I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks and I was unable to post any updates on this site, so this is probably old news to most of you, but NoRecess has continued working on SonicGX, and he has uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube demonstrating a stage that is inspired by the special stage from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Sega’s Mega Drive console. It looks utterly amazing!
SonicGX special stage preview on YouTube In case you’re not convinced that the above video is actually achievable on a GX4000 or Plus machines, NoRecess has also posted a video showing the game being played on a GX4000.
Bloktris
Screenshot of Bloktris
Another game that was released while I was on holiday is Bloktris – the latest multi-format game from Under4Mhz. As the name suggests, it’s a version of Tetris. It features several different backgrounds and configurable difficulty levels, although I encountered a couple of bugs that caused some graphical glitches while playing it (I was playing version 1.00). You can download Bloktris from itch.io.
Two new games from Under4Mhz
Under4Mhz has released two more games – Mahjong and Pegged – for the Amstrad CPC and several other 8-bit computers and consoles. Mahjong is based on mahjong solitaire, and Pegged is a peg solitaire puzzle game in which you are given various layouts of pegs and must remove them one at a time until only one peg is left on the board. Both games can be downloaded from Under4Mhz’s itch.io page.
Screenshot of Mahjong
Screenshot of Pegged
Gates to Heaven
Screenshot of Gates to HeavenESP Soft have released their new platform game Gates to Heaven. One of their first releases was Gates to Hell, and more than 15 years later, its protagonist Ruperto González has returned to save humanity once again. A group of saboteurs is preventing a new company, Amsoft+, from deploying its revolutionary operating system AMSDOS+. Ruperto must explore three levels of a museum and activate a program on each of these levels to enable AMSDOS+ to be deployed.
Gates to Heaven can be downloaded from itch.io at a cost of only $1.00 (excluding VAT), and it’s well worth the money.
CPC Jewels
Following the release of Gates to Heaven, ESP Soft have now made their previous game, CPC Jewels, freely available to download. If you haven’t played it already, it’s an excellent and very colourful Columns clone, which was rated 9 out of 10 on this site.
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!
