Creepers
In response to my mini-review of Creepers two days ago, Revive8Bit has released an updated version with smoother scrolling and no annoying flashing border. The download link can be found in the comments section of Revive8Bit’s YouTube video of the game.
A second Madballs game has been discovered!
Ariolasoft’s version is a pinball game with a pseudo-3D view, but the prototype doesn’t have any Madballs branding. It plays much like any version of pinball, but each table has a green and a pink circle, and bouncing the ball against them causes them to flash. If both circles are flashing, and the ball hits either of them again, you will be transported to another table. However, if only one circle is flashing, and the ball touches it again, it stops flashing – which makes going to other tables rather frustrating.
Why did Ariolasoft never release their version? According to the author, Ian Munro, Ariolasoft either lost the licensing rights, or failed to secure them, and thus Ocean managed to obtain the licence instead. Personally, I think Ariolasoft’s pinball-based game could have been an interesting use of a licence, and based on playing the prototype version, it would probably have been better than Ocean’s game. You can try it out for yourself by downloading it from Games That Weren’t. Thanks to Ian for granting permission for it to be released!
Liezere
Five games from Revive8Bit
A new entity named Revive8Bit has released five games – yes, five – in the space of a few days!
The first one is Aetheria – a platform game in which you control a ball of energy. Your task is to restart Aetheria – an engine the size of a moon that was built to power a dying star but has now fallen silent. You must explore the rooms within the engine, find weapons and skills to upgrade your own powers, locate switches to open locked doors, and dodge a variety of enemies who may fire shots at you. This is a fairly good game, and probably my favourite out of the five.
Chroma-Phaze: The Palette Puzzle is, as its name suggests, a puzzle game that involves colour. Each single-screen level contains at least one coloured barrier – either red, blue, green or yellow – and you can shift one colour at a time to make it disappear. The graphics are basic but the execution is clever, although I found it rather easy.
Creepers is the most original game of the lot. The Amstrad CPC has never had an equivalent of the popular, and hilarious, artillery game Worms – until now. If you’re not familiar with Worms, the gameplay involves each player (human or computer-controlled) in charge of a team of worms, and each player takes it in turn to move one worm and fire a shot at one or more opposing worms in the hope that they will lose energy and ultimately be killed. The graphics are again somewhat basic, the scrolling is very jerky and the border flickers very annoyingly a lot of the time, but it captures the fun of Worms reasonably well. Just don’t play it if you have epilepsy!
Mars Terraforming is a real-time resource-based strategy game that sees you attempting to colonise Mars. Can you transform this cold, lifeless planet into one that is habitable by humans? The game takes place on a board made of hexagons, and you build on the hexagons to create resources to enable the colony to survive and grow. I haven’t had a chance to look at this one properly as it seems quite complex (as a lot of strategy games are).
The fifth and final game is The Shaft. This is a platform game, and the background story is that you live in a deep vertical shaft below the surface. The world at the top of the shaft is supposed to be desolate, but you have found some photos from an inspector who left the shaft and came back that this isn’t the case, and you are determined to discover for yourself what it is really like out there. To reach the top, you will need to activate switches and find coloured keys in order to unlock doors that are marked with the same colour. I liked this one, although it’s a bit on the easy side.
At the moment, Revive8Bit’s web site is under construction, so to download the games, you’ll need to go to their YouTube channel and click on the appropriate video. Each video has a pinned comment containing links to a disc image of the game, and a PDF file of the manual.
Brick Blaster
News has come through of a new Breakout clone called Brick Blaster by issalig, although it’s been available on GitHub since last April. The rather outlandish story goes that you were riding your scooter to the local grocery store when you were abducted by an alien from Mars and incarcerated in a prison made of bricks. Now, armed with only an ironing board and a nuclear tennis ball (!), you must escape by knocking down the walls. As Breakout clones go, this one is pretty good, and I can imagine it would have been positively received back in the mid- to late 1980s had it been released then. You can play the game online or download a disc image.
Return Home
WacKEDmaN has been working on an arcade game that has also been on GitHub for a few weeks now. Return Home is a simple space shoot-’em-up, which according to the author has been written with the assistance of AI tools (specifically, Claude Code). You can download it from GitHub; the disc image is in the ‘dist’ directory.
I have reviewed five games. Three of them were released by DMV-Software via the German magazine CPC Amstrad International in its final few issues, and since the World Cup is nearing the final, the other two are football-themed.
The Dragon’s Forest
Nick
Super Cableman
Bomb Jack GX
The game was previewed for the first time by Xyphoe on his regular Friday night livestream, which you can watch below or on YouTube. You can download Bomb Jack GX from itch.io.
Bounty Hunter
Bounty Hunter features a heavily armed man wandering around a landscape, shooting aliens, throwing grenades and dodging landmines. The gameplay sounds very similar to Exolon, and indeed, Games That Weren’t has speculated that Exolon may have been inspired by Bounty Hunter, as the name ‘Raffaele’ can be found in the high score table! Surely that can’t refer to anyone other than Raffaele Cecco?! Unfortunately this newly discovered prototype version has no sound, but it does have colourful graphics and lots of big explosions, which are also a feature of Exolon.
As with Time Lords, it’s a shame that Bounty Hunter wasn’t completed, but you can download the prototype of Bounty Hunter from Games That Weren’t. Unusually, in order to play it, you need to boot CP/M first by typing |CPM at the Ready prompt, and then type BOUNTY at the CP/M prompt.
2,500 games reviewed!
Another milestone has been reached today, as CPC Game Reviews has now reviewed 2,500 Amstrad CPC games! Following DaReInt’s release of The Morning Star, I noticed that he has also released two other text adventures in English, one of which I never noticed, so I have reviewed all three of them:
Manic Miner Anthology
More information about Manic Miner Anthology can be found on the CPCWiki forum, where you will also find a link to download the collection from Dropbox.
The Morning Star
The Morning Star has been developed using the DAAD engine and contains AI-generated pictures for each location. It can be downloaded from itch.io, and while it isn’t free, it’ll only cost you $2.00 to download it, and it’s very suitable for people who aren’t experienced at playing text adventures.