Or rather play a game called A-maze-ing!
Theorising that one could hype up a game within its own name, Tony Bartram of AMCOG Games sat in front of his home computer – which wasn’t a Sinclair QL – and wrote a game titled A-maze-ing.
Seeing its initial launch at the recent Wakefield (in Bradford) Show, A-maze-ing is described by Tony as a 2.5D maze shoot-em-up – and it is now more generally available.
The plot of the game involves a mad scientist, Professor Kraken, who has created a giant organism, fed with the support of an army of autonomous robots providing it with energy fields – but somehow things got out of hand, and the professor has himself been consumed by his own creation, and with it continuing to grow, things are becoming out of hand. It needs to be terminated.
This is where another of Kraken’s experiments comes into play – you! You are an energy being, and your unique physiology is the best chance there is of dealing with the problem organism.
Your objective is to explore the maze that is the professor’s laboratory complex in search of flasks of chemicals that can be used to destroy the organism – but you must work fast; it’s continuing to grow, and the longer it takes you to carry out your mission, the harder it will be; the bigger it is, the more of those chemicals you will need.
And being an energy being, you’ll need to sustain yourself – which you can do by collecting the same energy fields dropped by the robots to feed the organism.
Specific objectives are given at the start of each level – in some cases, you’ll only need to clear the level of robots, while on others you might need to collect all of the energy – but the bottom line is that one way or another, you’ll have a mixture of shooting robots, collecting power-ups, energy, and chemicals, and ultimately killing an out of control, ever-growing organism.
The game includes:
- 2.5D graphics – that’s where the graphics are depicted as though from a perspective to give them a three dimensional appearance, but the actual gameplay is restricted to a two dimensional plane – with eight directional scrolling.
- Four original music tracks and high quality sound effects.
- HD graphics, and a smooth walk animation.
- User definable keys, and joystick support.
The game is compatible with RISC OS 4 on VirtualAcorn, and RISC OS 5 on most platforms that can run it. However, for the Raspberry Pi it is recommended that the Pi 2 or later is used.
The version of the game now on general release is an update of the one released at the show – version 1.08 features an additional three levels and more graphics, as well as a few performance improvements and calibration fixes. Updates are free, so if you purchased the game on physical media at the show, check inside the case for an update code – you can use this to download the latest version from !Store. If you have yet to splash out, you can now do so – also via !Store – for just £9.99.
