Micro Mart


Running The Gauntlet

Categories: Review: Software

 
Author: Shaun Bebbington
Published in Micro Mart #1041

With news of dungeons, knights and other such goodies, Shaun rounds up the hottest retro news

Retro Mart: Running The Gauntlet

A committed fan of the Commodore VIC-20 and Atari’s classic arcade game Gauntlet, known as 'Exit of 99' (whatever that means), has - resurrected his project to bring the famous dungeons to the mighty VIC. Started in his childhood back in the 1986, and rediscovered back in the early part of this decade, then halted again until January of this year, Exit has a BASIC version to download and try, which includes the misspelling of the word 'treasure' from his original attempts some 23 years ago.

Exit's current job is to work out how to transfer the game mechanic from the original to the VIC with just 3k of extra RAM. The most obvious thing is to keep the scrolling rather than changing it to a flip-screen affair. The slow progress is available to see from cbhb.exitof99.com/vegaunt.html, which includes a couple of early betas to download. As a clone of Gauntlet appeared a couple of years ago on the Dragon 32 and 64, in the form of the game Glove, it'd be good to see it on Commodore's first colour computer.

C64 Previews

It's a big week for Commodore owners, as there are two previews released into the public domain and also I've had some news of yet more releases through the independent 8-bit software publisher Psytronik Software. The first is a scrolling platform game called Knight 'n Grail, by Mix256, which seems to be influenced by the arcade game Ghosts 'N Goblins.

Knight 'N Grail

Armed with an infinite amount of projectiles, your task is to search the castle, presumably for the grail mentioned in the title. To try it for yourself, it can be downloaded from noname.cé4.org/csdb/release/index.php?id=74882.

Push Over is up next, which is ported by Raffox from a 1992 Amiga puzzle game released by Ocean. For those who don't know it, the aim of the game is to place bricks in the right order so that the last one falling will cause a domino effect, kind of like Domino Rally Action Alley but on a computer. So far, everything is in place from the original version, with the exception of the number of levels to play.

To grab a playable preview, head over to readyb4.org/hosted/pushoveré4.

News From Psytronik

Knight 'N Grail

Now for the hot news from Psytronik. Last year's winner of the 'best game by format' Retro Mart award, Joe Gunn, will finally see the light of day on real-media, with Cronosoft also handling the cassette version. This classy 2D platform game has lost none of its appeal since it was released, and to get a deluxe boxed version for my collection is something that I've been looking forward to for a while now.

But even better news for C64 fans is that the software label will be adding Creatures to its portfolio. Released by Thalamus in 1990, and created by Apex Computer Productions, this piece of entertainment software is considered as something of an all-time classic. Both titles are expected by March, so it's time to start saving your weekly spends.

For information about these products, point your web-browsing interface at www.psytronik.com, and if you're interested in the tape version of Joe Gunn, head over to www.cronosoft.co.uk.

That's your lot for this week. In next week's instalment, I'll be reviewing Tempest Xtreem for the Atari XE/XL, from the Atlantis Games Group. See you then.

Shaun Bebbington

This article was converted to a web page from the following pages of Micro Mart #1041.

Micro Mart #1041 scan of page 106

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Micro Mart #1041 scan of page 107

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