Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) I don't have any terrible unfinished games for release this week, my main project for the week was to port WitchBlaster to XNA and see if I can get it running in a browser via SilverSprite. It's about 80% of the way there.

Anyway, PC World reviews editor Harley Ogier generously gave permission to post the entire extended review that appeared only on the April 2010 coverdisc. Here it is here.

PC World's DVD-Exclusive Review

I grew up playing platform games and side–scrollers, shareware titles I picked up from friends on floppy disk. In those days, shareware games were generally a respectable length: far better than the half-hour demos of today (that often take half a day to download).

Witch Blaster reminds me of those days: though it consists of only four levels, I’ve already spent two or three hours flying around on a broomstick. My side–scroller skills aren’t what they used to be, and the game provides a considerable challenge.

Were Witch Blaster a full–length title, I’d criticise the difficulty level as being too high. However, the difficulty stretches out the game’s four levels by preventing you from sailing right through on your first attempt. If you’re incredibly skilled and finished the game in four minutes flat, I expect you’re an exception to the rule.

The enemies are varied and challenging, from swarms of bees to snakes with jetpacks. Jetpacks. The power–ups are worth attaining, turning your basic Fireball attack into an unstoppable 180–degree barrage of flame. There’s an element of strategy involved, as it’s easy to lose your power–ups: sometimes it’s better to cloak yourself and avoid further conflict once you’ve fully upgraded your fireballs, as they can be invaluable in the level–end boss fights. However, stop taking out enemies too early and your score is sure to suffer.

The graphics have a pixelated charm, and would look completely at home on a 386. Witch Blaster has a very professional, polished feel. While it looks antiquated, it really does look like something that you would find on an old floppy disk stuck down the back of a drawer.

If it were a shareware game, Witch Blaster would be impressive. As a game put together in 48–hours, it’s even more so. If you play one game from the PC World DVD this month, it should be this one.

— Harley Ogier

BETTER THAN: 8MB RAM
WORSE THAN: The ATI Radeon
A retro classic with a good layer of polish.

8.5

Here it is, the editor's choice winning review of Witch Blaster from New Zealand PC World, April 2010. Special thanks goes to the editors at PC World for allowing me to publish this free of charge.

CeltX is a brilliant application that I used to write my ScriptFrenzy entry, and I strongly suspect it was used by most other ScriptFrenzy winners too.

Far more than just a simple text editor, CeltX is specifically designed for producing scripts for Film, Television, Plays, Radio, Comic Books and more. Since it has built in script formatting, with a single keystroke you can switch between writing action, dialogue, scene headings, character names, shot directions etc.

CeltX creates a 'Project' file for your work, that contains not only your Scripts but character and prop catalogues, shooting schedules, story boards and so on. There's even a commercial service to allow for real-time script collaboration over the Internet. Although the huge number of options can be daunting, there are a few sample project files that help explain things.

CeltX is free and open source (albeit with commercial plug-ins) and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be downloaded from the official website at http://celtx.com/

Time for the second unfinished game for the Garbage Collection: GunCat.

Overview

A few years back the Auckland Game Works team were collaborating on a game called GunJet, which was meant to be a StarFox styled shooter and our first game. Unfortunately for various reasons the project was never completed, and we ended up making The Kiwi's Tale instead.

GunCat is a tech demo that is an absurdist parody of GunJet (Allegedly developed by AGW's German rivals) that I whipped together in a day or so to demonstrate the viability of porting the project from C++ to Blitz3D.

I brought some of the art and sound across from the GunJet project, unfortunately the title screen features some of the worst anime art ever attempted (I take the blame!). The game itself, despite only being one level long, is actually reasonably challenging and playable. It might not be 'fun', but it isn't hard to see how it could be with a bit of work. Except for the final boss (See if you can recognise him) the 'enemies' in the game are tributes to early shoot-em-ups.

It's possible that I might one day turn GunCat into a fully fledged game. The basic concept is that the GunCat was a catgirl robot made by aging Japanese professor (For less than morally sound reasons) who becomes the Earth's last hope against an invasion of giant insects. Doubt I'll ever get around to it though!

Instructions

Move - Cursor keys
Shoot - Space bar

Download

The game can be downloaded from the Garbage Collection page or here.