Launched at the recent Wakefield in Bradford Show, 3D Pingo is a new title from AMCOG Games, and it is now available to buy from !Store.
3D Pingo is a sideways scrolling platform game for RISC OS that offers the player a three dimensional perspective on the playing area, with movement possible not just left and right, but also deeper into the play area and back out of it towards the ‘camera’. Vertical movement is also possible, by jumping or climbing steps to go higher, and falling to go lower. Ideally, though, it’s best to avoid falling – play takes place on platforms high above the ground!
Your goal is to guide Pingo around the platforms, avoiding the various bad guys – and, as noted, falling off – to collect all of the sky jewels. Once you have them all, you can make your way to the exit to finish the level.
The game features:
- Four original music tracks by AMCOG’s Tony Bartram, and real time sound effects produced via RDSP.
- Eight levels to play through, and three difficulty settings.
- Three dimensional game play, on a 720p screen.
- User definable keys and, on RISC OS 5, joystick support.
- Full source code included so, should you be interested, you can learn how a game like this is put together.
If you’d like to see the game in action before buying, why didn’t you come to the show? Okay, just for you, then, Tony has popped up a video of it in action.
Suitable for RISC OS 4.02 and 5, the game runs on most modern RISC OS platforms. The version available from !Store is 6.02, which has some improvements over the version sold at Wakefield, and it can be bought for just £9.99 – though if you bought it at the show, you should have found a code with the game to allow you to download the new version.
Now, observant readers will notice that I mentioned version 6.02. I asked Tony about that before writing this post, and he told me that the RISC OS version of the game isn’t the first version. In fact it has quite a rich history:
Version 1 was a hand drawn design dating back to 1985.
Version 2 was a BASIC version that was never released.
Version 3 was developed in 6502 assembler in the latter half of 1989 with the title Vortex, and Tony sent this version to Superior Software in the hope of them publishing it. There’s a video of the game on YouTube, and it can also be played online (and downloaded) from the BBC Micro games archive.
Version 4 was for a different platform altogether, and gained a different name – Rubber for the Amiga.
Version 5 brought the title back to this side of the fence, and was released as a ‘type in listing’ in volume 9, issue 4 of Drag ‘n Drop magazine.
And version 6, of course, is 3D Pingo – the game released by Tony at the recent Wakefield Show, taking the original concept and adding a little more depth in the form of the third dimension.
