30th January 2015
TFM has announced that there are only six physical copies of his game Cyber-Chicken left – four on cassette and two on disc. They are now on sale at a reduced price of €10 for the cassette version and €12 for the disc version (excluding postage). Head over to the Cyber-Chicken web site to order a copy – and if you haven't bought a copy yet and you're not convinced, read the review by Missas on this site!

25th January 2015
CPC4eva has reviewed nine games:

• Captain America Defies the Doom Tube
• Drazen Petrovic Basket
• The Fury
• International Rugby
• MASK II
• MicroProse Soccer
• Uchi Mata
• World of Sports
• Yie Ar Kung Fu II

Missas has reviewed Mansion Kali.

20th January 2015
Missas is back with reviews of two games:

• Altair
• Dead by Dawn

4th January 2015
Happy New Year to all CPC fans!

I have reviewed nine games:

• Jetpac
• Lucky Luke: Nitroglycérine
• Metaplex
• Periscope Up
• Psycho City
• Short's Fuse
• Star Commando
• Syntax
• 2048

Crackers Velus have released a new version of 2048 which features MODE 0 graphics – and the game certainly looks much better as a result! The new version can be downloaded from NVG, along with the original version which used MODE 1 graphics.

30th November 2014
Following on from the news about the #CPCRetroDev game programming competition, Crackers Velus have released their own entry, 2048.

Many of you have probably heard of this puzzle game, which was developed by Gabriele Cirulli and released earlier this year as a mobile app and has become very popular indeed. The game involves sliding blocks around a 4×4 grid and combining them to produce higher-numbered blocks. The aim is to produce a block with a value of 2048.

The very simple nature of the game means that 2048 has already been ported to many 8-bit computers, and now it's the CPC's turn to get a conversion. You can download 2048 from NVG. Just be aware that once you start playing it, you'll probably become addicted!

29th November 2014
It's been a long time since I reviewed any games, and since I've been off work this week, I decided to test some Spanish games, so here are 11 reviews for you:

• Kong's Revenge
• Liberator
• Mambo
• Mot
• Omega Dimensión
• Perico Delgado Maillot Amarillo
• Piso Zero
• Power and Magic
• Senda Salvaje
• Sputnik
• Stroper

Staying on a Spanish theme, I've learnt that a CPC game programming competition was held recently, although almost no one outside Spain seemed to be aware of it! Over 30 entries were submitted to the #CPCRetroDev 2014 contest, and the prizes were €200 for the winner, €75 for the runner-up, and €75 for the best game written in BASIC. You can find more information about #CPCRetroRev here.

Now that the rest of the world knows about the competition, will there be more entries from outside Spain in 2015?

2nd November 2014
MiguelSky has been busy lately. Not only was he working on converting The Prisoner to the CPC, he's also managed to convert another game! This one is called Dead by Dawn, and it was originally created on the ZX Spectrum using the 3D Construction Kit, which lets you create your own Freescape-style games.

This is not the first time that MiguelSky has converted a Freescape game; earlier in 2014, he also converted a Commodore 64 game called A Chance in Hell to the CPC. Could there be even more CPC Freescape games making their way? Only time will tell...

Dead by Dawn can be downloaded from the Amstrad.ES forum.

1st November 2014
After several months of delays, Commodore Plus has released the English version of The Prisoner. This text adventure was originally released in Spanish in October 2013 and is based on the British cult 1960s TV series starring Patrick McGoohan. In the game, as in the TV series, you are an unnamed secret agent who has resigned from his job - but you have been abducted and taken to a mysterious seaside village, where everyone is identified by a number rather than a name, and the population is constantly being monitored and indoctrinated. You must escape from this Orwellian nightmare - but how?

You can download The Prisoner from NVG or find out more about the game (in Spanish) at Commodore Plus' web site.

30th October 2014
A new game called Altair has recently been released. It's an unofficial conversion of a Spanish 1981 coin-op arcade game by Cidelsa. The person behind it goes by the rather bizarre pseudonym of Inmensa Bola de Manteca, which translates to "immense ball of butter" in English. The gameplay is quite similar to Galaxian and it's quite faithful to the original arcade version (footage of which is available on YouTube). You can download Altair from either NVG or from Inmensa Bola de Manteca's web site, and the source code for both the CPC and ZX Spectrum versions of the game is also available from the author's site.