Fumigator is a really mysterious game – so mysterious that no
one seems to know what its correct name is! It was originally uploaded to the
NVG FTP archive under the name The Polluting Bacteria, after a message
that appears on the attract mode screen. Somewhere along the line, it also
became known as Fumiga, after a filename on the disc. A few years
later, a cassette version was found with an Amsoft title screen naming it
Fumigator – although it's uncertain if this was a genuine Amsoft
release, as no one had seen a physical copy of the game. Finally, in 2016, the
ZX Spectrum version, released by Microbyte and known as Exterminator,
was recovered.
The search for a physical copy of the Amstrad CPC version of this game
continues, but in the meantime, CPC Game Reviews will use Fumigator as
its name – mainly because calling it Exterminator could cause
confusion with
Audiogenic Software's game of the same name.
I have reviewed Attentat, and I have also rewritten my
review of Les Pyramides d'Atlantys. I had given it a rating of
only 1 out of 10, but that was largely due to the fact that I didn't understand
how to play it. Someone – it may have been the game's author, Luc Thibaud
– posted a link to a walkthrough of the game many years ago on my
guestbook (which is long gone now) but I never got round to playing it again.
Now I have finally played it again and given it a
rating that it deserves.
A note about CPC Soccer 22 – both
CPC-POWER and
CPCRulez combine it with CPC Soccer in
their respective databases, but the author, VoxelTower, treats it as a separate
game on his itch.io page, and I have
done likewise and kept Missas' review of the original game.
4th October 2021
There's been so much news about new and forthcoming games recently that it's
difficult to know where to begin!
Title screen of Los Amores de Brunilda
Los Amores de Brunilda
Retroworks has released a new game
called Los Amores de Brunilda. This graphic adventure was released for
the ZX Spectrum in 2013 and the MSX2 in 2019. You control Fray Gonzalo, one of
two monks who are making a pilgrimage. During their journey, they stop at a
village to get some rest, but Fray Gonzalo's companion falls victim to the curse
of Brunilda – the ghost of a woman who committed suicide in the house
where they are staying.
Like Retroworks' most recent CPC release, The Sword of Ianna,
Los Amores de Brunilda is designed to run only on the
Dandanator
hardware device, which enables the creation of games that use up to 512KB of
ROM. Because of this, you can only play the game on a CPC that has this device,
or on an emulator that supports the device, such as
CPCEC or
Retro Virtual Machine. It
is an excellent game with cute and beautiful graphics and very atmospheric
music, and you should definitely try it out if you haven't done so already.
There's even a choice of seven languages, including Basque and Galician; I don't
recall ever seeing any other Amstrad CPC games that support these languages! You
can download Los
Amores de Brunilda from Retroworks' site, or
watch their trailer for
the CPC version on YouTube.
Bug's Quest for Tapes
It was announced on one of Novabug's livestreams very recently that Yellow
Belly's game Bug's Quest for Tapes is now available to download from
CPC-POWER! As you may know if you visit CPC Game Reviews regularly,
the original plan was that it wouldn't be made available to download for free
until after Play Expo Blackpool,
which is taking place on the 23rd and 24th October 2021. However, CPC-POWER
accidentally made the cassette and disc images available for downloading –
oops! Yellow Belly has said that he doesn't mind, though, so go ahead,
download it
and enjoy!
Bubble Quest
Édouard Bergé (Roudoudou) recently released a YouTube video of a game he has
been working on for the GX4000 and Plus machines called Bubble Quest. The
footage dates from 2020 and development of the game has been delayed due to the
ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but it looks amazing; it's
hard to believe it's running on a GX4000! The gameplay is very similar to
Bubble Ghost; you have to guide a bubble around the
screen while avoiding any contact with walls and other hazards. Let's hope that
Roudoudou can find the time to finish developing the game. In the meantime, you
can watch the footage below, or
watch it on YouTube.
Video of beta version of Bubble Quest on YouTube (footage from
2020)
Retrobytes Productions
has released a short trailer
on YouTube for Arctic Moves. After the release of Navy Moves,
Arctic Moves was planned as a sequel, and while it eventually saw a
release on the PC in 1995, a CPC version never happened – but it looks
like Retrobytes Productions want to right that wrong! There's no gameplay
footage in the trailer, but it looks like they aim to release a CPC version of
Arctic Moves some time in 2022.
