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Amstrad CPC enthusiasts have a snappy-looking piece of entertainment software to look forward to over the coming year, in the form of a Zelda-cum-Gauntlet type affair called The Eternal Light. In this production, you will play a Wizard which must explore the locale and take out your foes, the evil 'Shadows'. No doubt, spells and other such power-ups will be included, as well as visiting various other characters in the game.

As you can tell, details on the story are a bit sketchy, but the elementary game mechanic can be seen on YouTube at tinyurl.com/eternal-light, whilst a discussion about this development is found on the CPC Zone forums. Simply navigate to the 'Programming the CPC' sub-forum.

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Meanwhile, the CPC conversion of Elvira: Mistress Of The Dark is progressing nicely. To bring you up to speed, this project was started in April 2007, for the CPC 6128, and is based on the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST release of the same name by Flair Software in 1991. There have been a few previews released through the CPC Zone forums (mentioned above), and now there is finally there is something that can be played online, which can be found at tinyurl.com/elvira-cpc.

There's a new fanzine hitting the virtual shelves for we retro enthusiasts, by the name of Retro Action. Created by the same people behind the excellent Amstrad Action tribute issue (at www.lulu.com/content/2685625), this is an all-format affair covering all of the topics you would expect, from the classics and latest releases, to the joys of DOS Box and Retro Remakes. The latest issue leads with the Remake competition of 2008, a retrospective of the TV show Games Master, and an interview with Zenobi Software. It's available as a PDF from www.retroactionmagazine.com. I'd point out that fanzines are usually the best way into the published world (without any formal qualifications, of course), so if you have something that you are passionate about, why not get involved in 'Action' by contacting the team.

The Commodore VIC-20 has had a total of three games released in a relatively short space of time. Whack-E by Kweepa, sees our armoured medieval hero search ancient dungeons for gold and other such treasure, which is complicated by the roaming nasties therein. This game is amazingly around 2k in size, and can be downloaded from www.kweepa.com/step/vic20/whack-e/whack-e.prg.

The second notable release is another unexpanded affair, called Ten Ten, by Jeffrey Daniels. The aim is to accomplish universal balance, aligning the on-screen dots, controlling each set of which in two different play fields, so basically it's a puzzle game. Go and get this one from sleepingelephant.com/denial/games/TenTen.zip

Finally, in How Many, (yet again for the unexpanded machine), the task is simply to guess how many love hearts you see on the screen in a limited time-limit. You would have to be near genius to get it right each time, or an extremely fast counter, so perhaps one for mathematician Carol Vorderman, although the programmer created this release for Hannah. It sounds simple, but can be utterly distracting. Try it for yourself by downloading it from tinyurl.com/vic-20-howmany

Next week, I'll be looking at some of the latest games from Psytronik Software.