A preview version of Crazy Columns for the Amiga is available.

March 14, 2021, 03:23 Evgenia Germanova ред.

In early March, it became known that comrade Jochen Hoffer and friends had released another and hopefully last demo (it's about time for release), as they dubbed it, a "preview" version 0.98 of the arcade puzzle game Crazy Columns, in development since late 2020.

According to the author, he based it on the 1990 Sega arcade Columns. And added three additional game modes: Time Battle - where in 5 minutes you need to score as many points as possible, Crazy Fill - in which the glass is initially partially filled, like in Flash Columns mode on Mega Drive (only without the flashing target block), and Bad Buddy - mystery mode, which, apparently, offers to clear the field of bad guys in the manner of unforgettable Dr. Mario.

That said, there's a two-player game available in any of the modes, and the standard mode also has five levels of difficulty, with a separate table of records for each. There are also such tables in Time Battle and Crazy Fill modes.

Control is chosen for each player: WASD and left Shift, arrow keys and right Shift, or one of the joysticks. You can turn on the classic version, where "Down" drops a figure, and "Fire" rotates the colors. Or leave the standard one, which also involves the key (or button) "Up", so that the colors can be conveniently rotated in both directions, and more logical in this sense, "Fire" dropped the column of blocks.

To brighten up the game pastime offer us to set one of the eight ready-made backgrounds, or own (winding up) of the prepared before starting the game files. Nice music and sounds for Crazy Columns prepared by coder-musician #m#neoman - their volume can be separately adjusted to a comfortable level, including off.

And all this wealth of features is available now, in this introductory version. So then why wait for the release, you ask? Apparently, thinking along similar lines, or perhaps in anticipation of future commercial success, the author decided to turn off a couple of (the most tasty) difficulty levels, a thing with custom background files, and at the same time, saving something would not be - both settings and best results. Thank you very much, Jochen, now we will definitely buy your game!

But the system requirements are minimal - a basic Amiga A500 (which has a 68000 processor running at 7 MHz), an OCS PAL video chipset and 512 KB of memory are enough. Which isn't surprising, since the game is written 100% in assembly language, and that pays off. A "manual" is already available for those who want it the game's user manual.

The same preview version you can download from "Perfect Pixel" or from the author's website in ADF-image format - also in German.