Raiden

Grab your joystick!

It's been almost a year since I first mentioned news of Raiden's development for the Atari STe by none other than our favourite Frogger dude, Scott Clifford. Sadly, his commitments forced the project to be temporarily put on hold. Thankfully, he has restarted and is making good progress (I'm keeping my fingers crossed).

The initial work behind the scrolling, backgrounds, and sprites is coming together. Also, the enemy sprite routines and placements are now being coded. Quite incredible for a one-man effort and it's a very exciting project to see in progress. I wish Scott well and eagerly await the next update (hurry up mate - I can't wait).

Watch this space, and the plan is rolling around inside Scott's head...

- Hardware scrolling is used for the entire screen - no status panel.
- DMA hardware for the playback of authentic arcade music.
- The Blitter will be utilised for the larger sprites.
- YM chip will be used for the sound effects.
- Support for the JagPad controller can be implemented.
- Please note that my video was recorded using emulation (better on my Atari STe)

Operation Garfield

Wolves eat cats

I've been browsing through the Floppyshop archives and stumbled upon a game called Operating Garfield by Dave Brankin. It’s inspired by Operation Wolf, but what caught my eye is that it’s made for the Atari STe. The Blitter handles the 8-way scrolling and sprites, while the audio makes use of the DMA stereo.

So, how’s it different from Operation Wolf? Well, it’s not - it’s a blatant ripoff and another mouse-controlled crosshair shooter. The story, though, is nuts! This time, aliens invade Earth, but they’ve decided to disguise themselves as Garfield - that lazy orange cat from TV. Safe to say, they’ve severely misjudged us!

The action plays out over a scrolling city skyline, with massive Garfield heads firing rockets from the rooftops. Using the mouse, you shoot down both rockets and heads. It’s that simple. While you're frantically blasting away in this pseudo-3D missile command, keep an eye out for smart bombs and ammo caches. There’s also a Defender-style radar at the top-left, but honestly, I found that too small, so almost useless.

Unfortunately, the difficulty is off the scale, so I rarely got to see the later levels. The scrolling could’ve been smoother, especially given the STe hardware. It’s better on a real machine, but nowhere near Asteroidia levels. Worst of all are the T2-style samples - good, but they’ll grate quickly. Gimme chip fx any day!

Operation Garfield isn’t meant to be taken seriously - it offers a few minutes of stress-busting fun. Think of it as a cheap Op. Wolf ripoff with lots of pointless yet satisfying Garfield-killing. Not great, but worth a play.

- DOWNLOAD -

GEM Desktop

When wallpapers weren't a standard

DeskFX is a GEM utility I thought was pretty cool and entertaining, if annoyingly flawed. It replaces three parts of our beautiful GEM desktop - the default font, a choice of wallpaper, and an animated mouse pointer. As you can see, above, the wallpaper feature only updates every 2/3 seconds which is lame compared to DeskPic. However, the new fonts are superb and (like a big kid) I loved playing with various animated pointers!

It appears the author had an STFM and DeskFX worked fine on my computer in both resolutions. Sadly, I couldn't get it to work on my Atari STe in LOW resolution - only in medium res. Not in the sense of available colours but in terms of functionality, who uses low to work? Who still works on their ST? ;-)

I thought this was a nice utility to share; grab the download on disk UTL-4410 over at Floppyshop.

Grap

Atarimania's Marko Latvanen sent me a game developed by Tangram programmer, Mark Luthe, for the German magazine ST Magazin. Grap first appears as a Tempest clone but is actually a puzzler which I'm sure will appeal to the brainiacs? It was originally sold through the publication as a "budget" mail-order back in 1990 but hasn't been available since. I am very excited by this rare and fascinating find and I hope you enjoy playing it :-)

The only place you shall find Grap is on the excellent AtariMania website.

Computer Magazine Archive has more on ST Magazin (you'll need Google Translate)

Thinkers might wanna check out our "Puzzle" section right here on AtariCrypt :)

Falcon

Game changer

It's satisfying to finally complete a favourite collection of something we love. I have just managed to complete the Falcon trio. Sure, there is a compilation release that bundles the lot together, but I've never been impressed with many like that. I want the original, individual, games. Now I finally have 'em all! :)

I still remember when I first saw this game. A game-changing moment in my history that my old ZX Spectrum heart couldn't believe. The visuals, the audio, and the feeling of flight. Wow, Falcon is a brilliant flight sim with awesome graphics and many interesting locations to fail its many missions! So here is my special 3x cover feature for our Box Art section. Why not take your own F-16 for a spin today?

AtariMania features every Falcon release within their ST database...

     ~ Falcon
     ~ Mission Disk 1 Operation: Counterstrike
     ~ Mission Disk 2 Operation: Firefight
 - 8BitChip has done it again and adapted a Falcon bundle for hard drive installation.
 - Old Game Finder has the floppies for those poor souls without the original disks or a hard drive! :p