Wizball is one of those love/hate games, with seemingly everyone I talk to coming down on the side of hate these days. But anyhoo, the uber-art-person Trevor "Smila" Storey from Mersey Remakes has been hankering for a remake of this for ages, and as it's a game which I have very fond memories of myself (admittedly of the Speccy version rather than the superior - gah! it hurts to say that - C64 one) I drunkenly said I'd remake it using Retrengine, the C/Allegro/AllegroGL/OpenGL/FMod engine that I used to make Exolon DX.

As it stands, things are going quite well with the remake - there was a bit of a slow patch for about 4 months this year but I'm back in the groove at the moment. The mortifying thing about this remake is the staggering amount of bugs I've found in Retrengine while making it. Most of them are things that won't affect Exolon DX but there are a couple of doozies in there which I'm amazed haven't resulted in the game grinding to a halt on PCs and Macs across the world.

So woss done so far? Well, most of the core game is in place with cauldrons getting filled with paint, Catellite whizzing around the screen happily and most of the weapons and pickups coded. I still have to do a bunch of the enemy types and I've not even started on the bonus level yet ("bonus level?" I hear the Spectrum owners ask. Yup, just one of the many bits that was ripped out of our version during the conversion*).

Chris "Infamous" Nunn, who did the lovely Exolon DX music is back on board once again as he's "gay for Galway" (my words, not his - but I said them out loud so I can quote 'em and pretend he said it). I'm also hoping to get him to do all the sound effects, but I've not told him that yet...

And of course, Trevor Storey is doing the graphics, inbetween doing the graphics for every other remake under the sun (including Ghostbusters, so that's good news for all the idiots who keep requesting it on the forums despite the fact that the "game" is very, very, very bad. So bad that instead of giving it coal for Christmas, Santa's going to shit in its sock drawer). So it'll look reet purty, I'm sure.



*sorry, not conversion - I meant ham-fisted arse-porting.