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I'm oldskool, the last couple of levels of arcade Scramble are too much for today's wuss gamers :D

Hope it can be fixed.

Is this supposed to end after one loop?

When I was a professional games journalist these were the games I HATED reviewing. Not because they were terrible, but because they were SO close to being absolute triple-A classics but were spoiled by just a couple of bad, easily-fixable decisions that you had no choice but to knock off significant numbers of points for.

This is at its heart one of the best Xevious-inspired games I've ever seen on an 8-bit machine - it looks great and it plays brilliantly and would easily have sold as a commercial title back in the day. So just a bit of constructive criticism:

1. I wish people would spend half as much time on a full suite of sound FX as they do on music that I'm just going to switch off anyway if I have to choose between that and game sound. All games, but especially shmups, NEED sound FX, even if it's just a few zaps and bangs that actually make you feel like you're taking part in a space war (and audio cues for important events like a power-up appearing), rather than just watching a movie with the sound off while some nerd practices keyboards in the corner of the room.

2. The screen aspect ratio is just horrible. Zoomed in to the gameplay area on an emulator it looks fantastic, but you lose the score and lives readout, which takes up way too much space generally AND isn't symmetrical (you have a huge empty black area at the top and the score/logo bar all unbalanced at the bottom so it feels like your monitor's gone wonky), AND introduces a large wasted area down the sides. All you need is the score and number of lives, small and unobtrusive, in a corner somewhere (or even just popping up for a couple of seconds in between lives) and then you can fill the screen with the action.

3. Speaking of lives, seven is WAY WAY WAY too many to start with. The game is set at a good level of challenge for a standard three-life arcade game, not too hard and not too easy. But giving people so many lives - and handing out bonus ones like candy - makes even your first go last far too long and destroys the addictive qualities. 

Of course all these things are your decision, it's your game and there are plenty of others I can go and play instead. But I'm a huge Xevious fan and I'd SO like to see this be the utterly awesome game it could be (and in gameplay and graphical terms already is). 

Agreed 100%. I properly HATE these Japanese coders who make great ports (Galaxian is another one on the Megadrive) and then DON'T LET ANYONE PLAY THEM. What is the point? And what's the point of whining at somebody who's made a really good one that we CAN actually play, just because they used a bit of AI? Honestly, this is why we can't have nice things. You're an absolute douche, blb8.

Agreed. So just to annoy them I got AI to help me make some box art for it :D 

Absolutely incredible to me that people are bitching about this because AI was used. Who cares? The end product is what matters.

Am trying to figure how to install ACE-DL on the Pi, thanks for the info. 

This is an AMAZING port, all but arcade perfect and perhaps displacing Pang and Donkey Kong as the best-ever coin-op ports on Amstrad hardware, but under emulation (on a Raspberry Pi here) there's a consistent glitch with bombs being in the wrong place, eg see the top left quadrant in this pic. They generally reset to the right place when you collect one in the same group, and it doesn't seem to affect Round 3 or Round 5. Bomb Jack Extra Sugar did not have this problem on the same system, so hopefully it can be fixed. 

Sadly V1.1 (CD32) still does this on Amiberry (Retroarch version) after the map screen on your second life. Heartbreaking, because such a great port. 

Is anyone else finding this crashing after the first life?

Coolio :)

I think this might conceivably be your most accurate work yet. Feels identical to the original (which I only recently discovered was the blueprint for Bionic Commando). Tweaked the flyer into some placeholdery box art. 

The 50% off sale doesn't really work, due to processing fees the minimum payment is still $1 :D

Sweet game. Bit of tape box art... :) 

PS Don't you think an extra life every 10K is crazy generous, though? I can play for hours at that level. Every 30K would probably be more than enough.

Oh, excellent, thanks :)

This is good fun, though I wish it had sound effects. Made some box art for it :) 

Hi, do you have any idea why I'm getting these numbers all over the screen (in the libretro version of FBNeo)? The CD version is fine but the arcade one does this. 

Fair enough 😄

Original doesn't kill you if you end on the middle part.

Nope. But now it only happens about 50% of the time. I can't find any logic for it, sometimes you lose a life when you beat the Rivets stage and sometimes you don't.

K-ong1.p seems to be very broken - no matter what you set the keys to they stick on QAOPZ, and you lose all your lives when you clear the third set of levels.

Seconded. Runs beautifully, though.

Nice, the least unfair Roguelike I've played in ages. Made a little box art. 

Sorted :)

How to run it? Emulator auto-starts the jukebox instead.

It's 15 March now!!!!!

Am I missing something on the third stage? No matter how I try to jump on either the hippos or the fish, I go straight through them and drown.

Nice. Got my pal Grok to help out with some box art. 

Cheers. I must just be an idiot but I can't for the life of me figure out how. I deleted the Loading and Menu parts in the S folder successfully in ADF Opus (tried both V1.2 and the 2025 version), but when I edit Startup-Sequence, it immediately reverts to what it was before as soon as I hit Return or click OK. In the 2025 version it won't let me change the contents even temporarily. (The "Writeable" box is ticked and the ADF file isn't marked Read-only.) 

I can delete Startup-Sequence entirely but then there's no way I can find to add a new version. I tried creating a plain text file called Startup-Sequence.txt, removing the suffix and dropping it into the S folder but it wouldn't recognise it ("unknown device type").

Noticeably nicer sound in the new version, sweet.

Can anyone help me out with how to start it with the Japanese level order? I've managed to figure out that I need ADF Opus and I've found the start-up sequence, which looks like this:

CursOff
NoBorder
CursOff
Cls
SetMap Menu
Prompt "Selection:>   "
Type2 S/Menu

Which bit do I change to "Donkey_Kong CRAZYKONGLEVELS"? (And actually, anything I change in ADF Opus just seems to revert as soon as I close the window anyway.)

How are we meant to play the B, C and D sides? They just come up with a message and "Press any key to return", which dumps you back to the menu screen.

Nice one :)

Boo, when I try to run it under emulation in Amiberry it crashes with a "DH0 is write-protected" error :(

Well, if the hardware can handle Turbo Arcade… 😄

Cool, I'll let you know if I can get it to happen again. In the meantime, for your next feat, how about giving Deathchase a try? :D 

Emulator, Stella. 

Amazing! Thanks so much, I love it! 

I did find a bug where after a few games, I started a new game and all the baddies and Redbirds were gone, it was just me and the train and the purple thing in the interior. Will see if I can replicate it.

Absolutely blown away by this. In no time at all you've got all the basic functionality of the game in there, and it looks way better than the mockup did. Gonna be watching this one very closely :) :) :)

Oh wow!