As I'm sure you know, there have been many good games that have been developed in Italy including such as Breathless, Virtual Karting and many more. This is something that looks as it will continue into 1998, heres a look at some of the games we may be seeing from there.

To start off with I'll tell you about a new software house that is doing it's best to help rebuild the Amiga market. It is called Darkage Software, they intend to publish the best software using the shareware system for distribution and sale.

Currently, they have 3 games in the works. The first is Alive. This is billed as being a classic arcade game, and as you can tell from the screenshot, it all looks very frantic. The second game is a Sega Rally Clone, I don't have much information in this at the moment but from what I have heard it has an excellent 3D engine and looks as though it could do very well. The last game they have under development is Oyup Oyup. This is a Puyo Puyo clone and features some excellent oriental graphics.

Darkage plan to sell their floppy titles for only 5-7$ and their CD-ROM titles for 10-14$, very cheap I'm sure you'll agree.

Arcadia Developments is the name of the next team. They are currently working on a game called Bubble Heroes. This is a Puzzle Fighter clone that will bring the excellent gameplay of this game to the Amiga. It doesn't hold back on the graphics front though as it will have 512 colours on screen at once and features some very nice light and transparency effects. It also boasts 64 pixel AGA sprites and animated backgrounds. The game will feature 3 different playing modes, there are Story, Challenge and 2-player. It is planned for the game to have at least 60 levels. Currently it is looking as though the game will be CD only, if so it will probably include some digital audio tracks to enhance the sound in the game. Something that is very interesting is that the game may include TCP/IP support to allow games over the Internet, something that has been very lacking for the Amiga.

Moving on, there is another team called Skywards Software. You may have heard of them before as they are the team that coded Mikro Mortal Tennis. There are now back with a new game called Powerball.

Heres a quick run-down of the game. It is a simple puzzle game where the player must clean each screen from all the coloured bricks. Doing this is possible by using a ball that bounces up and down in the screen, this is controlled by the player who can move it either left or right. The ball cleans all the same-coloured bricks; to change its colour it has to touch a brick with two crossed arrows.

However, things are not that easy as there are other bricks in the game whoch have differing effects on you. You will find some that are painted with a skull, these should be avoided as they cause the loss of a life), those which can be moved (but not cleaned) represented by a four-head arrow and those which allow the ball to be teleported between two points.

Obviously, difficult grows up going on through the levels which compose the game and examining each screen before starting action could be useful. But you have to take care of the time limit in each level; running out of time will cause the loss of a life. During game, you can collect several bonuses which can increase points or lives, make you jump to the next level etc. They appear for a few seconds as a brick on the screen. Besides, you can resume game from any level using a useful code system from the main menu.

The final version of the game will feature 80 levels, the chance to customize game by changing music, patterns or pictures, yet more bonuses, new bricks and the chance to play customized levels edited with the enclosed editor.

These are just a few of the games that you probably haven't heard of. There are many more that have had quite a bit of attention. One of these, The Golem, has been kept under wraps recently, so much infact that people have been saying that it has been cancelled. This is not true and the development of it is still going well. Expect to see it released around June time.

Below are a few contacts that are related to this article:-

Paolo "Modem" D'Urso (main organizer, coder - Darkage Software) granata@mail.caribusiness.it

Massimo Marino - maxime@webzone.it