Screenshot of The Mandarin II: Limoncello's Revenge
Mananuk has released The Mandarin II: Limoncello’s Revenge – the sequel to his 2022 release The Mandarin, which received a rating of 7 out of 10 on this site. General Limoncello has stolen some plans for the construction of a new space station, and our hero Mandarino has accepted a mission to retrieve them. The game begins with you flying in your spaceship to Limoncello’s base, and then it switches to platforming action as you explore the base in search of the pieces of the plans. An interesting feature in the platform section is the ability to hide temporarily to make yourself invincible, which you’ll need to use in order to pass some of the enemies that can’t be killed.
The Mandarin II: Limoncello’s Revenge features two title screens from the very talented CPC pixel artist Titan, and some nice music from EA (which is welcome, because I thought the music in Mananuk’s previous games was poor). You can download it from itch.io.
Physical editions of BEARS! and SOH Tactics GX now available
BEARS! and SOH Tactics GX cartridges and boxes
Steve from SOH Digital Entertainments has announced on the CPCWiki forum that physical editions of his cartridge games BEARS! and SOH Tactics GX are now available. The cartridges are 3D printed with a grey shell, just like other GX4000 cartridges, and they come in a plastic case with a professionally printed sleeve and instruction booklet.
Both games are available for a price of £24.99 each, which incidentally is the price that a GX4000 game normally sold for back in 1991! Postage and packaging in the UK is £4.75, but Steve is still trying to confirm how much it will cost to send them to other countries. They are only available in very limited quantities, so if you want one, you’ll need to be quick! They’re currently only available by contacting Steve through the CPCWiki forum, but if demand is sufficiently high, a second batch of cartridges may be produced and advertised on other channels.
The Ruin of 0ceanus Pr1me
Title screen of The Ruin of 0ceanus Pr1me
Marco Innocenti released his latest text adventure, The Ruin of 0ceanus Pr1me, for multiple formats recently, including the Amstrad CPC. It’s a sequel to A1RL0CK (which I found enthralling) and it won the PunyJam #4 contest that was held last month. The adventure casts you as Colonel J. T. Thomas, exploring the abandoned Oceanus Prime base that lies two miles underwater and finding yourself sharing it with some gigantic tentacled creature. Fans of science fiction and horror should enjoy it, although it contains language that some may find offensive, as well as descriptions of things that people may find disturbing. You can download The Ruin of 0ceanus Pr1me from itch.io.
Tristam Island is now public domain
Hugo Labrande released his text adventure Tristam Island under a Creative Commons CC0 licence a couple of months ago, effectively making it public domain. It was originally released in 2020 for a wide variety of platforms, and the full version could only be downloaded from itch.io by paying for it, but now it can be obtained for free – although you can still make a donation if you wish. You are stranded on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean following a plane crash. The island was evacuated decades ago, and it seems that MI5 – the UK’s domestic intelligence and security service – wants to keep the details of what happened secret...
A belated Happy New Year to all Amstrad CPC fans!
A new version of an Amstrad CPC emulator called ACE-DL was released recently, and I learnt that it features support for the Magnum and Trojan lightguns, so I thought I would take the opportunity to try it out and review five games that can only be played using either of these lightguns:
Screenshot of Booty: The Remake
SalvaKantero of Play On Retro released a new game just before Christmas, although I was unable to post an announcement here as I was away visiting my family for Christmas. Firebird’s original release of Booty was nothing special and it had a number of flaws, but SalvaKantero thought he could develop a new, improved version – and he has certainly succeeded in doing that! Booty: The Remake is much better than the original game in every way.
If you haven’t played Booty before, you’re a cabin boy on board a pirate ship, and you must collect 125 pieces of treasure scattered around twenty rooms in the ship. It’s a platform game, and you have to avoid contact with cutlass-wielding pirates and various animals, and collect numbered keys in each room to open doors in the right sequence. You can download Booty: The Remake from itch.io.
