A big thanks to Philip Bee for the recording of these rare clips of ‘Trojan’ (Durell) on the ZX Spectrum.  Basically Clive Townsend recently had all his Microdrive disks backed up, and recovered was the remains of the unreleased Capcom conversion ‘Trojan’.

This here is an early colour beta of the game:

Unfortunately, although looking very playable and pretty much complete - World Of Spectrum is unable to release the game into the wild due to copyright issues from Capcom, so you’ll have to make do with these clips in the meantime.

These two remaining clips are much later versions of the game

Clip 1.

Clip 2.

Not a bad looking game!

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   GTW general, News  |   add a comment

A while back you may remember when we mentioned the ‘Zap’ BBC game which was being uncovered by Jamie Woodhouse (Creator of Quak on the Amiga/PC and GBA) which never got released,  well Retro Software have recently picked up the game and have made it available and for sale in proper inlays very much in Psytronik style with professional quality and duplication.

I had my first experience of playing ‘Zap’ at Retrovision 2010 and I must say that its a very good blast if you are into your shooters like me.  It has quite a harsh scoring system which makes posting a high-score quite a challenge.  Graphics and sound are very good throughout and for the very cheap prices which Retro Software are charging, there is no excuse not to pick up a copy. (And on a variety of formats too!)

Additionally we were presented with another game called "The Krystal Connection", which is a very addictive platform/puzzler affair for the same price.  This is yet another game that was never released and was saved from the developer’s disks.  It originally was due for release by Melbourne House in 1986, but never quite happened (We think because support was dropped for the Beeb by Melbourne House at that time).  The guys have Retro Software have had things tidied up and released in proper inlays and tape/disk.  Graphics are nothing spectacular, but are very functional and the game tune I found very catchy.  Overall its the playability that shines through, and this was very popular on Dave Moore’s BBC at Retrovision 2010.

And there is more to come - and the theme of saving unreleased games continues, with the next title looking to be Repton: The Lost Realms.  More about this up and coming release can be found here: http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Repton:_The_Lost_Realms

At present, there is a bit of a debate about offering digital copies of the games for a smaller charge (Though at present people buying the game physically are given a digital copy to play with - but i’d check this first with R.S, as I may have got my copy as a favour).  Hopefully it will happen, as some people may not want to buy a physical copy of a game when they don’t have a BBC Micro, and would prefer to play them on an emulator.  We’ll see how that pans out.

For more details on ordering, check out: http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   GTW general, News  |   add a comment

The guys at Plus4World have recently added a new category for entries in their C16/Plus4 database for GTW related titles, which will continue to grow over time.

You can now check this out directly from here: http://plus4world.powweb.com/sl.php?ptid=126

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   GTW general, News  |   add a comment

Simon Cooke’s biography on Wikipedia doesn’t pay enough justice to his role within Sam Coupe scene.  His unreleased contributions include Populous(incomplete), Bubble Bobble (unattainable license, 1991), Zub (unfinished, but screenshots exist).

Unrelated to Sam Coupe but of great importance is that he worked on a finished cool-looking (at least judging from shots) Prince of Persia conversion to Spectrum that got scrapped due to licence issues, this is a different one from the russian adaptation made later by another team.

Sources

• Simon Cooke’s biography on Wikipedia
• Populous
• Bubble Bobble
• Zub
• Prince of Persia
  

Posted by Fabrizio Bartoloni in :   GTW general  |   add a comment

1992 Bullfrog
ST, Amiga, PC, SNES, Mega Drive

Code - Paul (Paulie) Hughes
Graphics - Mark R Jones
Music - N/A

Ah "Flood", the memories had with this awesome Amiga game back in the day.  With it’s groundbreaking speech effects throughout, Flood proved to be a huge hit on the ST/Amiga back in 1990, and so it was inevitable that a sequel would follow.  This time the main character, Quiffy, would also look to make an appearance on 16-bit consoles which were starting to take a hold on the gaming public alongside home computers.

