Coracle (ZX Spectrum)

Awkward introductions are normally the reserve of weddings and dinner parties as the 'plus one' of a proper guest. The virtual world of videogames is where we retreat to avoid these kind of interactions. Thus initial meetings with a new videogame are usually refreshingly straightforward – often following the tried and tested format of... "this is game X: it's a bit like game Y". Or possibly "It is like game Y with elements of game Z". Not so with Jonathan Cauldwell's latest offering Coracle for the ZX Spectrum. From somewhere within his mind yet another new game that is rather difficult to describe has sprung forth.

La Mulana (PC)

[Originally reviewed by T. Fahs in RGCD Issue #02, May 2007]

La-Mulana isn't just a celebration of a moment in gaming history, it's a distillation of rose-tinted memories and savvy design that manages to completely transcend the very games it hopes to imitate. A thoughtful love-letter to the MSX home computer, it's a childhood's worth of memories brought to life, somehow better than the real experience ever was.

The MSX was something of an underdog as a gaming platform. Despite the 4 million units sold, the dated video hardware – the very same used by the ColecoVision and SG-1000 – couldn't compete with Nintendo's Famicom, and it didn't get great third party support, except from Konami. But Konami loved the MSX, and legendary classics like Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Snatcher all called the platform home. So it is fitting, then, that La-Mulana draws most heavily from these games. The most obvious influence is the open-ended platform-adventure Maze of Gallious, but you'll see winks to a lot of Konami's greats littered throughout.

Dragonwing (VIC20)

[Originally reviewed by SirClive in RGCD Issue #01, February 2007]

The VIC-20 is something of an unsung hero in the home computer world. Launched in 1981, it was Commodore's answer to the Atari VCS and Intellivision consoles. But with the addition of a real keyboard it offered a colour computer at an amazing price (under $300 in the US). It was the first home computer to sell one million units and at the height of its popularity they were churning out over 9,000 units a day. So why is it now treated like your embarrassing uncle with the ill-fitting wig? Well mostly it's because of it was overshadowed by it's flashy little brother the Commodore 64, but it really is criminal to miss out on some classic games from the dawn of home computing.

If we fast-forward 20 years to Finland, we find a near legendary coder/musician from the Amiga Demo scene going through some form of electronic regression back to the (8-bit) womb. Moving backwards through the Commodore hardware catalogue, Aleksi Eeben creates a game on the humble unexpanded VIC-20 and it is quite simply hard to believe that it could all be done in just 3.5k!

Voxatron (PC/Mac/Linux)

The Voxatron experience begins with a polygonal Minotaur smashing the crap out of the production team’s logo. With this in mind, Voxatron really did have me at "hello".

This bout of battery sets the scenes for a game heavy on destruction and ruination, but it’s not hard to predict that. What was a tougher call for me was that this game would be the first indie game I’ve played to send me flashing back through the years, like a low budget Highlander, to the first time I stayed up all night playing a video game.

Retroinvaders (ZX Spectrum)

I've always loved the timeless character and aesthetics of Taito's classic Space Invaders, but if I'm completely honest I just don't think that the game itself has aged particularly well over the past 30 or so years. With their considerably more dynamic attack waves, Namco's Galaxian and Galaga are much more fun, but when it comes to classic coin-op alien-shooters, Konami's Gyruss has always been my personal favourite. With it's innovative rotary shoot 'em up game-play and enemy waves that weave and dive in and out of the screen, Gyruss seems light years ahead of it's heritage - yet despite being hugely enjoyable to play it lacks a distinct visual identity. Space Invaders, Galaxian and Galaga all have immediately recognisable enemies, whereas Gyruss features rather generic looking spacecraft and nondescript spinning alien blobs.

Now if only someone was to marry the future-proof Gyruss design with the classic visuals of those earlier shooters... Oh, hang on a sec - Retroinvaders, you say? What have we here then?

Retro News Update

Yet again I've let the news build up to the point where the only way to tackle it is via a mammoth post. So without further delay, let's have a brief look over what's been happening over the past week in the retro and indie gaming scene. More detailed reviews of select releases to follow soon.

