Hiya all - especially Flash.
I just found this site yesterday. For some reason I had the idea of checking if there was anything to find on
Horace in the Mystic Woods that I'd missed before...and there was - this site.
After reading the article in Retro Gamer back when ish #43 came out I bought both a Psion (2 actually, but I've sold the surplus one again) and the game on Ebay. I'm more of a platformer fan than a Horace fan, but Horace or not - it's a great game and I was completely obsessed with it and completed it quickly.
...now the Psion is in a drawer but I'd never sell the Psion or game...who knows if I want to have another go at it.
If I must say one bad thing about it though, it's that you can die from making the wrong choice - ie. collect the wrong bomb and you will fall to your death. Death should come as a result of a bad decicion - not from a crazy level designer punishing you because
he's got to crank out another 34 levels in 3 days.
...on the other hand you
can restart on any level you've already reached, so it's not too bad - it just becomes a bit of a platform-puzzler then.
I'll just introduce myself here while I'm at it.
I'm 41 and very much into retrogaming, emulation and remaking games. A big chunk of my online time is spent over at
Retro Remakes where a big community of people are swearing like there was no tomorrow and remaking old games they love - including me (well, they're not remaking
me...but you already knew that).
My own site is
here if anyone wants to take a look.
Just checking the filedates I can see I started a remake of HITMW a year ago - almost to the date (feb. 13th 2008), but I didn't finish it - I wasn't satisfied with the jumping and I wanted it to be exactly like the Psion version. I still have a 'dream' of remaking it some day, but I don't know if I'll ever get 'round to it - I've already got 3 other games underway and who knows what other ideas I have when I'm finished with them?
A perfect time to ask; "
How would you feel about a freeware remake of HITMW"? - like I said - I'm not sure I'll actually get to it, but at least I won't have to think too much about it if you're against it. I downloaded the source btw and was pretty surprised to see that it was mostly in some Basic variant. I'd never have guessed - I feels so smooth (well, unless there's too much moving at once...or collapsing platforms) I was convinced it was done in assembler.
I don't know how much I have to contribute to RetroBytes on a daily basis but I'll follow the happenings here closely anyway - I find your DS project very interresting. Back in the 80's and 90' I programmed in Z80 (Spectrum and Sam Coupe) and 68000 (Amiga) and I wanted to make a game, but I never finished anything. I only started programming again about 5 years ago and I'm getting more ambitious here in my old days...I want to make a complete game in assembler. I'm hoping to start this year but hopefully not later than next year, but there's no rush since I don't have anything specific I want to do anyway. I haven't even decided on a platform. The hardware I know the best is the Spectrum and that would be a big help to me, but I might go for some more modern hardware -
that's why I find the Warhawk project so interresting.
Alright..see you around the internets.