This month in... The One '92

News

The transformation/infiltration/coup was complete and the team from ACE magazine had taken over reigns. The One for Amiga was now just "The One" as the ST mag had been rolled into ST Action. Notable changes included the scrapping of the developer profile section (which I personally liked) in favour of "special interviews" because the latter was "simply more interesting", and more detailed, critical reviews (the previous team may have gone a little easy on games). Jim Douglas was the new editor, and Gary Whitta returned as staff writer.

Konami snagged the rights to the "Batman Returns" game, which would be developed by Rage, a new company risen from the ashes of Special FX (which had been formed by ex-Ocean folk).

Commodore were about to launch a new Amiga, the A600. There didn't seem to be a whole lot to get excited about with the main new feature being a "Smart Card" slot. Software publishers could include an "uncopiable card" along with floppies for extra copy protection... but would any publishers actually do this? The A600 turned out to be one of the biggest, most baffling mis-steps of a company that had squandered the amazing lead the Amiga had given it 7 years earlier.

"The Lawnmower Man" looked like it could be one of this Summer's blockbusters and The Sales Curve had acquired the game license (though I can't find evidence it was released).

In the aftermath of Robert Maxwell's death and the subsequent implosion of his empire, Acclaim had bought Renegade and this month saw the news that the Image Works label would continue (for now). The American publisher also had the rights to the eagerly awaited movie, "Aliens 3".

As mentioned above, developer Special FX had closed up shop and the team had re-formed as Rage. While they would continue to develop games for other software houses (though, interestingly enough, specifically not Ocean) they planned to publish titles themselves. 3D footie game "Striker" was the first game on the way.

Several developers teased the possibility of sequels to classic games. Andrew Braybrook confirmed he was working on "Uridium 2", while Archer Maclean was pondering either "Snooker 2" or "IK+ Deluxe", and Jez San said preliminary design work on "Starglider 3" had been done and that they were looking for "the right deal". Only the first of those would see the light of day. Team 17 were following up "Project X" with "Alien Breed" (The One thought this was a sequel) and Titus had "Blues Brothers 2" on the way (though it was not released).

Maxis had found huge success with "Sim City" and "Sim Earth". "Sim Ant" had just been released, and the next Sim game was to be "Sim Body" (simulation of the human body) and "Sim Soap" - a simulation of the day to day happenings on the set of a soap opera. Neither of which appeared.

Publisher Electronic Zoo - perhaps best known for "Battle Squadron" - shut up shop.

While US Gold had the official rights to the Barcelona Olympics, Psygnosis were planning one of their own. Written by Teque London, it promised digitised graphics of real athletes to produce "authentic action".

Gremlin had a couple of treats in store for racing fans. Magnetic Fields was working on "Lotus: The Final Challenge", which would feature a track designer, and while not much was known about the "Nigel Mansell" game, apparently the "early road routines" were "some of the most spectacular ever seen."

In a bid to prevent other developers knicking their ideas, there would be no previews or in-development pieces of the next instalment in Dino Dini's "Kick Off" series, "Kick Off 3". Or at least that's the excuse they gave for keeping it under wraps. I'm not sure if it started out this way, but this one was not written by Dino.

Helicopter shoot-em up "Apocalypse" looked to be yet another victim of the Mirrorsoft collapse, as doubts grew that it would see the light of day due to legal wranglings over ownership and the break up of the team.

With the European Championships coming up, publishers were looking to cash in with no less than 8 football games due to hit the Amiga. US Gold took a slightly different tack in launching a compilation call "The Lineker Collection" which included "Italy 1990", "Hot Shot" and "Microprose International Soccer Challenge".

The Golden Joystick winners were:

• 16-Bit Game of the Year: "Heimdall" Core Design
• Overall Game of the Year: Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega)
• Programmer of the Year: Archer Maclean
• Software House of the Year: Electronic Arts
• Best Graphics: "Heimdall" Core Design
• Best Soundtrack: "The Secret of Monkey Island" Lucasfim/US Gold
• Best Simulation: "Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker" Virgin
• Best Coin-Op Conversion: "Toki" Ocean

Sensible Software's upcoming "Sensible Soccer" had been signed to Renegade, not Ocean as reported in last month's issue. While apparently being the most previewed title of the year, one new tidbit was popstar Captain Sensible would be on music duties.