Gold Maze
Screenshot of Gold Maze
RetroVynZ has released a clever little puzzle game called Gold Maze. You are exploring a labyrinth and you have to collect as much treasure as you can. The maze consists of a 7×7 grid of tiles, and the puzzle element comes from pushing these tiles around to form passages to enable you to reach the treasures, in a similar manner to Pipe Mania. The quicker you can collect the treasures, the more you’ll earn, but each treasure will disappear after a few turns, so there’s also some strategy involved in how to move the tiles. The game is written entirely in BASIC, but it is very well presented indeed. You can download Gold Maze from itch.io.
Robert Small has reviewed Emlyn Hughes International Soccer. Astonishingly, despite this game being widely regarded as a classic and one of the best football games for the CPC, no one has reviewed it until now!
The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor
Title screen of The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor
Stefan Vogt has released a new text adventure called The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor, which is set in a remote Scottish manor in 1986. You are Thomas King, and you and your wife Cora are staying there for Christmas – but as you explore the history of the manor, you begin to uncover a dark secret that goes back centuries.
There are three possible endings – good, neutral and bad – and unlike most text adventures, interaction with characters takes place using a menu-based system similar to the ones found in point-and-click adventures where you choose what your character will say next. A physical release from poly.play is planned, but in the meantime, you can download The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor from itch.io – although it requires CP/M Plus and it will only load on a CPC6128 or a Plus machine with at least 128K of RAM.
The Cult
Screenshot of The Cult
Tartessos Games has released a new game for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum called The Cult, or El Culto in Spanish. You have travelled to a village in the mountains whose inhabitants are living under a constant blanket of fear, and your goal is to uncover the source of this terror. The game has been developed using the Mojon Twins’ MK1 engine, and you can download it from itch.io.
New reviews
I have reviewed seven games, six of which are entries in the recent 2023 #CPCRetroDev Game Creation Contest:
There’s been lots of news about new and forthcoming games in the last few days, so here’s a summary of what I’ve learnt.
Kung Fu Master GX
Ayor61 of GGP has released a version of Kung-Fu Master that has been modified to make use of the enhanced palette of the GX4000 and Plus machines. There’s a new overscan title screen, the display and player sprites have been redrawn by Maître Joe, and you can choose to play the game with infinite lives. You can download Kung Fu Master GX from GameJolt.
Octopus 21
Kung Fu Master GX isn’t the only new release from GGP. Ayor61 has also released the final version of Octopus 21 – a cartridge version of the Nintendo Game & Watch handheld game of the same name that was first previewed at the Amstrad Eterno festival in 2021. You can download Octopus 21 from GameJolt.
You may be thinking, “Wasn’t a conversion of Octopus released a few months ago?” Indeed there was. Originally, Ayor61 was working with Titan (Éric Cubizolle) to develop the game, but towards the end of 2022, the project appeared abandoned. Kukulcan of CPC-POWER decided that Titan’s beautiful graphics should not go to waste, so both of them collaborated to work on their own version of Octopus, which was released last July – and now, several months later, Ayor61 has completed work on his version.
Yewdow
The mysterious Japanese developer Inufuto released his latest game, Yewdow, for the Amstrad CPC and many other 8-bit machines a few days ago. Unusually, Yewdow features Mode 0 graphics; all of Inufuto’s previous games on the CPC use four-colour Mode 1 graphics. You have to guide a car around a screen by placing arrows to make it change direction and collect coloured flags – an interesting combination of arcade action and trying to work out the best routes to take. You can download Yewdow from Inufuto’s site, although it’s only available as a CDT cassette image from there; if you want a disc image, head over to CPCRulez instead.
Booty: The Remake
SalvaKantero of PlayOnRetro has been working on a remake of the Firebird budget game Booty. He has posted an announcement and video on X that it is virtually completed and is in the beta testing phase. A previous post on X contains a video that will give you an idea of what it looks and plays like. It’s much more beautiful than the original game!
The Heart of Salamanderland
Finally, Juan José Martínez announced on the CPCWiki forum that he is developing a new platform game for the Amstrad CPC called The Heart of Salamanderland. So far, there are very few details, but Juan has said that his young son is responsible for writing the background story. He’s posted a video on SDF Social showing his work in progress so far, which looks very similar to one of the sections in another of his games, Golden Tail.
