Simone "RETREAM" Bevilacqua, who has released a nice round of great games, has just announced his latest creation.
"Gemdalus", very much like all other RETREAM games, looks stylish and polished, and has a nice soundtrack. The gameplay can be described as a blend of Pac-Man and Snake, with hints of Bomb-Jack and some remote Tetris-clone thrown it. In other words, it's a fast paced, easily accessible arcade style game, with an element of strategy.
"Gemdalus" runs on AGA Amigas, and supports CD32's NVRAM. The game is still under development, with no release date yet.
Even more games, no time to lose: more first person shooting, yet another puzzle game from Simone Bevilacqua, and two point-and-click adventures in this issue of Games galore.
"Blood"
Shortly after "Exhumed" (or "Powerslave") another MS-DOS first person shooter based on the "Build" engine was ported to the Amiga by BSzili: "Blood", originally from 1997, first shown on the Amiga in June 2021, and uploaded to AmiNet in September, goes deep into horror territory, with graveyards, crazy monks, and rolling heads.
It's
an exciting 3d shooting game that requires a powerful AGA Amiga with
FPU - 68040 and higher - Kickstart 3.0 or higher, 32MB of RAM, harddisc,
and, just as "Exhumed" does, game data files from the PC version (see
links below).
(Note: the AmiNet readme says a
68060 is required, but we have seen video of "Exhumed" running on 68040,
so we're assuming "Blood" has the same CPU requirements, thus probably
runs on 68040, too.)
Watch a video of "Blood" running on Amiga 1200 / 68060 @ 66 Mhz with Roland SC-88 MIDI expander music (yay!) on anouk33's YouTube channel (2021-08-03):
"Cybersphere" was announced in June 2021, and by now we can purchase the finished product - see links below.
Being a Hollywood-MAL based piece of software, it requires quite some harddisc space, and is available for many platforms - the game CD contains versions for AmigaOS4, MorphOS, AROS (x86), plus Windows 32-bit (runs on 64-bit systems, too), Linux 32-bit (runs on 64-bit systems, too), and MacOS.
Simone "saimo" Bevilacqua at it again - over the summer of 2021 he's updated his variation of the good old "Memory" card game concept with bugfixes and new features. "MeMO" is actually a pretty old game that dates back to 1996.
What sets "MeMO" apart from the competition is that it's a saimo game, which means it looks great, plus it
has some super laid-back fusion music, allows two players to play simultaneously - a feature rarely seen in computer card games - and it has some AI trickery designed to make "MeMO" a totally non-frustrating experience.
The game requires 68020 CPU, 1MB ChipRAM plus some other RAM, ECS chipset, PAL video, and AmigaOS 2.0 (or higher).
We've reported about the game before so we won't go into too much detail here - but a new (v1.0j, July 2021) demo release of Michael "Mixel" Dawes' beautiful point-and-click jump-and-run adventure "Creeping Me Out: Hex Night" is certainly worth mentioning.
Here's the - pretty impressive - "CMO Hex Night Demo Launch Trailer" from Mixel's Lab on YouTube (2021-06-28):
It's been quite a while, we've got some serious catching up to do, let's go: Turrican returns to the Amiga in AGA colors, Simone Bevilacqua is developing some slick puzzlers with cool graphics, Luigi Recanatese goes full retro-racing, and as always we have some beautiful platformer.
Turrican 2 AGA
Yeah, it's Turrican, the legend. At the end of April 2021 a ("back"-)port of the MS-DOS conversion of Turrican 2 was released to the public. It's still work-in-progress, but judging from user comments it's already really good.
Not much needs to be said about this - everyone has played Turrican, it's one of the best action-shoot-em-up-platformers on several platforms, Amiga included. And now it looks even better!
As expected from an AGA game, "Turrican 2 AGA" runs on Amiga 1200 and 4000 (and emulators, of course), some FastRAM is recommended for best experience.
Updated AGA graphics and Turrican gameplay - you certainly don't want to miss this. A third demo version has just been released. A very exciting project, very much looking forward to further progress.
Here's a video from Saberman's YouTube channel (2021-09-29):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw0CVwbn-mI
If you want to try the latest demo of "Turrican 2 AGA" yourself, you can find a dropbox link in the forum thread (as of now latest release is on page 8): http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=106735
Developer Simone Bevilacqua from Italy - creator of games BOH, SkillGrid, and many more - always comes up with nice new ideas, and gives his productions a recognizable, polished style.
He's been working on "Follix" and "ArtPazz", two arcade puzzle games, which introduce some technical marvel that goes by the name of ALS (AMOS Layer System), allowing for some visual effects rarely seen anywhere else on the Amiga.
In both games you move tiles to restore the proper order of things and advance to the next level, but the presentation is very different. While "Follix" is more fast paced, and feels very arcade, "ArtPazz" with it's recreations of famous historic paintings and laid back music creates an entirely different atmosphere.
And here's another video from Simone's YouTube channel, showing "ArtPazz" gameplay (2021-03-17):
Now we're getting reaaaally retro. So you think an Atari 2600 is an old gaming platform? You have no idea. We're talking b/w TV game consoles retro here, the ones with built-in games and a switch. Or just a built-in game, no switch.
"Knight Rider 77" by Luigi Recanatese, uploaded to AmiNet in April 2021, is one of those good old, very simple, quick and fun to play arcade games.
It's a straightforward racing game, looks super fun, and requires an Amiga with 1MB RAM.
This is a platformer featuring simple, beautiful, smartphone style graphics, some cute abstract dudes, nice music, and all the game mechanics that make platform games fun. Does that sound good to you? Demos have already been released for you to download (see below), and a physical, boxed version is planned with a release date tentatively set to some time near end of 2021.
Amiga games developers are pretty active these days - here's the latest release in Amiga shoot'em up games. And it's an impressive one.
"SkillGrid" is a new vertical shoot 'em up for AGA Amigas by Simone "RETREAM" Bevilacqua, who by the way is also responsible for the excellent BOH and Huenison games, among others, and has created a little gaming universe made of his creations.
So now he's released SkillGrid, which takes place in the same universe, and again has somehow to do with some Evil Masters - you can read the full saga on SkillGrid's homepage (see links below).
A couple of different editions are available, including a physical
"Deluxe Edition" with CD, floppy disks, 16-page booklet, postcards, badges, and
even a A3 sized poster! Very nice.
Here you can see SkillGrid in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLLtD4nr5ck
Judging from the screenshots, the music, and the video, this is an awesome game. Gameplay looks above-average, the action is frenetic, graphics are good to stunning, smooth and stylish, and then there are these outstanding music tracks (some of which almost speak out "I love Iron Maiden!") and sound effects.
Bevilacqua's work is really impressive, he's applying minimalistic gaming ideas from the smartphone-generation to the Amiga, and does so with amazing technical skill. The boxed "Deluxe Edition" of SkillGrid (or any of RETREAM's games, for that matter) is just beautiful, a must-have for any serious Amiga gamer.
