A long time ago I announced that I wanted to do a remake of a classic Atari ST game “Robotz” in Flash. Fast forward to today, and I still haven’t got around to it. However James Monkman (Heavy Stylus of RGCD) wasn’t as lazy as me, and set about creating this awesome re-imaging of the original.

Although it’s for Windows PCs only (as it was created in Game Maker it’s a mighty fine game indeed! A lot of the limitations of the original have been removed, and the gameplay is faster, more frantic and basically more fun as a result. Check out this cool video to see what I mean:

The graphics are lovely, a faithful blend of rips from the ST original and some new pixel art. 505, Crazy_Q and Damo provide the stomping soundtrack.

If you remember the original, you’ve got to try this version of it.

Hell, if you just enjoy quality games – you’ve got to try Robotz DX

Loads more info and the download here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/robotzdx/

Matt Simmonds is something of a legend in the Amiga/demoscene world. Under the pseudonym “4mat”  he composed hundreds of famous music tracks for cracktros, demos and games. You can find over 500 of them on the Amiga Music Preservation site. MobyGames also keeps a relatively accurate list of his commercial and freeware audio work.

Today he released his album “Decades”. All of the 14 tracks on the album were created using the same tools he had available “back in the day”, namely ProTracker and FastTracker 2. I just bought the album from Amazon after having a listen on-line, and I’m really pleased at the mix of styles and raw chip sound that shines through. Some tracks carry better than others, but my personal favourite has to be “Virginia”. You can listen to the tracks below:

Read more about its production on Matt’s blog: I Hear the Sound of Waves. There is also a great interview with him on IndieGames.com. And if like me, you really enjoy what you hear, then Amazon MP3 has the goods.

Fellow Photon Stormer Ilija was saying just the other day that Matt has been in contact with him quite a bit recently. Perhaps a graphic/audio collab is on the cards? We’ll keep you posted … and Matt, if you’re up for it, we certainly have a couple of games we’d love to have your audio input on

After what feels like an age, Ilija and I are pleased to announce that our game Quartet is finally released to the wild, ready for you to play!

Although development of the game was very rapid (we had the whole concept, art and core game up and running inside of 24 hours) the sponsorship process on this one was anything but. As with most of our games we listed it on FlashGameLicense.com. The process started well, and a mini bidding-war broke out between Gimme5games and MiniJeugos. In the end we selected a bid from MiniJeugos, as although Gimme5 had bid higher, they gave us the ability to run our own ads. So we happily selected them as the winning bid, sent them a friendly message and waited…

… and waited, and waited. After a week we sent them another message on FGL. Nothing. A few days later we tried again, but still they refused to get back to us. Eventually after 2.5 weeks with not so much as a peep from them, we had had enough. Every single message we sent them was civil and polite, but what was so annoying is that we knew they were logging into FGL every day, because we could see their “last logged in” dates. Which basically meant they were choosing to ignore us, which is incredibly unprofessional. We asked FGL to step-in and take action, but they failed to respond to us either.

In the end I contacted the other bidder on the game, Gimme5, explained what had happened and offered them the game instead. They replied the same day, thankfully still wanted it and we took it from there. Our dealings with Gimme5 were fast, professional and courteous. They were quite precise about certain integration features, but it was all to do with their branding placement (they weren’t cheeky enough to start asking us for gameplay changes, which an amazing amount of sponsors do!). So there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, but no worse than I’ve experienced with any other sponsor, and the game is live on their site today.

While we were integrating the Gimme5 API/branding, FGL did get back to us. They weren’t able to offer any explanation as to what had happened with MiniJeugos, but we were at least able to cancel our agreement and transfer it to Gimme5. To this day MiniJeugos haven’t so much as offered a single message to us, not even an apology, which is quite incredible. So there we have it… I personally know a number of devs who have dealt successfully with them, but they totally failed for us  – so if you are accepting a bid from them on FGL you may want to fire them a PM first, just to check they really mean it. Otherwise it could mean weeks of delay and wasted time trying to sort it out.

