May 1991 - Castalia, Radonium, Head-On

So this marks the first month where Gazette is a supplement only for subscribers. The Table of Contents' helpful article and program summaries are gone, the whole 40-odd page section now has a Table of Contents crammed into a single 1/3 page column.

I had a lot of technical issues running the games on this issue. But I did like Vincent D. Zahnle's "Picture of the Month" Croc in the Gazette Gallery:

Anyway, on to the games...

Castalia - Mark Neri

I couldn't run this from the disk image I had but Chris "Orphaned Games" Federico hooked me up with the C=64 GameBase, a collection of just about every game made for the system, and its copy worked - I grabbed and posted the .T64 image here. Anyway, this game is a bit like "Boulder Dash"... blue goblins are running around, and even though they die when you hit them, they take 2 of your health. There are movable rocks, fireball spells, healing potions, etc. Honestly it's all a bit too much for me, and a little too fast paced, but it seemed like a cool idea. Rating:3/5

Radonium - Robert Travaini

This game has a bit more going on than it first looks... it's a physics-y deathmatch, two players only, the red and blue space craft zip around (nice effect where a shadow indicates a craft gaining a little altitude as it goes faster) and bounce off the walls, though facing angle is limited to the 8 compass points, and thrust is kind of squared off as well. Each player has a base of 24 canisters... it's strange. A player can safely fly over their own canister depot, but as long as ANY of the opponents' canisters are undestroyed, the entire square depot region is deadly to the touch (and the canisters in the corner require diagonal shots) The canisters just provide points, but you only get points if you shoot the other player before they shoot you, and then you play up to a fixed number of rounds. It's a kind of intriguing bit of indirection, and it might bring up some cool brinksmanship. Tentative Rating:4/5

Head-On - Grant Young

This disk-only game has a cool title screen but then crashes immediately, and the GameBase version isn't any better. Rating:???