The Amstream Amstrad Video Game Awards Show 2022-23 (also known as the Sugars) were streamed last Friday by Xyphoe on his YouTube channel. As with last year’s Sugars, fifteen games were nominated for eight categories, and the results are as follows:
Under4Mhz, a developer who I haven’t previously heard of (and who seem to be unrelated to the Amstrad CPC developers 4MHz), has released a puzzle game called Vexed. It’s a clone of Puzznic, in which you have to clear tiles from the screen by pushing them around and matching them. You can download Vexed from itch.io, and it’s available for a wide range of other 8-bit platforms as well.
Chloe Aprende a Reciclar and Rigor Mortis
Francisco José Poyato Falero has created and released two platform games that use the Mojon Twins’ MK1 engine – Chloe Aprende a Reciclar and Rigor Mortis. Both of them were previously released for the ZX Spectrum, but Francisco has converted them to the CPC. You can download both games from the Internet Archive.
Screenshot of A Case of MurderTaskmaster Software recently released three text adventures for various 8-bit machines, including the Amstrad CPC. Back in 1988, the author, Edward Toovey, wrote some adventures on his ZX Spectrum when he was still at school. Like many schoolboys of the era, he had dreams of becoming famous through writing computer games, but then the author’s Speccy died, and so did his dreams.
Fast forward to 2022, and Edward managed to recover the original cassettes, extract the game data from them, and convert the games so they used the DAAD engine. All three games – The Dragnet Case, A Case of Murder and The Mystery of Markham Manor – see you playing a private detective called Sam Boon, and you can download them from itch.io using the links below:
At the moment, A Case of Murder is the only game to feature graphics on the Amstrad CPC; the other two games are text-only, although if you prefer to play your adventures without graphics, a text-only version of A Case of Murder is also available.
I have reviewed A1RL0CK. This is a science fiction text adventure that was developed for the PunyJam #3 contest, in which entrants had to write and submit a text adventure that began in an airlock using PunyInform, which creates code that will run via Infocom’s Z-machine interpreter. The contest wasn’t specifically aimed at 8-bit machines, but Marco Innocenti, the author of A1RL0CK, used Stefan Vogt’s Puddle BuildTools for PunyInform to convert it to a wide variety of 8-bit systems, including the Amstrad CPC. Indeed, it was thanks to Stefan Vogt that I learnt about A1RL0CK, and I’m very glad I did!
Screenshot of FruttiCrazy Piri have released a preview of their latest game, called Frutti, as an early gift for Easter. It’s a tile-matching puzzle game in which you have to clear piles of fruit from the screen. There is a basket along the bottom and you have to push items of fruit from the basket to the bottom of a pile so they form groups of at least three of the same item. Every so often, an owl will jump on to a branch and move it downwards, and if it goes below the height of the tallest pile, you lose a life. You can download the preview of Frutti from itch.io.
