genecyst has updated his game “Holy Hell” and let us know about this via the PDRoms webboard.

Holy Hell is a puzzle game with shmup elements. The goal of the game is to reach the end of every level trying to chain more blocks of the same color together.

You guide a little ship powered with four different colored weapons. Every weapon can destroy only blocks of its same color, so you must switch between them to blow up everything…

Brown blocks cannot be destroyed and must be dodged…

Changes:

– 37 levels
– speed increase every 5 levels

http://pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6574

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

* JESS RETHINKS: You know, now that GORF is finished (for good this time, seriously), I’m thinking about turning my attention toward Awesome NES, which hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age. I’m not sure what a dog’s age is, exactly, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s about four months and some change. I also should look into keeping at least a few of the promises I made earlier in the year. Since this is 2009, just a hair’s breadth away from the next decade, there’s really no point in procrastinating on an Assault of the Invaders update.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

I’ve made a few improvements to the previous release candidate, due to popular demand. All right, one person asked for it, but it was something that bothered me too. Past versions of GORF lacked the shimmering shields that were one of the coolest effects in the arcade game, but this release finally takes care of that issue. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to squeeze in the shining shields, but after shifting the character and screen blocks around a bit, I finally had room for them.

Thanks to www.nintendomax.com for the news.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

The first release candidate for GORF is now available for download. Give it a spin and see if you can find any bugs I might have missed.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

Yet more news on the GORF front. I’ve purged a few bugs from the previous build, and it should (should) work with 3-in-1 cartridges now. If you’d like to contribute to the project, I’d appreciate a list of what works with the game and what won’t. Here’s an early preliminary list, compiled from player input on the AtariAge and Denial web sites. The fix should resolve some of the issues people have had with their hardware, but not all. As usual, if you play the game on untested hardware, you do so at your own risk, but I’d appreciate any testing and status reports you’re willing to provide.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/

Jess Ragan has updated his Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Release notes:

The latest beta (as well as one of the last) is available from this link.

http://www.lakupo.com/grblitz/gorf_beta_98.zip

This is extremely close to completion. I may add an extended credits screen and a more elaborate explosion for the player’s last ship, but aside from that no new features will be included. This is the end of the road for the design, past bug fixes. Please play this, share it with friends, and spread it around a bit. I want as many people to get their hands on this as possible! Also, if someone would post about this on Digital Press, I’d appreciate it.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/149361-gorf-now-on-gameboy-advance/page__view__findpost__p__1839339

Jess Ragan is working on a Gameboy Advance version of the game Gorf.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorf ):

Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”. It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Gorf’s objective is simply to destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down.

Jess would love to recieve feedback, so please get back on him – this way he can make the game even better and you’ll have updated versions to enjoy!

Readme.txt:

Presented for your enjoyment is the fifth GORF beta. It was a whole lot of work, but then again, it was a whole lot of worth it. Included in this release is a sleek title screen, along with the art gallery I’ve been promising since the last of forever. This took a while to finish, but I’m proud of the results… aside from the occasional hiccup it’s extremely well put together, looking almost like a professional quality GameBoy Advance release. And to think, this entire game was written in BASIC! I’m continually amazed at the versatility of this compiler… I would never have gotten this kind of performance out of Quick BASIC thirteen years ago. Working on this game has also given me a whole new appreciation for the GameBoy Advance. I loved it as a gamer before, and now I love it as a programmer too!

Anyway, you’re probably wondering how the art gallery works, so here’s the scoop. After you select it from the main menu, just press left and right on the D-pad to cycle through the twenty-five available images. Since many of the pictures are in portrait or “tate” format, you can also flip the system sideways and use up and down to leaf through the screen shots, box artwork, and promotional materials. This works especially well with the GameBoy Micro. If you want to get a full view of any image, just hold down one of the shoulder buttons to make the guide arrows vanish. Finally, to read a brief description of the image being currently viewed, just tap the A button. A text bar will slide in from the bottom of the screen. Press A again and it slides back out. When you’re finished with the gallery, press either B or Start to return to the title screen.

