Biohell
Graphical text adventure that's played, for reasons best known to its developer, on a Spectrum emulator.
For immediate release, 22nd April 2009, somewhere in the virtual Ether, from Andy Remic of QUAKEWARE and www.AndyRemic.com:
Andy Remic’s latest novel, BIOHELL, is coming to a VDU near you thanks to a hard-core conversion to the mighty rubber-clad 8-bit monolith known as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and is due to be released on 1st May 2009 through www.AndyRemic.com.
As Andy explains, "When I finally finished the novel BIOHELL (published by Solaris Books, February 2009) and it hit the shelves, I thought to myself: what do I do next? There was of course the follow-up novel, HARDCORE, to complete but I was eager to pursue an advanced gaming angle." And with its sophisticated graphics and tactile keyboard, the old Speccy seemed like the best outlet for this, "I’d recently been approached by three large games developers who were interested in the idea of BIOHELL – namely ID Software (Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake), Rockstar North (Grand Theft Auto series, Manhunt) and RARE (Sabre Wulf, Knightlore, Viva Piňata, Perfect Dark Zero) but I decided against the glitz and glamour of worldwide gaming domination, and instead set out to develop a 48K Spectrum adventure myself." And so work began on what will become one of this year's biggest interactive fiction releases.
Andy has always had aspirations to publish his own games on the mighty ZX, and has very fond memories of the machine. "You always remember your first computing love affair: and mine was a sleek black little Spectrum number. It was October 1984, and I got my Sexy Speccy along with Ultimate’s Knight Lore for Christmas of that year. It changed my life!!" he mused.
BIOHELL – THE STORY
The City: an entire planet teeming with corruption, guns, sex, and designer drugs. Humans are upgraded by the injection of microscopic nanobots, courtesy of a new technology from the Nano-Tek corporation, but when this highly desirable technology heads onto the black market, millions of people inject themselves with pirated biomods - and transform into zombies. Now they roam the streets, out for blood, packing shotguns and bombs. The Combat K squad are dropped into this warzone to uncover what's turned the planet into a wasteland of murder and mutations, and soon their focus is on the darkness at the Nano-Tek corporation itself...
BIOHELL - GAMEPLAY DESCRIPTION
BIOHELL is a fast-paced hardcore first-person epic graphical text adventure, utilising guns and bombs to progress across a nano-molecular zombie-infested city game-world where you, FRANCO HAGGIS, must battle AIs, aliens and, of course, horrible zombie mutations. The game utilises advanced AI for behavioural patterns in advanced violent textual adversaries, superlative 8-bit advanced 3D bump-mapping, a full range of 8 (yes 8!!) colours and advanced shading techniques, advanced textual parser and many advanced Spectrum features!! Hell, this game is just totally advanced!!
BIOHELL release date: May 2009
Publisher: QUAKEWARE
Platform: ZX Spectrum 48K & 128K Price: £free (Download)
Available from: www.AndyRemic.com Also check out: www.solarisbooks.com