29th October 2009
Depardy Shaun heads out to the 8-bit towns in the wild west adventure Wanted: The Wild Bunch. Yeehaaa pardners!
Retro Mart: Wanted: Dead Or Alive
Jon Wells' port of the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum game The Wild Bunch, which was released by Firebird Software in 1984, is now finally available on the Commodore 64, and is available on cassette tape, floppy diskette or as a binary image for use with popular C64 emulators such as VICE.
Originally created by Kevin Smith, it tells a grim tale from the pioneering era in America's historical wild west. Finding an innocent man shot in the streets, you're the only witness to his dying words. "The Wild Bunch," he says, giving you a brief description of the outlaw who shot him before passing away.
With a Colt 45 near your feet, a Pinkerton Agent, empowered by the local Sheriff, sees you and assumes that you're the murderer. Making a mental note of the dying man's description of his killer, you set out to track down these lawless gangsters, and to clear your name. And thus starts a graphical text adventure that has been missing from the C64's catalogue for the past 25 years. The prices for this fine piece of software start at just £1.99 (for the emulator file) and go up to £12.99 for the Premium Edition disk. The packing has been really well done, in typical Psytronik style, and looks so authentic you could be fooled into thinking that this game was released in the 1980's for the old bread bin.
If you want to read about the history of its development, head over to www.gamesplaygames.co.uk/thewildbunch, or Psytronik for ordering information.
Sweet As Honey
Last year came the Speccy version of the Picto cross-inspired game iLogicAll by CEZ Game Studio, and now it's been ported to the Amstrad CPC version thanks to ESP Soft. This production sees a summer of discontent among the drones and other occupants of a militant beehive, leading to general strikes and a sharp downturn in the wholesale price of honey, leading to recession, and all because the queen bee, Paca Beja, forcing her drones into a 65-hour working week. Her daughter, Maribee, is set to take the reign and herself become the Majestic Queen Bee, not an easy task, as there's a great test for her to undertake and claim the crown, and restore harmony to the hive.
The task in hand is to work out the hidden pictures in the 16 x 16 square matrix. Clues are given in the form of numbers representing blocks on each row and column - for instance, if the numbers four and four appear as a clue on a particular row, that means there are two blocks of four squares to be filled in. Further clues are given if you look at the corresponding column to where you have placed your marker, if that states a one, then there's just one block to be marked. Once you get the hang of it, you'll be quickly racing through the earlier levels, and there's a helpful password system to stop earlier stages becoming boring. Time is lost for any mistakes that you make. To grab this free download for your favourite CPC emulator, point your web-browser to tinyurl.com/iLogicalCPC.
There's more, though, with the Mojon Twins releasing platformer Medley Block 1 for the CPC. It features the dubiously named Mari Stormbringer, a sales assistant at the local supermarket. All of a sudden, she finds herself in an alternative universe in which she has to rearrange the coloured blocks in each world. Again, it's available as an emulator image, and can be had from tinyurl.com/PlatformerMedley1
