A video showing a work in progress of a conversion of the game Snow Bros. to the CPC has been uploaded to YouTube. The game has been in development for nearly three years and it’s still far from complete. You can discuss its progress on the CPCWiki forum.
Video preview of CPC Bros. on YouTube A new contributor, Jorge Giner Cordero, has reviewed Akalabeth. (Yes, there is an unofficial CPC version of this famous game!)
Screenshot of Out of This World
Another Enterprise game has been converted to the CPC by Geco. This one is called Out of this World and it is completely unrelated to Reaktör’s game of the same name. This new release is a clone of the classic 8-bit game Trailblazer, in which you manoeuvre a ball that rolls and bounces along a colourful 3D scrolling landscape and try to avoid falling into holes. The original version of Out of This World was programmed by Andrew Richards in 1987 and is also known as Magic Ball. Information about the game is quite sparse, but it appears to have been released exclusively for the Enterprise, and you can see some screenshots of the Enterprise version at Mobygames. It certainly demonstrates what the Enterprise was capable of!
I was admittedly somewhat harsh in my criticism of Geco’s previous conversion TVBALL, but he has definitely redeemed himself with Out of this World! You can download the game from the CPCWiki forum.
A playable demo of Ghouls’n Goblins has been released. You can download it from the CPCWiki forum. It’s getting quite a lot of attention on the forum! Remember that it’s a cartridge game so you’ll need a Plus-compatible emulator such as WinAPE to play it.
Heroes Rescue
Screenshot of Heroes Rescue
Jonathan Cauldwell’s Arcade Game Designer utility has proved quite popular on the ZX Spectrum for creating new games, but it’s received relatively little attention on the CPC, which is a bit of a shame. However, Javy Fernández recently announced that he is developing a new platform game called Heroes Rescue using Arcade Game Designer. So far, he has released a playable demo with six levels, which you can download from Defecto Digital Studio’s site. You can follow its progress on the CPCWiki forum.
Ghouls’n Goblins
I also recently came across a video on YouTube showing a work in progress of a conversion of Ghosts’n Goblins to the GX4000 console by Nemo Kantio. It’s been in development for a long time but it’s only come to my attention in the last couple of weeks. There’s no indication of when it will be released (if ever), but nonetheless it’s an interesting video to watch. It seems to make good use of the extra graphical features of the GX4000, and the graphics are definitely far superior to the official CPC release of Ghosts’n Goblins! The only strange thing is that the new game is entitled Ghouls’n Goblins; is this a mistake, or is it intentional?
Video preview of Ghouls'n Goblins on YouTube Missas has reviewed two games:
I may have reduced my CPC activities (and thanks very much to those of you who have e-mailed me with messages of support for everything I’ve done over the years), but I’m still checking the CPCWiki forum regularly, and there are still plenty of new releases and games being developed!
Elf
Firstly, an English version of Elf has been released. You can download it from NVG.
Railways
Screenshot of Railways
Trewdbal Productions is developing a conversion of Sid Meier’s game Railroad Tycoon for the CPC, provisionally entitled Railways. The aim of Railroad Tycoon is to earn money by building a rail transportation network that transports passengers and goods from one place to another.
A preview version of Railways is available, and although you can’t buy any trains, you can explore the map and lay tracks and build stations, which will give you a feel of how the game should eventually look as development progresses.
I have spent countless hours playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe (a fairly similar game to Railroad Tycoon) and its open source successor OpenTTD, so it was a real surprise to hear about an attempt to convert this style of game to the CPC! You can follow its progress on the CPCWiki forum.
TVBALL
Screenshot of TVBALL
A Hungarian fan of the Enterprise computer has converted a Breakout clone to the CPC. The original version was called Enterball, and it was also converted to the Videoton TV computer – a computer I had never heard of until now. I don’t know what the specifications of this computer are, but the CPC conversion by Geco, entitled TVBALL, looks very Spectrum-like and there are some issues with the speed of the bat and ball. You can download TVBALL from the CPCWiki forum, but make sure you scroll down to get the latest version of the game!
