Guns 'N' Ghosts Cartridge Available! (C64)

High fives all round! It has been a long time coming (the tape, disk and download versions have been available since the 14th of April from our partners at Psytronik), but I'm super proud to announce that Georg "Endurion" Rottensteiner and Trevor "Smila" Storey's 72-level demon-smashing Commodore 64 arcade game Guns 'N' Ghosts is finally available to buy on cartridge from our shop!

Guns 'N' Ghosts is an intense action game with a variety of play modes that offers a particularly rich two-player cooperative adventure, so grab your shotgun, ready your psychic powers and help paranormal investigators Trev and Georg eradicate a monstrous mélange of spooks & spectres!

Featuring box art by Smila, the 64KB PCB is housed in a ghostly transparent cartridge shell illuminated by an internal LED, and the game comes complete with a printed manual and seven vinyl stickers.

The cartridge version is available in two packaging types, a standard card carton and a more expensive 'deluxe version' that comes in a plastic case (a Universal Game Case with a specially cut foam insert to hold the cartridge as shown below). The standard version is priced at £22, whereas the deluxe version costs £27. Shipping is £4 for UK/Europe and £5 for the rest of the world. A digital version of the game will also be sent out to all customers following receipt of payment.

Please note that Pystronik Software are also selling the game on premium/budget disk, tape and as a download for £9.99, £4.99, £3.99 and £1.99 respectively (plus shipping) via their Binary Zone Retro Store.

The even better news for cartridge fans is that whilst fixing the hardware incompatibility issue responsible for the delay, Georg managed to squeeze in one of his earlier games as an exclusive Easter egg - just check out the photos below! We will be announcing the 'secret' to loading the second game in the near future, but for those of you wanting to try and find it yourself the only hint you are going to get is that it requires one single input at a specific time. Happy hunting!

Guns 'N' Ghosts (C64) (2013)

System Requirements

* A Commodore 64/128/GS (PAL/NTSC).
* A joystick/joypad (two for two-player).
* A VDU preferably connected to a loud sound-system.


Downloads

The retail version of Guns 'N' Ghosts is currently not available for free download. You can buy the game on cartridge from RGCD here, or as a download, tape and disk from Psytronik Software here.


Introduction

The C64 game development super-team Georg "Endurion" Rottensteiner and Trevor "Smila" Storey have returned with their first new collaborative game since their record-breaking successful hit Soulless!

Another Psytronik and RGCD collaboration, Guns 'N' Ghosts delivers a long-awaited, original single or two-player arcade style experience to your C64 in all formats (cartridge, disk, tape and download). Grab your shotgun, ready your psychic powers and help paranormal investigators Trev and Georg battle through 72 screens infested with zombies, skeletons and bats and various other spooks & spectres!

Reports of supernatural sightings have been coming in from all over the country and Trev and Georg are on the case! Georg is very handy with a shotgun, useful for getting rid of any unwanted zombies, reanimated skeletons or freakish lab experiments gone wrong, and Trev is gifted with incredible mind powers. These give him a special link with the spirit-plane - and the ability to send demons back to whatever hell-hole they crawled out of.

Guns 'N' Ghosts is an intense action game with a variety of play modes that offers a particularly rich two-player cooperative adventure, so get a friend round, plug in an extra joystick and kick some undead ass!

RetroGameCrunch (Part One) (PC/Mac)

RetroGameCrunch was a Kickstarter project born out of the Ludum Dare Game Jam held in August of last year. What's a RetroGameCrunch you say? What's a Kickstarter? What's a game jam and is it anything like a pearl jam?

Well to take them in reverse order, Pearl Jam are a popular beat combo who were particularly successful in the early to mid 1990s and were named after the jam made by one of the band member's grandmothers. A game jam is a relatively new concept where a group of developers get together and make a game in a strict amount of time. Think of it like a group of musicians jamming until they produce a song, but with video games instead of music. Except video game music, obviously.

Kickstarter, meanwhile, utilises another relatively new concept called crowd-sourcing and allows artists and developers of all sorts of gadgets and gizmos the opportunity to pitch for funding from the general public directly without needing to resort to a middle man - except for Kickstarter of course. The site has grown massively since it was launched and has now expanded from its original technology-based origins to reach out to all sorts of creative artists.

Video game development is one such medium suited to online crowd-sourcing and retro video gaming in particular has done well due to its target demographic of thirtysomething+, male gamers with a disposable income and (obviously) internet access.