We were contacted a week ago by Steve Rack, who had designed a character called Toe Fluff. He decided to open the character up to any artist who fancied creating a customised version. And let’s just say it all went a bit mental from there! It grew into hundreds of quality customs, a big feature in Digital Artist magazine, and an exhibition to show off the best.

Steve had seen the work we did on the Droplet Series 2 game (indeed Gav has created his own spirograph inspired Toe Fluff for the exhibition), and he wanted to know if we’d be interested in creating a “retro art package”.

Now dangle anything “retro” and “art related” in front of us, and we’ll most likely bite your hand off while pixelling and coding you a new one. And thus, Sketch-A-Toe Fluff was born! You get a blank Toe Fluff shaped canvas to doodle on, all set in a nice retro homage to etch-a-sketch (without the complexity of the dial controls!).  Pick a crayon, and get drawing Click the logo to find the “hidden” credits screen, with a new 8-bit tune from Ilija.

Steve would love it if you sent your best bits of work to him via email.

Full details, and the tool itself, are on the Sketch-A-Toe Fluff page. Have fun!

Ok so maybe we’re sleeping with the devil somewhat in releasing our game Quartet for an Apple device But it’s fun, free and TGC have done a good job converting it.

Downoad it free from iTunes

They added a nice feature where you can import a photo from your camera allowing you to use your own faces. Which actually makes the game quite fun (and harder if the faces all look similar!)

We aren’t totally happy with the way the graphics scaled, but we just didn’t have time to modify them (if you look at the Credits screen you’ll see we fixed that one, but got no further). So the lovely pixel graphics look very blurry. But, it’s free, has cool Open Feint integration and I feel is good for killing a few minutes.

The full Flash version will be out very shortly, as we’ve signed an agreement with Gimme5Games to sponsor it.

Given all the current Flash vs. HTML5 furore going on at the moment, I thought I’d throw this into the pit and let it smoke:

Akihabara is a set of game libraries that let you create 8-bit/16-bit style games using JavaScript, utilising a small sub-set of HTML5 that is available in most modern browsers. Yes, HTML5, not Flash. The site claims they’ll work across Chrome, Safari, FireFox and Opera. Apparently a benefit of the engine is that they’ll also work on the iPhone, although given that they use the keyboard for movements/jump this claim is a little strange. But this is of course game dependant, and you could easily code a “mouse only” game that the iPhone could cope with.

There are some demo games on the site, which are also the example games in the download. None of them are going to set the world on fire and all are easily re-created in Flash at much higher frame rates. But I have full respect for the developer who created this project, and I’d love to see where it progresses.

The only reason I won’t invest any time in digging deeper is that the example games don’t work on Internet Explorer (and nor does the author claim they will). And like it or not IE is still the major browser of choice. As a result this is confined to “nice curiosity” rather than “contender” for the time being.

http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

Final thoughts: It’s going to be years before HTML5 is a viable platform for building games, but the day will come. Nothing can prevent it. However I firmly believe that Flash will evolve with this, and there is no reason at all why HTML5/JS can’t become a new publishing target for the Flash IDE.

Of course I firmly hope that Adobe will wake-up and give game developers what they’ve been asking for for years from Flash Player itself. The video battle is over Adobe – you started a whole new wave of technology on the web when you pioneered it. But time has moved on and the browsers have caught up. Leave video behind and start empowering us game developers before you lose us too. We are your final real foothold Flash Player has on the web today. Flash games are still the one area where there are no real contenders, but we regularly have to scale back our games because we know Flash Player can’t cope. We’re hitting the limits of your technology, pushing it as hard as it will go. This is a dangerous place to be.

All of your RIA movements are admirable, but they offer nothing that cannot be achieved via many other different options. Unity know game development, and they know game developers. But their plug-in will never gain critical mass.

Support us or lose us Adobe.

I blogged about the Silmarils collection being available for the PC a few months ago, and now DotEmu have opened their new online shop. It’s still in beta but you can browse their PC, iPhone and Online games. If you sign-up now you can grab a few games for free, but I believe this offer is limited for 10 days. They had Ishar 1, Beneath a Steel Sky and Drascula available for free download at the time of writing. The rest of the catalogue, including the brilliant Gobliiins games and the addictive Krypton Egg, are really cheap though, with single games costing only €2.90.