Octopus
The Amstrad Eterno festival took
place in Barcelona on the 25th September 2021 after being cancelled last year
due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the games that was previewed at the
event was Octopus by Cyrille Gouret. Octopus is a game for the
GX4000 and Plus machines that is based on Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld
game of the same name. As far as I can tell, it can emulate the LCD look of the
original Game & Watch handheld, but there will also be a deluxe version with
much better graphics. You can
watch a preview of
Octopus for the CPC on YouTube.
New reviews
As well as all that exciting news, there are also some new reviews to read.
Robert Small has reviewed two games:
Last year, VoxelTower released CPC Soccer to much acclaim (including a
10 out of 10 rating on this site) and
comparisons to Sensible Soccer, which is widely regarded as an excellent
football game for 16-bit machines. Now he has released an updated version called
CPC Soccer 22 with many improvements. The most obvious of these is that
the action is now presented in the CPC's 16-colour Mode 0 instead of the
four-colour, but higher resolution, Mode 1, so teams and players now have more
appropriate colours of shirts. Other additions include five different types of
pitch that affect the behaviour of the ball, cutscenes where the referee
approaches a player to give him a yellow or red card, and a cursor to show where
you're aiming when you're taking, for example, a goal kick or a corner. Even
with all of these new features, the game still fits into 64KB of memory.
ESP Soft has released a new game
called Siemb Chronicles: Arkos the Traitor. It's based on events from two
previously released games – Dinamic's Game Over, and Galactic
Tomb – another game from ESP Soft.
In Game Over, Arkos faithfully served the evil ruler Gremla until he
decided to revolt against her increasing lust for power. Now that she has been
defeated, you, the hero of Galactic Tomb, have travelled to the planet of
Hypsis, where Arkos is based, in a mission to overthrow him.
As previously mentioned on this site, Novabug held his second charity
fundraising stream for
Macmillan Cancer Support on YouTube,
auctioning 20 copies of Yellow Belly's new platform game Bug's Quest for
Tapes, with every penny going to the charity. The target was £664, but it
was easily smashed, with a total of £2,500 raised! One bidder
even donated an utterly astonishing £464!
Novabug's Bug's Quest for Macmillan fundraiser on YouTube
28th August 2021
Cover of issue 1 of AmtixCPC Micro Action
Amtix! magazine relaunched
Chris Wilkins of
Fusion Retro Books has relaunched
the Amstrad CPC magazine Amtix! Originally published by Newsfield
Publications from 1985 to 1987, Amtix! focused on games, but it was less
successful than its ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 counterparts, Crash and
Zzap!64, and it only lasted for 18 issues before merging with
Computing with the Amstrad. Now Chris is planning to relaunch
Amtix! as a quarterly publication called AmtixCPC Micro Action,
with each issue containing 60 A5-size pages.
Novabug has uploaded a
video to YouTube that shows what the physical copies of Yellow Belly's game
Bug's Quest for Tapes will look like. All of these copies will be
auctioned on a YouTube livestream that is scheduled to take place on Saturday
28th August 2021 at 21:30 BST (20:30 GMT), and all the proceeds will go to
Macmillan Cancer Support. This is
intended to be the only opportunity to purchase a physical copy of the game
– once they're sold, that's it! However, images for use with emulators
will be available to purchase at a later date, probably at the end of October
2021.
YouTube video showing the production of copies of Bug's Quest for Tapes
I have reviewed four games, and given that the English football season has
now started, I thought I would include a couple of football management games
(even though I'm not a fan of the genre):
Yellow Belly has released a
promotional video for
his game Bug's Quest for Tapes, which you can watch below. It's looking
very promising, although some of the sprites shown in the later part of the
video are of a somewhat, er... dubious nature!
Promotional video for Bug's Quest for Tapes on YouTube
Yellow Belly is in the process of developing a platform game called
Bug's Quest for Tapes, and it's getting close to completion. It's
based around Novabug's YouTube livestreams
where he tests and plays a few cassettes from his collection of Amstrad CPC
games every Saturday evening. In Yellow Belly's game, you control Novabug and
you have to collect as many tapes on each screen as you can.
Once the game is completed, the plan is that
Xyphoe will play and attempt
to complete it on one of his YouTube livestreams every Friday evening, and if
you would like to purchase a physical copy of Bug's Quest for Tapes,
Novabug will be auctioning twenty copies on one of his livestreams, and all
proceeds will go to Macmillan Cancer
Support. In the meantime, a few screenshots of the game are shown below.
