Palace Software‘s Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back is the sequel to the cult hit, Cauldron, released in 1985. Cauldron II was first released for the Commodore 64 in 1986 and this is a conversion of that game. It features gameplay that is quite different to the original Cauldron, although it is essentially still a platform game at its core.
Continue reading Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back, ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum version of Palace Software‘s The Evil Dead video game was never released as a stand-alone title, although it was given away as a freebie on the b-side of the cassette for the ZX Spectrum version of Cauldron. Probably because Palace realised that no person in their right mind would pay money for a game this bad.
Palace Software‘s 1985 release, Cauldron, is a conversion of the Commodore 64 original, where you play as a witch who is on a quest to become the “Witch Queen” by defeating her opponent, “The Pumpking”.
Warlocked is a neat handheld Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game, developed by British company Bits Studios and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Color in 2000. Unfortunately, due to “poor sales”, it was only ever released in North America.
Snowball Sunday is a winter/Christmas-themed snowball fight game for the Commodore 64, written by Ashley Routledge and David Saunders. There isn’t much information available about it online, but from what I can tell it was given away free with various Commodore magazines in 1988. It was also freely available for download from Compunet (aka CNet) – an interactive service provider that was accessed via dial-up, that existed from 1984 to 1993.
This 2016 homebrew release for the ZX Spectrum is a tribute/sequel to the classic Hungry Horace, Horace Goes Skiing, and Horace and the Spiders games from Psion, originally developed in the early 1980s by Beam Software. It is a Christmas-themed Horace game written by Steve Broad.
Confuzion was written by Paul Shirley – of Spindizzy fame – and published by Incentive Software in 1985. It’s a sliding puzzle game where you have to re-arrange tiles so that a spark can reach a bomb before the timer runs out.
This ZX Spectrum conversion of the 1987 scrolling hack and slash arcade game from Taito was developed by Icon Design and published by Imagine Software in 1988. And it’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
The sequel to Castle Master continues where the first game left off: you’re still trapped inside Eternity Castle and must escape to finally complete your quest.
Castle Master II: The Crypt was the final Freescape game to be released for the Spectrum (or any system it found its way on to), and was only made available as a double pack with the original Castle Master, not long after the first Castle Master‘s release in 1990. It was again developed by Incentive Software/Major Developments and published by Domark.
The King of Grabs 