15th September 2011
It's 05:00 and Shaun is playing 8-bit games again to bring you your weekly dose of retro gaming brilliance
Retro Mart: Coracles And Dingoes
Jonathan Cauldwell has a new shoot-'em-up for the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum called Coracle, which will soon be available on cassette and as a virtual tape image [for your emulator] from Cronosoft.
Unlike conventional games of this genre, which will usually see hordes of malevolent alien foes heading towards your single, armoured vessel, you patrol part of an ocean and must accurately shoot the passing rain clouds in order to raise the water levels. Once you're high enough, you must then populate the sea with a certain number of species, but there's a twist. Firstly, you don't have control over the movement of your ship, only its speed and the direction of each shot within a limited range; secondly, you mustn't shoot down any passing aeroplanes and lastly any plastics or other debris must be kept out of the water.
This all makes for quite a quirky, novel and fun production, coded to Jonathan's usual high standard, which should no doubt prove a hit. If you're interested in original 2D Speccy games, take a look at the Cronosoft website already mentioned, or head over to Jonathan's site, where you'll find more information about Jonathan and his 8-bit work.
While on the subject of new Speccy games, former Ocean Software employee Mark R Jones has contributed some great graphics to a new game called Dingo currently being developed by a World of Spectrum (www.worldofspectrum.org) forum frequenter known as Sokurah, of Tardis Remakes (tardis.dk/wordpress).
The production is a remake of an arcade game from 1983 credited to Chris and Tim Stamper, of Ultimate, Play The Game fame. It's a race against time to collect all of the fruit within the play area before the dingo beats you to it. He'll also hurl flattened fruit at you. Visit the aforementioned websites for more info.
Fairies Wear Boots
The development group behind Psytronik Software's (www.psytronik.net) excellent and highly acclaimed Commodore 64 game Knight 'N Grail is back with a new game featuring fairies, but don't let that put you off because the latest demo of Fairy Well is simply superb.
Fitting into 16K of RAM and planned for cartridge release through RGCD, this game is a flick-screen affair, with your task being to choose one of the three fairies (each having its own attributes) to go on a quest to retrieve the lost Jewels. Unfortunately, the game world is populated by many evil forces that are out to stop you, and each of the four levels is randomly generated, but these are only minor details for the 8-bit gamer.
More details will be announced through the RGCD website, but I will confirm if this particular production is to be C64GS.
Contact Retro Mart
That's it for this week, but before I go, I want to hear from you. If you'd like to contact me, you may do so by sending your retro-related questions, memories and news by email to shaun@micromart.co.uk. Alternatively, use the Micro Mart forums, which you can get to via the website at micromart.co.uk. See you next week!
