fantastic ideas from a hard-working community. If you haven't played any of the games just mentioned, you owe it to yourself to dig deep into the history of the scene. In fact, you might as well, because the game reviewed here just can't compare.

Ruari's recent Mecha 8 review was spot-on. I didn't just agree with every single point; it completely captured my feelings on the entire competition as a whole. What the hell happened this year? I can't be the only one who is depressed by the paltry turnout this time around. Even at its best (with Zombie Incident), I can't say MSXDev '11 was more than "barely competent". And M-Tanks? In what would be considered an afterthought entry any other year, somehow managed to score third.

Mecha 8 (MSX)

There have been quite a few times when I've picked a game to review and then given up on it, not because I disliked it but because I found nothing to write about; basically I just didn't care enough about it to either damn it or praise it. However, that's not the case with Mecha 8, one of the entries in the MSXDev 2011 game design competition.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, and while a few good points stood out in my runs through this vertical scrolling giant robot shoot-em-up there just weren't enough sparks of brilliance to make me fall in love with it.

Zombie Incident (MSX)

One of the first reviews I ever wrote for RGCD, back when the magazine still came out on a compact disc, was of an MSX game - and for a while now I've been eager to get back to the old MSX, while continously kicking myself for passing up the chance to pick one up at a car boot sale a few years ago. With the judging of the MSXDev 2011 game development contest going on right now and games already entered for the 2012 contest it's looking like a bumper season for MSX gamers and reviewers, and I was chuffed to fire up the top notch blueMSX emulator and have a crack at Zombie Incident, one of the nine entries in the 2011 contest.

Inspired by the Mojon Twins' Cheril Perils, nenefranz’s Zombie Incident is a screen-by-screen platformer that pits the player against a castle full of zombies of varying species, on a quest to collect eight stars and escape the castle. And at the finish of an incredibly hectic weekend in this reporter's personal life it's quite simply a treat to play.

Azzurro 8-Bit Jam (MSX/ZX Spectrum)

The latest MSX/ZX release from Spanish coders Relevo Videogames has already received it's fair share of press coverage. Being (quite possibly) the only retro-platform videogame coded as a promotional tool for a drinking establishment - and originally only available to play (and buy) in the Azzurro Rock Pub in Bilbao, Spain - it's easy to see why Azzurro 8-Bit Jam atracted so much attention upon it's launch.

Several weeks later, the excitement surrounding the game has calmed and the MSX and ZX Spectrum ROM/TZX files have finally been made available for free download from the Relevo Videogames site. So, was it worth the wait? Does it live up to the hype?