Christmas Surprises, Part Five

There's enough news to cover. Let's start, as usual, with games.

Has everyone seen the Automania box art yet? Kickstarter is starting soon, and I really want to participate, even though this game will go to everyone who backed KS3.

Lampros Potamianos hasn't written anything in a while, but now he's almost released a new game, Combustion (Pyromania). It's a port of a classic game, but just look how good it is! The author has fixed all the flaws of the original and is finishing the final fixes, so we might even see this game in December.

Billy Bovver in Parkland Panic is a yet-to-be-released Pac-Man clone by Steve Edwards. For now only game sprites are available. The chances of seeing it are slim, but we've already added it to the database, as we keep track of such projects as well.

I hope you didn't have time to read the rest of this page, because I just found another game I want to share. Lee Smith's Janky Miner is one of those projects that was almost ready and looked absolutely amazing, but years later, it never came to fruition. According to Facebook, the author has at least two more promising games and one nice tech demo, but all of them exist only as videos or screenshots...

Let's move on to the apps. It turns out the database still has holes that need to be patched.

knloader by kounch is a real game launcher. It remembers the settings for each game and also shows a screenshot. It looks nice, but I haven't tested it myself; I only learned about it yesterday, even though it's been around for years.

Skate Training I: Transitionanigans by Jim Waterman is a fun, but for most of us, useless utility designed to improve rollerblading or ice skating skills.

It should be noted that ZNC Compiler and Boriel ZX BASIC have been updated since then. BASIC is updated frequently; it's a very lively project.

And today I have three demos for you.

A brand new project, Raycasting on Next, by Dragon's Lord; the first version was released for the classic Speccy.

Colour Cycling Wool by Matt Langley (restored from source).

Isometric Fun by Paul Dunning. It looks very cool, but the author is reluctant to release the source code.