Games galore #27: Turbo Tomato, Ms Pac-Man 500, Shadow Warrior, Devil's Temple, Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd

Among the many arcade style game releases, in this issue we also have a slightly unusual point-and-click adventure from Germany.

Turbo Tomato

Around July 2021 arcade action game "Turbo Tomato" by Nivrig games was released, and got an update to v1.1.0 in October.

It's a fast paced collect-and-evade game involving bombs, obviously tomato, and mutated vegetables. Doesn't that sound awesome? Yes it does, and you can even play it in 2-player-cooperative mode. Lots of levels, lots of enemies, and lots of explosions should keep you entertained for hours and hours.

You can get a digital edition of "Turbo Tomato", but real Amiga gamers choose the "Deluxe Collector's" edition - see link below video for both options. The collector's edition includes a 3.5 inch floppy, printed manual, poster, stickers - and a "Turbo Tomato" magnet for your fridge.

The game requires an Amiga with 1MB of ChipRAM and Kickstart 2.0, and can be installed to harddisk.

Here's the game's release trailer on NIVRIG's YouTube channel (2021-07-31):

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLicBgoYfIA

Go to Bitmap Soft's website for more information, and get your copy of "Turbo Tomato":
https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk

Additional sources:
https://nivrig.itch.io/turbo-tomato
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2021-10-00036-EN.html

Ms Pac-Man 500

After developer Jean-Francois Fabre aka JOTD's "Pacman 500" comes "Ms Pac-Man 500" - another near-perfect arcade conversion. 

Many classic games running on coin-op machines in the 1980s got ported to home computers and consoles back in the day, at the time when they were successful at the arcades, or shortly after. "Pac Mac" and "Space Invaders" would be quite prominent examples, everyone wanted to have these games running on his/her machine - sometimes regardless of the price: "Pac Man" for the Atari VCS 2600 had to make huge sacrifices in graphics and sound, resulting in a game that looks vastly different from the arcade original. Some Amiga conversions are especially disappointing, where better quality would've been technically possible, but wasn't achieved due to lack of hardware programming know-how by the developers. In some cases, for whatever reasons, a game wouldn't be available for the Amiga at all. 

Nowadays a handful of experienced Amiga developers have come to change this situation for a growing list of games - for a couple of years now great arcade conversions keep popping up, among which are "Bubble Bobble" as "Tiny Bobble", "Gradius" as "Tinyus", and "Jackal", to name just a few.

Well, so here's "Ms Pac-Man", near-perfectly converted from the original, with all the levels, intro animation, intermissions, and so on, in smooth 50Hz framerate, for all Amigas with at least Kickstart1.3 and 512K RAM (or Kickstart 2.0 and 1MB RAM) - great work!

Here's a video from Jean-François Fabre's YouTube channel (2021-10-27):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGI-lNRBUw

Go to the game's itch.io website for more information and "name-your-own-price" download:
https://jotd666.itch.io/mspacman-500

Additional sources:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=108339
http://hol.abime.net/6483

Shadow Warrior

"Shadow Warrior" is another first person shooter that was ported to the Amiga by BSZili around April/May 2021. Just like his other "Build" game ports "Blood" and "Exhumed" ("Powerslave"), it requires a powerful Amiga (68040/68060/Vampire), and some game data files from one of the PC versions. An updated version of "Shadow Warrior" was recently released to AmiNet. 

It's quite a gory game, with a tone similar to "Duke Nuke'em 3D", but in terms of Amiga-first-person-shooters it's certainly also among the best, bringing "advanced" raycasting techniques from the PC to the Amiga. 

