You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'News' category.
The epic arcade adventure ‘Knight ‘n’ Grail’ is finally complete and on sale now from Psytronik Software for the Commodore 64. The game is available on disk only in Premium, Budget and Digital flavours. All pre-orders are currently being posted as we speak.
This is one of the best games for a long time on the C64, featuring some fantastic gameplay, a very large game map, neat touches throughout, excellent visuals and music throughout. It’s been heavily playtested to ensure that players get a fantastic experience – and that they will. As well as getting a top notch game, you have the option to get the game as a professionally produced disk release (Premium / budget) to play on a real C64, or you can purchase just a digital copy to play on any C64 emulator.
For more details about the game, visit: http://www.psytronik.com
For ordering details, visit: http://www.binaryzone.org/retrostore/
I was pretty happy the other night getting a late goal against a friend. I played as the half star rated Accrington Stanley against the 5 star Arsenal. After a scrambled equalizer, I was dared to get the free kick in which followed 5 minutes later. I never thought in a million years i’d bloody get it…
In the end I held out and won 2-1… I was sad enough to be the only one who thought it was cool 
On Monday (Yes, I know i’m late!), one of my free part-time developments went live – River Primary School website.
River school website
This was a particularly interesting project due to the difference in audience compared to previous websites i’ve delivered and the diversity between two sets of users that had to be covered. With a primary school website you are trying to deliver a site which parents can use, which children can use and which is designed in an appealing way to children (but also professional).
I’m not a fan of clip art, nor the dredded Comic Sans font… but Primary Schools use these a lot. There is nothing wrong with this of course, it’s just as personal principle I had to find other means to get child friendliness in the actual web design itself – which I did so in using photos of things like coloured pencils, children’s drawings and using Garamond fonts. Luckily there was no previous website to compare against, so we had a completely clean slate to start with.
During development, I had at the back of my mind that other websites would be required shortly for other future part-time projects – so initially the site was built as a empty template shell and tightened up into a reusable state. What this means is that the template only required a stylesheet change and change to its configuration to give it the correct titles. Chuck another CSS file at it, different content and slightly different configuration settings, then you get a completely new website in very little time. Now if only I could get similiar rapid development for the new GTW site! (Now thats another story… and a nightmare migration one at that!)
With River Primary School’s website though, the template method is temporary. In the “grand scheme of things” (Most likely in 2010 when things calm down a bit from 2009), the website will eventually be put into a Content Management System (Drupal). Ideally I wanted things in Drupal from the start, but time was against me sadly – but this is a start at least! 
There’s still work to go though… more pages to be added, including some big Year Group pages in the next few months. Hopefully now there will be encouragement to help it grow as a useful resource as well as being a web presence for the school.
Kenz has recently really gone to town and has now produced a disk range of the Psytronik titles, including our game Sub Hunter.
Click picture for full size
The game can be bought in two new options, Deluxe edition or Budget disk edition. The Deluxe edition comes with full colour professional box packaging, instructions, disk with colour slip and label. The budget version has it all apart from the snazzy box. In total the deluxe copy just costs £8.99, whilst the budget edition is the same as the tape price at £3.99.
The disk version will be coming complete with the bonus disk materials, and the free release of this will be shortly before Christmas on C64.com.
… and not necessarily a bad one either. It’s surprising what you can do with 3 left over eggs and a frustrating urge to get away from computers for a few days (Well, apart from playing Fifa 2009 every day)…
Now to eat the bloody thing, complete with Pro Plus close to hand…
Recent Comments