Gunlord (Dreamcast/Neo-Geo)

We originally mentioned NG:DEV's Gunlord when the game was first announced back in May this year. After months of waiting, the game is finally available for pre-order for both the Neo-Geo (AES/MVS) and Dreamcast, with a release planned between late 2011 to early 2012. If the new nine-minute game trailer is anything to go by, Gun-Lord looks to be the solid Turrican style blaster that we were all hoping for (complete with lightning-flash style cannon and familiar morphball attack). Could this be the indie publisher's best game to date? The trailer may initially seem a bit underwhelming in comparison to Fast Striker's eye-popping visuals (the voice narrating the background story over static images is particularly hammy, but give it a chance) and the price tag is perhaps a little steep (32 Euros for the regular DC edition and a whopping 400 for the MVS/AES!), but regardless - there's nothing we love more at RGCD HQ than a bit of no-nonsense run 'n' gun fun, so our purchase is already in the bag. Expect a review when the game is released.

Cho Ren Sha 68K (PC/Sharp X68000)

In the first of a series of critical retrospective features, RGCD will be looking back at some of the classic homebrew releases for both modern and retro platforms. In this first article, Sven 'ptoing' Ruthner takes an in-depth look at Yoshida Koichi's classic shmup ChoRenSha68K (particularly it's undocumented features and game modes) 16 years on from it's original release.

I have read my fair share of more recent reviews of ChoRenSha and what many seem to forget is that this is not a release from 2001 or 2005 or whatnot, although that is the time when it became popular in the West due to the internet making Eastern doujin games available to a wider audience of players. In fact, the original version was actually made in 1995 for for the Sharp X68000 (hence the 68K in the title), and if you look what was in the arcades around at that time it holds up well, especially since this was essentially a one man effort. Apart from the (excellent) music which was made by Ruzarin Kashiwagi, everything else was made by Yoshida Koichi himself.

Prince Of Persia (C64)

Nine days ago, Andreas Varga (aka Mr. SID) announced that he'd be releasing a C64 conversion of the classic Apple II version of Broderbund's Prince Of Persia - and today he delivered on his word, with a near-perfect port freely available as a cartridge image in the popular EasyFlash format. It's an awe-inspiring achievement, although arguably being one that perhaps wouldn't be quite so impressive if it wasn't for a little bit of help from the 21st Century hardware required to run it on a real machine.

For those of you who haven't heard of EasyFlash before, basically it's a 1MB flash cartridge for the Commodore 64, with the bonus being that it is entirely programable from a standard system with a disk drive - it's relatively user friendly with no UV lamp or EPROM programmer required and it's cheap to build yourself or buy online. Now that's all well and good, but until now use of the device has been limited to replaying old cartridge games and the occasional enhanced crack. However, with Prince Of Persia - a game specifically written for the EasyFlash - it's true potential for releasing new games that wouldn't be feasible in other media formats has been realised; EasyFlash now has it's killer app.

Space Disposal (ZX Spectrum)

Hooray! It seems like ages since I last had a bit of space-themed blasting on the old Speccy, and with a name like Space Disposal surely the game will be full of pure and unadulterated asteroid-cracking and enemy-'disposing' mayhem. Ah, but hang on - what's this? "Authored with Arcade Game Designer" by Paul Jenkinson? As in the same guy who previously delivered the uninspired Chopper Drop? Harrumpf. Oh well, I guess I'd better prepare myself for a critical write up of another mediocre game...

...Or perhaps not. In fact, despite being developed using the more-than-slightly sluggish AGD, Space Disposal is actually quite a lot of fun. Unlike Paul's other recent game (which looked quite nice but was tedious to play), this one actually features some solid design and decent gameplay - as well as looking and sounding good. Now where is that humble pie? I suppose I should have a slice with my afternoon cup of tea.

C64 16KB Cartridge Game Development Competition - Status Update #5

I haven't posted one of these competition updates for a while, but that's not because there's been no activity! On the contrary, our good friend Tim Harris has been testing previews and test builds on real cartridge hardware on a near daily basis. So with just over a month and a half left, let's have a look at the development status of the entries.

