Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Chivalry is not dead! Phew. It’s been a long time since I’ve chivalled so when Maldita Castilla’s demo asked me to don armour and beard to fight off a wave of evil in the cursed Kingdom of Castile, I immediately sprang into action. We’ve talked about Locomalito’s lovingly crafted games before and this is shaping up to be a beauty. But what is it? Well, the most important thing about Maldita Castilla is that it’s not Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins. The second most important thing is that it’s really bloody close to being Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins.

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Indie dev Locomalito is a bit of a genius. His work includes Hydorah, a stellar shmup, and L’Abbaye des Morts, a gorgeous ZX Spectrum-styled platformer, and he even goes as far as to provide box art and .pdf manuals for all his projects.

Tonight he’s released Viriax, a game which grants you control of a tiny virus and tasks you with infecting and killing a whole human. Go, go, brave little virus! Locomalito was good enough to send us an advance copy, and my infectious opinions await below.
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I’ve always considered arcade-medical-terror as something of an underpopulated genre, so I’m thrilled to see that indie developer Locomalito of L’Abbaye des Morts and Hydorah fame is, in fact, hard at work on an arcade-medical-terror game that he calls Viriax. It’s a sort of anti-shmup where you play a virus navigating a human body with randomly generated levels and… oh, just watch the trailer below.
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Reader Adam Britton sends word of Spectrum-tacular indie game L’Abbaye des Morts. You want to give this a go, I think. I just lost half an hour to it, and developer Locomalito calls it “AN OBSOLETE VIDEOGAME FOR A DARK PASSAGE OF HISTORY”, which is obviously excellent. He actually wrote it on holiday in Southern France, and it’s a (loose) interpretation of how a Christian sect known as the Cathars were hunted in the 13th century. Go play! Or just go and marvel at Locomalito’s excellent site, which boasts retro boxart for all his games.

A video of L’Abbaye Des Morts came to me for protection, and I’ve sheltered it beneath the jump.
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I was chatting to Mathew Kumar about the release of his new exp. zine when he mentioned that Hydorah has been finally released. I actually had a tab with its page open for a couple of months, as it was saying it was just about to release, and I knew that I would have to post about it when it was. It’s a freeware old-school shooter with a few modern twists – like limited saves and a sort of map-approach to level selection (Which reminded me – and probably only me – of Xain’d Sleena aka Soldier of Light). You also gather extra weapons when completing missions, with you selecting which one you want to arm up with each time you go in. I’ve only played a couple of levels of this, but I really like it. Go get here, or watch the trailer below…
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