Things have been a little... erm, fraught of late here at Oldschool Gaming towers so, rather than flood the news with all those releases I haven't already documented, here's a single post covering loads of new games!

Mojon Twins Covertape #2 (Spectrum)
After being quiet for simply ages, those pesky Mojon Twins are back in force with a cassette image full of Spectrum releases. Side 1 contains Lala Lah, D'Veel'Ng, Julifrustris in the City, Bootee, the amusingly named Jet Paco and a playable demo of Sir Ababol 2 whilst side 2 harbours Balowwwn, Dogmole Tuppowski vs. the Mesmerizing Meemaid From Miskatonic, Monono, an update of Viaje al Centro de la Napia called Journey to the Centre of the Nose, Mega Meghan and Ramire the Vampire and the mushroom of Cheshire. No seriously, those are the actual names! Almost all of these twelve titles are fairly typical Mojon-style platform or maze action games, usually with some cleavage on the loading pictures.

Gommy Medieval Defender (MSX)
Next up is an MSX conversion of Gommy Medieval Defender from the Spectrum courtesy of Retroworks. After his compatriots all mysteriously disappear, Gommy is left to defend the castle alone by standing at the top of the battlements and lobbing things at the invading hordes making their way up the outer walls.

Shmup! (MSX)
It won't be any surprise to find out that the next MSX title Shmup! is a shoot 'em up... but it does have an interesting two ships under single player control mechanic, as well as a power-up that fuses the two ships together.

Vampe: GOTO Vampe (Spectrum)
Back to the Spectrum again and Vampe: GOTO Vampe is described by the developer Valdiras an arcade maze game with survival elements which is a sequel to his previous 2013 release Vampe. I've not had a chance to play it yet, but the responses in the World of Spectrum thread seem positive.

VIC 20 games by Kurt Johns
Finally, there's a collection of VIC 20 releases from developer Kurt Johns been made more readily available online; four of these games are new (as in released during 2013) but, since they come as a collection, we might as well mention the lot! There's thirty one games on the website, all available to purchase on cassette or download for free. The author has drawn particular attention to Boogieman, Exploria and Korque over at the Denial forums, which look like this:

Avatar's latest C64 release is a puzzle game called Lights On. The objective is simple; moving over each square on the game board will light it up, passing over it again turns the light off and the player must get every light lit to complete the stage.

  • External link:   Lights On at the CSDb

Request In Peace (or RIP for short) is a single screen action game for the Spectrum; carry the right item to each grave to help the tormented souls because hidden somewhere in the graveyard is an item worth loads of cash. The download comes with documentation containing some... erm, colourful language.

  • External link:   Request In Peace at Bytemaniacos

Okeydokey, there's three new reviews have just been added. We've got a conversion of Spectrum classic Sabre Wulf to the Commodore Plus/4 (or indeed any machine in the series with 64K) for those who fancy a spot of exploration and something that looks a little like Ghosts 'n' Goblins for the Atari 8-bit called Ghastly Night.

Finally there's More Tea, Vicar? which is a scrolling shoot 'em up for the Spectrum with a silly storyline about tea being outlawed and clergymen acting as smugglers. Anyone fancy a cuppa...?

Jonathan Cauldwell has just released Arcade Game Designer 4, the latest instalment of his powerful but easy to use development tool which opens up developing Spectrum games to pretty much everybody - the results from the previous releases speak for themselves but, as the man himself said in the news post to the Oldschool Gaming forum, "this is the tool you really wanted back in the 1980s".

  • External link:   Arcade Game Designer forums

The now annual RGCD 16K Cartridge Competition was launched a few days ago. For those who haven't followed the previous installments, the rules are pretty simple; each entry has to run from just 16K of cartridge ROM. Previous years have seen some excellent games such as Molusk, C64anabalt and Jar's Revenge. In fact there's already four entries announced including Max Hall's Cosmic Ark and Rocket Smash, both of which we've been quietly following during development. More information, a list of entries and the complete competition rules are over at the RGCD website.

  • External link:   16K Cartridge Competition at RGCD

Released for the PET by Mr Nop (who also wrote Oil's Well), Ladybug is an implementation of the coin-op game of the same name. That means collecting items using the rotating doors to aid in avoiding nasties.

  • External link:   Ladybug (download) at Oldschool Gaming
  • News source:  Format War forums

Just a quick update to put three more reviews online; for the shoot 'em up fans out there we're looking at some fifteen metre high battle robots in Mecha 8 on the MSX and there's a spot of time-based blasting courtesy of Paul Kooistra's Dead on Time for the Amstrad CPC. And speaking of Amstrad hardware, fans at the more masochistic end of the platforming action scale might want a peek at Rick Dangerous 128+, which adds improved graphics and the screens that were missing from the original CPC version.