Incidentally, the British astronaut Major Tim Peake stated in an
interview in The Guardian newspaper
that Tomahawk on the Amstrad CPC is his favourite computer game. Cool!
I have rewritten my review of One Man and His Droid and
given it a higher rating. It was originally one of the first reviews I wrote for
this site, and at the time I didn't really understand how to play it! Now that I
do, I can appreciate it better and give it a fairer rating.
1st July 2021
Screenshot of Dr. Roland
John Lobo has released a new game called Dr. Roland. It's a clone of
the Nintendo classic Dr. Mario that was originally submitted to the
2020 #CPCRetroDev Game Creation Contest. However John's entry was disqualified,
probably due to the organisers of the contest being worried about potential
ligitation from Nintendo. If you've never played Dr. Mario before, it's
quite similar to Tetris or Columns; you have to manoeuvre falling
capsules and destroy viruses by aligning them so that there are four elements of
the same colour in a row or column. Dr. Roland can be
downloaded from itch.io for
free.
Another new game has been released! This one is called Aeon and it has
been developed by VincentGR and Kukulcan, who is better known as the maintainer
of CPC-POWER – a site that I'm
sure all Amstrad CPC fans will be familiar with. The game has been developed
using Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer and consists of four
parts, and it features several marvellous tunes that have been converted by
Jonah Ship from the ZX Spectrum, and cutscenes before each part with Mode 1
screens that use a lot more than four colours, thanks to some clever technical
trickery.
If you want to see what the game is like, you can
watch a YouTube video
of Xyphoe playing all four parts, and you can
download the game from CPC-POWER. I have also written a review (continue reading below for the
link).
Roudoudou has released Open Tower Defense. As the name suggests, it's
a tower defence strategy game where waves of enemies come from the left-hand
side of the screen, and you have to place fortifications to prevent them from
reaching the right-hand side. The enemies become increasingly powerful, which
means that you continually need to buy and build more fortifications and spend
credits upgrading existing fortifications.
The Sword of Ianna has been available on the CPC for nearly a year,
and if you're not already aware, it only works on the Dandanator hardware
device. To the best of my knowledge,
Retro Virtual Machine
and CPCEC are the only
emulators that currently support emulation of this device. If you haven't played
it before, I think it is well worth the effort of trying to get the game to work
in one of these emulators!
27th May 2021
Proposed box artwork of Hibernated 1: This Place Is Death (Director's Cut)
Hibernated 1: This Place Is Death (Director's Cut)
Back in 2018, Stefan Vogt released the text adventure Hibernated 1: This
Place Is Death, and it was very highly praised (including an
8 out of 10 rating on this site).
Since then, he has spent many months rewriting and greatly expanding it, and now
he has released Hibernated 1 (Director's Cut). This new version has been
developed using the PunyInform engine, which generates code that is compatible
with Infocom's Z-machine. In short, you can create much larger and more complex
adventures with PunyInform than you can with DAAD or PAW (two engines that were
used in the development of the previous, 'classic' version of the game). In
Stefan's words, "If Infocom had been asked to recreate the classic
Hibernated, the Director's Cut would have been the outcome."
Following my announcement earlier this month about being able to play some
Amstrad CPC games online at
Amstrad CPC Games,
Sean McManus has updated his site so that you can
play some of his type-in
listings online using the same online emulator. A number of Sean's type-ins
were published in Amstrad Action and Amstrad Computer User in the
early 1990s.
A new site, simply titled
Amstrad CPC Games,
has recently been launched. If you visit it, you can play around 30 great
Amstrad CPC games, such as Arkanoid, Bomb Jack, Commando,
Gryzor and Ikari Warriors, in your web browser – no need to
download or launch an emulator! All of this is possible thanks to Andre
Weissflog's hugely impressive
Tiny Emulators set.
Also, after watching Xyphoe
play Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge on
one of his live streams recently,
I have reduced the rating on
my review to 9 out of
10 (it was previously 10 out of 10). I still think it's a great racing game but
it doesn't deserve full marks.
XeNoMoRPH's YouTube channel added
I've added links to videos on
XeNoMoRPH's
YouTube channel on my site. This channel is run by Joseph Antony and it features
short gameplay videos of modern Amstrad CPC games and some of the less well
known releases from the CPC's golden era.