The game was being developed by non other than ex-Ocean coder Paul Hughes with graphics by Mark R Jones (Who also worked at Ocean). 

Flood 2 promised more of the same of the first game, with a multitude of additional features and bits to improve further on the original (Which sadly and undeservidly never had the full spotlight treatment on its original release).  

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   Features, Reviews, GTW general  |   2 comments

For many years for GTW64, one of the largest scale searches has been for the elusive Daffy Duck by Hi-Tec Software.  Although we have been very close to finally releasing the game (With discussions still going on),  the search did uncover another surprise which arguably is just as important a finding as Daffy Duck would be.

Bugs Bunny - Private Detective was finished around the same time as Daffy Duck, but didn’t quite make the reviews before Hi-Tec went under, and so the game was pretty much never heard of to C64 users.  However, Dave Palmer managed to find the master disk and kindly loaned it to GTW64 to preserve.

A great finding overall and a great offer of hope for the future of finding the great Daffy Duck.  Well worth checking out if you haven’t already.  Read the story here… http://gtw64.retro-net.de/Pages/b/Review_Bugsbunny.php

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   GTW64, GTW general  |   add a comment

Not too much is known about The Mindwarp, but this was a nice looking Descent style game from 1996/97 which was being produced by Maxis software on the PC and which was advertised in a few places and magazines.

The game was reported by SEC as looking very unlikely to be released, and reports in 1997 confirm that the game was canned.  It’s not entirely clear why, but possibly the game was well overdue (as was Simcopter at the time) and it was felt that the game would not recoup enough money.

One of the designers, Garrett Smith, has the game listed as one of his credits - but no material of the game unfortunately.  The YouTube clip demonstrates some rare footage of the game which came as an extra to a Pinball game that Maxis released.  The same YouTube entry mentions that there was apparently a playable demo released on a Maxis compilation, but the compilation has not been located.

It is hoped that more can be found out about the game, and even playable versions located.  With one credit already, maybe there is a chance of digging this up someday.

Many thanks to Clint Basinger for highlighting this one! … We hope to have more on this one soon!

Sources

• Garrett Smith website
• SEC reports link 1
• SEC reports link 2

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   pcGTW, Features, GTW general  |   add a comment

Along our web travels an interview with Australian Gamer Joseph Hewitt, a man involved in Command & Conquer, Dune II, Kyrandia and Lands of Lore, to name a few classics, was discovered and which informed readers about three Westwood games that got cancelled or unreleased.  Here are just a few of those titles:

• Vindicators (unreleased) – PC, Apple IIGS
• Body Count (cancelled) – Genesis
• Ancient Glory – (unreleased) PC

Hopefully more information on these titles soon, but check out the interview via the link above.

Posted by Fabrizio Bartoloni in :   GTW general  |   add a comment

Thanks to Fabrizio, check out this interesting write up "Beta Blues" by Travis Fahs over at IGN spread across two volumes.  Some of it may be old ground already covered and the features are almost a year old, but then there are some items of general interest which are worth a read if you haven’t seen them already…

• Beta blues Vol.1
• Beta blues Vol.2
  

Posted by Frank Gasking in :   GTW general  |   add a comment

We’ve seen countless many games disappear into the myst without a screenshot or even a title left behind.   This is not the case of Meantime (you may remember this title from GTW64’s coverage), one of the most popular vapourware (not so whimsical actually) according to gamers expectations.

This Interplay RPG evolved from Wasteland engine while sharing same development team, yet it’s not a follow-up. It came to a hault when the 8 bit market collapsed, bringing the end to the AppleII and C64 editions.  It was then later revived in DOS just to come to the same conclusion.  With the debut of advanced engines like Ultima VII , the competition would have been very unfair we guess!

Sources

• GTW64 entry
• Meantime page

Posted by Fabrizio Bartoloni in :   Features, GTW general  |   add a comment