THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE ARCHAIC PUBLISHER Spectraxx Tape Magazine AUTHOR Lee Tonks YEAR 1988 DESCRIPTION Archaic is a 3D isometric arcade game, developed with CRL's 3D Game Maker as a bonus game to be included with an issue of Spectraxx Tape Magazine. (See Facts and Notes below for a description of both of these). CONTROLS Sinclair Joystick, Kempston, Sinclair keys. INSTRUCTIONS You are a great hero who has been thrust into the depths of an underground cavern system by some mad scientist type who wants to take over the world. He plans to do this by using a strange device (of some description...I don't recall), which he has hidden within the maze of this very same underground cavern system. You must find and destroy this before he can do the evil deed. This means exploring a maze of 256 caverns which are populated with evil beasts and badly drawn nasties. You are armed only with your trusty pickaxe stash, which you can lob at any offending beast that comes your way. Oh yeah, and thanks to the restrictions of 3D Game Maker, you only have one life to do it all in! CHEATS None that I'm aware of, unless there's some kind of generic 3D Game Maker poke which gives infinite lives in all 3DGM games. SEQUELS/PREQUELS None. INLAY CARD TEXT Errrm, there wasn't actually an inlay included. See the notes on Spectraxx below. SCORES RECEIVED Archaic itself was never reviewed, although Spectraxx did receive a few notes of praise from readers (as well as a few "this is crap" ones). URL FTP://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/games/arcade/archaic.zip It's also available on request from : Dragonlord - mail him at diehl@io.org or from his WWW requests page at : http://www.io.org/~diehl/snaps/archaic.zip GENERAL FACTS Archaic was designed specifically to be a freebie, given away as an incentive to buy my tape magazine, Spectraxx, way back in 1988. I sold a fair few, but I don't think too many people will have seen this before. Archaic took just over three days to make. I mapped it out on paper first, and then translated it into 3DGM. It was about the third game I attempted to put together with this rather restrictive system, and was the only one I was ever even partly happy with. The graphics aren't bad, but I'm crap at drawing and the reason they look even half decent is because I basically just altered all of the graphics provided as standard with the 3DGM! Archaic was a word lifted at random from the dictionary because I couldn't think of a name for it! The snapshot was made by me! I uploaded it to NVG too, just to see what people thought of it. I think it looks pretty dated now, and it slows down too much if the room is too busy. Works best on Z80 played at about 200% speed! Notes ----- SPECTRAXX Tape Magazine was a tape-based mag run by myself and some of my friends between 1987 and 1988. It lasted thirteen issues and was just getting good when I had to quit to do my GCSEs. Everyone else lost interest and sadly Spectraxx died a death (possibly because after my GCSEs I bought an ST! I'm sorry, Spec-chums, I did come back to the Speccy eventually). If there's enough interest, I may be persuaded to convert some of the old issues of Spectraxx into .TAP files for using with the emulators. We'll have to see. Some of the early stuff is really poor, but it got better as we became more experienced (in programming and writing!). It was kind of monthly, and included a reviews section with screenshots, hints and tips, an adventures section, mailbag, reader's games and contributions, and sometimes a free game. 3D Game Maker was released by CRL, also in 1988. Basically, it was an editor which allowed the user to add his own graphics and room layouts to a pretty basic 3D isometric game. It had its flaws, but was relatively simple to use and so proved quite popular. I uploaded all three sections of this to NVG as well, although it needs an emulator which provides tape support (i.e. Z80 can save Speccy tape output to a .TAP file - this is fine).