Which brings us, at last, to RetroGameCrunch, the product of a game jam that was such fun to the people involved they decided to go to Kickstarter and extend their game jam over six long months, producing a game a month in return for up-front funding from the public. RGCD was one of the many backers and this post will look at the first three of the promised six games, with a future post covering the remaining games.

KRUNCH (PC/Mac/Linux)

It's difficult to not be immediately intrigued by the dark, foreboding atmosphere of KRUNCH, an indie game by LeGrudge and Rugged that puts a new spin on the familiar twitch platformer genre. In fact, this game of stressful close calls and peril-filled levels isn't a platformer; rather, I'd call it a 'floater'. Birthed from a Ludum Dare prototype, KRUNCH has an awful lot to offer gamers who really enjoy punishing themselves.

Mok Force (PC)

[This review was originally written by J. Monkman for indiegames.com, and has been reposted here with the editors permission].

Arguably inspired by the works of Kenta Cho, Deathmofumofu's Mok Force is an endless procedural doujin shmup that has one foot set firmly in the past and the other boldly stepping forth into a neon-coloured abstract future. The game design is strictly old-school with no power-ups, no gimmicks, no shields nor health bars and the only goal is to beat your previous high score. Combined with a deep DnB soundtrack (by Japanese producer Gu-Dara) that perfectly compliments the relentless action and high-speed low poly-count 3D visuals, the end result is an elegant, accessible and enjoyable shooter experience.

Jagware Collection 1.0 Available! (Atari Jaguar CD)

Jagware presents a new Atari Jaguar CD compilation of four puzzle games from four groups; Do The Same from Cerebral Vortex, Diamjag by Orion, Atomic Reloaded from The Removers, and Beebris by Reboot - all four of which support online scoreboards. But that's not all - also included is an exclusive early look at the alpha build of 'Project II', Reboot's ambitious forthcoming horizontal scrolling shmup.

CVSD's Do The Same is a beautifully presented tile-rotation game where your goal is to match a given pattern of blocks in as few moves as possible (and before the time runs out). A highly polished release featuring backgrounds based on hand-crafted clay models and 112 levels to beat, Do The Same was previously available on CD in very limited quantities - now those who missed it in physical form have the chance to grab it again!

Next up is Atomic Reloaded, a logic puzzle game inspired by Thalion's Atomic in which you are tasked with creating molecules from their component atoms by moving them around a maze. Described as 'Atomic as it should have been', Atomic Reloaded features 82 original levels guaranteed to challenge even veterans of the original!

Diamjag is an early release from the prolific Jaguar coder Orion, in which you must guide a ball-like character around 28 single-screen mazes collecting diamonds - the catch being that when your ball starts rolling you wont stop again until you hit a wall!

Reboot, the organisers of this project have contributed Beebris, their updated Jaguar conversion of one of Law's old Atari ST releases based on a 'popular tetronimo game'. With four game modes, each with forty levels of difficulty, Beebris remains one of Reboots more popular additions to the Jaguar homebrew catalogue.

Jagware Collection One is a superb compilation of games, but if you want further incentive to pick up a copy you may wish to consider that all profits made through sales of this Jagware release will be going toward funding future Jaguar hardware development by SCPCD, creator of the JagCF and the Jagtopus 4-cart programmer - the format on which future cartridge games will be distributed.

The physical release comes cellophane wrapped in a clear DVD box with full colour, double-sided printed inlay on a full face printed, glass-mastered CD, direct from the factory (100% professionally produced in the UK). Instructions for each game are included on the inside of the inlay. It requires no additional hardware to run other than the Jaguar CD console itself. As an added bonus, a vinyl Reboot sticker will be included with every order.

Priced at £24 (plus £4 UK/Europe shipping, £5 rest of world) Jagware Collection 1.0 is available to buy from our shop page today!

Mojon Twins 2-Games-In-1 Cartridge Available! (C64)

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally completed our official cartridge compilation of The Mojon Twins Nanako in Classic Japanese Monster Castle and Sir Ababol, and it is available to buy now from our shop!

Although the plan was originally to put them out as separate releases, it seemed a shame to waste the ROM space, so we've managed to squeeze both games and a menu onto a single 64KB cartridge. Changes over the previous versions available on CSDB include two minor NTSC bugs fixed, as well as Nanako now being fully playable via joystick - making it available at last for GS owners. The 64KB PCB is housed in a transparent purple cartridge shell illuminated by an internal LED, and the game comes complete with a printed manual and a vinyl Mojon Twins sticker.

