32-bit Acorn Gaming
News

News round-up and other information, including Quake (7/9/97) [New]
Emulator news (Updated 3/9/97) [New]

New Games

Other News

News Round-up and other information

The most recent Acorn game release was the superbly funny and very well designed platform game Emotions, which must surely rank as one of the best original Acorn games ever - and not over-priced at £20, either.

£500,000
An Acorn company are currently developing a game with a total budget that is likely to have exceeded £500,000 by the time of completion! This may not be a particularly large budget on most other platforms, but for an Acorn game it is exceptionally high. The company in question are developing the game for a large installation of StrongARM Network Computers for a large corporate company.

The game is a fully 3D racing game vaguely similar to WipeOut in style, but more freeform, and features stunning artwork and many 3D special effects. The company version of the game will have a networked multiplayer option.

A PlayStation release of the game now looks certain, but the company developing the game will not (as I understand it) be publishing a native RISC OS Acorn version themselves. Such a version, which would certainly come on a CD and would probably require a StrongARM, may well be released by another party, however - but this is not certain yet. Let's hope they do, else you'll have to go and stay in various hotels with suitable intranets to play the game (or buy a PlayStation)...

Psygnosis Games on Acorns
Don't get too excited - it ain't gonna happen. But the amazing thing is that it very nearly did at one point! Certain well known Acorn games programmers, such as Tom Cooper and David Jefferies, have been working at Psygnosis, publisher of top Playstation and PC games, for some time now. And at one point it looked likely that David Jefferies was going to be involved in porting a few Psygnosis games to Acorns, but sadly the brakes were put on the project when Psygnosis realised exactly how much time the conversion work would take. Still, there's at least one Risc PC in Psygnosis to fly the Acorn flag...

Acorn users can be found throughout the gaming industry. Famously, Eidos has in the past developed video compression software for Acorns, and they now own and publish Core Design's work - including the world-famous Tomb Raider, but it is a safe bet that no Acorn release will ever be made. The majority of Acorn users who would have bought the game probably own PlayStations by now, anyway. Krisalis, now no longer publishing but doing development work published by others, also have one or two Risc PCs which are sometimes used for prototyping work due to their ease of use.

Destiny
The Next Big Thing is due to be the release of Robert Templeman's Destiny, an original Acorn Doom clone that has been under intensive development for over a year and a half. The first release will require a reasonably high-end machine, but a version suitable for lower-specification computers will become available soon after. It looks likely that Destiny will be released in time for the Acorn World 1997 show at Wembley this October/November.

Quake
The possibility of a full release of an Acorn version of Quake is one that is being constantly discussed in the newsgroup comp.sys.acorn.games. A port of the freely available Quake source code by Martin Piper of TBA Software has been available for some time on the internet, and TBA claim to be about to release a full and speedy version, but this claim has been outstanding for some months now with no such release appearing, so it is not yet known whether such a version will eventually appear or not. A playable (but unofficial) version of Quake can be downloaded from http://ns.applause.no/~mickey/.

Another author, Jan Vlietinck, has developed a version of Quake which does not use the original source code, although it is also unclear as of yet whether this version will ever see the light of day in a final and complete form. You can download the current version from http://www-vis.imag.fr/AcornDemos/FtpArea/3D_engines/, but this isn't a playable game.

TBA/Brutal Horse Power
TBA are also continuing work on Brutal Horse Power, their car racing game, although it has long ago passed its promised release date - hopefully it will be complete in time for Acorn World, however. Other promised TBA games seem to have disappeared from view, but if they release both BHP and Quake then this should satisfy most people!

Other Games
Iron Dignity holds out the hope of an Acorn game with a genuinely stunning 3D graphics engine, with a development demo a few months ago impressing most observers with the high quality of its visuals.

Acorn have stated that they intend to provide many big name games for playing on Acorn machines, but this is likely to take the form of games emulation, and not native conversions. This work is intended for the NetStation Network Computer, and so games which require large amounts of disc-space - such as 3D walkabouts like Doom - are not viable candidates for conversion.

Paradise continue to work hard on their budget games, although they will have a hard act to follow their first release, a very impressive game called Inferno. All their games cost £10. Their new shoot'em'up, Overload is looking very good, with the usual superb Paradise graphics and sound being in evidence, so this should be a really great game! More details of this and another forthcoming Paradise game are available. That makes two new horizontally-scrolling shoot'em'ups due out, with Oblivion being the other promised game.

For those who fancy something a little more cerebral, a demo version of Tiles, a desktop word game, is available from Brain Games's web pages. The game is now StrongARM compatible and includes eleven boards in five languages with four sprite sets.

Those interested in writing their own Acorn games but who aren't confident of their programming ability should check out Grasshopper Software's Games Suite 2, a regularly updated development suite which lets you write fast arcade games with ease. The sprite plotters which come with it run up to 19 times faster than those built into the OS, and the core engine is 100% hand-written ARM code. The suite is improved on an almost daily basis.

Various groups and individuals are promising new releases for further afield than Acorn World - far more than in the past few years - although how many of these will actually ever become reality is of course still to be seen. Details of many of these are given in the previews listed above, some of which are exclusive to these web pages, whilst many others are omitted due to current lack of any information more detailed than simply a name. At least three groups claim to be developing Worms-type clones, following ground tread last year by Werewolf Software with Tanks. Kindred Software, in particular, are developing such a game - their version is called Moles - and they also have various exciting plans for other releases but wish to keep them out of the public glare lest they never come to pass!

Acorn are showing more of an interest in games development than ever before, and are now known to have provided technical and hardware support to certain games developers.

There is even a possibility of Karma, the massive space adventure first announced almost ten years ago, finally being finished. The surviving author, Ian David Robinson, is working on it in his spare time.

King and Country is looking like it might be a decent homegrown strategy game, although progress seems slow (development screenshot below). Overseas programming group Fantasia are also working hard on completing their new game, Wizard Apprentice, which looks set to be released by The Datafile on CD. MetalFighters 4000, a side-on beat-em-up also in development, has been temporarily put on hold. Even The Fourth Dimension have awoken from their hibernation and have recently released both a compilation, a puzzle pack and the Wipeout-style racing game, Drifter, with further releases planned for the future. It has also been suggested that they are intending to release some of their games for the NetStation platform.

After an exceptionally quiet previous year the Acorn games scene seems at least alive, with the promise of serious sums of money from the sale of Network Computer games proffering the hope that an Acorn gaming renaissance may yet occur.

[King & Country screenshot]
King and Country development screenshot

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Gareth Moore
Last updated 7/9/97