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).