Guess that about does it for this update! Stay tuned for the options screen and a special mode called the Mission Matrix, which should help bring the classic game of GORF into the modern age of achievements, trophies, and… uh, whatever the Wii does to reward gamers. (Lately, that hasn’t been much. Ahem.)

GORF is a trademark of Midway, a division of Time-Warner. Space Invaders is a trademark of Taito Corporation, a division of Square-Enix. Galaxian is a trademark of Namco-Bandai. Dragon BASIC is a trademark of Jeff Massung. All rights reserved.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/149361-gorf-now-on-gameboy-advance/page__st__25

5nake is based on the oldschool Snake games but with a few new features and modes.

The modes:

* Mission; where the snake must collect fruits, powerups and progress through a series of levels to unlock them.
* Practice; where you can play one of the levels from the main game with no limits.
* Survival; where you have a limited number of steps, collecting fruits gives you more steps.

There are a variety of powerups to help you on the way including: slow motion, don’t grow, shrink, score multipliers and extra lives (Easy and Normal difficulty only).

The game includes a save feature that can keep track of high scores, custom levels, unlocked levels and unlocked goodies. (It can be disabled if it causes problems with your card or if you don’t want to save your progress.)

There are a variety of graphical themes including unlockable ones and 3 difficulties to choose from, the game also feature a Level Editor so the player can create his own levels.

Programmed by “JustBurn” and “MattTS”. Music and sound effects by “Kepler”.

http://staff.emuboards.com/5nake/

genecyst has passed by on the PDRoms webboard to let us know about his game “Holy Hell”.

Holy Hell is a puzzle game with shmup elements. The goal of the game is to reach the end of every level trying to chain more blocks of the same color together.

You guide a little ship powered with four different colored weapons. Every weapon can destroy only blocks of its same color, so you must switch between them to blow up everything…

Brown blocks cannot be destroyed and must be dodged…

http://pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6574

Broken circle is a turn based RPG, with a new combat system, isometric graphics and high quality battle animations.

Release notes:

Broken Circle

In the year 2004 Elvis Morelli , one of the artists, join a compo from an important publisher (we prefer to do not show the name) and won the possibility to create and publish his game. After that offer he decide to arrange a team to develope the game but unfortunally they was great in drawing but they hadn’t experience in development and they chose to look around for someone. They found Francesco Marra , 7 Raven Studios Co. Ltd. owner, and asked him to program the game. The development was so hard due to the complexity of the game type and took long but when they completed it the publisher will refuse the game with a stupid excuse (” we have changed our policy and we do not accept any more 3rd party software we know you won the competition but we can’t take it now.”). They had a paper signed but proceed with a legal action was so expensive and prefer to skip and look for someone interested. The original game was a 256Mbits cartridge and for that time was so bigger to be accepted from other publisher and Francesco Marra with Alberto Dolci , another member of the team, decide to change part of the code and gfx to fit in a small cartridge.

A file system and advanced compression method was used to reduce the size, all sprites was reduced from 256 colors to 16 color for all enemies and a special routine was added to their own tools to create some special table taht skip equal or flipped animation frames.

The size of the cartridge was 128Mbits but after again another hard work and color reduction was 64mbits. Wow they was very happy because was the size requested by all other publishers in that time.

Unfortunally after many meeting and offers only 1 publisher was interested to buy the title, the GBA was nearly at the end of his great story and a lot of publisher was no more interested to buy a GBA game. Alten8 was the only one interested but unfortunally they was not an official Nintendo publisher and they only tried to sell the game but once again without success.

The game offer a nice experience and show almost all the power of the GBA.

Enjoy it.

7 Raven Studios Team.

Thanks to http://www.gbarl.it and http://www.nintendomax.com for the news.

http://www.7rs.it/