redballoon

Don’t forget that Beyond The Ice Palace was going to be Elite’s unofficial sequel to Ghosts n’ Goblins.

Oh he's really done his homework and practiced! All legit times! Totally unbelievable but amazing! I'm here for the speed running You have to make no mistakes but you're also at the mercy of the positions of doors opening and closing.

That's Melkhior's Mansion now available on both Linux and Mac. It's the first time ever that we've released anything on those two platforms so go easy on us eh Spectrum Next and 128K versions up next at some point this year. We're not the developers on those two and just providing assets, moral support and answering any of their questions about it.

Version 1.1 is now available here. A few bug fixes and now with added thumbstick control is you use a controller to play.

Melkhior's magic eye of death. Do you want to know the remaining ones? As for Sir Stamperlot's times. Oh, the number of times I've fallen through a trap door at critical times...gnnngngngnghhgh. It's funny watching it happen to others but

we do talk to each other but i thought it’d be better emailing him so he’s got any bug logs coming in 1 place. The uses for the leaf, cross and eye of death aren’t quite right, though. 1 of them I find very useful, another useful for 1 of the quests. Yip, no donations but thank you anyway. I’m glad you enjoyed it. When testing it, I went from being utter rubbish at it, to completing all quests just about every game to now competing each quest as quickly as possible. We’re not submitting any of these speed times to the leaderboard but maybe we will in the future to see if someone can beat them. Personally, I’m hoping that someone actually gets out their pencil and paper and map it, just like the old days!

uuuuh i just did the art design and graphics. You could always drop an email with the log and that wee explanation of what you were doing at the time. The email address can be found here. Thanks! You'e got a top spot, too! YASS!

Aces, thanks! I'm not sure why the isometric viewpoint isn't used as much these days. You could easily set the camera and build it completely in 3D these days. But it can be a confusing viewpoint, so maybe that's a factor. That was a deliberate choice. We wanted to make it look like you were looking at a standard floor plan. That's not to say we didn't consider having it oriented the same way as the rooms, but we decided against it pretty quickly. The size of the map was a factor - it would've been bigger - plus it threw in some UI headaches and we just don't have the manpower to dwell on those type of issues. The map was a later addition to the game after it felt that some players might just find the game too difficult without some sort of guide, so in it went. I was initially against it, seeing as back in the Spectrum days, i'd always be looking forward to mapping games with a pencil and paper. Oh but that's the best thing!! It just makes things more frantic and that's what it's all about . We absolutely want you to panic! Not a great deal without having to try various things to see what works and change a few things. Hopefully, the bobbing item will be enough to either catch your attention or at least give a clue that there's something there. The other thing is that an item will slow you down and you can push them, so you'd eventually find it. We deliberately never filled the rooms with furniture and so on, and it's also a reason why we kept the doors as a portcullis so you can at least have some vision through them.

Glad you're enjoying it! Well, we decided to go follow the instructions for Atic Atac in that it tells you absolutely nothing on how to use the objects and what they're for! Time will tell whether that was the right decision! We thought it'd be fun for players to figure out what the objects were used for. Some are more useful than others but they all have their uses.

A proper Mac and Linux versions are in the works as wee speak, but those are a bit of a learning experience so a wee bit of work is still required on those! Somebody has managed to get the PC version running on a Mac, but no idea how. The Next and Spectrum 128K versions are still in progress and current estimation for them is this year, the 128K version is aiming to be released in April to coincide with the Spectrum's 40th birthday! We're not directly involved with the Next and 128K versions, though, I'm making the odd-graphical tweak on various things just so they'll fit. It's been a mad 24 hours since we released it, that's for sure!

Obv, he means David Flyncher.

Woah, I hate being that guy but imma have to be that guy. The Quill was by Gilsoft and they also released The Illustrator, which allowed you to add in graphics to text adventures created in The Quill. Gilsoft went onto release Professional Adventure Writer a few years later. The Graphic Adventure Creator was released by Incentive and had nothing to do with The Quill/Illustrator.

I was asked to convert the Klass of 99 graphics back to the ZX Spectrum absolutely years ago as there was a port in the works. I made a start but it fizzled out, sadly. Fast forward 12 or so years later and working on Melkhior’s Mansion, I let slip this useless nugget of information to MM’s coder…who then went in to try real to me that he was the coder of the original Ko99! Cool story, bro.

Just got another of the rarer Spectrum Codemasters games...£85. Brilliant! *goes to lie down and cry* 7 to go!

I stopped collecting ZX Spectrum games quite a few years ago but 11 months ago out of sheer boredom I decide to try and collect all of Codemasters’ ZX Spectrum releases. Even though I was a Spectrum collector for quite a few years and I’ve got a reasonably large collection, I found I only had 2 Codemasters games. There’s a total 111 games, 14 Quattro releases and 5 or so large box compilations. I decided I wouldn’t bother with the large box compilations but I may change my mind. Y’know, I thought it’d be relatively easy and inexpensive but I’ve been proved wrong. So, here I am 11 months into it. I managed to compete the 14 Quattro releases just at the beginning of the year and I’ve my 103rd - Soccer Pinball - out of the 111 on the way. There’s 15 or so of those games that only turn up every now and then and they’re all expensive. Most of these were £2.99 when they were released. I paid £70 for Soccer Pinball. It’s looking like I’ll have to spend around £800 for those remaining 8 titles. I don’t even want to work out how much I’ve already spent on this Codemasters collection. They look good but.

Nope, he's still very much here and still working on it, amongst other things.

The Next versions of Wonderful Dizzy and Rex are still in development. No idea about the rest, but.

Thanks! Maybe not this game - it’s going to be given away for free on current platforms; PC, Spectrum Next and Spectrum 128K and we’re seeing if we can get it on Android and iOS. Any sequels wouldn’t be free, though - yip, we’re even considering a sequel! Madness! - so Steam is something we could look at then.

Thanks! Here’s the direct link to the download.

We released a playable demo of our upcoming Atic Atac/Knight Lore inspired game, "Melkhior's Mansion" at the weekend, there...would anyone mind if I put the link up to download the PC demo?

Definitely go for loading from tape! It’s part of the journey, maaaan. Earlier on today I spent 20 or so minutes trying to get a game to load. Rewind the tape, alter the volume, press play, “R Tape loading error, 0:1” FUCK!, rewind, alter the volume slightly, press play. And repeat! But when that game finally loaded, I shouted out, “fucking YASS!”...then reset because the game was shite.

You can upgrade the original to 2MB but.

Second stretch goal hit -full colour manual. *cough* Melkhior's Mansion...