10 Games That Defined The amstrad range
ROLAND In TIME
There were eight Roland games in total for the Amstrad CPC, released between 1983 and 1985. “We had Roland On The Ropes, Roland In The Caves, Roland does this, Roland does that, I can’t remember them all,” says Lord Sugar. “The character would jump all over the place. We named him after Roland Perry.”
GET Dexter
Originally released for the CPC, this funny isometric graphic adventure was developed in France where the CPC was popular thanks to the efforts of Amstrad France boss Marion Vannier. Boasting superb graphics, animation and music it was packed with tiny flourishes, testing player skills to the limit.
Gryzor
Or Renegade, if you wish, for either of these Ocean classics looked superb on the CPC thanks to the artistic skills of Mark K Jones. Packed with screens and with lots of weapons at your disposal it played like a dream. CPC owners blessed with 128k could also enjoy an enhanced version of it.
FANTASY WORLD Dizzy
This offering is proof that some games were ported from the Amstrad to the Spectrum, with the Oliver twins making the CPC their lead platform. It just so happens that Fantastic World Dizzy was also created when Amstrad owned the Spectrum and back when Dizzy was an unofficial 8-bit mascot of sorts in the United Kingdom.
Burnin’ RUBBER
This launch game shipped with every GX4000, 464 Plus and 6128 Plus and it instantly hinted at the power of the new machine. Made by Ocean and essentially an unofficial version of WEC Le Mans, it boasted superb sprite scaling and jaw-dropping graphics. It was included in the demo units sent out to shops.
PREHISTORIK 2
Amstrad only wanted the extra Plus features to be accessible to games released on cartridge but clever developers soon found a way around that. Prehistorik 2 was among the disc and tape games taking advantage of the extended colour palette and graphical touches, although it suffered from slowdown.
BATMAN
The first Batman game ever developed made its way on the Amstrad PCW proving that the computer could indeed be interesting to gamers. There was no colour, other than green, in this 3D isometric action adventure, of course, and it sounded bloody awful but, holy Amstrad, it was very enjoyable to play.
SONIC The hedgehog
Yes, that Mega Drive favourite was available on the Amstrad
Mega PC and it was completely indistinguishable from the original. But that’s only because it was the original game, plugged into the Mega Drive port on the front of this 386 Pcconsole hybrid and played using the bundled controller.
BLOCKADE
This Tetris clone made its way on to the Amstrad Notepad, squeezing onto the computer’s long, thin screen. Other games for the system included Super Blockage and Trikade. But other than that, the Notepad was really a machine for boring stuff like word processing and spreadsheets.
PRINCE of PERSIA
Having established itself as a CPC classic, pushing the tech to near-16-bit levels, Jordan Mechner’s platforming classic was bundled with the Amstrad PC5286. Aimed at gamers specifically, the computer came with a 14-inch VGA monitor displaying 256 colours from a palette of 250,000, as well as a joystick.