Break/Space – break it, but don’t pay for it

“To baldly go where no-one has gone before!”

Coming out of my shell (I’m busy, I’ve a real-life job and everything plus … acht who am I trying to kid I’m a lazy fucker. Anyway…) to punt you in the direction of Break/Space, a likeably compact, sci-fi space-faring roguelike for the ZX Spectrum. Originally programmed in BASIC as part of a game jam, it was subsequently ported to machine code and has received a number of updates to iron out bugs and tweak gameplay (as of writing it’s on V1.8). Combat, trading and exploration are all crammed into likeably jolly 8×8-graphic-based grids full of planets, alien ships and anomalys. And it’s free.
More information and downloads here.

CKD – it’s what all the cool kids are calling it

You probably already know by now that Crystal Kingdom Dizzy has received a belated

Is a Kingdom even the ideal governmental form for crystals?

port to the ZX Spectrum, one of the machines the egg-who-wears-boxing-gloves-for-some-fucking-reason made his name on. You might wonder what the point of that would be, considering that the game was already published on the ZX Spectrum back in 1992. Playing it for a few seconds makes you realise what the point was – this is CKD given a complete overhaul with a new, smooth, game engine, superbly reworked graphics and new music and sounds. It’s a huge improvement on the original commercial release (which wasn’t bad in the first place) and a perfect example of what love, care and enthusiasm can create over time. It’d be great to see the same talent lavished on a new game, Dizzy-related or not.

As I’m lead to understand 16th century London sex workers used to say “Get It Here”

Recommend-o-me

And not a Craig McLachlan in sight! (It’s a “Bugs” joke…. forget it)

A quick recommendation for a simple but addictive and extremely playable highscore game. Antibody is an arena shooter where the player controls some kind of bug in the middle of circular area which has to shoot up a whole bunch of other bugs which appear out of nowhere in waves. Control is ludicrously simple: the mouse rotates the player and left button fires whilst right button makes the player’s bug briefly shoot forward to get out of the way of projectiles or marauding beasties (although this needs to reset itself so can’t be used indefinitely). The enemies come in a range of sizes and with a range of attack styles and the action never lets up. There’s also a nice touch when your bug gets hit where, instead of just blowing up, it goes red and remains controllable just before asploding allowing you to direct it into the enemies that done you wrong.

Antibody (which I discovered via Free Bundle no. 6) is freeware and available here for Windows, Mac and Android based machines. You’ve 77,600 to beat, motherflippers.