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Hyper Sentinel is a forthcoming arcade shoot-em-up for ’80s retro gaming fans which has recently been launched as a Kickstarter courtesy of Rob Hewson and Andrew Hewson, who fans of videogaming back in the day will remember as Hewson Consultants, responsible for two of my all-time ZX Spectrum favourites.
Quazatron is a game I remember playing for hours on end until my fingers stopped working, and I can also recall the Saturday morning I got the bus down to Stockport to buy Technician Ted from Boots, where the counter was run by an irritating bloke with a pencil moustache. He thought he was Don Johnson with his flash suit. However, if I ever had a problem with a game (not with these, but with others), and tried to take it back, if it worked in the store, you had zero chance of getting your money back! I wanted to slap him six ways from Sunday… but enough about one of the many problems I had as a teenager 😉
Hyper Sentinel is very reminiscent of another of their classics – Uridium. I loved a game or three back then, and playing the demo for this game, you can see the similarities, as well as how it’s been updated to give you pin-sharp graphics and fantastic sound, whilst keeping the retro feel.
Oh, and something else back in the day – at school, we used to have open days occasionally to raise funds, and for myself, I decided to contribute to the games side of things by bringing in my ZX Spectrum (I did this in 1986 and ’87, and maybe ’85 and ’88 too, I can’t remember now… I’ve had a sleep since then) and I’d load games for people to play on it, charging about 20p a go.
One kid saw “Dominic Robinson” credited as the programmer on the Spectrum and asked me expectantly, “Did you make this??” I paused, then said emphatically, “Yes!” 😀
Of course, I didn’t, and I wasn’t fantastic in the computer programming side of my Computer Science course at Uni a few years later, but how I wish I’d tried doing what many of the great programmers did to start, by just altering game listings in magazines to see the effect. After all, that’s how I learned .shtml back in 2000 when I set up my website and used that as a basis.
But back to Hyper Sentinel, and for the various pledges you can make, the rewards include a Limited Edition USB Cassette (the game for PC and Mac on a USB stick within a cassette shell), the mobile game on iOS or Android, an eBook of Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers by Andrew Hewson – with the option to add a tenner for the paperback version signed by Andrew, a Retrogaming MP3 Album, 4K Mike Berry Artwork Pack, a digital copy of the game on PC, Mac or console, Certificate of Authenticity, Signed Postcard Pack, Exclusive Fridge Magnet, a Classic Hewson game signed by Andrew Hewson, and a Signed A2 poster.
And I haven’t even yet mentioned that the game features 4K graphics in 60fps with pixel-art graphics! 😀
Check out the demo at this Kickstarter link and see the trailer below!
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.