Protovision has officially confirmed that its development team has been working with David Murray (aka The 8-Bit Guy) on Planet X2.1 – an enhanced version of the original real time strategy game (Planet X2) for the Commodore 64 that that contains new features, such as:
- a completely overhauled codebase resulting in a number of game play improvements
- the game now runs completely from cartridge
- additional playfields – now counting 14 maps
- 8 selectable in-game tunes
- simultaneous in-game music and sound effects
- new graphics from pixel magician John Henderson (known for his artwork in The Wild Wood)
- an achievement system, graphically represented by 42 different medals
- achievements saved to cartridge
RGN has played Planet X2.1 and can confirm that the update improves the overall production values of what is otherwise a very good real-time strategy game. Planet X2.1 is expected to be open for pre-orders before the end of this month.
In further Protovision related news, RGN has picked up that the long awaited ‘Hawkeye clone’, Outrage may actually finally be receiving a release in the upcoming months as its game status on the Protovision website was recently updated to ‘Almost complete’.
According to Protovision, Outrage was produced by Cosmos Designs for the Boeder Talent Competition of the 64’er magazine a long time ago but was was never released. Protovision bought the rights to distribute the game but the game needed some bug fixing and improvements to ensure that it is of a high commercial grade quality, unfortunately the source code was not made available and as such the process of bringing the game to the general C64 gaming community has been a long process.
Sources:
Protovision – Planet X2.1 and Outrage
In the many write-ups I have read (both in English as in German magazines) there seems to be disagreement about whether or not the source code was or was not available.
Having talked with some of the Onslaught developers, I know that the source code was available to them but proved useless. The dependencies between different parts of the code made assembling the game cumbersome and efforts to fix that were never used. Label and variable names were mostly in German and often made no sense to the developers. Changes made to the code were all done in their binary versions.