Leg It / Zombie (PC)

Zombies and running are subjects that fit together very well; you have to do one to escape the other, for instance, and one of these two things can't do the other thing at all (cue internet fight over Fast Zombies™). And of course without raising the dead there would be no zombies to run away from, or to shoot in the face. With this in mind I'm grave robbing some releases from a staggering six months ago, one a complete game and the other a work-in-progress that seems to be cooling its heels in development limbo.

Leg It and Zombie are games in the style of 1980/90's LCD handheld games like Nintendo's Game & Watch series; Leg It is a finished product now, with its gun toting brother Zombie still in beta - both of them were made available for download in March and April respectively but there seems to be little internet chatter about them, and Retro Remakes only picked up on them in the first week of this month (this is the bit where I'm trying to convince the Ed that this is worth publishing, by the way!) and good indie games could always do with a little extra publicity.

8-Bit Night (PC)

RetroSouls' world-rotating platformer 8-Bit Night (formally known as 8-Bit Story and MegaRunner before that) has finally been released on the PC... But hang on, something about this game feels very familiar, doesn't it?  That's right - regular RGCD readers will recognise that 8-Bit Night is essentially an enhanced PC conversion of Alter Ego, a game that the same developer (and later Shiru) released for the ZX Spectrum and NES to pretty much universal acclaim.

8-Bit Night is a game built around a simple, yet previously unused mechanic.  On a base level it's a standard retro platform romp (which is where I imagine the 8-Bit of the title comes in) - your little man must collect all the glowing 'pixels' on each level whilst avoiding spikes, nasties and falling to your death.  Same old, same old.  However, the special trick here is the addition of a ghost character whose position and movements mirror yours on the opposite side of the horizontal (or vertical) axis across the centre of each level. Pressing the action key or button flips the world and swaps your position with the ghost - enabling you to reach areas (and pixels) that were previously inaccessible.  Also, some pixels can only be collected by your ghost character, whereas others are limited to one particular axis, resulting in some top quality puzzle solving fun.

Buzzsaw+ (ZX Spectrum)

Possibly inspired by a fairly obscure Japanese arcade game from 1992 called 'Cosmo Gang The Puzzle', Buzzsaw is a variation on the Tetris premise of arranging falling blocks to complete lines, but with the addition of cute baddies that get in the way of actually completing those lines. Each block that drops is the same basic shape – just three tiles in an 'L' shape. If all three components were always crates (the default block) then this would be the most trivial Tetris variant ever – but instead some tiles in these blocks may be replaced by the aforementioned baddies, or weights that crush baddies. The most spectacular variant, however, is when a tile is replaced by the titular Buzzsaw. This is a circular sawblade that, upon being placed, carves through any baddies below it, and then skips off to the left or right (dependent on orientation) massacring any baddies in the playfield it gets to. Placement of the little critters is thus crucial to allow them to be Buzzsawed later - and at faster levels this game becomes a hectic juggling act, exactly as one hopes of this sort of action puzzle game.

Frank 'N' Stein Re-Booted (ZX Spectrum)

Let's get this straight - Han shot first and ET's pursuers carried guns - but the jury is still out on Deckard's voice-over/the happy ending/whether he was a replicant.

So what should we make of this revisionist-history re-work of the 1984 ZX Spectrum game Frank 'n' Stein? Upon its initial release this game was one of many games that could trace their heritage to Donkey Kong and Miner 2049er. The player is asked to guide Professor Stein to collect (in order) the items required to build his monster. Baddies follow fixed paths and hinder progress, and a timer ticks down. So far so Miner Willy. The difference here is that our hero has no 'jump' button, but rather has to use the action button to trigger poles, springs and teleporters in order to navigate between platforms and avoid death-by-surreal-baddy. Other special floor tiles either slow down, or in some way impede the Professor's progress.

Brainsplode! (PC)

Firing projectiles along parabolic arcs from a fixed position to blow stuff up is a fine starting point for any game. The experience is made even better with a variety of different munitions to sling at the target. Rust Red Games' Brainsplode! certainly hits these two targets, with its entertaining, challenging brain-blasting gameplay.

Blowing up alien brains with shots fired from a fixed cannon is the name of the game here, and while at first glance it seems like a straight up artillery game the puzzle elements thrown into the mix add a surprising depth of play which pushes Brainsplode! over the line from entertaining to addictive.