23rd August 2007
This week, Shaun takes a look at some new games for Commodore machines, and takes a sneaky peek at Jonathan Cauldwell's latest works
Retro Mart: Joe Dangerous
There's a rather classy platform game recently released for the Commodore 64, by the name of Joe Gunn, created by Georg Rottensteiner. If you can imagine a cross between Rick Dangerous and the original Prince Of Persia, in an 80's style, you'd be thinking along the right lines. The game starts with hero Joe finding the ancient tombs of the Crocodile King somewhere in the midst of Egypt. The play follows as a screen-by-screen affair, with some rather apt music and cute visuals. Throughout the catacombs are strewn many puzzles to solve, as well as treasure to plunder, of course. To find out more, and to download this game, head over to https://csdb.dk/release/?id=51491.
Also for the expanded Commodore VIC-20 is a new Frogger clone. The imaginatively titled Frogger '07 requires a machine with an extra 16KB of RAM, but the emulator VICE is compatible, if you haven't got an expander on your machine. Unusually for a VIC game, it uses low-resolution (multi-coloured) graphics, and plays very much as you would expect. I've always thought the basic concept of the game is somewhat flawed by the fact that the frog can't swim, but nonetheless this is a very commendable release by Glen Richards, with some rather nice music accompanying play. This too can be directly downloaded from the Internet. Point your web browsing software in the direction of www.adam.com.au/grichards/FROGGER07.d64.
Build Your Own
Game-making utilities have always had their place in the market, although most of them were never very good, to be honest, especially on 8-bit machines. In 2005, Jonathan Cauldwell created the much-loved Platform Game Designer for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which does exactly what you'd expect - Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy type games that can be created by anyone without knowledge of machine language.
Jonathan has recently revisited this utility and started improving on it, adding new features, such as cause and effect sequences, potentially meaning that a later screen might not allow progress unless a certain event has happened on an earlier level. Platform Game Designer II, as it is currently known, will be for the 128K machines only, though projects created could be made to run on a 48K machine once compiled.
I've had a sneaky peek at its current state, which includes a Bubble Bobble type game as an example. I honestly didn't think that the original Platform Game Designer could be improved upon, but I think that Jonathan is somehow going to manage it. No release details are yet known, but I'd expect Cronosoft to be the culprit for the cassette version, and the price to be around £5. Jonathan's homepage is at members.fortunecity.com/jonathan6/egghead, and Cronosoft's website will be online again at www.cronosoft.co.uk.
Jonathan has also hinted at a new Egghead game, to be released on Egghead's eighteenth birthday, which will be on the 29th November of this year: A new Egghead adventure will be something else to look forward to methinks. And if, like me, you're interested in new software on 8-bit machines (among others), head over to www.oldschool-gaming.com, which will soon be launching its own forums.
