13th January 2008
First of all, a belated Happy New Year to everyone who visits CPC Game Reviews. A lot has been happening in the two months since I last updated this site, so let me tell you what has been going on, if you don't already know.

Devilmarkus has been working for several months on an Amstrad CPC conversion of the role-playing game Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, which was highly acclaimed on the Amiga. Now he's released a four-minute video preview of the game which you can watch. Featuring colourful graphics, digitised music and sound, and animated sequences, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark looks certain to be a great game, if it's finished (it is a very ambitious project; the Amiga version occupies three discs!). Devilmarkus hopes that it will be released in the first half of 2008. Meanwhile, you can monitor the progress of development on the CPC Zone forums.

Since my last update more than two months ago, two new Spanish CPC games have been released. Magical Drop CPC is a conversion of the coin-op game of the same name. It's a Tetris-style game in which you try to put three or more bubbles of the same colour together to make them disappear and thus score points. It's very fast-paced and quite addictive as well. Oscar Sanchez is responsible for the conversion, and you can download it from his CPC Mania site. The second game is from ESP Soft, under their new sub-label ESP Basic, and is called BCM: The Code Searcher. It's a platform game written entirely in BASIC, and while it may not be fast because of this, it is quite challenging and shows that it is possible to write good games in BASIC. The game is available in separate English and Spanish versions from ESP Soft's website.

Magical Drop CPC

BCM: The Code Searcher

I have reviewed six games:

• Die Alien Slime
• Glass
• Hawk Storm
• Jungle Jane
• Mutants
• Yie Ar Kung-Fu

I have also added a link to the CPCGamesCD - a CD image containing every game on NVG, as well as several of the best CPC emulators, and the CPC Loader frontend.

12th November 2007
Kevin Thacker has put the final touches to his new game, Balloonacy. The graphics have been improved and music has been added, and hopefully Cronosoft will be releasing it soon, along with Star Sabre. As usual, you can download a playable demo containing four levels of the game.

7th November 2007
Following on from the recent news about Star Sabre, you can now download a playable demo and try the first level out for yourself. I can guarantee you'll like it!

Two of the main CPC emulators have been updated as well. Richard Wilson has released WinAPE 2.0 Alpha 15 which you can download from the WinAPE site, and CNGSoft has released CPCE 1.85 which you can download from the CPCE site.

I have also reviewed six games:

• Black Magic
• Centurions
• Le Chevalier Blanc
• G-LOC
• I Alien
• Realm

14th October 2007
News has reached me from the CPC Zone forums of another new game in development called Star Sabre, which will hopefully be published by Cronosoft when (if?) it is finished. It's a horizontally scrolling space shoot-'em-up and it looks very nice indeed.

I have reviewed three games:

• Dizzy Dice
• Purple Saturn Day
• Speed King

Also, if anyone knows how to play the Time Jump event in Purple Saturn Day properly, would they please let me know? I can't work out how to score more than 42,000 points!

E-mail: nich <AT> durge <DOT> org