Screenshot of Wordle CPC
Most of you will probably have heard by now of the addictive word puzzle Wordle that seems to have taken the English-speaking world by storm over the last few months, and which was recently bought by the New York Times newspaper. I’ve certainly been enjoying my daily Wordle fix! If you aren’t familiar with it, you have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, and like Mastermind, you are told if a letter is in the correct position, or if a letter is in the word but in the wrong position.
The concept is so simple that it has already been ported to several retro computing platforms, and it was inevitable that someone would convert it to the Amstrad CPC. That someone is Arnolde, who previously developed the Bejeweled clone Gem Jam for the CPC. Dictionaries are available in four languages – English, French, German and Spanish – and you can download Wordle CPC from the CPCWiki forum. Now you will no longer have to wait for hours for the next day’s puzzle to appear; you can just play as many games as you want.
Xyphoe’s Nightmare is a new game that is currently only available exclusively on the Antstream streaming platform. It has been developed by Yellow Belly (who was also the man behind Bug’s Quest for Tapes), with the help of some other contributors. Xyphoe himself has stated that the game will be made available to play on emulators or a real CPC in due course – something that I would like to emphasise – but for now, it can only be played on Antstream. You can watch the official trailer on YouTube.
Cover of The Mandarin
Mananuk has converted his platform game The Mandarin from the ZX Spectrum to the Amstrad CPC. The story is rather crazy – our hero Mandarino has been recruited to infiltrate an enemy base called The Dying Orange and rescue a small creature who has been kidnapped by an evil empire. You must explore the base and retrieve energy cells in order to activate an emergency walkway and flee the base after you rescue the small creature.
Colin Bell, the editor of AmtixCPC Micro Action, has asked me to mention that issue 3 of the magazine is scheduled for release on 25th February 2022. Among the planned features is an interview with Juan J. Martínez (the programmer behind The Dawn of Kernel and Brick Rick, among several other games), and there are also previews of Xyphoe’s Nightmare (which has unfortunately been the subject of some controversy recently) and Black Sea, and of course there will be plenty of reviews of the latest games for the Amstrad CPC.
At the time of writing, it’s not available to order from Retro Fusion Books yet, but when it is available, it should cost £3.99 excluding shipping costs.
Advertisement for issue 3 of AmtixCPC Micro Action
Screenshot of LlumScreenshot of Tetris dotBAS
Iván Ávila has released Llum. It’s a clone of the puzzle game Lumines, which was originally released for the PlayStation Portable. 2×2 blocks of one or two colours fall from the top of the screen, and you have to align blocks of the same colour together so they form a larger group of 2×2 blocks. It’s similar to Columns, except that instead of forming lines, you need to form large blocks in order to score points.
You can download Llum from itch.io, but note that it requires BASIC 1.1, so you won’t be able to play it on a CPC464.
Tetris dotBAS
If you followed the 2021 #CPCRetroDev Game Creation Contest, you may recall that one of the entrants, Wrecking Ball, was particularly impressive. It finished in sixth place overall and won an award for the best game written in BASIC, but it stood out because, despite being written in BASIC, it featured music and beautiful multi-coloured graphics, yet it was still very playable.
Now the author, Francesc Alcaucer, is working on a version of Tetris, called Tetris dotBAS, that uses the same techniques. Again, it’s written entirely in BASIC, and it was a real surprise to me to discover how fast the pieces fall! The game is still under development, but in the meantime, you can download the current version from itch.io.
New reviews
Robert Small has reviewed two games, both featuring the Harrier Jump Jet:
Does anyone remember Code Masters’ humorous music management simulation Rock Star Ate My Hamster? Well, SyX has released two modified, updated versions of the game – the Bizarre Edition and the Millennium Edition.
When Rock Star Ate My Hamster was originally released in 1989, the tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a competition, and ten of the runners-up received a special edition for the ZX Spectrum titled Rock Star Goes Bizarre, which featured six additional pop stars who weren’t in the standard edition. This special edition wasn’t preserved until mid-2016. It was then converted to the Commodore Plus/4 by the Italian team FIRE, who in turn also developed the Millennium Edition and replaced the existing pop stars with new additions such as Germana Bigga (Ariana Grande), Ketty Parry (Katy Perry), Anna Ray Barbados (Rihanna) and Dea Kosova (Dua Lipa). New loading screens have also been designed, featuring Michael Jackson on the Bizarre Edition and Daft Punk on the Millennium Edition.
