There are some fantastic games out currently for the Spectrum Next – games like Baggers In Space, Delta’s Shadow and Q*Bee. Nothing prepared me however for what I thought was some new (Meega) Commodore Amiga shoot ‘em up for the cream beast – to be in fact a new Spectrum Next title!
As soon as I watched the new teaser trailer with smooth parallax scrolling, huge colourful shiny sprites and waves of baddies to shoot it was apparent that this was going to be ‘Next’ level stuff. I knew straight away that this title had the potential to be huge for the beloved ‘Speccy’ Next.
The game shows off huge boss baddies, horizontal and vertical play areas, loads of highly detailed sprites on screen whizzing about and loads of weapon pickups with a unique weapon select system. We also get a taste of some fantastic techno style music from Richard Faulkner aka ‘A man in his Techno shed’. No sound effects are present as of yet, but there is a huge chance of sampled effects and even speech to come!
The game’s graphics and code have been produced by Patricia Curtis who has worked on some huge titles like the conversion of Xenon 2 for the Amiga CDTV and Megadrive!, so if that’s not enough for you to get your retro vouchers ready I don’t know what is!
All in all if the legendary R-Type and Salamander did the big dirty then this is their super child. You can show your interest and pre-order TX-1696 from the following website:
I had the pleasure of playing this (and meeting Bret-great guy) at the Retro Computer Museum recently. Brilliant game and you would not think it is a speccy game at all. Very well done.
Lovely to meet you there 🙂 See you next time?
Hey! Awesome meeting you buddy! TX-1696 for the speccy NEXT is going to be huge I reckon!
Great to see something refreshingly different for the Next. I hope it’s a success