After the fanfare of the Sinclair ZX
Spectrum’s 30th anniversary Shaun rounds up some Commodore news
Despite some of my misgivings about Adobe
Flash (certainly after developing with it and its curious scripting language),
I have to say that there are some good examples of games created with it. One
of the good productions is getting the remake treatment on an old 8-bit
computer, being the 2008 Japanese game Ginormo Sword.
Genesis Project is handling this conversion
to the Commodore 64, called Jagged Sword.
It is played from a birds-eye view in true
retro-styled 2D. You control a noble knight of the realm, who has a whole host
of mythical monsters, creatures and other such unsavoury things to battle
against. For each victory, you are awarded bags of gold bullion, which may be
spent on upgrading your weaponry or armour. As you get further into the game,
you can pick up deadly magic spells too.
Guide your knight to take on all kinds of unsavoury
characters in Jagged Sword for the Commodore 64
There's a library at the start of the game,
which will log each creature that you fight, and the game contains 54 in all.
You're able to go back to play each level from any point in the game too, so I
assume that even after you've unlocked the entire binary world there'll still
be reasons to continue, as you can travel to earlier locations and compete
against the enemies that you've missed or just not beaten yet. This is also
handy for accruing gold to upgrade your suite of armour and other such aids.
I really recommend that you play the
available preview, which is available from csdb.dk/ release/?id=108447,
as it should keep you entertained for a few hours at least.
On to another C64 game, this one from
Endurion, the developer behind Soulless and Joe Gunn, we have a cute 2D
platform game called Catnipped. This bears some similarities to the epic arcade
hit Bubble Bobble, and I'm assuming you take control of a heroic feline to
rescue some cute kittens from certain danger.
Unfortunately, with Catnipped, there's
nothing to download and play yet. As soon as there is, we'll make sure you know
about it. From the bold and impressive graphics, and knowing the author's
previous work, I'm as eager as anyone to see more of this production. My
trigger finger is twitching already, or that could have something to do with
the few hours I've just spent playing the aforementioned Jagged Sword preview.
Either way, C64 fans have some real high-quality gaming to look forward to over
the coming months.
Complete Trilogy
Ghislain
Commodore VIC-20 enthusiast and developer
Ghislain has released his entire body of work for the old 8-bit publicly as
freeware, which features all the Realms of Quest (ROQ) role-playing games,
undoubtedly his finest work on the platform.
Ghislain was actually late to the VIC (in
development terms), with his first game dating back to 1988, around three years
after commercial support had ended for Commodore's first colour computer. Fle's
had over a dozen productions from the 1990s, and as many since the year 2000.
There's certainly a lot to play through
here, the highlights of which (excluding the ROQ trilogy) are his spiffy
Theater of War games, again in trilogy form, in which you must pitch your
strategic nous against warring computer-controlled forces.
Further details are available from
tinyurl.com/Vic-games, which includes a link to the games archive.
Commodore
FREE
Coding Corner
Many of you may remember the Commodore 64
assembly programming tutorial that I wrote through these pages last year.
Well, if you still haven't got around to writing that C64 game you've always
dreamed of, or at least, learning the ancient art of machine code like you
have always wanted to, but can no longer locate the Micro Mart issues in question,
the articles have been reprinted through the excellent fanzine Commodore
FREE, which is available in various digital formats at www.commodorefree.com.
These are written for beginners and go at a sedate pace. So if it's too slow
for your liking, you could also try tinyurl.com/ C64-Games-Programming,
written by coding guru Endurion.
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