World Reborn (GBA)

[Originally reviewed by T.M.R in RGCD Issue #05, March 2009]

In the not so distant future, mankind has been reduced to barbarism and most of society has collapsed whilst the world is turned into a free for all battle. In order to restore order, the powers that be create the Judge4101, a powerful judicial computer that essentially takes control and drags everybody back on track, kicking and screaming as they go. All goes well for a year until without warning the Judge4101 stops talking... and that isn't such a bad thing because, when it starts again, it declares mankind to be in contempt of court and promptly dispatches an army of "biotech" weapons in order to carry out the sentence! Enter our heroes to be, Perrin and Thiel are both children of the Judge4101's regime but brave and, when tooled up with the mobile base they discover near their village and the battle craft within, something for it's honour to worry about.

Sub Hunter (C64)

[Originally reviewed by C. Allcock in RGCD Issue #05, March 2009]

After agreeing to take on the last-minute challenge of reviewing Sub Hunter, I quickly realised that I was in for a bit of a treat. Late in 2008, Richard Bayliss and Frank Gasking together finished a rather epic 4-year project that's been commercially released on Commodore 64 disk format by Psytronik - the same company that sells updated, physical copies of gems like Creatures, Mayhem in Monsterland and Joe Gunn to name but a few. So, as a new member to this exclusive club of new-school Commie releases, Sub Hunter has its work cut out to 'keep up with the Joneses'...

Phaeton (ZX Spectrum)

Released back in 2010 for the 48KB ZX Spectrum, Rafal Miazga's Phaeton is a unique arcade-puzzle/logic affair.  Again, as with Genesis: Dawn Of A New Day, it was the screenshots on the World of Spectrum news portal that grabbed my attention, and I immediately (and mistakedly) assumed that Phaeton would be a exploratory shoot 'em up similar to the popular 80's classic Cybernoid.  After all, the loading screen and in-game shots featured a flying saucer on the screen with a couple of satellite upgrades orbiting it, and even the mythical name sounds like it is going to be a blast-fest.  Unfortunately my assumption was wrong, but thankfully in this case there was a silver-lining on my cloud of dissapointment.

Phaeton is in fact a logical puzzle game requiring arcade relexes and skill to beat.  You guide your saucer around each flick-screen maze on a dangerous mission to retrieve highly radioactive isotopes from a terrorist organisation.  Orbiting your vunerable ship are two shielding satellites that take damage upon touching the landscape or enemy drones, so to navigate around the maze you have to alternate the direction of their orbit (by pressing fire) enabling you to navigate past obstcles and through tight gaps.  The trick is to keep both satelittes from colliding with anything while still managing to collect and actvate items with your saucer craft - and even though the game plays at a sedate pace, working out how to navigate past some of the obstcales you encounter is quite frankly as hard as nails.

ThrustBurst (PC)

 
[Originally reviewed by J. Monkman in RGCD Issue #05, March 2009]
 
Picking a featured game for our comeback issue after such a long break was never going to be easy. With several superb releases to choose from, I was really struggling to select a worthy game to highlight - and then out of the blue I received a message from acclaimed pixel-pusher Ptoing announcing the launch of ThrustBurst; the debut PC title from new independent development group Umlautgames.

Golden Axe: Myth (PC)

“Golden” and “Axe”. Two words, spoken in the correct order, that are guaranteed to invoke flashbacks to a time where musclebound barbarians rode miniature dragons while stout dwarves knocked the hell out of things with their axes, and throwing a bottle of Blue Curaçao into the air invoked powerful magic.

“Prequel”. A word guaranteed to make the average film buff go all hand-wringy.

Italian modder Baritonmarchetto has released a freeware prequel to Golden Axe. It’s called Golden Axe: Myth. And it’s pretty good.  Barbarian handshakes all round!

RGCD Website Status

Regarding the inclusion of the 'Other Projects' tab on the navbar above, over the weekend I'll be moving over details on some of our projects from the old RGCD site. Apologies if you are following us or subscribe and get spammed by a load of stuff that may be not be relevant or of interest to you, but unfortunately it is a necessity. I really want to progress with the migration and there seems to be no way of adding posts without them also being mailed out to subscribers (even historical posts are sent out as updates, as you may have seen when I moved the Robotz DX and r0x pages).

I'm continuing to post news as and when I can, but don't be alarmed if a few older items are blogged here in the coming days and weeks; as well as moving the site over I am probably going to post up some of the more suitable reviews and articles from previous RGCD issues (and there are well over 100 of them to choose from).

In other news, RGCD collaborator iLkke has kindly agreed to pixel a new logo for the blog. Although I'm a massive fan of ptoing (and his previous RGCD logo) he's just too busy these days to help and the current logo isn't an ideal size to be used on a blogger site.

There are a few other bits and pieces I could mention about or ongoing r0x zer0 project, but Tomchi has sworn me to secrecy... ;)

Frogatto & Friends (PC/Mac/Linux)

Old news really (although it is still in constant development the game has been publicly available since last year), but Frogatto is such a special game that I think that it's more than worthy of mention again.  Released as open source, Lost Pixels' Frogatto & Friends is an absolutely stunning 2D story-driven platform adventure - in fact the production quality surpasses any indie release that I've played in the past couple of years (barring game-du-jour Super Meat Boy of course).