Update: DotEmu have confirmed which free games are available, and when. The line-up is as follows: Ishar 1 from April 26th – 27th, Nicky Boom April 28th – 29th, Metal Mutant April 30th – May 1st, Maya May 2nd – 3rd and Transarctiva May 4th – 5th.

Sign-up at DotEmu.com

If you were a real gamer back in the early 90′s you owned an Atari ST or an Amiga (and some poor freaks also owned PCs). But all of you would have been aware of the game developer Silmarils. Renowned for an almost Cinemaware-like level of graphics and attention to detail in their games. Most of them are classic fantasy based such as the Ishar series. This isn’t surprising given that the company were named after the symbolic jewels central in JRR Tolkein’s work The Silmarillion. This love of fantasy was evident in their games, graphics and stunning box artwork.

I was pleased to read today that DotEmu will be releasing the Silmarils Collection for the PC on March the 10th. This includes 16 games. You can make out most of them from the box shots above. Personally I always thought the Ishar trilogy and the concepts of Robinson’s Requiem were superb, so as long as this collection is keenly priced I’ll be there. Hopefully DotEmu will have done as good a job on these titles as it did on R-Type and Street Fighter.

You can sign-up to their mailing list here: http://www.silmarils-collection.com and once released (March 10th) this site will probably also contain full details of the games. For now here is a link to their newsletter announcement.

I rarely blog about Flash games I’ve played. Very rarely in fact. I don’t really see the point, as there are a hundred other blogs out there willing to tell you their thoughts on what’s “hot and new” in the gaming world. Often full of useless suggestions about how the game could be “improved”. I’d rather you just play the games for yourself, use your own sense of judgement.

Then I come across a game like ImmorTall. And I feel it warrants 30 seconds of your life to play it, and a few minutes of mine to write about it. Because it’s different. It dares to break a few conventions, to tell a story, to draw you into something you probably aren’t used to. To make you think.

And I like that. I like that a lot. I like that Flash game developers have the balls to do this. To push boundaries, to redefine the very concept of “game”. There are no rules but their own.

Then I read the comments from the knuckleheads on Armor. And I close my eyes, and a part of me inside breaks. Crushed by the realisation that there can be so many idiots on our tiny little planet.

After the blissful chaos of preparing for the Droplet 2 launch party, I finally had time to take stock and catch-up. The party was an absolute success. Both the game iLKe and I made, and the Twitter wall I coded for Gav went down a treat. The Twitter wall featured this awesome video that was projected, Bat symbol like, across Bristol’s Park Street onto an adjacent building. People in the queue (and there were a lot of them!) could send their tweets to the wall and see them displayed in near real-time. Here’s a video taken from someone there. And here’s the actual SWF that was projected (give it time to download, there’s a 3MB FLV streaming in)

Before I discuss the game – can I just say you MUST check out this montage picture of the incredible custom Droplets. They were all featured in the gallery, and the level of talent displayed in some of them is nothing short of breath-taking. There’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to the Droplets.

The game was released onto the Droplet web site the day before the party. It was also mentioned on Twitter (lots!), Facebook (lots!) and best of all could be seen running on TVs in both the store and the gallery. The footage was from an earlier build, but it still looked great, and I got plenty of compliments

So what’s happened since then? Well there were a couple of bugs in the game, as is to be expected with the last-minute rush we endured. Most notable of which was that the scores didn’t reset when the game was completed! So people could work their way up the highscore board a little too easily Thankfully Katie spotted this one and I promptly zapped it.

There was also a display issue with the background sky scroller, that absolutely no-one noticed except me – but it bugged me every time I played it. iLKe also tweaked the level layout quite a lot, refining a few areas and making others cleaner. He also saw fit to redraw my Pause screen a little. Damn pixel gurus I also updated the Droplet page here on my web site, to include the missing Development details.

Anyway the new build is up on the Droplet micro site. And yes I wiped all the highscores to keep things “fair”. Enjoy!

