|  Digits! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-04-18 |
 Step right up folks, there's a new game available for your C16 or Plus/4! Is it an epic space adventure with blasting lasers? Hunting monsters? Racing a fast car?
Nope! It's math. *crickets*
Hey, where did everybody go?
Joking aside, Digits is a rather simple math-based puzzle. It's been popping up in articles recently (Forbes, The Verge). If you don't mind doing some calculations in your head, perhaps give it a try (or play the original online). |
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| | BASIC 10Liners 2023 Results | | Posted by Luca on 2023-04-13 |
 Silently, in the loud cloud of the mega releases for the mega parties, quietly but inexorably, the 9th edition of one of the most loved online compo parties has reached its natural end with the final results of the 2023 edition.
BASIC 10 Liners 2023 has seen once again some very interesting Basic V3.5 works shine in the roster of the participants.
In the PUR-80 category, three friends have crossed swords against their fierce rivals, but most of all this competition has seen the name of a fundamental Plus/4 scene's group raise from the grave! Yes, Synergy is back, thanks to the two entries by Haegar, which got ranked respectively 24th (Mini Tron) and 29th (Soli Pong)! Tron264 by FeCO reached the 35th place, although a Tron-like game offering two game's modes would probably have deserved more than that.
Veteran coder raze carried around the 264 flag, joining the PUR-120 category with Mini Mars Plus, a vector game which refreshes the soul of a Lunar Lander -ish ancestor with a splash of Thrust. 8th place out of 9 for it.
And in the end, here we are in the massive EXTREM-256 category, where FeCO again puts you behind the wheel on the highway, the road is a mess, the horizon gets blue far away, the 17th place is on sight.
Congratulations to all the participants, you honoured the beloved black box. See ya in 2024! |
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| | 9 Hungarian Books Added! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-04-13 |
| Big thanks to Lacus, who scanned 9 Hungarian books for us! |
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| | TED Vibes and Chromatic Distortion | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-04-09 |
 Revision 2023 is still underway, but two great productions have already appeared on our small scene.
First up is TED Vibes: a music box by Murphy/Exceed with wonderful graphics by Poison/Singular. You can hear not less than 13 new TED tunes from 9 composers.
In the 4K intro front, edhellon is back with Chromatic Distortion, a follow-up to last year's Chromatic Admiration. Beautiful visuals plus a new tune by h0ffman.
UPDATE: Chromatic Distortion won the oldskool intro category in the compo. Be sure to check out these new releases! |
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| | Radar Rat Race! | | Posted by Gaia on 2023-04-05 |
 In our "games that could have been but weren't" pseudo-series (yes, think about Squirm 16 and Galaxian Plus4...) we continue to present you classic, old-school games that could have been released on our system, but for some reason they weren't.
Today's release, Radar Rat Race, is - again - a modified clone of an arcade classic released in 1980 by Namco, called Rally-X. It was first developed for the VIC-20 by HAL Laboratories in Japan, but soon enough, Namco's corporate lawyers convinced Commodore that it would not be such a good idea to release any unlicensed arcade games. So Commodore's software engineers went on and transformed the cars into rats, the streets into a maze filled with stationary cats, and renamed the game 'Radar Rat Race'. The game was a launch title for the VIC-20 released as a cartridge and was later also ported to the Commodore 64 in 1982, and now this version has finally been ported to the Commodore 16, too! Game journalists at the time criticized the game's controls and repetitive sound, but called it "quite exciting and amusing to play."
You have to guide your mouse through a giant maze. The "camera" only shows a small part of the maze at any given time. At least three rats pursue the player. The goal is to eat all of the pieces of cheese, shown for the entire maze on a radar screen, without getting caught by a rat or bumping into a stationary cat. By pressing the joystick button, the mouse can disperse a limited amount of magical dust (called "star screen"), which confuses the rats for about five seconds. Once the round is complete, the game starts again, with more rats and faster play. Certain levels are special in that they are faster and have more stationary cats than normal levels ("speed run"). The gameplay is originally accompanied by a rhythmically altered version of a phrase from Three Blind Mice looping in a mere three seconds that gets on the nerves very quickly and was replaced by a complete composition by Maestro Csabo meddling other lesser known titles, but you can always get back to the original tune by pressing 'F3' on the title screen or 'E' during gameplay.
If you're a C16-only freak and the game still seems strikingly familiar to you, that is not a coincidence. We already have Menekülés, a "clone of the clone" with cats chasing your mouse and collecting cheese in a... guess what?... maze!
The game is relatively compact, so we could squeeze in a nice title screen for you, but we leave the details up to your Google skills. |
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| | WE:COME:FROM:PLANET:PETSCII | | Posted by Luca on 2023-04-01 |
 In a world moving toward the AI TextToImage tools, one man still resists, a man dangerously owning an armada of robots which are "...made by a real person to look like they were autogenerated by a computer...". And that man is buzz_clik in person!
PETSCIIBOTS takes the virtual PETSCII art back from the potential virtuality of those PNG image files filled with plenty of PETSCII made little (sometimes bigger!) robots, dropped by buzz_clik 5 years ago, at the time when he ignited his artistic project called "PETSCIIBOTS". So, who said "NFT"? Now those imaginary robots are real solid SEQ files, they're for real, ready to be used. A proper PETSCIIBOTS Player allows to browse both regular BOTS and bigBOTS, the entire organized collection of SEQ files is included into the packet in order to edit your own D64s containing Player + BOTS, and the same whole collection has been spread onto 10 D81 disk images which are very convenient to be used on SD2IEC devices.
Are we now closer to the Pocket ̶M̶o̶n̶s̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ Robots Plus/4 game we all await for? Gotta BOTS'em all! |
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