Three new CPC games have been released recently, two of which are conversions of ZX Spectrum games.
Skool Daze
Screenshot of Skool Daze
The first one is Skool Daze, which is widely (and in my opinion rightly) regarded as an all-time classic; I have fond memories of playing it, and its sequel Back to Skool, on a Spectrum. It was actually released at the end of 2015, although as usual, I’ve only got round to writing about it now! You play a boy named Eric, and you must retrieve your school report from the headmaster’s office by finding the four-letter combination to the safe. However, you also have to attend lessons and avoid getting lines from the teachers; get 10,000 lines and you’re expelled!
The Spectrum version has been completely disassembled and meticulously documented, and Spanish CPC user Joseman took up the challenge of converting it to the CPC. Naturally, it lacks the colour of the Spectrum version, and the default colour scheme is hideous, but thankfully there is the option to change the colours to something easier on the eye. You can download the CPC version of Skool Daze from NVG. Now, does anyone want to try converting Back to Skool to the CPC?
Jumping Jack
Screenshot of Jumping Jack Sinclair ZX Spectrum Emulator
The second game is from 40Crisis, who has already emulated several Spectrum games on the CPC, like Ant Attack, Jetpac and Maziacs. His latest conversion is Jumping Jack, which was originally released in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum 16K by Imagine Software and was featured in a ‘making of’ article in issue 146 of Retro Gamer magazine a few months ago. It’s a very simple platform game in which you must jump up through moving holes in the platforms to reach the top of the screen, while dodging enemies that move from left to right. It’s initially quite addictive but it soon becomes very frustrating indeed.
Jumping Jack can be downloaded from the CPCWiki forum. However, this download doesn’t actually include the game itself; instead, it contains a program to generate the CPC version of the game from the ZX Spectrum version. Therefore, you will also need to download a TAP or TZX file of the Spectrum version, which can easily be found on World of Spectrum.
Elf
Screenshot of Elf
The third game is a Spanish text adventure called Elf. It’s an unofficial adaptation of an Amiga and MS-DOS arcade game that was released by Ocean Software in 1991. Yes, I thought it sounded a bit odd that an arcade game could be adapted as a text adventure, but there you go. It contains lots of digitised pictures and looks quite impressive, but obviously you’ll need to understand Spanish to be able to play it properly. However, the author Javy Fernández has stated that an English version is to follow. You can download Elf from NVG.
RIP Push’n’pop
Sadly, the Push’n’pop website, which was a focus for the CPC demoscene community and also hosted an interview with the organiser of the #CPCRetroDev competition that I linked to just two months ago (see entry below), has disappeared from the Internet. The articles that were on the site have been donated to CPC-POWER for their archives, which will be a great relief to many CPC users out there, but I can’t find the aforementioned interview on CPC-POWER yet.
And finally…
I have decided that I am going to curtail my Amstrad CPC activities significantly this year. I’ve realised over the last few years that I have spent far too much time with the CPC, mostly maintaining the NVG archive, trying to keep it as tidy as possible, and uploading new versions of games – and it’s still nowhere near as tidy as I would like it to be!
I will definitely not be abandoning the CPC scene completely – I’ve been part of it for 20 years – but it’s become too much of an obsession and it was increasingly taking over my life. I will not be taking down NVG and CPC Game Reviews, but don’t expect to see these sites being updated frequently any more (not that I was reviewing many games for CPC Game Reviews anyway, admittedly).
CPC4eva is back and he has reviewed fourteen games:
Screenshot of The Return of Traxtor
Following on from writing Space Pest Control as part of the 2015 #CPCRetroRev Game Creation Contest, Juan J. Martínez has converted his Spectrum game The Return of Traxtor to the CPC. It’s a puzzle game in which you must match three or more coloured blocks to make them disappear. Blocks are constantly appearing at the top of the screen and pushing the other blocks downwards. You can download The Return of Traxtor from Juan’s site, usebox.net.