This game was created to celebrate the launch of Series 2 of the awesome little Droplet vinyl toys. iLKke and I took the Droplet characters back into an 8-bit NES style era, complete with platforming action, colourful scenery and a truly micro bipbop vibe.

Read more about the game, and of course play it on the Droplet page

I’ve got nothing much more to say other than – it’s out! The Gravity Crash soundtrack by CoLD SToRAGE is available to buy online for immediate download. It costs £10 (which is probably £3 more than it ought to) but you get 16 tracks for your money, including some awesome remixes – most notable of which is a C64 SID rendition of the title track Scarface.

Track previews, downloadable PDF booklet, exclusive mixes and direct support of the composer are included in the price. Have just thrown it on my mp3 player ready for the drive into work tomorrow. Even if you’ve never played the game, still check this out – as the man himself says, it’s a “buffet of 80s electro”

Dave Munsies classic Retroshoot is coming back in full force as “Retroshoot 360 – Return of the Retronauts”. Here’s a special preview video. Watch it in HD if you have the bandwidth, because this is smegging awesome!

Sorry if you already knew this, but out of pure chance I thought I would check to see if one of my favourite web sites – Nectarine Demoscene Radio – was back on-line today, and lo and behold, it was! Nectarine had been streaming classic and modern demo scene tunage across the tubes for years. Site admin Yes had built up an awesome collection (18,000+ mp3s!) and like lots of other people I had saved hundreds of favourite tunes on there, voted on thousands, and listened to probably weeks worth of tunes!

And then some script kiddie went and ruined it for us all. He found an exploit in a script, and wiped the whole database and back-up. The site died and the scene lost a little bit of its heart the same day.

Lots of people wanted to help bring it back. I offered my services (as did many others)  but the events obviously took their toll on the Admin, and the site was destined to be nothing more than a fond memory. I would check back every 4 months or so, just in case, and today I struck gold

So I putting a shout out – if you used to listen to Nectarine, or are just interested in 24-hour streaming demo scene coolness, then go over there, register and help to breathe life back into the site again.

http://www.scenemusic.eu

Baldy Dash is a game myself and the talented crew at Aardman Digital built. It’s to promote the new Shaun the Sheep Nintendo DS game “Off His Head” published by D3.

It marks my second game released this month, and my 5th involving sheep, farmers and lots of grass

The concept is similar to Star Fish – drive around, collect the wigs and avoid everything else. The sheep amble around the farmyard, trying their best to get in your way, slow you down and end your game.

If you play this game on the official Shaun the Sheep web site (and are logged-in) it will enter you into a competition to win a Nintendo DS and copy of the game. Just make sure you have the highest score on the Competition leaderboard by the end of November.

Click here to play Baldy Dash and read more about the development process.

I was really excited to receive another couple of books in The Spectrum Games Bible series today. It’s a series of 6 books that present screen shots and mini community written reviews of 1,200 Sinclair Spectrum games released between 1982 and now. Editted and compiled by Paul Johns and Michael Fraser these are fascinating reads.

I love just picking a book and opening it on a random page to see what retro gaming delight (or howler!) will greet me. The games are presented by year and alphabetical order, with a neat index at the back of each should you wish to locate something specific.

Game reviews are often quite short, but for some span a page or two. Nearly all of them have screen shots which really help to jog the old grey matter. As the reviews are written by community members they vary in quality. Some are a little too introspective, focusing on the life story behind that particular game for the reviewer, rather than the game itself. But overall they are still a great read. I’d strongly recommend them to anyone who has an interest in retro gaming, or Flash game development today – as they are a gold mine of ideas and concepts.

The books vary in price as they are printed and delivered by lulu.com, so the higher the page count, the more it costs. The print quality is excellent and the colour covers a nice touch. Layout is clean and clear and I had no printing issues with any of them. If you are extremely flush with cash then you can buy full-colour editions, which have all screen shots in full colour internally. The cost of these editions ranges from between £40 and £70, with postage on-top! However the ones I (and I dare-say most people) own are the colour cover with black and white internal pages. They are a far more reasonable £9 to £10.