Featuring all the usual platforming fare you'd expect in a modern game (including wall jumping, multiple moves and collectable upgrades), the attacks in Frogatto are particularly noteworthy.  Similar to controlling Yoshi in the classic Super Mario World, you attack the various in-game critters by grabbing them with your (upgradable) sticky tongue and holding them in your mouth to be either spat out at another enemy as a projectile weapon or simply regurgitated onto their backs so you can jump onto their soft undersides.  It is all simple, very retro and unlike Super Meat Boy, completely wholesome and family-friendly.

Edge Grinder (WIP) (C64)

Edge Grinder is a new RGCD endorsed game coded by Cosine's TMR and soon to feature all new graphics courtesy of Trevor 'Smila' Storey.  Planned for release through TMR's Backward Engineering group, RGCD will be organising a very limited run of real C64 cartridges (as long as the game can be squeezed within 16KB).

Adventures In Time (C16/Plus4)

Another title previously missed by RGCD (due to the inactive state of the magazine), Assassins' 2010 release Adventures In Time is a game that I've been eager to write about since first playing it last year.  Coded for the relatively obscure Commodore Plus4 (and expanded C16), Adventures in Time is 8-Bit retro platforming action at it's very best.

For those of you unfamilar with the machine, the Commodore Plus4 lacks the necessary sprite hardware and sound capabilites to allow for the same quality of games and demos that the C64 became famous for - underwhelming in just about every aspect, the Plus4 did not fare well in the competitive home computer market and was discontinued one year after it's initial release.  However, as with most 8-Bit platforms, today there is a thriving homebrew scene - and without a doubt, when it comes to high-quality releases the Hungary-based Assassins are the top of their class.

Hack Slash Loot (Beta) (PC/Mac/Linux)

The problem with most roguelikes is that they generally look a bit drab.  Ascii characters may have been all the rage back in the eighties, but there's only so much emotional attachment you can apply to an @ symbol and regardless of the genre's apparent depth, I find many of the inherent quirks and complexities off-putting (yep, you've guessed right - Dwarf Fortress is certainly not for me).

In contrast to the over complicated and downright ugly roguelikes of yore, David Williamson's Hack Slash Loot is far more the type of adventure game I prefer to play during my coffee break.  It's both incredibly accessible (with simple mouse driven controls), maddeningly addictive and presented in a super-retro, low resolution format using gorgeous micro-sized pixel art and featuring some neat audio effects.

Space Trip (C64)

Released with practically no fan-fare or hype by The New Dimension earlier this year, Achim Volkers' Space Trip is a nostalgic blast from the past.  Similar in both visual style and gameplay to Gremlin Graphics' Future Knight (1986), Space Trip is a multi-screen adventure in which you play the role of Captain Steve Zappa on an interstellar mission to eradicate alien invaders from captured space craft.

The Sounds of Tomchi

Whilst chatting with Tomchi briefly this evening, he was telling me about a new chiptune he has started for the r0x zer0 menu screen and I thought that it would be nice to show him a bit of support by showcasing a few of his recent tracks in this blog.

As an introduction, Tomchi (aka Nicolas Flandin) is one of the new school of Atari ST tracker musicians, still dedicated to the machine years after it's commercial demise and relentlessly striving to create fresh new sounds on the very limited YM2149 chip.  We met whilst working together on our r0x game project, and (despite his previous activity in the scene) it was here that I was first introduced to his music.  Since then, I've been hooked.

Genesis - Dawn Of A New Day (ZX Spectrum)

 
Although I grew up with a +2A Spectrum in the house as a kid, these days I tend to overlook the majority of homebrew releases for the machine in favour of my upgraded C64. However, while skimming through the recently released games on the World Of Spectrum site, Retroworks' Genesis - Dawn Of A New Day instantly captured my attention with it's stylish monochrome graphics and promise of a worthwhile shoot 'em up experience on Sir Clive's much-loved and underpowered 128KB machine.

RGCD Website Status

Over the weekend I've succeeded in removing most of the evidence that this is a Blogger-built site (apart from the address, of course) and I've even managed to add a few new pages of content.  It isn't perfect, but after a lot of messing around it appears that Blogger is actually capable of building basic websites much faster than I can using html - and to be honest I'm quite happy with the results so far.

I've also been mailing some of the old RGCD crew to see if any of them are available to join the blog as authors - although I expect a lot of them will no longer have time due to real-life commitments (after all, that was what stopped me from editing the RGCD magazine).

The next logical step is to transfer what old RGCD data I can fit within Blogger's limitations and then link the rgcd.co.uk domain here instead (while Elliot works on building a new site in the background).  We had a good chat this evening and agreed to use this blog system as a design tool for him to work from, so there are likely to be a great deal of changes here over the next few weeks/months while work progresses.

Regular visitors to the blog (are there any?) will notice that the tabs across the top of the page have changed; there are now pages here for both r0x and Robotz DX under the 'Games' section.  For now the text is just a direct copy from the original site - I'll work on updating them properly as soon as my desktop PC is up and running again.
 
In the meantime, if you are enjoying the new reincarnation of RGCD please take the time to comment, or at least add your email to the subscribe list (so you receive updates by email when they are published).  It's pretty lonely here at the moment... ;)

Dash-Da-Dash DX (PC)

 

When I first came across Renard's Dash-Da-Dash DX earlier this year (courtesy of a news post on indiegames.com), my first thoughts were far from positive.  Seeing a couple of screenshots of the game full of obviously ripped sprites and a soundtrack that sampled whole tracks by just about every underground electronic act worth mentioning from the past decade, I initially mistook it for another of those hideous no-effort montages from a coder who obviously was too lazy to create or source their own original material.

 

How wrong I was.