After the Majesty of Sprites more majesty comes from the often overlooked ugly stepchild of the Commodore range, the Plus 4 in the form of Dork Dave. This new game is a somewhat Mario inspired platformer, that runs not only on the Plus 4, but the even more modest C16 model. It looks pretty neat and even features parallax scrolling!
The stunning Commodore Plus 4 homebrew game Majesty of Sprites is due for a physical release on disk, thanks to Psytronic software. When? Erm, soon, it would seem, but theres's no exact date.
The game was originally released for the Evoke 2015 party, winning an undeservedly low 3rd place in the interactive competition. Hopefully this new release, which comes as either the standard disk version or as an inevitable deluxe version, will make up for it's slightly overlooked original debut.
If you haven't seen or played the game, it's well worth a look. It makes hugely impressive use of the Plus 4's somewhat limited capabilities, with graphics that could be mistaken for a much more powerful platform.
What's got to be one of the least appetisingly titled DLC packs in a good while finally has a release date. The new pack apparently has over a 1000 new rooms, a new playable character and probably a load of other stuff too. The bad news is it's not free, unlike Shovel Knight's recent upgrade. Oh well.
There's no footage of this interesting new homebrew in action yet on YouTube, just the trailer from the developer, so I thought I's remedy that with a play through of the first 5 levels. This has to be one of the best Speccy homebrews I've seen in a while and it's no surprise since developer RetroSouls is also responsible for the excellent Alter Ego games that came out over the past couple of years.
Lirus is an original take on the multi directional Robotron style shooter game, with excellent presentation and fantastic title music. Slower paced and the classics of this genre it's still a lot of fun to play and quickly gets challenging. What really makes it unique is the emergent behavior of the enemy viruses that you are tasked with killing. Rather than moving around the stages like traditional enemies they multiply and spread gradually across the stage like cellular automata, a nice idea that adds an unusual challenge. Definitely worth checking out.
Russian demo party Chaos Constructions took place this weekend and whilst not all the results are in yet, or at least up on pouet.net, this winner of the game dev competition looks pretty promising. I look forward to playing it when I get the chance.
Another new release for the C64, this time with what seems to be an unusually elaborate physical release available from Protovision Software. The 'Coward Edition' at just 35 EUR comes with the game in a nice tin box, an 80 page manual and a keyring. The 'Hero Edition' at 55 EUR comes with all the above plus a certificate, CD, high quality pentagram and best of all a 'low serial number'. There will apparently be a download only version available in due course, without any of the goodies obviously.
Hero Edition
What's the game like? I have no idea, but it's good to see these kind of ambitious releases on old platforms.
Like all the Touhou games it's a pretty relaxed casual sort of shooter, that definitely doesn't require Zen like patience, cat like reflexes and a sixth sense for luridly coloured bullets.
First place in the 'wild' category at the DiHalt demo party and a rare new game release for obscure Soviet computer system, the Electronika BK-0011M.
Bomberman: Тест Милены - Whatever it means, this game is a nice action puzzle game, clearly inspired by Hudson's orginial Bomberman, but with it's own unique elements. It's a lot of fun to play if you like that kind of thing.
The Electronika BK range of computers were pretty weird machines, being based on the 16-bit DEC PDP-11 architecture, rather than the usual 8-bit microprocessors of most home machines of the era. The system seemed to have a fairy big following well into 90's, but unlike other machines popular in Russia, such as the Spectrum, it doesn't seem to have much support these days.
The NEC PC-FX was a Japanese exclusive console, never released in the west and home to a lot of verbose, text heavy games. Most of it's library is going to be pretty impenetrable unless you are fluent in Japanese and it's relative obscurity and reliance on FMV multimedia stuff makes fan translations rare.
God Fighter Zeroigar is one of the few decent action games available on the system and it now has a fully comprehensive English translation patch released this week, thanks to SamIAm over at romhacking.net. The only emulator currently capable of running it is Mednafen, but it should be worth a look.