Visit the web site for more details: http://www.spectrumgamesbible.co.uk

While digging through a huge stack of old Atari ST disks I found one which contained a bunch of my first ever ST games and demos. Created with STOS these are extremely primitive pieces (even by the standards of the late 1980s!) but I found it amusing watching and playing them all the same.

My very first real game was called Octopod. It involved shooting octopus, which for no sane reason would drop a gold coin after they exploded in red meaty chunks. Shoot the coin and you got points. Don’t shoot the octopus fast enough and you lost a life. Playing the game back tonight I found it insanely hard! Either my reflexes are vastly reduced now, or it doesn’t run quite the same under emulation

Eitherway I present you a video of Octopod (sans music, as Camtasia was being a dick re: recording inputs)

At the start you will see it’s inside the STOS editor. At the time this was a quite nice place to work, and reasonably well featured. You could have memory resident programs loaded into membanks, so you could switch between say the compiler or sprite editor at the press of a few keys. The block across the top is where you’d assign a sequence of key commands to function keys. The nasty salmon colour scheme is my fault, the default was white text on black. Remember back then most of us coded using TV sets, so this could be quite painful after extended periods of time!

I do a “list” at the start so you can view the source code and have a giggle. Oh and yes, you had to use line numbers! Only with AMOS on the Amiga did they drop that restriction. You can find out loads more about STOS at the STOS Time Tunnel web site.

I’m now considering re-coding it in Flash as part of the GYM Board 30 minute challenge

I was digging through some boxes in our attic when I came across an old folder. It contained computer magazines and comics I had made back in the mid 1980s, aged around 10 years old. I used to sit there and literally draw my own magazines. I’d draw the covers, the layout, even screen shots for the games I was reviewing. One such magazine I called Arcade & Software. Very much inspired by Computer + Video Games (C+VG) of the mid 80s:

Here is the cover of issue 1. I only ever made 2 issues. The two games I’ve drawn on the cover are Knight Tyme (on the left) and Alien 8 on the right. Not that the robot looks a thing like the robot in Alien 8 mind you.

While flicking through Arcade & Software what caught my eye however was the inclusion of the Turbo Stripe Sofware Catalogue. This catalogue contained a list of games that as a 10 year old I really wanted to be making myself, complete with box cover artwork, short descriptions and even prices and ordering instructions.

These games never existed, I didn’t actually code them back then. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so at that age. It would be a couple more years before I started programming for myself. Reading through this fictitious catalogue there was something captivating about knowing that several decades ago this is what I really wanted to be doing. And these were the sorts of games a 10 year old me wanted to making.

So you know what? It’s time to fulfil a small part of that childhood dream and actually make one of those games. But which one? To decide let’s push embarrassment aside for a moment and dive right in …

… I present to you, in all its time-warped yellow-sellotaped glory the Turbo Stripe Software Catalogue (1987). Please excuse the horrendous spelling. And I claim no responsibility for copyright infringement re: the game ideas shown.

So here’s the front cover. The first thing to explain is that as a child I owned a Toshiba MSX 8-bit computer. In hindsight this was an incredible machine. It had a built-in cartridge port for which you could get some amazing games from the likes of Capcom and Konami. Games such as Nemesis (Gradius), Road Fighter, Sky Jaguar and Castlevania. It also had a tape recorder for the cheap tape-based games from Mastertronic, Ocean, Gremlin and other software houses of the day.

It was a great computer, even if virtually no-one else owned one (which made acquiring games in the school playgroup extremely difficult).

Obviously the kid playing on the MSX on this front cover is doing so with some kind of advanced invisible Wiimote. Turning the page …

And here we have the first two games. I’ll give you no clues as to what Hoppin Harry was going to be a clone of. As you can see collecting the “lady frog” would net you “bounes points” [sic]. I think the 00010 number is the ordering code. Obviously leaving room for another 99,000 or so titles of similar quality.

