13th October 2011
Imagine full-colour gaming on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with crates, cute-looking monsters and, most importantly, rotary saw blades
Retro Mart: The Buzz
After several years of development, the technically splendid and fun puzzle game Buzzsaw+ (Foxton Locks Mix) has been released for the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It's now available in the World of Spectrum (WoS) archive at tinyurl.com/y7xw.
Created by Jason J Railton, with sound effects by Mister Beep, it's dedicated to the late, great Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith whose work's considered to be some of the best ever for the old Speccy, so while at WoS, you may also wish to track down Joffa's excellent games as well.
Anyway, back to the game in hand. Buzzsaw+ tells the story of a night watchman in a packing crate factory whose first evening at work was interrupted by an alien invasion.
The invading mother ship has crashed into the factory, which has activated the box-making machine, trapping hordes of evil but cute creatures in the process, who are forced onto the conveyor belts.
With the storage bay filling up quickly, it's your job to arrange the boxes (sent down to storage three at a time). Among the crates are those pesky invading aliens. The only thing that'll save humanity is keeping the storage bay clear and disposing of the malevolent creatures with rotary saws, weights and other such items.
Failure to keep the storage area clear will cause an overflow, blocking the conveyor belts and provding the invaders with an escape route. A full row of boxes will be removed. Buzzsaw+ is very much a Tetris-like game. Using advanced programming techniques, Jason has been able to add "rainbow colour" effects to the graphics, which allows more than two colours per 8x8 attribute call to be displayed at once. Other versions of the game will soon be available, but for now, enter the World of Spectrum link above and search for the game title or author to get your copy.
Dunjon Battler is a new 2D game played from a bird's eye view of proceedings, which is, in many ways, similar to (and inspired by) Nintendo's superb The Legend Of Zelda, a game released for the Nintendo Famicom way back in 1986.
In Dunjon Battler, created by Jeffrey Ouellette, your task is to guide your hero through dungeons and caverns, avoiding and fighting the nasty roamers therein, along with finding treasure and other riches. Things are never as simple as that though, because many of the exits are locked and you need to find skeleton keys to pass through them. To get your copy, head over to tinyurl.com/dunjon-battler
Before I go and play Hop 'n' Chop, theres just time to tell you about a new disk-replacement system for the old Commodore PET, which allows the use of microSD cards to be connected to the almost ancient technology. To find out more, go to tinyurl.com/5tpupdo
Game Of The Week
The Shaw Brothers' last game for the Speccy fell under the radar a little, when the publisher went under during the latter days of the technology's commercial life. Thankfully, this fine production, Hop 'n' Chop, was rescued by Cronosoft, which offers the original tape and emulator images. You must help Jack Lumber, a Lumberjack who works for Log Company. His task is to chop down the relevant marked trees for timber processing.
After hacking into one side of a tree, he must sharpen his axe to chop down the other side for safe felling. There's also the small matter of platforms to traverse, mad axemen and other roaming nasties to avoid even more hazards, which I won't mention here.
This is a top quality 2D platform game that's graphically similar to the ZX Spectrum version of Rainbow Islands, converted by Ocean in 1990, and once you get your head around the controls (down's jump) it's a whole lot of fun too. In fact, I might have another go before I get on with some more college work.