Here's a video of "Shadow Warrior" running on an Amiga 1200 / 68060@66MHz from anouk33's YouTube channel (2021-05-20):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhB97A3ZEIE

You can grab "Shadow Warrior" from AmiNet:
http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/jfsw

See AmiNet readme file for more information about game requirements, or just go here and download PC shareware version:
http://www.jonof.id.au/buildgames/sw.html

Additional sources:
https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=4661
http://bszili.morphos.me/
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1512859
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=106580

Devil's Temple - Son of Kung-Fu Master

What started as "Kung Fu Master Remastered" has become "Devil's Temple": Graeme Cowie was working on a remake of arcade beat'em-up classic "Kung Fu Master" for OCS Amigas, with a planned release date some time in early 2022, but the author's goals have changed a bit: Over time this remake has turned into a re-imagining of the idea, with very different graphics, additions in gameplay, an original soundtrack, and so on: Son of Kung-Fu Master!

A playable demo has been released, along with a teaser video, and pretty much everything about this game already looks and sounds great. Fans of beat'em-up games will love this new title, that obviously has elements from "Kung-Fu Master", but also "Renegade" and "Final Fight", all presented in full 16-bit Amiga quality.

Here's "Devil's Temple" teaser video from Graeme Cowie's YouTube channel (2022-04-04):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-E7GFX-vWg

You can download latest "Devil's Temple" demo at:
https://mcgeezer.itch.io/kung-fu-remaster

Additional sources:
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=110293
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=107812
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2021-11-00027-DE.html

Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd

Author Timo Kloss has released his point-and-click adventure "Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd" ("Hero with horse"). Initial development of the game dates back about 20 years, when it was created on the Amiga using the author's own "Inga" graphic adventure engine. (You can find it on AmiNet.) For some reason it was never properly finished - until Dec. 2021, when Timo decided to fix it and stitch it together, and release it to the public. 

So we get a somehow incomplete, but well playable, good looking, outstanding sounding (~190MB WAV soundtrack!) graphic adventure that should give you at least a couple of hours of good fantasy entertainment, with its funny storyline and dialogue, about 20 game characters, and about 40 locations to visit.

"Ermentrud" is currently only available in German language, but for many platforms (AmigaOS 3.x with graphics card, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, Windows, MacOS), and obviously requires a harddisk.

Here's a trailer video from Inutilis Software's YouTube channel (2021-11-13):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nxFbwbcmmk

Go to the game's web page for more information:
https://www.inutilis.com/portfolio/ermentrud-das-spiel/

...or download it right away from it's itch.io page:
https://inutilis.itch.io/ermentrud

Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2021-12-00026-DE.html
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2021-11-00038-EN.html
https://www.timokloss.com
https://twitter.com/timo_inutilis

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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #28"!

Check out "Games galore" main page with all articles -
click here!

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Support Amiga game development! Buy a game!

Amiga37 event in Mönchengladbach, Germany

As has been announced on Jan. 17th 2022, the "Amiga37" event will take place in Mönchengladbach, Germany, on October 15th and 16th 2022. Tickets are available since April 25th.

Go to https://amigaevent.de for detailed information, latest updates, and tickets!

The Amiga Art Contest 2022 is on!

Amiga artists, warm up your fingers! 

Since 2019 "10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast" is organizing the "Amiga Art Contest", where all sorts of Amiga art creations - images, animation, sound - can be submitted. The 2022 event has just been announced. 

You can submit your artwork to the following categories:

1. Handdrawn artwork

2. Digital photography

3. Raytracing

4. Music

5. Animation

The rules are quite simple: "As long as your Amiga created it, you can submit it." Prizes will be given to the first place and second place winners of each category, plus an extra "Best of Show" winner.

The contest goes from June 1st 2022 until October 11th 2022.

Here's the official announcement video from 10MARC's YouTube channel (2022-06-06):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlxoWrTpqXc

Go to https://www.amigaartwork.com for more information!

Games galore #26: Abu Simbel Profanation, Black Dawn Rogue / Technomage, Slayers of High Toro, Blade re-release, Pacman 500

Oops, it's been quite some time, catching up with 2021/2022 Amiga game developments: an old platformer got remade, "Black Dawn" got another sequel, a new turn-based strategy game was released, an iso-3D adventure game got re-released, and good old Pac Man makes another appearance.