Turbo Driver was my version of the bastard child of Spy Hunter and Super Sprint. Needless to say this would have incredible graphics too (at least I managed to spell that correctly this time). I’m not entirely sure how this game would play or look, I think it’s just filling space to be honest

Ahh the classic Lock In Man. No, it has nothing to do with after-hours at a pub/bar. Instead you are trapped in a maze with “pellets” to eat and ghosts to avoid. I’m not sure why I didn’t just call it Pacman and be done with it. The one thing I remember most about my plans for this game, and which is alluded to in the description, is that it would ship with a level editor. I always got bored of the single level layout of Pacman and figured it’d be fun to create your own. I still think there is a shred of inspiration in that idea. Perhaps the maze could literally change around you as you play? So it becomes not so much about reflex based survival as it does puzzle solving.

The final game in the catalogue is Chalic. That’s my 10 year olds spelling of chalice (i.e. a cup/goblet). This was going to be a hybrid Gauntlet / Rogue game with more fantasy RPG overtones. As you can read in the description you’d be trapped in an ever-changing maze, and are trying to rescue a chalice before the Wizards monster does. I’ve no idea on earth why a chalice would need “rescuing”. I mean it’s just a bloody cup. But obviously it was in danger. Maybe if the Wizard drank from it, the world would be forever enslaved and “Prince Hugh” would wither and die? Who knows. I wrote the damned thing and even my mind is still reeling.

It’s worth noting that “Chalic” was only going to have “good” graphics rather than “excellent”. I find it interesting that I wrote it would have a “good title page”. Obviously game title pages were very important to me at the time. And the more I reflect on that I realise that actually they still are important to me today. I will often spend a disproportionate amount of time on the title pages for my games.

Coming soon was SOS North Sea and Ship-T11. SOS North Sea was a blatant rip of Chop Lifter. Ship-T11 was just going to be a shmup, the T11 part being the name of my calculate I had at the time. I’m not including these two games as being eligible for creation.

Which of these four gems do I feel is worth of being converted to Flash? It’s a tough choice.. personally I’m favouring “Chalic”, but I’ll open this up to the couple of you insane enough to have read this far. Which would you like to play?

Jeff over at 8-bit Rocket has published an awesome interview with Dave Munsie, the creator of the current Flash shmup darling Retro Shoot. It’s a great game and a great interview, so I urge you to both play it and read it

Today I managed to get time to finish-off and release my new game, Kyobi, onto FlashGameLicense.com. The game is best described as a cross between Columns, Tetris and a Match-3, but with a big fat dose of physics thrown in for good measure. As the blocks drop you can grab them with the mouse, and fling them around. Match 3 or more of the same colour and they all explode in a shower of particles.

Throw them together with real force and you’ll shake the screen and score bigger points. Chain combos can be obtained by smashing lots of colours one after the other within a set time. There is something very feng shui about the game. Watching people play is fascinating; some will try to organise the blocks into different stacks of colour along the bottom. Others will just slam them around with gay abandon! Personally, I’m a “stacker”

I am really pleased with how this game plays. I spent a lot of evenings working on tweaking the difficulty, so the first 20 levels guide you through the game. The pace ebbs and flows gracefully. After a really hectic level with 6 blocks falling every couple of seconds, the next level can often be far more sedate with a slow trickle to give you a breather. Basic game AI controls level progression there-after, ensuring the game doesn’t just get faster and faster (which would be no fun for anyone). The game uses my new PixelBlitz physics classes through-out.

At the time of writing this Kyobi is up for bidding on FlashGameLicense.com. If you have a Developer account there (or are one of my FGL friends) you can play it here. Everyone else I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until it goes public, sorry!

Right now I’m waiting for SomaTone.com to finish the music and sound effects for Kyobi, but hopefully that will be done soon – this will be the first time I’ve ever used them, but I’m sure they will do an excellent job, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with! In equally exciting news for me: The Game Creators will be bringing Kyobi to the iPhone this March. Can’t wait to see what they do with it too

I worked on a few commercial games on the Atari ST back in the mid 1990s, one of them was Super Stario Land by Top Byte Software. This was a shameless port of a Nintendo game a few of you may have come across. The developer (Adrian Keylock) literally copied as much as he could from the NES original onto the ST, and I did the graphics.

