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.

In a recent attic clearance, I discovered a carrier bag full of Amstrad CPC 3″ floppy disks and a drive capable of reading them. I suspected the disks contained programs that I and my brother wrote back in the good ol’ days and, being a nostalgic old fool, I was quite keen to salvage the data from them.

“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.

A new, and rather impressive, Amstrad CPC demo has just been released by The Batman Group team: Batman Forever.

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.