See, there’s this site run by a mad coding genius called Jayenkai, and for a good long time now he’s made it his purpose to craft games of many and varied types, but limiting himself to just a week of development time on each. The prospect of keeping this up for even a month or two would probably scare the pants off most sane people, but in fact  AGameAWeek.com has grown to include an incredible library of his efforts! Sadly, until now, I have not advertised this incredible feat in any way. Sorry about that; a most lamentable oversight on my part.

Anyway, yes – do not be deceived, dear reader, into thinking that just because a game took only a week to make that it must somehow be a load of rubbish. Nothing could be further from the truth! Jay has mastered the technique to a fine art, and pretty much all of his projects – for the PC and also some for the DS – are worth looking at.

To make it easier for you, he has recently bundled together his entire collection of work in a series of Zip files, labelled according to their ranking. If you didn’t fancy browsing through the entire  Jayenkai Archive and downloading each title individually, you can now get the whole lot in party-sized compilation packs from this blogpost. Happy time!

Breaking news! IT’S BACK!
RGCD #5 is now available!

And with it comes a spifftastic and star-studded selection of reviews, articles and extras covering a year’s worth of retro gaming. You thought it was dead, didn’t you? I’ll admit that I was thinking the same at one stage. Fortunately it is not so! James Monkman and his band of merry men have come up with the goods and, after some turbulent times, the mag should hopefully be back on a regular update schedule again.

Thrustburst is the featured game (though if I had my way it would’ve undoubtably been Qwak instead), with reviews of Rana Remake, Noitu Love 2, 3D Starstrike, Self Destruct and Rom Check Fail amongst the many PC titles you can read up about.

In the authentic “modern retro” corner there’s Sirius, Loops of Zen, Sub Hunter, Animal Party, Wizard of Wor (for the Speccy!), Plutos and the trip-off-the-tongue Crocodingus in Cube Island to name but a mere few.

This just scratches the surface! Honestly, there’s more stuff in it than I could cover in a week of posting – 45 articles and over 47,000 words, to be exact – so get your browser over to the RGCD homepage to download your copy today for a right proper blast from the past.

Oh, and if you look carefully, you’ll see some of this mysterious “writing work” that I was on about the other week, since yours truly is now a RGCD contributer. It was indeed a very cool thing to be given the chance to write for one of my favourite retro mags. Why James wanted to involve a nutter like me we’ll never know… I suspect it may be best not to wonder too much on that

Anyhow – happy reading, ’til next issue!

Perfect! Just in time for all of us to have a nice, comfy playthrough before Christmas, the 2008 Retro Remakes competition entries are now available to download! A big congratulatory slap on the back must go to everyone who got something together during the three months of coding time, and special thanks to the RR staff for braving the piles of paperwork and getting it all organised.

A quick note, though. Keep in mind that RR’s bandwidth is limited and goes through the roof at times like this, so try to avoid hitting refresh every couple of seconds if the page isn’t loading for you. Go have a nice cup of tea, perhaps with some digestive biscuits (or even ginger nuts if you’re so inclined), then try again

Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to make time to have a proper hands-on with a few of the entries. Blast Passage, Mini Saboteur, The Kiwi’s Tale and Revenge of the Punched Tape immediately catch my eye – Retroman and Cosmic Prison Commando might get a look too. Bonus points for the most bizarre combination of two 8-bit games has to go to Tetroid, however… it’s Metroid, with Tetris blocks in it! What on earth is going on there?!

On a closing note, this is the second time that (for various reasons) I didn’t have chance to put an entry in for the compo myself so I’m a little sad, but come hell or high water it will be third time lucky when – indeed, if – the competition rolls around again!

Until next time… let’s retro!

Say hello to the Skwawker. Wizard hats for the win!

I’ve been having wagonloads of fun with it, even though I should actually be doing something constructive… so much fun that I was utterly sucked in to the experience and was entirely unable to post about it yesterday as I should have! Oh well  Having reached the space stage today, some of the other evolutionary phases don’t give you all that much to do, but even then, it’s still enjoyable to just look around and explore what Maxis - and all the other Spore players around the world – have created to fill up this tremendous artificial universe.

On my first trip through the creature stage, it was quite comical to stumble upon an epic (i.e. big, stompy, kill-you-in-one-bite) version of a creature that I’d made up with the Creature Creator over six weeks ago – especially considering that I’d only bothered to make 3 different critters back then Probably part of the game’s design, but still, very cool.

In any case, here’s a few screenshots of my first alien and some of their vehicles and buildings. If you want to look at my full catalog, that’s easy too – search for user Zolyx in the Sporepedia. Fwee!