Today I saw someone had uploaded a video of it to YouTube. It made me smile, even if the graphics do now make me cringe. It was actually really hard work to draw because the developer enforced a strict number of bitplanes per sprite, which mean I had at most 3 colours to paint with (plus black). The graphics were shamelessly stolen from the NES original. But there were no “Sprite Rip Archives” back then! They were copied by hand from a TV screen onto graph paper. Then redrawn on the ST.

Quite frankly if the ST hadn’t been on its last legs when this title hit, Nintendo probably would have sued our asses off. As it happens they didn’t, the game got good reviews and sold well. It even spawned a sequel.

Interesting factoid #1 – the main character is based on Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

Interesting factoid #2 – I was never sent a final copy of the game. The publisher was run by a guy called James Matthews. He was a nice enough chap, but the cheeky bastard never even saw fit to send me the game – let alone any payment for my work. I did finally get a boxed copy off ebay a few years ago.

Jack’s Beach Blitz is a new game from the fine folks at 8-bit Rocket. They have been posting about the  development process for a few weeks now (you can read it all on their blog). Originally starting life as a Pacman styled game, it’s now much more of Gauntlet meets Wizard of Wor. You play Jack, a slightly cycedelic coloured orange who has to traverse each level, blasting the baddies, teleporting, picking up bonuses and ultimately trying to collect your girl before pegging it to the exit.

Monster spawning generators can be shot (but take a lot of your limited ammo supply), you can also pick-up power-ups such as freeze or instant kill. But without taking out at least a few of the generators they just keep on coming! They also move pretty speedily (as do you), so you don’t really have time to run away from them. Thankfully they are pretty dumb, so more often that not you can evade them quickly, but if you don’t do something about the number of them you’ll soon get overwhelmed.

Graphically it’s obvious the 8-bit Rocket team could do with a talented artist onboard (sorry guys!). The graphics are far from terrible, but do get cluttered on later levels and have that “grid like” look to them, which a skilled pixeller can avoid easily. In-game the animations are cute, and things move along at a very nippy pace. The main menu is a bit of a jumble though, with mixed visual cues. Some careful spacing here would do wonders. It was also really quite hard to visually differentiate between something that would do you damage, or do you good, so that was more trial and error.

As for the audio – it’s great Lots of big sounds and rolling effects. Glad to see you got to use that music too guys!

Aesthetics aside it’s the gameplay that counts, and JBB has in this in spades. There’s a nice puzzle element (unlock things that block your girl), there’s the solid arcade element (shoot, and shoot fast + avoid) and there’s the whole time aspect too. Take too long and you’ll be swamped.

It’s nice to see a real solid arcade blaster out there. Give it a play!

My lovely wife bought me the Video Games Live: Volume One CD around a year ago from Amazon, and they only just received stock of it and shipped it! But it arrived today and was waiting for me when I got home from work.

All I can say is WOW! It is incredible. I’ve never been to a Video Games Live concert, and there is one coming up soon in London at the end of October which I sadly can’t make, but I’ll be sure to get tickets to the next one as soon as they return! The CD is stunning. Think lots of game music as performed by a full-on orchestra, with wonderful vocals.

The CD opens with the Kingdom Hearts music, which blends nicely into the Warcraft Suite, and it doesn’t let-up from there. The Civilization IV Medley by Christopher Tin is nothing short of beautiful, with an incredible African theme. The operatic God of War montage sends chills down your spine, and I’ve not even mentioned the music from Advent Rising, Tron, Halo or Castlevania.

If you treat yourself to one CD this Christmas, consider this one! It’s truly stunning. Game music like you’ve never heard before (unless you’re lucky enough to have been to a VGL concert of course, in which case I’m extremely jealous of you )

There are over 2000 videos from VGL on Youtube here. Just watch this and tell me that’s not a great concert to be at?

Well it was quite a hard slog, but in the end I finished my Flash remake of the Atari ST classic game Abombinaball. I am extremely happy with the end results. It’s polished until you can see your face in it, and has gone down really well in the final round of beta testing.

Here are a couple of screenies:

Read my full development post-mortem here. The game is currently in the bidding process on FlashGameLicense.com (3 bids and counting!) so once this has finished I’ll of course release it for everyone to play