wee doors banging

This weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend Replay Expo. Held in Norbreck Castle hotel in Blackpool, Replay is a two day video gaming event featuring both classic retro machines and games as well as the latest releases. So. Many. Highlights.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”. Well, something like that.

Uridium 2, one of the Amiga’s finest and hardcorest shoot ‘em ups, never quite made it to the CD32 console. A real shame since it was set to feature improved graphics and an all-new CD soundtrack. Now, thanks to some prodding from Heavy Stylus and clever hackery-pokery by musashi5150, a CD32 version is at last available.

Hot on the heels of the impressive Batman Forever demo on the Amstrad CPC, comes this state of the art effort on – wait for it – the venerable old Commodore VIC-20.

And it really is State of the Art. It’s a remake of Spaceball’s famous Amiga demo “State of the Art”. On a VIC-20. Unbelievable!

Good news, everyone. My “Alien Breed on Quake 1 Engine” conversion project, QBreed, has been picked up by a clever chap by the name of ltheden who is working on extending and packaging it up for release.

Last year I wrote a little about Alien Breed 3D, one of my favourite games on the Amiga and indeed ever. In that post mentioned that I’d begun (and then abandoned) a project to reverse engineer the AB3D level structure and recreate the levels in the Quake 1 engine. This was known as QBreed.

I was lucky enough recently to be invited (by DDNI) to lunch with Trevor Dickinson, the man behind the company behind the latest “next generation” Amiga computer, the AmigaOne X1000.

For this UFO: Enemy Unknown fan it’s been a long wait for a sequel. Sixteen years long. So you can imagine how terribly excited I got when I read 2K Games’ announcement that they had a brand new X-COM game in production. I thought my wait was finally over, but then I read on a little. They’re making an X-COM first person shooter?!

The Amiga Revival Fair 2009 was held on Saturday 12th December 2009 in Enfield. Organised by the Amiga North Thames user group, it featured a number of Amiga hardware and software exhibitors as well as demonstrations of new products (yes there are a few!) and games competitions. I couldn’t make it, but a fellow Northern Ireland based Amiga user did and this is what he found.

Greg Wood, a web designer from Nottingham in the UK, has posted a list of his top 5 Amiga games and why he likes them. “So what?”, you may ask. It’s hardly the choice of games, rather it’s the unique take Greg has taken on the design that makes his post remarkable.