The Computer Shopper Show was to take place at Olympia in May. For the first time it would feature an area dedicated to all things Amiga.

Features

On the cover disk this month:

• "Fire & Ice" Graftgold/Renegade
• "The Humans" Mirage
• PD games "Yelp!", "Microbes" and "Asteroids".
• A pretty novel "Bullfrog's Interactive Work In Progress" application which presented the user with scanned photos of the office, with bits that could be clicked on for more info, including chats with the devs and sneak peaks of upcoming games ("BOB" and "Populous II: Challenge Game data disk").
• The latest user submitted "Microprose Golf" and "Jimmy White's" shots.

Gary Whitta gathered seven of the biggest and brightest stars of UK games in a pub for a chat over a few beers. Those present were: Peter Molyneux, Jez San, Archer Maclean, David Braben, Eric Matthews, Jon Hare and Michael Powell.

A guide on add ons and peripherals to create the Ultimate Amiga.

PD Zone featured: "Lemmingoids", "Obliteration", "Mad Bomber 2", "Smash Telly", "Smash TV: the Rip-Off" and "Atic Atac" (unofficial, of course).

"Wanted!" - a light hearted rundown of gaming's most wanted baddies.

Notable Previews

• "The Humans" Mirage
• "ShadowWorlds" Teque London/Krisalis
• "James Pond Presents: Aquabatics" Millennium
• "Graham Taylor's Soccer Challenge" Krisalis
• "Football Kid" Krisalis
• "S.A.S." Krisalis
• "Vikings: Fields of Conflict" Krisalis
• "Euro Football Champ" Domark
• "Zool" Gremlin

Notable Reviews

• "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - the Action Game" US Gold - 82% "Still, quibbles aside, if you're as big a fan of the Indiana Jones movies as I am then you should be equally chuffed with this: it's one game even Indy would take his hat off to!"
• "Ultima VI" Origin/Mindscape - 91% "There's no other RPG that comes within a mile of matching Ultima VI's huge depth and amazingly real atmosphere."
• "Project X" Team 17 - 90% "If you're a newcomer to the Amiga, this game is a perfect example of what the machine can be made to do. And if you're a jaundiced old-hand who thought you'd seen it all, it'll open your eyes."
• "Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon" SSI/US Gold - 87% "Wouldn't it be nice, though, to be able to say there was anything about the game which was surprising, innovative or original? That there isn't is probably not going to stop dedicated RPG players flocking to their local emporium in droves, but it's certainly not going to attract any new converts to this particular genre of game."
• "Deliverance" 21st Century Entertainment - 81% "Though a little rough around the edges, the no-nonsense baddy-battling and exploration action makes Deliverance one of the best arcade adventures I've seen this year."
• "John Barnes European Football" Krisalis - 80% "How to describe Krisalis' latest in a nutshell? Well, it's not quite as good as Barnsey plays for Liverpool, but it's a damn sight better than he plays for England."
• "Fire & Ice" Graftgold/Renegade - 92% "Fire and Ice is truly excellent, the best platformer since, ooh, Rainbow Islands (another Braybrook game). Miss this and you'll feel dog rough."

Charts

Games

1. "Project X" Team 17
2. "Black Crypt" Electronic Arts
3. "Formula One Grand Prix" Microprise

Diary of a Game: Part 2 - Matching and Testing

Once again a depressing amount of time has passed since my last update. Given what's on my plate workwise over the next few months I suspect the sporadic nature of my posts will continue. Thankfully I have continued to find time to chip away at the game, and some progress has been made.

After I managed to get a super rough first pass of the (very) initial base of the game done (with the balls/bubbles/whatever falling down the board and stacking up correctly), the next thing to tackle was the colour matching. This ended up being a rather humbling endeavour as my initial confidence met the realities of my inexperience with 6502 coding.

The first step was get the connecting neighbours for each any given cell on the board, which was straightforward enough.

Finding the neighbours of each cell.

