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An early release of Battle for Wesnoth 1.2.5. for RISC OS 5 has been uploaded to the RISCOS.info wiki by Alan Buckley. Battle for Wesnoth is a free turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take a hand in any number of other adventures. The current release does not contain the level editor and probably not online play. You must have an Iyonix to play this game.

Do you want to write a review of Battle for Wesnoth 1.2.5 for us?

Emotions by GEK Studios

With the news of GEK Studios getting back in the RISC OS scene, I thought I would review one of their games.

My first impressions of Emotions, frankly, are quite good. Your introduction to the game is a cinematic scene in a rather unique style of a goofy looking person with buck teeth called Henky-Penky sleeping. He wakes up and looks in the mirror, he decides that his life is too plain and boring without emotions so decides to go on an adventure of a lifetime, a quest for humanity. The main objective of the game is that you must collect the emotion yellow faces while avoiding or killing monsters and mind-boggling puzzles!

Emotions is available on the GEK collection from APDL at the very cheap price of £6.90 and an extra £1.00 for carriage outside the UK. The installation process for Emotions is very easy, but you have to install !GEKonfig if you haven't previously. It ran well on our test machine, a StrongARM Risc PC running RISC OS 4.37 (Select 3i3).

Unforunately, when the introduction scene finished it returned to ugly Mode 13 and a pretty weird menu system.

The graphics are now sadly ageing and don't look very attractive compared with high-graphics games such as TEK 1608 and Heroes of Might and Magic 2.

There are lots of nice weapons, including the machine gun and also a chainsaw that splatters blood all over the place.

A feature that I find really good is the ability to listen to a tracker song of your choice while playing, so if a track gets annoying, you simply change it!

The gameplay isn't very mind-blowing. After finishing the first really easy level, you need to switch your brain on to solve some of the puzzles involved. Unfortunately, a lot of the puzzles are repeated and get rather boring.

Overall, it's a nice game and for £6.90 along with over half a dozen other games included, Emotions is certainly the best of the lot. Hopefully, GEK will use some of the good features of this and their other games in other projects, such as the cut-scenes. Also, what do you guys think of an Emotions 2? I would certainly buy it if it were ever to be developed and released. The gameplay isn't very good, neither are the graphics, but it's still fun to play! I give this game a pretty decent 6/10 - Tepid.

Blasts of the Xtreme have announced the near completion of their latest title 'Labyrinth of Horrors: The Death of Dignity', a very psychological puzzle graphical text adventure written using the GTAC game authoring system from Andrea Gallo who recently wrote an article on it for Archive Magazine. The story, puzzles and mazes have been completed and the graphics and music are in development.

Labyrinth of Horrors will be released at the upcoming Holland RISC OS show in September in the BOTX Budget Range with a £5.00 price tag.

The Plot:

You are set a magical quest to find the Ruby of Eternal life, but it isn't as easy as that...

Alan Buckley is currently porting the latest version of Battle for Wesnoth 1.2.5 to RISC OS, it seems to run well on the Iyonix but is currently a bit slow when loading or starting a scenario. He needs to sort out a few problems with the choppiness of the music, and entering the tutorial hangs the computer. It's currently rather large, it's over 64MB in a zip file.

Watch this space for information on the development of this port. 

Hugh Robinson has converted the classic arcade shooter Asylum to SDL, this is the first port of Asylum to another platform even though the sources to the game have been out for several years. The SDL version of Asylum could potentially be back ported to RISC OS to make it compatible with modern computers such as the Iyonix and the A9Home.  

The current RISC OS version is 2.02 which fixes the high-score table/finishing level crashing problem over earlier versions and can be downloaded from here.    

The Plot:

Young Sigmund has a few problems. To help him resolve his mental instability you must enter the surreal world of his inner mind and shut down the malfunctioning brain cells which are causing him these problems. Unforunately, all is not as simple as it seems.

Blasts of the Xtreme, one of the many active game developers, have finally updated their website. The website is now pop-up free, and purchasing and general surfing is now much easier. The site is also more RISC OS compatible than before.   

Blasts of the Xtreme will be releasing several new games at the Holland and South East shows in the next few months, most will be in the BOTX Budget Range. A large update to their Heroes of Might and Magic 2 expansion pack Bloody Battlegrounds is also rumored to be in development.

Martin Bazley has updated his two Doom authoring reference documents, with a few minor corrections to the linedef specials and sector types and a whole new section in the texture alignment tutorial. He has also created a WAD file that helps illustrate most of the concepts in the tutorial.