Games World

Paul Brett with the latest gaming news.

Welcome to another GamesWorld column. I would like to take this opportunity to wish all RISCWorld readers a Happy New Year. If, like me, you are a keen RISC OS games player then I have no doubt you will be pleased by the latest games to make an appearance after the Christmas and New Year holiday. It seems that a number of developers have taken the time away from work to polish off some new releases and to resurrect some older ones.

DinoSaw

One of my favourite RISC OS websites, Acorn Arcade, have been busy releasing freeware versions of some classic older RISC OS games. Recently they manage to obtain the rights to the Tom Cooper hit DinoSaw.

DinoSaw is a prehistoric platformer, you can either jump over nasty things or hack them to death with your chainsaw. You can tell when you hurting something because it bleeds rather a lot. There are a few bonus objects to be found around the game.

Food - simply boosts your score.
Hearts - Give BOTH players an extra life. On two player mode when a player's game is over, and the other player collects a heart he is allowed to rejoin the game.

There are fifteen levels to this full version. You can progress to the next level by walking off the right hand side of the current level. This version of DinoSaw should work fine on everything from an ARM 2 to a Kinetic RiscPC running RISC OS Select. It should also run on an Iyonix if you have Aemulor Pro (There have been some reports of crashing after the title screen, *audio off seems to fix this).

Controls

Space - Start game
Escape - Quit program
Print - toggle 1/2 Players
Z - Player1 left
X - Player 1 right
C - Player 1 jump
Keypad 1 - Player 2 left
Keypad 2 - Player 2 right
Keypad 3 - Player 2 jump

FazeMaze - Neil White

GamesWorld favourite Neil White has also been busy beavering away and has released a beta version of FazeMaze. All you need to do, in this deceptively simple desktop game, is collect all the yellow blobs in the maze and then make your way to the exit. The controls are:

Z - left
X - right
O - up
K - down
Q - quit

In order to get the game to work the current directory needs to be set to inside the game. (I did this but still couldn't make it work -ED). Neil has also produced a two player version which I have also included.

RuneSeeker - Paul Vigay

Paul Vigay has dusted off an old game of his and made it Iyonix compatible as well as releasing it as freeware. RuneSeeker has 12 levels and the aim is to collect all the items on each level and then reach the exit. You will need to collect all the coins as well as find keys to open locked doors. There are a number of items you can pick up to help your search. These include a magic hat that speeds you up and a metal detector to help you locate hidden coins.

You will also have to contend with the badies on each level. Sometimes they can be distracted with a handily placed bone, or perhaps you might decide to try and blow them up with a conveniently placed bomb. You also have to cope with special areas of the maze that only allow you to go one way and then flip over after you have moved through them.

Although the graphics could do with an overhaul RuneSeeker is very enjoyable to play and can certainly keep you busy for several hours. You can get a lot of instructions from the title page. RuneSeeker requires at least version 4.15 of the ABCLib module and I have included this in the games directory.

So that's all from me for this issue, I hope to back again with another feast of gaming delights in the March issue.

Paul Brett