It has been a while since a proper first-person dungeon crawler crossed our desk from the Commodore 64 scene. So when Labyrinth of Ur showed up, with its grid-based corridors and a lone hero clutching a sword, it got my attention fast.
The game comes from a developer going by Ursimon. It wears its influences openly: Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder are named as the inspiration. Anyone who has spent a few late nights mapping corridors on graph paper will know exactly what kind of game this is trying to be.
There is a twist in how it was made, though. Labyrinth of Ur was written from scratch in C, and Ursimon built it with the help of AI. That detail will spark some debate, and we will come back to it.
Heliobane is the latest modern game to make the trip backwards in time. According to IndieRetroNews, this shoot 'em up started out on Steam and has now been rebuilt for the Amiga 1200 by a developer going by the name Coze. The headline also describes it as an "AI shoot 'em up," which is an interesting label for a game heading to a machine from the early nineties.
I'll be upfront. The original post is light on details. There's no feature list, no breakdown of levels or weapons, and no word on how the port was put together. What we do have is the core idea and one very happy player.
TIL THEY CROAK has one of the more stressful premises I've come across in a while. Someone has planted a bomb in your chest, your heart is about to blow, and the only thing keeping you alive is hitting people. Hard, and often.
The game calls itself a melee-only boomer shooter, which sounds like a contradiction until you think about it for a second. You keep the speed and the room-clearing rhythm of the genre, but you leave the guns at home. A beta sign-up is now open for anyone who wants to try it early.
Warlock, the newest Commodore 64 project from developer Haplo, is out now. It borrows the mood of old first-person fantasy shooters and drops it onto a top-down map. If you remember Heretic and still keep a breadbin computer within arm's reach, this one is worth a look.
Haplo isn't new to the scene. The developer's earlier C64 titles include Shift and Tenebra, both well regarded in retro circles. Warlock looks like the most ambitious of the three so far, at least on paper.
Heretic, Seen From Above
The idea behind Warlock is simple. Haplo wanted the intense, gloomy energy of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic, but from a completely different angle. Instead of peering down a corridor in first person, you look down on the action from above.
Some games arrive with a serious pitch. Doody Calls - Turd World War is not one of them. It is a brand new top-down squad shooter for the Amiga 1200 from Software Amusements. The team built it from the ground up for the machine's AGA chipset, the upgraded graphics hardware that set the A1200 apart from earlier Amigas.
It's also based on an existing browser game, v1.33, which Software Amusements has reworked into what it calls a family-friendly tactical shooter. The colour scheme is mostly brown. You can probably guess why.
Bombs Away, Squad Alpha
You don't walk into battle here. You get dropped in by a "Poo-nook" helicopter and take command of Squad Alpha. That's a trio of AI teammates who apparently never stop talking. They aren't just there for show, either. According to the developer, they flank enemies and duck into cover on their own, so you aren't babysitting three bodies who walk into every bullet.
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