Abu Simbel Profanation - The Full Adventure

Originally created in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum, and first released for the Amiga in 2001, the "Abu Simbel Profanation" recently got a facelift remake for AGA machines called "The Full Adventure".

It's a funny multi-screen arcade platformer with beautiful graphics, an upbeat soundtrack, and many different enemies and obstacles. Among the sound effects is a spine-chilling scream that you're gonna hear whenever you lose a live - which probably is quite often, as the difficulty level of the game is said to be hard as nails. Niiice!

The game requires an AGA Amiga with 2MB FastMEM and a 030 CPU.

Here's a gameplay video from YouTube channel Ransom (2021-09-28):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MyklC3EGJ4

You can download the game from AmiNet:
http://aminet.net/package/game/misc/Abu_Simbel_Profan_-TFA-

Additional sources:
http://www.indieretronews.com/2021/09/abu-simbel-profanation-full-adventure_27.html
http://hol.abime.net/6323 (OCS/ECS game from 2001)
https://s0yamigamsx.wordpress.com/abu-simbel-the-full-adventure/

 

Black Dawn Rogue / Technomage

Black Dawn saga continues: In early 2021 the follow-up to "Black Dawn Rebirth" was announced, and by October we got a first teaser video, with a second one following closely in December, and the announcement of "Black Dawn Technomage" in January 2022. Well, everybody likes a good dungeon crawler game, and the latest "Black Dawn" sequel - quite like it's predecessors - very much looks like it's going to be just that.

Also it looks as if the authors would like to keep the aforementioned first teaser video private to famous retro-gaming news website "Indie Retro News", so we'll just provide you with a couple of links here:

http://www.indieretronews.com/2021/10/black-dawn-rogue-next-amiga-aga-game-in.html

https://www.indieretronews.com/2022/01/black-dawn-technomage-next-amiga-aga.html

You can also visit "Black Dawn" team on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/blackdawnuniverse

Slayers of High Toro

By far the majority of Amiga games released these days are platform/jump-and-run games. For a welcome change, here's turn-based strategy game published by Bitmap Soft in May 2021.

It's a spiritual successor to Windows game "Slay" which dates back to 1995. "Slayers of High Toro" runs on any Amiga with at least 1MB RAM, and is available as a physical "Deluxe Collector's edition" with some nice extras for a great retro experience: 3.5 inch floppy in a glossy A5 box, color printed manual, badge, stickers, and a poster.

Here's a video from the author's YouTube channel  (2021-03-21):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH0moStN-Ng

Go to Bitmap Soft's website to purchase your copy of "Slayers of High Toro":
https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk

Additional sources:
http://blitmapgames.co.uk
http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/slay.html
http://hol.abime.net/6486

Blade (1996) re-release

Great looking dungeon adventure game "Blade" by Mark Sheeky, first published in 1998 by Alive Mediasoft, was released for free around Sept. 2021.

"Blade" title screen as seen on https://marksheeky.itch.io/blade

According to the author, it's his most ambitious Amiga game project, and the isometric game screens and cutscene graphics certainly look impressive. 

"Blade" in-game screen as seen on https://marksheeky.itch.io/blade

With lots of levels, potions, scrolls, and spells, there's quite an amount of things to discover and explore for adventure gaming fans. "Blade" runs on pretty much any Amiga with at least 1MB of RAM, but might require harddisk installation.

"Blade" in-game screen as seen on https://marksheeky.itch.io/blade

Go to the game's website for more information and download:

https://marksheeky.itch.io/blade

Additional sources:
http://hol.abime.net/5332

 

Pacman 500

Of course you know Pacman, the legendary pill-eating yellow dude who's relentlessly being hunted by ghosts. "Pacman 500" is another release of Namco's 1980 classic, this time attempting to stay as close as possible to the original arcade machine. 

From what we can see it's quite successful at doing so - apart from minor changes due to different screen orientation (the arcade machine uses a 3:4 display, as opposed to the Amiga's 4:3 aspect) it indeed looks and sounds and feels just like the original! 

Another great arcade remake, "Pacman 500" runs on any Amiga with 512KB memory.

Here's a video from Jean-François Fabre's YouTube channel (2021-09-05):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvU7mu-3J5I

Go to the game's itch.io website for more information and "name-your-own-price" download:

https://jotd666.itch.io/pacman-500

Additional sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man
https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1993
http://www.indieretronews.com/2021/09/pacman-500-amiga-conversion-from-arcade.html

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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #27"!

Check out "Games galore" main page with all articles -
click here!

* * *

Support Amiga game development! Buy a game!

iBrowse 2.5.6 released, AmiSSL 5.1 released

Great news for Amiga 68k internet users: iBrowse and AmiSSL have both been updated, indicating active and steady development.

Here's a copy of the iBrowse's latest list of changes (see link below):

• Adapted to fully use OpenSSL 3.0, via AmiSSL v5
• HTTP Brotli compression support
• OpenSearch autodiscovery support
• Gemini client, allowing loading of gemini: URLs
• Improved Gopher support
• JavaScript fixes and improvements
• Google/Gmail account login fixed (became blocked in March)

Note that iBrowse requires latest AmiSSL.

Go to iBrowse's website for more information:

https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/news.php?id=1653156226

HippoPlayer 2.52 update is out!

Allround Amiga music player "HippoPlayer" got a new update, with lots of fixes and enhancements.

It updates HippoPlayer to version 2.52, thus requires an existing full installation.

Here's a quick overview of the changes from 2.50 to 2.52 (skips 2.51), according to the AmiNet readme file (see link below):

• "project icon" support
• improved compatibility with FTPMount
• improved MP3 identification
• GUI graphics fixes
• bugfixes improving stability and usability
• added and/or improved support for many players
• added and improved scopes
• multiple scopes

Go to AmiNet for full details and download:
http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/hippoplayerupdate

AADevLog #3 - A paint program for the ZX81

The Sinclair ZX81 is a wonderful little machine. It's limitations create both a simple, fun environment to play with, and a challenge for developers.

About four decades ago, I started learning about computers with a ZX81. Type in stuff on a minimalist keyboard, print characters to a simple 32x24 characters monochrome screen, don't worry about colors or sound, because they're just not there. The ZX81 has very little memory, and the user interface is almost non-existent, so you're done pretty quickly. It's great, but also very limited in terms of sophisticated tools - there's just no extra room for such things, and you're having a hard time entering and editing the required data on the ZX81 anyway.

About three decades ago, I started using an Amiga. The Amiga, in comparison to the ZX81, is a highly capable computer. It has plenty of room, tons of screen size, a proper keyboard, several standard I/O ports, and colors and sound on top of it. Well, obviously it became my main computing platform.

About two weeks ago I got myself a ZX81 again. Oh what pleasures. Nostalgia galore. And that great experience of typing in little things which create immediate results.

Of course I quickly ran into some of the aforementioned limitations, so I decided to create some ZX81 support software for the Amiga: a paint program to paint nice game intro screens.

First painting with zx81paint.

It's called "zx81paint" and runs on Amigas with OS2.0 or higher. Currently it can't load or save files, but a first painting was created successfully. 

Due to the simplicity of the ZX81, the data that needs to be handled is also very simple, so there are little to no critical issues. For example the ZX81 picture itself is stored as a fixed-size array of bytes filled with ZX81 character set codes. Most of the development time is spent on putting together a pleasant and useful user interface. With the data and program structure in place, functions like line-drawing, flood fill, etc. can easily be added.

File loading and saving is currently missing - and might be one of the more challenging aspects of this little project. Several file formats used by emulators come to mind, but it would also be nice to have something that can directly be played back to the ZX81's tape-in ("EAR") jack.

There's no fixed feature list for "zx81paint", but an early release version will be put on AmiNet in a few days.

Thanks for reading, c u next time!

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