Megapreview!

Here's a remarkable one - a new game for the Spectrum. We all enjoyed the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega machines, and it all seemed like it'd be impossible to do on the humble Speccy. But a number of things we all thought were impossible (like Doom) are clearly not so, as can be seen on the Greek Spectrum Club website. Anestis Koutsoudis is a leading member of the Greek Spectrum Club, and a rather fine artist, as can be seen from the screenshots. Andrew Owen is a reknowned member of the Spectrum community, and a co-founder of Brand New Company (http://www.brandnewco.org). We got in touch with Anestis to find out more about Sonic on the Spectrum... 'When I started the conversion by myself I thought very selfishly because I own an MB02+. I was looking forward to make the game multiload but with many parts. Because the MB02 is very fast I can have 1.8MB per disk. So, I started converting the graphics from the Mega Drive version. It was not possible of course to have the depth of that version on the Spectrum but the graphics looked good and with just a few scrolling routines I used was quite interesting. When Andrew joined the group he wanted to convert the game from the Master System which had the same resolution and it already simplified to run like an 8bit game. 'After that, during the creation of the graphics part, Andrew proposed me to create a version that doesn't actually exist on any other platform. So, as you can see from the screenshots you can choose between three sprites. The scrolling is going to be by 8 pixel (1 character) this is because we wanted to make it colourful. You know good old attributes. The games is going to be multiload but it can run on a 48k Spectrum.' The project as it stands looks incredibly good - check out Anestis' page for more screenshots. I personally remember seeing the first version of his page more than a years ago; it's good indeed to see it finally moving towards a finished game.

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