At the recent Southwest Show, a new game was being shown off and sold to show-goers by AMCOG Games – and as of a few days ago, that game is now available to purchase via !Store.
SCUBA Hunter is an arcade puzzle game set under water, in which you must swim around both open water and through cave systems, looking for diamonds to take back to your vessel. You must take care, though – in order to find all of the diamonds, you’ll have to move boulders out of the way, taking care to avoid having them fall on you, or to block your path. You also need to steer clear of jellyfish, octopuses, and sharks.
The game features many of the things you can normally expect from an AMCOG release – including four original music tracks (in this case produced using professional synthesisers, including classic 1980s analogue instruments – and keen listeners might detect a Jean-Michel Jarre influence), synthesised sound effects created in real-time with RDSP, plain text level data, and BBC BASIC source code, high resolution graphics, and smooth animation.
For this title, the game benefits from rotoscoped animation, whereby the frames of relevant images – such as the diver character – were traced from external images, so that the animated version appears to move in a manner closely matching the real thing.
The version available from !Store is 1.04, benefiting from a number of improvements since the one available at the Southwest Show, including improved boulder movement. As ever with AMCOG’s games, updates are available free of charge via !Store, so anyone who purchased it at the show can obtain their upgrade by using the code contained within the game packaging.
