Screenshot of Deva DrifterAlbertoven has released a new game called Deva Drifter. It’s a top-down racing game, similar to Super Sprint and The Oliver Twins’ Grand Prix Simulator games. There are no opponents, though; you’re racing on your own against the clock. Unlike other such games, the author has concentrated on simulating realistic physics, and you can drift the car around corners.
Deva Drifter is the third part of the Hidden History Saga; the first part, Vector Vaults, was highly acclaimed (and was rated 9 out of 10 on this site), and Deva Drifter is also great fun to play, although the track and scenery graphics are very basic. You can download a free version from Albertoven’s site that contains five tracks, and a deluxe digital version with additional tracks is available for €3.90 – but if you want a physical copy of the game, it will cost an eye-watering €69! I don’t see many CPC fans buying copies at that price, however good the game may be.
Yet another new game has been released for the Amstrad CPC, and this one – called The Sword of Ianna – is particularly special. Why is that? Well, it’s a cartridge game, yet it’s designed to run on normal CPC machines and not the GX4000 console or Plus machines! It runs on a device called the Dandanator, which effectively acts like a 512KB EPROM cartridge.
I mentioned The Sword of Ianna back in January. Retroworks originally released the game for the ZX Spectrum and MSX2 in 2017, and they’ve done a great job converting it to the CPC. One of the reasons why it’s only available on cartridge is that it’s a very large game indeed; it will probably take around three hours to complete it from start to finish! There’s also a huge amount of animation, similar to Prince of Persia.
You can download The Sword of Ianna from RetroWorks’ site. It really is an amazing game and all CPC fans should try it out! Because the game runs on the Dandanator, you can only play The Sword of Ianna on a CPC that has this device, or on an emulator that supports the device, such as Retro Virtual Machine.
RetroWorks has released a trailer video on YouTube that you can watch below, and Xyphoe played the game on a live stream last Friday, which you can also watch on YouTube.
Trailer for The Sword of Ianna on YouTube
I have reviewed two games, both of which were released very recently:
ESP Soft has released their latest game Red Sunset. They made a preview available back in Christmas 2018, and it looked amazing. The final version consists of three levels of vertically scrolling action in which you control one of two types of fighter – the Slider or the Viper. The graphics, music and scrolling are all amazing, and the game has been developed by the same team behind Galactic Tomb – another stunning example of what the Amstrad CPC can achieve in the right hands.
Space Moves box and cassette from Matranet
The new, expanded version of Space Moves is now available to order from Matranet on cassette at a cost of €21.45, excluding shipping. The cassette comes in a jewel case inside a cardboard box, and it also includes an instruction manual and a CD containing the soundtrack. There are no plans to release it on disc, although a DSK file for use on emulators should become available to download once all the physical copies have been sold, as far as I know.
John Ward is trying to write Ultimate Play the Game’s ZX Spectrum classic Atic Atac for the Amstrad CPC, and Steven Day has contributed some beautiful Mode 0 graphics. John has posted a video on YouTube to demonstrate how gorgeous the game looks and plays so far, and you can also follow its progress on the CPCWiki forum.
A new contributor, Shaun Neary, has reviewed three games (although he’s been in the Amstrad CPC gaming community for a long time – even longer than me!):
Amstrad Eterno has released a cinema-style trailer on YouTube for the enhanced version of Space Moves by Retrobytes Productions, which you can watch below:
Trailer for Space Moves on YouTube
Today CPC Game Reviews has reached a milestone, with 2,000 Amstrad CPC games reviewed! It took almost five years to reach 1,000 reviews, and as I got older, left university and real life increasingly got in the way (as I’m sure it has for the large majority of readers), I felt I would never reach 2,000 reviews – but I’ve done it at last!
A big thanks to everyone who has contributed reviews to this site over the many years it’s been online (21 and counting). Without your help, the site would still be languishing at around 1,400 reviews.
I hope all of you Amstrad CPC fans out there are still enjoying browsing all the reviews and playing lots of great (and perhaps not so great) CPC games during these challenging times, and please remember to stay safe.
So what’s in the latest batch of reviews to be added? I have reviewed four games:
