Tag Archives: homebrew

Old Towers: Up and Down and Side to Side

As we’ve seen a few times already, the Mega Cat Studios Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming platform contains some great examples of new games written for classic platforms.

A favourite of many players is Old Towers, another game from the Russian collective RetroSouls, who specialise in high-quality short-form games for old-school systems ranging from the ZX Spectrum to the Sega Mega Drive. Old Towers has appeared on a couple of different formats, but the one found on the Evercade cart is the original Mega Drive version.

Grab your popcorn and get ready for some brain-bending puzzle action, then — it’s time to climb the Old Towers.

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Multidude: One-Player Co-Op

Have you found it difficult to get together with friends lately, perhaps due to a global virus pandemic? Are you missing the joy of cooperating with your fellow dudes, and open to an electronic surrogate? Then do I have the game for you.

Multidude is a short puzzle adventure by Russian developer RetroSouls. It was originally released for ZX Spectrum in 2014, then subsequently ported to NES the following year, at which point it was picked up by Mega Cat Studios for a packaged release.

It’s also part of the Mega Cat Studios Collection 1 for the Evercade retro gaming system, and that’s the version we’ll be looking at today. Bring on the dudes!

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Atari A to Z: Saboteur!

I never played Clive Townsend’s classic open-structure 2D platformer Saboteur! until his recent Nintendo Switch version, which I absolutely loved.

Imagine my delight, then, when I saw that some talented AtariAge members had taken it upon themselves to port this classic game to the dear old Atari 8-bit. How would it come out, I wondered.

Pretty damn well, as it happens; some speed inconsistencies aside, we have a very true port of a ZX Spectrum classic here — now available for any Atari fans to enjoy! Check out the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

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Atari A to Z: Octopus

Nintendo’s Game & Watch series of LCD gaming handhelds might not be the first things you’d think needed converting to other platforms — but on the occasions when we have seen adaptations of them, they’ve always been a lot of fun.

It helps that their simple gameplay remains somewhat timeless and thus easy to update with slightly fancier presentation without having to make significant changes to the mechanics. So that’s exactly what a group of Polish developers did on 2011: they took on the second of the “Wide Screen” Game & Watch releases, and converted it to Atari 8-bit.

The result is a simple but immaculately presented and enormously addictive little game. I give you Octopus.

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Sunday Shooting: Judgement Silversword

If you enjoyed Eschatos, which we looked at last weekend, you’ll enjoy its spiritual precursor, Judgement Silversword.

Originally developed as a “homebrew” title for the WonderSwan Color WonderWitch device, Judgement Silversword won a short-lived software competition and subsequently saw a very, very limited commercial release.

Fortunately, despite it being one of the rarest and most expensive WonderSwan Color games out there, it’s pretty easy to get hold of in other forms today…

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