Screenshot of Survive Hadley's Hope
A mere week after Devilmarkus released Alien Escape, he has released a sequel entitled Survive Hadley’s Hope. Once again, you play Ellen Ripley, and your shuttle has crashed on the moon LV-426 near the terraforming colony of Hadley’s Hope, which has been overrun by Xenomorphs. You must explore the colony and find a way to send a distress signal, and then repair your shuttle and escape.
From what I’ve played of Survive Hadley’s Hope so far, it has the same limited parser, but it’s more difficult than Alien Escape as you’re in much greater peril from Xenomorphs. If one does appear, you have to type a command quickly (and ensure you have a suitable weapon!) – but if you type it incorrectly (which is easy to do under pressure), the Xenomorph kills you and the game ends. Sometimes you’ll also want to go to another room, and just as you press the RETURN key, a Xenomorph enters and kills you – and again, it’s game over.
Screenshot of the Mode 0 version of Alien Escape
Devilmarkus has released a text adventure called Alien Escape, which is based on the Alien movie franchise. You play Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist, and you must find the escape pod and Jones the cat and evacuate the Nostromo before the fearsome Xenomorph locates you and tears you apart! There are graphics to accompany each location, which can be viewed in Mode 1 or the much nicer and more colourful Mode 0.
This is the first time in 18 months that I have reviewed some old games!
Time Bomb is a clone of the coin-op game Check Man, and after reviewing it, I have rewritten my review of Stomp, which is also a Check Man clone, and given it a higher rating.
I have reviewed three games, all of which were released in 2025:
CPCGamesCD front cover
A new version of CPCGamesCD was released towards the end of last month – the first update in five years. CPCGamesCD is an ISO file (an image of a CD-ROM) that contains all of the games on the NVG FTP archive, as well as nearly 300 Amstrad PCW games. The archive includes the CPC Loader software, which allows you to browse the full list of games, order them by name, publisher or year of release (to give a few examples), view loading screens and in-game screens, and most importantly, play them on a range of emulators – all from a convenient user interface!
This update contains all the games that were on the NVG archive as of the 27th May 2025, so it includes recent releases such as Dark Knight: Shadow of Madness: Reward Edition, SkillTeam, Phantomas en el Museo and Bomb Jack Extra Sugar. Incidentally, CPCGamesCD (and NVG) has now grown so much in size since it was last updated that it no longer fits on to a 700MB CD-R, but Windows 10 and 11 will nonetheless allow you to mount the ISO file by right-clicking on it in File Explorer. You can download the ISO file by visiting CPCGamesCD or you can go to ESP Soft’s itch.io page.
Dark Knight: Shadow of Madness: Reward Edition
Title screen of Dark Knight: Shadow of Madness: Reward Edition
When Mananuk released Dark Knight: Shadow of Madness in July 2024, he also gave people who had paid for it an exclusive version of the game, named the Reward Edition. Now he has released the Reward Edition for free – although you can offer a donation if you wish. As the original version of the game was inspired by Batman, the Reward Edition features Robin as the protagonist. The difficulty has been increased, but the gameplay and level design seem to have remained unchanged.
NoRecess has announced on the CPCWiki forum that development of SonicGX (a conversion of Sonic the Hedgehog to the GX4000, in case you haven’t been following its development over the last number of years) is more or less finished. All the level designs have been completed and the game is fully playable from beginning to end. Any work over the next few months should be concentrated on bug fixes and minor gameplay tweaks.
NoRecess’ aim is to release SonicGX on the 1st of November 2025, so put the date in your diary! If you haven’t seen the most recent preview yet, or you want to watch it again, you can watch it on YouTube.
The fifth annual Amstream Amstrad Video Game Awards (better known as the Sugars) were streamed last Friday on Xyphoe’s YouTube channel. Fifteen games were nominated for nine categories – this year’s ceremony included a new category of “best arcade action game”. The winners were:
Best puzzle game: The Key: Episode 1 and Episode 2
Congratulations to all of the winners! You can watch the awards show below or on YouTube.
The Sugars 2024-2025 on YouTube
Inufuto’s games now available for Plus machines
Japanese developer Inufuto has released 18 games so far for a huge variety of 8-bit computers, including the Amstrad CPC. Now he’s gone one step further and converted several of his games to the Plus range of machines. There’s no significant improvement in the look of the graphics, but they make use of hardware sprites, so they move much more smoothly than in the original CPC464 version – and Inufuto has also fixed the keyboard scanning bug, so the games can actually be played properly on Plus machines.
Inutufo’s games can be downloaded from his site, although they’re currently only available as CDT cassette images. At the time of writing, the following games have been converted:
Screenshot of SkillTeam
A new puzzle game for the Amstrad CPC has just been released. It’s called SkillTeam, and it’s based on an online game of the same name by LukaszM. There are 60 levels, and on each one, you must shift crates and create a path to the chequered flag that marks your goal and lets you proceed to the next level. If you’ve played the classic game Sokoban, then the concept should be very familiar. You can also acquire different skills by collecting coloured crystals; for example, the light blue crystal enables you to pull crates instead of push them, and the red crystal lets you destroy crates. Each level has a password, and the programmer, David Crespo, has even provided the ability to skip a level if you find it too tough, although you can only use this option three times.
SkillTeam can be downloaded from itch.io, and it can even be played online through the RVMPlayer emulator.
Physical editions of Harrier Attack Reloaded now available
Harrier Attack Reloaded cartridge in box
Physical editions of Harrier Attack Reloaded, Chris Perver’s recently released conversion of Harrier Attack for the GX4000 console and Plus machines, are now available and can be purchased via eBay for £37.12 (excluding shipping costs). You’ll get the cartridge in a very nice-looking case, complete with an 8-page instruction booklet that includes an interview with the author of the original version of the game for the CPC464.
