Cassette edition by @PlayOnRetro for only 9,99€.
Reservations open until October 13th.
More info at www.playonretro.com
Almost 7 years ago, on November 5, 2016, our colleague Azicuetano suffered the Stendhal syndrome when he browsed the Retroconsolas Alicante event and saw the wonderful creations that many homebrew teams had developed for 8-bit systems that he thought were already forgotten. This shock caused that during the following week he started looking for information on how he could develop a game for Amstrad, his beloved childhood computer.
Stendhal Syndrome can be described as a psychosomatic illness that causes elevated heart rate, happiness, palpitations, incomparable feelings and excitement when the individual is exposed to works of art, especially when they are considered extremely beautiful.
A year later, Baba’s Palace was born, winner of the CPCRetroDev 2017 contest, just a handful of points behind the incomparable Profanation 2, and with rivals as tough as Basquet Cases, Cris Odd Prelude, Bitume, Laser Boy or Phantis Legacy among others.
Baba’s Palace is the result of the fabulous musical art of McKlain and a year of free time work by Azicuetano. Behind this, many days watching Fran Gallego‘s videos and reading in detail the CPCTelera manual. Hours and hours spent searching for inspiration, creativity, pixel art, level design, testing and a lot of brainstorming. If you are curious, in the documentation delivered with the game for the CPCRetroDev you have a document about the “making-of”, as well as the source code. There is also a very nice interview from Fran Gallego to Azicuetano where he explains many of the technical details of the game and its development process.
This past weekend was held the 7th edition of Retroalacant (here the great chronicle of Manuel Sagra), a great event about retrocomputing in Alicante, and in the 4MHz stand we have exhibited an Amstrad CPC with Baba’s Palace to be used by the public attending the event. As a concept, a puzzle game that forces you to rack your brains to overcome each level, has all the chances to go completely unnoticed in an environment with so many attractive games available to the public. Well, it was nice to see how anyone who came to look and timidly explored to find out what they had in their hands, ended up spending an hour trapped between bugs, stairs and stones. And most surprisingly, the varied demographic that was hooked: young couples, teenagers, children, and even a mother with her three year old daughter in her arms who made it to level 28 in one sitting! Truly, seeing is believing : )
There have been so many expressions of affection and stories shared with us about Baba’s Palace. Stories as diverse as the fact that the daughter of one AUA member, aged 19, plays regularly on an Amstrad GX4000 console and sometimes even takes it in her backpack to her friends’ house to play there. Or that of a family that even put the Amstrad in the dining room of their house for a while because they used to play long games together.
Precisely, this edition of Baba’s Palace is the result of one of those tender and unexpected anecdotes. Juan Antonio Rubio, recent author of the book “ZX Spectrum Assembly. Let’s make a game?“, was one of many who spent hours playing this game with his daughter, alternating attempts, and together they managed to reach the sixty-odd level. He always had a thorn in his side that Baba’s Palace didn’t have a physical cassette edition and he was the main promoter of the idea that led to this fantastic edition of PlayOnRetro, by Felipe Monge.
If you like collecting and being able to play your favourite games, don’t miss this opportunity, there may not be any more…
It never ceases to amaze us to see the repercussion that the game has achieved. Apart from awards, good scores and attractive reviews in specialised press, it is amazing to see how in every YouTube video about Baba’s Palace there are a lot of kind and disinterested comments highlighting different aspects of the game. The same goes for posts on Twitter or forums about retro games. That’s a real reward for us! We never imagined we would receive such a great reward as the love we have received.
Thanks to all of you!
Together with Baba’s Palace, PlayOnRetro has a wonderful collection of Amstrad games for sale: Castaway, Jax the Dog, Space Panic + Spaceman Kerl, Shadow Hunter and Transylvanian Castle DX2. Check them out and take advantage of the offer to get all 6 games for the price of 5!