The cartridge version is available in two packaging types, a standard card carton and a more expensive 'deluxe version' that comes in a plastic case (a Universal Game Case with a specially cut foam insert to hold the cartridge as shown below). The standard version is priced at £22, whereas the deluxe version costs £27. Shipping is £4 for UK/Europe and £5 for the rest of the world. A digital version of the game will also be sent out to all customers following receipt of payment.

As a joint RGCD/Mojon Twins/Psytronik production, we've handled the cartridge production whereas Kenz at Psytronik has compiled a three game pack on disk and tape, including UWOL: Quest For Money (a game we previously released on cartridge last year). Psytronik Software are selling the game on premium/budget disk and tape for £9.99/£4.99 and £3.99 respectively (plus shipping) via their Binary Zone Retro Store.

To celebrate the completion of this project, we've put the UWOL cartridge temporarily on sale, with £5 off the cost price. Not only that, but fans of Assembloids might want to check out Dr. Martin Wendt's previous game Not Even Human - which has also been dramatically price slashed! This promotion won't last forever, so grab them now.

But sadly it isn't all good news. Royal Mail have raised their postage costs for the new financial year, so I've had to change some of our shipping methods and push up the prices by £1 across the board. Whereas international post was previously insured for up to £46 by default, this now needs to be purchased as an extra (see the 'Shipping Insurance' category of the store). For UK customers, from now on I'll be sending parcels 'Second Class Signed For' in order to keep the price low but still offer adequate compensation for up to two games per package (additional cover up to £500 is also available). I've been as fair as I can with this.

Sorry to end on a downer... On the positive side there is more news and reviews to follow soon!

Sir Ababol / Nanako In Classic Japanese Monster Castle (C64) (2013)

System Requirements

* A Commodore 64/128/GS (PAL/NTSC).
* A joystick/joypad.
* A VDU preferably connected to a loud sound-system.


Downloads

Download Sir Ababol & Nanako in .crt cartridge format HERE!
Download Sir Ababol & Nanako in .prg program format HERE!

BONUS! Check out the original ZX Spectrum versions HERE!
BONUS! Check out Onslaught's cracked version of Sir Ababol in .d64 disk format HERE!
BONUS! Check out Onslaught's cracked version of Nanako in .d64 disk format HERE!

EMULATOR PACKAGE! Download the game ready-to-run combined with the Windows 32-Bit version of the VICE emulator HERE!


Introduction

Following on from last year's authorised C64 cartridge release of UWOL: Quest For Money, RGCD is back with a compilation of two more Mojon Twins game conversions coded by Woodmaster - the classic run 'n jump collect 'em up 'Sir Ababol' and mind-bending platform-puzzler 'Nanako in Classic Japanese Monster Castle'.

UWOL: Quest For Money (C64) (2012)

System Requirements

* A Commodore 64/128 (PAL/NTSC).
* A joystick/joypad.
* A VDU preferably connected to a loud sound-system.


Downloads

Download UWOL: Quest For Money in .crt cartridge format HERE!
Download UWOL: Quest For Money in .d64 disk format HERE!
Download UWOL: Quest For Money in .tap tape format HERE!

BONUS! Check out the original ZX Spectrum version HERE!

EMULATOR PACKAGE! Download the game ready-to-run combined with the Windows 32-Bit version of the VICE emulator HERE!


Introduction

Despite being super rich and earning 90% of Spain's national income from the videogame industry, year after year, Uwol wasn't satisfied. The money just wasn't enough - what he craved more than anything was adventure (in addition to yet more wealth), so he decided to become a treasure hunter and follow in the footsteps of his gaming heroes.

After already collecting valuable rewards such as the fire that doesn't burn (which looks great in the hall of his house), the proton pistol and proton charger, three pairs of Gremla's knickers, Miner Willy's book of bills, Wally's pajamas, the Sword of Power (although this is just a copy because the real one is still in use) and heaps of Saimaza coffee, Uwol learns that a mysterious and eccentric millionaire has hidden a huge fortune of stolen gold coins within a deserted manor next to Canutos Forest - the so-called Storm Palace. So he decides to emulate his idol Goodie and begin a new quest... A Quest For Money!