With a simple routine to return a list of neighbours for a given cell, I could move on to figuring out all of the matching connected items. This is where things got a little complicated. The board on which the items appear can be viewed as a graph/network of connected nodes. Most nodes have up to 6 neighbours, whereas those on the edges & corners of the board have up to 2, 3 or 4 depending on their position. Chains of connected items can potentially use every cell on the board. So I decided to use a basic graph/network search, which looks something like ...
For a given item:

1. Push the item onto the "open" stack (items that need to be visited)
2. While the open stack has items on it:
3. Pop an item
4. Mark it as matched & visited
5. Get a list of matching neighbours
6. Iterate through each neighbour, and if they haven't been visited then push them onto the open stack.
7. Go to step 2

While this is the kind of thing I've done many times in more fully featured languages, I really struggled to get my head around doing it with 6502. The fact that I didn't have decent chunks of time to sit down and focus on it didn't help. I eventually got there, though, and the moment where it finally worked was one of the most satisfying achievements for me in recent times, which is somewhat amusing.

Testing the matching chains of items.

What this all highlighted for me was that I really needed to spend some time improving my testing and debugging process. The C64Debugger was useful, though I just can not seem to get it to load symbols - I keep meaning to download the source and have a poke around. I had never really explored debugging in VICE, but I found this blog post a great introduction. Once I realised I could load symbols, VICE was a huge help (I had previously been manually printing out addresses at compile time in KickAssembler).

But as I went back to refactor and optimise routines I found myself getting pretty frustrated at subtle bugs creeping in which became difficult to track down. Thankfully there is a nice unit test solution for the C64. Yes, unit testing on the C64. Michael Taszycki of the excellent 64Bites video series has created the 64spec framework, which allows you to setup unit tests and run them on the 64 (or in an emulator). This now allows me to make changes and have some confidence that if I break anything I'll be able to catch it early.

One of unit tests. I have multiple files for each major component.

Oh dear, something went wrong somewhere. Time to debug.

And so now things are at the point where balls/bubbles/whatever fall down, stack up and get removed when chains of 3+ matching items are found. Next on my plate is some more refactoring and optimisation, then I need to tackle using sprites for the moving items so they look a little less crap.

Confidential Magazine #7 October/November 1989

While they didn't reveal actual subscription figures, the situation sounded a bit grim - the membership fee was to increase and there was a plea for readers to spread the word.

Meanwhile the helpline seemed to have switched to be a largely answering machine based service, and there was a request for solutions to a bunch of big recent adventures.

In this issue:

• The news included details of several upcoming adventures from Electronic Arts and Gary Gygax consulting for Infogrames on "Drakkhen".
• A look at "Talespin", a hypercard type package that allowed people to combine images and text into a series of pages connected via links.
• Details of the "Rainbow Warrior" game that featured arcade sequences depicting Greenpeace campaigns.
• Game industry agent Jacqui Lyons filed a report of a trip to the Soviet Union to meet with developers.
• A preview of "Elvira".
• A profile of strategy/role playing specialists SSI.
• An inteview with Horrorsoft's Mike Woodroffe.
• Play By Mail game "Gothick".
• Part 2 of the "Writing Your Own Adventures" series.
• Advice on how to go about running your own LARP events.
• This month's story was "Future's End" by Simon Scarrow.

Zzap!64 Annual 2019 Kickstarter launched

The folks behind last year's rather excellent Crash Annual are back. Chris Wilkins, Roger Kean and Oli Frey have teamed up once again, this time to resurrect Crash's sister mag, Zzap!64, for an annual due out towards the end of the year.

I must admit I didn't read the Kickstarter pitch or even watch the video before backing it as there was no question in my mind, so it was only through seeing people discussing it online that I realised that the likes of Mel Croucher, Julian Rignall and Robin Hogg were also involved. If that wasn't reason enough to back it, there's the return of the White Wizard adventure section (including an interview with Scott Adams), Simon Butler casting his over C64 fan art, Paul Rand on a day in the life of producing Zzap!64 back in the day, and perhaps most interestingly, a gathering of old school legends (Andrew Braybrook and Archer Maclean were mentioned) reminiscing about the C64 over a pint. The articles that have stuck in my mind from when I was a regular Zzap!64 reader were where they gathered a few industry greats to shoot the breeze (e.g. The Musicians Ball).

At the time of writing - a mere 2 days after it launched - the £20,000 target has been smashed, with almost £35,000 pledged. The first stretch goal has been met, and I have my fingers crossed the next one at £40,000 (a calendar) won't be too far away.