wee doors banging

Everything is going “cloud” these days. Your files, music, books, video – all online, all the time, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. But what about your games? Existing services like Steam allow you to download and install games on to your local machine, but what about “true” cloud gaming where the games themselves live elsewhere and you just consume the content (play the game) locally? OnLive is a new service that aims to do just that, and I’ve been asked to have a poke at it.

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.

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.

Here’s a quick look at a gloriously retro-arcade styled iPhone game that I’ve happened upon. It goes by the name of ElectroMaster.

Octoate reports on a new Amstrad CPC remake of Irem’s classic arcade shooter, R-Type. The new remake, developed by team Easter Egg, began life with the same Spectrum code as the original CPC version, but now 80% of it has been rewritten specifically for the CPC. Graphics, sounds and music have all also been greatly improved. A preview video is also now available.

Disney’s Tron: Legacy, sequel to 1982′s Tron, has a number of references to the original movie and other geek culture. But did you catch the 8-bit gaming easter egg in the Disc War arena?

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.

You are a bird. Some pigs have stolen your eggs. This makes you angry. You are an Angry Bird. Thus goes the largely irrelevant back story to Angry Birds from Clickgamer and Rovio, an iPhone game I’ve been playing a lot lately. Like, really a lot.

Angry Birds has been a huge success, selling half a million copies in the first month alone. This, I think, is down to the design cleverness that lurks beneath the polish, cutesy graphics and simple mechanics. No matter what you think of the game itself, if you’re in the games business then you could learn a lot from it’s design.

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?!