Amiten's Amiga Homebrew Site Now Online

It's always nice when a new Amiga web site comes online, and in today's post I bring you news that English Amiga Board user Amiten, has set up a site to document the development progress for a number of titles he's currently working on.

Amiten is someone who clearly likes to keep himself busy, as at present he has no less than four Amiga games in development! I'm sure he'd make more progress if he stuck to one title, but perhaps working on multiple projects keeps him enthused.

Currently the site documents the development progress of the following games:

- Amivania (Castlevania clone)
- Fish (Looks similar to a game and watch title)
- Spacer Remake (side scrolling shoot-em-up)
- X Wars (side scrolling platform shooter)

Out of all the titles, it's Amivania that I'm most looking forward to, and it's the one game I wish Amiten would spend more development time on.


(One of the many work in progress videos)
Amiten's site is well worth checking out. There's some extremely interesting material on there already, and I'm sure more will be added over the coming weeks and months.

You can find the site at: http://www.amisoft.freeiz.com/

Nuxelia's Programmer Reveals All

Regular visitors may recall that towards the latter part of November I covered the unreleased Amiga platfomer, Nuxelia, in one of my blog posts.

With the game generating a fair amount of discussion over on the English Amiga Board, forumite vitux, attempted to track down members of the development team in an effort to discover more about this project.

Well, after a combination of investigative work and waiting for answers, one of the programmers, Erik Gustavsson, signed up to the EAB and yesterday (19th December) gave an in-depth lowdown of the game, which you can find here.

It's a fascinating insight into the development of this title, and exciting to read of the special effects the team managed to cram into later parts of the game. If you found the demo impressive it's likely the full game would have blown your socks off.

If you've yet to try the Nuxelia demo, you can see it running below.


(Nuxelia demo)
My thanks go to Erik for taking the time to tell the Nuxelia story, and to vitux, for tracking down Erik in the first place.

Another Amiga mystery put to bed.

Amiganitzu Released and Ready for Download!

I've been charting the development progress of Amiganitzu on this very blog for many weeks now, and I'll admit to enjoying the various video updates EAB forumite CarasGhant has been posting to YouTube on a semi-regular basis.

Well, you'll be pleased to learn that the waiting is over and with Amiganitzu now reaching version 1.0, a full release has been made available for download - just in time for Christmas!

The release notes are as follows;

"An Amiga clone of Paganitzu (shareware version) for the Amiga, plus 10 original levels. Should run on all 68k Amigas, Kickstart 2.0+ recommended.

If you encounter problems try increasing the stack size, default is 50000. If you are running this on WinUAE don't set the CPU speed to 'fastest possible', set it to A500/A1200 exact".

Below is a short clip showing version 1.0 up and running;



The full game can be downloaded from the Amiganitzu web site or from the Aminet.

Many thanks to AmigaPD for the heads-up on this release.

Lemon Amiga's Top 10 Amiga Games You've Never Even Heard About!

Here's something a little different for today's blog post.

Rather than point you in the direction of a new game download or give you a heads-up on a forthcoming release, I'd like to highlight a YouTube video recently uploaded by the Lemon Amiga team.

The video in question is part one of a three part series, which aims to highlight some classic Amiga games you've never actually played.

I thought I was a pretty clued-up Amiga gamer, but there are titles here that I didn't know existed until I watched this.

If you want some new (well, new to you) games to play on your trusty Amiga over the Christmas period then this really is essential viewing.

Here's the background info accompanying the YouTube clip;

"[Here are the] Top 10 Amiga Games You've Never Even Heard About!

Yes, you read it right. Presented here is a showcase of some of the rarest, most unique and hard to find classic games for the Amiga computer. This Special features 65 (!!) Amiga games in total, and is presented in three 1 hour+ videos. The 'Top 10' are broken down into 10 genre categories, and this first video features the following 5 categories:

10. Platformers
9. Shoot Em Ups
8. Beat Em Ups
7. Run and Gun Platformers
6. 3D Adventures

That's 24 games, with at least 4 games featured in each catagory; so I'm sure you'll be able to find a game you've never even heard of among that lot!

For fans, see this also as a 'Fan test'. A genuine Amiga-head will probably know half of these rare titles. An enthusiast will know at least three or four, while the casual fan probably wont have seen any of these... Leave your comments below.

