I was on holiday and returned several days ago. During my holiday, a lot of new and updated games were released, and it’s taken me a while to catch up with them all.
El Hobbit: Vah-ka’s Cut
The Mojon Twins have released El Hobbit: Vah-ka’s Cut, which is, er, inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s works. You are the hobbit Bilbo, and the wizard Gandalf has informed you that there is treasure hidden in a cave that is guarded by a dragon named Charmander – but to enter the cave, you must search for thirteen dwarves. It’s typical Mojon Twins fare – lots of exploring, colourful, cartoony graphics and several catchy (and familiar) tunes – and it’s also interspersed with several simple Pac-Man-like mini-games.
El Hobbit: Vah-ka’s Cut is available in English and Spanish and it can be downloaded from The Mojon Twins’ itch.io site, but unlike their previous games, which were freely available, you will have to pay at least €3.00 to obtain it.
Hexapucchu
Éric Cubizolle, aka Titan, is best known in the Amstrad CPC community for his stunningly beautiful artwork, but now he’s produced his own game called Hexapucchu. It’s in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, in which you visit locations and select one of multiple choices at each location, which determines what you do or where you go next. The game is currently only available in French, but it is being translated into English, and possibly other languages as well. You can download Hexapucchu and view all the screenshots and other game material from Titan’s Amstrad Museum web site. The graphics are truly breathtaking!
Rick Dangerous II+
SyX and RedAngel recently released an enhanced version of Rick Dangerous 2 on disc for Plus machines. Rick Dangerous 2 is highly regarded on the Amstrad CPC, and has the honour of being given the joint highest rating for any game by Amstrad Action magazine – 97% – as well as a 10 out of 10 rating on this site. The duo have patched the game to use the enhanced palette, introduced a new loading screen, retouched the graphics, and fixed a few bugs. You can download Rick Dangerous II+ from the Cepeceros Podcast web site.
Screenshot of El Hobbit: Vah-ka's Cut
Screenshot of Hexapucchu
Screenshot of Rick Dangerous II+
Survive Hadley’s Hope
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:
