Botkiller 2 released (21/5/99)

Botkiller 2, the sequel to Jan Klose's platform game Botkiller has now been released. The game has been written by Richard Wilson with a little help from the Artex team, and is priced at £15.00.
 
 
The game has now been reviewed by Tim Fountain and Simon Jones, you can see what they thought of it here.
 

Wakefield news (17/5/99)

The weekend saw the first major Acorn show since the cancellation of Acorn World last year. Acorn Arcade now have a full report of the Wakefield show which includes details of all the show news.
 
 
Summary:

• RISC OS Ltd. were showing off and taking orders for RISC OS 4.
• Several new machines were being demonstrated, including the RiscStation 7500 and MicroDigital's Mico.
• Final Doom was released.
• Heretic and Doom upgrades were released.
• Cerilica Ltd. were taking orders for Cerilica Vantage, the new Vector graphics package.

R-Comp Releases for Wakefield (12/5/99)

R-Comp have announced today no less than 6 releases set for the Wakefield show this weekend. Heretic and Doom+ have been updated (see below) along with upgrades for Webster XL, a new Web uploading tool and a MIDI sequencer. The long awaited Messenger Pro email and news client is set for sale as well. A large advance over the old Messenger email and news client, Messenger Pro also contains MessageServe, a replacement for Newsbase. Priced at £30, it will be interesting to see how this fares compared to Jonathon Duddington's Pluto.
 

Doom and Heretic Updates (12/5/99)

Doom+ and Heretic have both been in constant development by Justin Fletcher over the past few months, and his efforts have culminated in the release of two huge patches. Most noticable on the list of improvements are the addition of bi-linear smoothing to each, and improved deathmatch facilities. Follow "More info" for a full list.
 

Sheep Racing 2.60 released (12/5/99)

Keith McKillop has finally been given permission to release his updated version of Sheep Racing, the old farmyard racing classic(!). You can get your copy of !SheepRace version 2.60 here, or alternatively, the original version here.

Quake in your boots! (6/5/99)

FreeUK have launched a Quake championship in "a bid to find the meanest gun in these green and pleasant islands". The competition, to be known as the "FreeUK Quake-Off", will run from the week commencing June 1st 1999. There is a first prize of £500 in hard cash, plus two runners-up prizes of £250.

Web pages for the competition (including the competition rules and an entry form) will be added to the FreeUK website (http://www.freeuk.com/) on Friday May 7th 1999. The closing date for entries is midnight on Sunday May 23rd 1999.

Time for all you laggers to show the rest of the world, or at least the UK, what you're made of!
 

Final Doom (6/5/99)

RCI have announced the release of a new set of levels for Doom+. Called Final Doom, it contains two complete 32 level iWADs - that is, two completely new games.

RCI say in their announcement, "The levels are notably tougher than those of Ultimate Doom or Doom 2, and they include far more textures and graphics (both are several Mbs larger than the earlier iWADs), and are suitable for both singler player and network games. And the box is pretty ;->"

Rather than introducing Yet Another Doom Clone to the scene, this pack is an update for existing Doom+ owners, rather than a whole new game, so you'll need a copy of Doom+ to run them (or possibly DIY, but this is unsupported). The price is £15 inc. VAT, which apparently is slightly more than the PC version in the shops.
 

Paradise Web Change (6/5/99)

Budget gamers Paradise have changed their web URL from http://www.paradise.force9.co.uk to http://www.paradise-uk.net, so start updating those links pages.

Although we haven't seen anything from them for a while, Ian Jeffray has promised that we'll be seeing both an improved demo and the finished product of Overload "during the summer".
 

New RISC OS machine revealed (5/5/99)

 
Specs for the new RiscStation R7500 have been posted on the Cybervillage website. The £576+VAT machine boasts a multitude of new features.

The new machine is based on a standard PC ATX motherboard and case (mini-tower or desktop versions) with 3 or 4 ISA expansion ports, which means that buyers will be able to benefit from the lower prices of PC peripherals - but at the price of losing Acorn podule compatibility. As the machine will come with a network card, 2 IDE sockets (for four devices), two serial ports, 2 MIDI ports, an in-built sound sampler and a PC joystick port (plus an IRDA option), this shouldn't be too much of a problem however.

The speed increase of the new 56Mhz 7500FPE chip coupled with RISC OS 4 (on flash memory for easy updating) should mean that the new machine is up to twice as fast as the old A7000+ that it is intended to replace. Not as fast as a StrongARM machine, but some see the new machine as a dry run for a new Phoebe-like machine in the future.