A strange creature called Gogly needs to collect keys in order to unlock doors. This moves him to the next screen. Each screen becomes more maze-like, while bouncing projectiles aim to hinder your progress. This is a hard game that sends you back to the beginning each time you die! The graphics are colourful and well drawn with some good sound effects included.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
XeNoMoRPH.
Gold Maze
(RetroVynZ, 2023)
How much treasure can you gather from the Golden Labyrinth? This is a turn-based puzzle game which takes place in a maze consisting of a 7×7 grid of tiles. At the beginning of each turn, you are given a randomly selected tile to place on the grid, which forces other tiles to be pushed along a row or column. By manipulating the maze in this manner, you have to collect the treasures, which appear randomly and will disappear after four turns. The quicker you collect the treasures, the more money you’ll receive. At the end of each game, you can score bonus points for collecting certain combinations of treasure. The game is written entirely in BASIC, but don’t let this put you off. It’s very well presented with lovely graphics and a beautiful loading screen, and while earning your fortune relies more on luck than skill, it’s great if you’re after something that will only take a few minutes at a time to play.
Gold or Glory
(Alternative Software, 1988)
The third and last of Charles Sharp’s sports-themed GAC text adventures sees you at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, as the coach for the women’s javelin team. For some reason, Britain’s two best female javelin throwers, Fatima Sanderson and Tessa Whitbread, have been performing poorly since they arrived at the Hotel Olympus. Has their food been poisoned or drugged? Well, those Lithuatvians look suspicious, and you’ve got only three days to solve the mystery... Thankfully, this is a somewhat easier game to get to grips with than the other sports-themed text adventures that I mentioned earlier, although the parser is still limited and you will occasionally have to enter exact combinations of words to achieve the correct results, which is rather annoying.
Free the King and Princess who are being held by your nemesis Death Adder in his castle. Play as either Ax Battler the Barbarian, Tyris Flare the Amazon or Gilius Thunderhead the Dwarf and take your revenge as you hack and slash your way past his evil servants and guardians who block your path. As well as a variety of mean moves, each individual character has his or her own exclusive elemental magic that varies in strength. This is an excellent and faithful conversion of the arcade hit with some of the best graphics ever on the CPC.
Watch YouTube videos of this game by:
Axelino,
ChinnyVision,
jgonza,
Novabug (gameplay),
Novabug (longplay),
Retro Danuart,
Xyphoe.
This is a really good little 5-on-5 basketball game from Opera Soft. There isn’t a lot of colour in the graphics but they are well animated and drawn with good scrolling. I was surprised at the variety of dunks you could score; three-pointers, free throws, one-handed and even reverse slam dunks are all possible. The game has some funky music and functional sound effects. It controls well and is one of the better sports games for the Amstrad CPC.
Golden Path
(Amsoft, 1986)
You are a Buddhist monk in the Orient who must achieve enlightenment by lighting incense before the statue of Buddha in a golden temple. Your journey starts with you as a young monk, and as the game progresses, you become older, eventually dying at the age of 100. The game sees you meeting various characters who may be friendly or hostile. You will find objects – but one of the big problems with the game is that I simply could not figure out how to make use of any of them! Another problem is that it accesses the disc all the time and this slows everything down a lot. The backgrounds for each room are well drawn, but a potentially interesting game is ruined by poor design and implementation.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
XeNoMoRPH.
Golden Tail
(Juan José Martínez, 2016)
The Golden Tail has been broken into thirty pieces by the evil Shogun, and the pieces have been scattered across the land. You are the ninja spy Kitsune, and you must retrieve all of the pieces of the talisman in order to restore law and order to the land. This is a simple platform game with a variety of enemies to dodge such as skeletons, vampire bats, samurai warriors and ghosts, but it’s innovative in that Kitsune has magical powers. He can become invisible for short periods of time, but during that period, he is able to move faster and jump higher, and none of the enemies will hurt him. The graphics are colourful and well drawn, although the music is nothing special. While it takes some practice to master the use of magic, the game is fun to play once you get the hang of it.
See also: Kitsune’s Curse.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
Metr81.
Goldorak is a vertical shoot-’em-up for the GX4000 and Plus machines, and a very good one. It is based on a popular animated cartoon series on French TV. The graphics are very good; they are colourful, detailed and move fast and smoothly. There are a great variety of enemies to face, and at the end of each level, a boss is lurking to destroy Goldorak. The sound is excellent, with an in-game tune as well as sound effects, and there is also some digitized speech. The gameplay is excellent. All the virtues of vertical shoot-’em-ups are here: intense action, weapon selection and a high difficulty level. Overall, a very professional production and one of the best shoot-’em-ups, if not the best, on the GX4000 and Plus range.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
Saberman.
Goliath
(Rainbow Production, 1986)
Fly your spaceship along a long corridor, shooting the obstacles and hazards in your way. Once you’ve reached the end of the corridor, you fly along another one. The corridor sections are viewed in isometric 3D reminiscent of the classic coin-op game Zaxxon. If you can complete both corridors, you then play a short section viewed through the cockpit of your spaceship, in which you must shoot aliens as they fly erratically towards you. The graphics are colourful, but there is a lot of flicker and the action is a bit slow, which makes the game too easy and repetitive, and therefore not much of a challenge.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
XeNoMoRPH.
Gommy, Medieval Defender
(Retroworks, 2024)
The kingdom is under attack and the medieval castle of Gomilandia must be defended against the enemy. Gommy is prepared for the battle – but all the king’s soldiers and servants have disappeared, and now he has to defend the castle single-handedly. You guard the rampart and must repel the enemy attack by hurling boulders at them. If any enemies make it to the top of the castle wall, or you are hit by an arrow, you lose a life. Every four levels, there is a boss battle in which Gommy fires himself from a cannon at the boss to reduce its energy and defeat it! The graphics are cute and colourful with varying themes as the levels progress, and the music is excellent as well. It’s enjoyable to play, but it’s too easy at the beginning, and it’s only much later on that the difficulty level increases substantially and things become hectic enough that I felt the game was a challenge.