Screenshot of Tetris 40th
Ayor61 has been busy hacking again, and this time he has produced a new version of the official Mirrorsoft release of Tetris for the 40th anniversary of the creation of the most famous video games of all time. Mirrorsoft’s version was released in 1987, and it’s certainly not the best version of Tetris for the Amstrad CPC, but Ayor61 has made several improvements. The latest version (V3.0) features a new overscan title screen with accompanying music, a new background image, the tetrominoes have been given a new look, and the highly distracting grey vertical stripes have been removed from the background of the playing area.
Screenshot of MinesweeperUnder4Mhz has released Minesweeper – another new game for a wide variety of 8-bit computers and consoles, which is a speciality of Under4Mhz. Unsurprisingly, it’s a clone of the classic Windows game of the same name, and it even replicates its look and feel. You can download Minesweeper from itch.io.
Web site maintenance
CPC Game Reviews is expected to undergo a database upgrade some time tomorrow (Friday 2nd February 2024) between 1100 and 1500 UTC. The upgrade should only take a few minutes, but it means that the site will be unavailable for a short time.
The Mandarin II: Limoncello’s Revenge
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.
