Screenshot of Color Lines
Cover of the English version of Orion Prime
4th July 2010
Tom et Jerry has released a new game, Color Lines. It's based on a
puzzle game originally released by Oleg Demin for the PC in 1992, and it has
taken Tom et Jerry ten years to finish it! The aim of the game is to move
coloured pawns around a 9×9 grid to create lines of five pawns or more.
However, you can't jump over other pawns, so you must ensure that there is a
clear path to the square you're moving the pawn to. This adds a considerable
strategic element to the game.
The game was officially released at the Amstrad Expo meeting
in Coutances, which took place towards the end of June. Unfortunately I was
unable to attend, so I didn't obtain one of the physical copies of the game that
were offered exclusively at the meeting. However, Tom et Jerry has made the game
freely available, and you can download it from
his website. Several (mostly French) CPC users have created their own
graphic 'skins' to alter the look and feel of the game, and Tom et Jerry has
composed 17 atmospheric tunes to listen to, and an additional tune by Ultrasyd
has also been included. As Tom et Jerry himself states, it is an addictive game,
and it was worth the wait!
In other news, the English and Spanish versions of Orion
Prime are now freely available and can be downloaded from the
Orion Prime website. Now all of
you CPC fans who don't understand French, or who missed the opportunity to
purchase a physical copy to play on a real CPC, can appreciate exactly why it
has received so much critical acclaim!
Mark Cooper has reviewed another game:
Screenshot of Blue Angel 69
12th June 2010
A month ago, Kevin Thacker
announced on the
CPCWiki forum that he is working on an Amstrad CPC conversion of Magic
Bytes' 1989 puzzle game, Blue Angel 69, with Markus Hohmann (author of
the JavaCPC emulator) helping with the graphics, and Mr. Lou providing
the music. It's a puzzle game for either one or two players, in which each
player takes turns to remove a mixture of positive and negative numbers from a
board in order to achieve the highest score. As the numbers are removed, a
picture of a scantily clad female robot is revealed. Well, it makes a change
from all those strip poker games! The game is nearly finished, and will be
available on both cassette and disc, and the disc version will feature
additional pictures and music.
Meanwhile, Mark Cooper has reviewed four more games:
3rd June 2010
Retro Gamer magazine has devoted
a full-page review to Psytronik's Dead on Time in their
latest issue (#77). It received an overall score of 93%, and it was also given
Retro Gamer Sizzler status. As far as I know, this is the first Amstrad CPC game
to receive this accolade, and if you've played the game, I'm sure you will agree
that it is thoroughly deserved!
Missas has reviewed another game:
A new contributor, Mark Cooper, has reviewed one game:
Olivier Floquet has also informed me of a correction to my
review of iLogicAll. I stated that it was the first
Picross game to be written for the Amstrad CPC. In fact, this isn't the case,
because another such game, called Amnesia, was released in 1998 - and I
think that it was Olivier who originally informed me about it all those years
ago! However, at the time, I could not understand how to play it, and I had
never heard of Picross and nonograms, so I never played it again. Thanks to
Olivier for this information.