Part 2 will appear soon, and will feature:

5. Point 'N Click Adventures
4. Puzzle Games.

Then sometime before the New Year, Part 3 will feature:

3. 3D Shooters
2. Racing Games
1. Empire Builders

Thanks very much again for watching these...!

Happy Christmas".

The video runs for 1 hour and 15 minutes and is well worth your time. When parts two and three surface I'll let you know via the blog.

Now, enjoy...

Remainder Software's Development Update

You may recall that back in late November I gave a heads-up on a new game currently in development by Downfall developers Remainder Software.

Well, it looks like everyday life has got in the way a little, as this short update, originally posted to the Remainder Software Facebook page reveals;

"Hello everybody!

I thought you'd appreciate a quick update.

Work on our new title has been slow due to real life and illness but things have progressed recently. I've managed to add a control and jumping system and some very basic collision detection with platforms (there's a clue for you).

There's a hell of a lot more groundwork to be done before I have something presentable but things are happening. I will also give you more info when that happens too :)"

(Early concept artwork)
Although development has slowed somewhat, it's nice to see that the game is still being worked on, and if it's anywhere near the quality of their previous title, Downfall, you can be sure it'll be well worth the wait.

I'll have more news on this as soon as it surfaces.

Descent DXX-Rebirth AGA (v0.57.3)

The DXX-Rebirth project is dedicated to two First-Person Shooters from the nineties: Descent & Descent 2

DXX-Rebirth is a Source Port of the Descent and Descent 2 Engines for Windows, Mac OS, Linux (most *NIX systems), offering OpenGL graphics and effects, advanced Multiplayer, many improvements and new features.

Now, thanks to the god-like coding efforts of NovaCoder, it looks like these games may be on their way to an AGA machine near you.

Here's the man himself with a few more details;

"I couldn't get very far with Hyperion's Descent port so I decided to just do my own.

So after 3 attempts to port this (and 2 months work!), here's the first video -> Descent DXX-Rebirth "

Before you get too excited, NovaCoder points out that at the moment he's currently busy working on NetSurf AGA, so he won't be able to give this port much time at present.

For further information on the DXX Rebirth Project, point your web browser over to http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/.

If you'd like to follow the progress of the Amiga version(s), I'd recommend following this thread over on the English Amiga Board.

I'll post further news on this as and when it surfaces.

The Hall of Light - The First Ten Years (2002-2012)

While "Spec-chums" have the long-running World of Spectrum to cater for all their Speccy based needs, and C64 owners look to Lemon64 for their fix, those with an Amiga haven't been quite as well catered for over the years.

This situation began to change 10 years today, when a number of Amiga fans came together to launch what is now known as The Hall of Light - one of, if not THE, largest Amiga game reference archives on the internet.

Here's CodyJarrett to explain how the project got off the ground in the first place;

"Surprising as it may seem, [today] sees the tenth anniversary of the Hall of Light's public launch. The website went live on Saturday 14th December 2002 although work had been happening behind the scenes and offline earlier that year and before.

The HOL evolved from an earlier idea for a game database which was called the EAB's Amiga Game Database (AGD). There was already a website called the Amiga Games Database but it seems that RCK just picked a descriptive working title.

I had been working on a separate offline list of Amiga games which was prompted by Amiga Power's "Absolute Power" guide (http://amr.abime.net/issue_24 and http://amr.abime.net/issue_27). Amiga Power's guide attempted to list every Amiga game ever and it later became a book called, you've guessed it, The Official Guide to Every Amiga Game Ever (although it did miss out quite a lot of games!)"

CodyJarrett continues...

"My Amiga list aimed to provide screenshots for all the games listed in Amiga Power's book and I created lots of the so-called Double Barrel Screenshots (DBS) with a titlescreen on the left and an in-game screen on the right. It also featured some Amiga Power mini-reviews. The list turned into a set of HTML pages which was viewed locally or from a CD but was only ever a personal project.

It was called Those Were the Days and looked horrible. I also did screenshots for non-Amiga platforms.

Shield your eyes!"

To read the complete story charting the early days of The Hall of Light, including a selection of images from a decade ago, point your web browser towards the following thread over on the English Amiga Board: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=855102#post855102

The above article provides a fascinating insight into just how far the project has come in just 10 years, and is well worth 5 minutes of your time.