[New Game Uploaded] Megablasters: Escape from Castle in the Clouds

[Gryzor]

File Name: Megablasters: Escape from Castle in the Clouds
File Submitted: February 1, 2015, 6:11:14 PM


Have you realised it's been 20 years since the release of the original Megablasters?

Let's celebrate with this special little game by Project Argon!

Coding: Axelay
Graphics: rexbeng
Sound and music: McKlain and Tom&Jerry.
Original game by Odiesoft.


Released 2015/01


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Click here to download this file

[Ast]

Really fine ! Congratulation to all the team ! This version is soooo goooooddd !

[Gryzor]

Indeed it is... I played just for a little bit and it seemed ace to me!!!

[CraigsBar]

Original megablasters was one of the best CPC games every. This one seems to kill me all to often. Maybe I am a particularly bad mega blaster, but the instant pixel overlap death spoils the fun somewhat. Great presentation and fantastic McKlain tunes, but IMHO not as fun as the original. Sorry I want to love this, but I died just to often. I live the vanishing baddies though.

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

[MacDeath]

2015 starts great, may become a great CPC year...


I love Rexbeng use of palette and style, but really, I'm not into too much horizontal lines, prefer 50/50 ditherings.

Will get a look at it anyway, must look even better on real screen.

[Nich]

Have you realised it's been 20 years since the release of the original Megablasters?

No, I didn't! Sheesh, where is my life going?!

Anyway, I like it, but I found it a lot harder than the original game (although I haven't played the original in a long time). On my first couple of goes I found the metallic robot heads to be very difficult to destroy, but then I found a tactic that seems to work.

Will this game see a physical release from Psytronik like most of Axelay's others?

[Morri]

Amazing game. Congratulations! I love the graphics personally, gives the game a darker / edgier feel.
Agree with the difficulty, I died extremely quickly but I love bombers so I shall endure.

May I ask how many levels / stages the game has as I amazed it all fits onto 1 dsk file compared to multiple dsk's in the original. Smaller game or amazing compression?

[villain]

Huh? Already more than twenty years passed since we were sitting at Marabu´s castle and Odiesoft philosophized about his code? And already twenty years since Gert Genial crossed the bridge over the Rhine in Konstanz, trying to spit into the river against the wind direction? And also twenty years ago that we were sitting in a piano bar in Konstanz drinking Weizenbier that was much too expensive? Seems to be true... Thanks guys for reminding me. 

The game looks great, but I always died really quick...

[Axelay]

Will this game see a physical release from Psytronik like most of Axelay's others?

May I ask how many levels / stages the game has as I amazed it all fits onto 1 dsk file compared to multiple dsk's in the original. Smaller game or amazing compression?

Two different questions, but answered with the same point.  Escape from Castle in the Clouds is a small mini-game to celebrate the anniversary, so it features only one world, though with a few more rounds than a world had in the original game, and the two player mode gets some different maps too.


It wouldnt, I suspect, warrant a standalone physical release.


That said, it's a quite large mini game.  Without modern compression it would likely have been both sides of a disk. 


With the difficulty, it's probably worth remembering that the original game gives you an energy bar, which we dropped for this game.

[Ast]

Can you Tell us more about the sprites displayed way you use ?

[Misel982001]

The technic used on this game makes it an equivalent of any 8bit game console!

[Axelay]

Can you Tell us more about the sprites displayed way you use ?

Are you sure you want to ask that here?  Could be a bit dull for the games section. 

Spoiler: ShowHide

Well, OK, the game uses compiled sprites.  They are locked to even lines to halve the address line calculation with a bit set moving down every other line, and the most common values are stored in registers for writing to screen ram rather than transferring from memory.  The overscan screen start positions are set so that the second part of the screen starts at the beginning of a new line and lookup tables are used to get line addresses, so the compiled sprite routines dont need to make any checks for encountering the second part of the overscan screen memory.

[arnoldemu]

I was going to guess compiled sprites and adjusting the overscan screen start.

[Ast]

Are you sure you want to ask that here?  Could be a bit dull for the games section. 

Spoiler: ShowHide

Well, OK, the game uses compiled sprites.  They are locked to even lines to halve the address line calculation with a bit set moving down every other line, and the most common values are stored in registers for writing to screen ram rather than transferring from memory.  The overscan screen start positions are set so that the second part of the screen starts at the beginning of a new line and lookup tables are used to get line addresses, so the compiled sprite routines dont need to make any checks for encountering the second part of the overscan screen memory.

Exactly what i think    really great coding...

[EgoTrip]

Great presentation, but that enemy that just appears right where you are without warning and kills you makes the game broken and unplayable. No thanks.

[TFM]

Great Game! Great introduction story. I use sprites in a similar way, saves a lot of time. Big Thanks to all the development team!!! 

[rexbeng]

Great presentation, but that enemy that just appears right where you are without warning and kills you makes the game broken and unplayable. No thanks.

There's no such thing in this game.


rb

[rexbeng]

Thanks for the comments everyone! As far as the game's dificulty goes, being a small game we didn't want MBEFCITC (lol!) to 'run short', so compared to the original Megablasters we decided it would be better to up the challenge a bit. When I say 'we', I obviously mean Axelay and I.


So it needs a bit of strategy to stay alive, and this requires some effort. Tough luck for those who'd expect the game to 'auto-complete' itself but, hey, stop behaving like you started gaming on a smartphone, pick up your gamepad and give it as many goes it takes! 


The game is not unbeatable, nor unfair. The enemies can overrun you if you are not careful but you can outsmart them if you are a bit resourceful, mind your surroundings and make good use of bonuses. In fact, there are many ways (styles) to play this game.


rb

[Gryzor]

So it needs a bit of strategy to stay alive, and this requires some effort.

Understatement, noun: the presentation of something as being smaller or less good or important than it really is.

[MacDeath]

but we are all nearly 40 or more... we became worse than casual gamers... 

[TFM]

I simply don't have the time to play a game for hours. It's boring when I can't advance. Meine drei Groschen. 

[Nich]

Two different questions, but answered with the same point.  Escape from Castle in the Clouds is a small mini-game to celebrate the anniversary, so it features only one world, though with a few more rounds than a world had in the original game, and the two player mode gets some different maps too.

It wouldnt, I suspect, warrant a standalone physical release.

Thanks for your answer. I noticed that the DSK file was around 104K compressed so I reckoned it was a fairly big game with lots of worlds, even after taking into account the long intro and the overscan menu.

[TFM]

Great presentation, but that enemy that just appears right where you are without warning and kills you makes the game broken and unplayable. No thanks.

You talk about this silver teleporter ball? Yes, just happened to me. It matierialized in my player character, 2 seconds later the same again. With 3 lifes... tough. One needs luck in this game, or a poke 

[EgoTrip]

I'm yet to get off level 1, because I keep getting stupid stuff happen that I cannot control or evade. Such as the teleporter ball materialising right in next to me and hitting me with me having no possible way to evade. Or getting trapped by 3 of the other enemies, dying and respawning only to get hit again more or less straight away, with no possible way to evade.

There is seriously no incentive to play a game where random shit kills the game. That IS unfair. I can handle a challenge, where something is genuinely difficult through good design. This is not it. I really dislike games that require more luck than skill in order to advance. Which is a shame because everything else about the game is really impressive.

[McKlain]

The "ball" doesn't teleport. It hides (cloaks) if you put a bomb on it's way, you can hear the "cloacking" sound when that happens, and after the bomb explodes, it comes back again at the same spot.


Maybe the game needs some gameplay instructions for everyone. We all know the basics of the game system, but it has it's peculiarities.