Over 50 Amstrad GX4000 & CPC+ Games In Under 30 Minutes
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- čas přidán 13. 05. 2023
- This video features gameplay footage from over 50 different games for the enhanced Amstrad CPC+ computers and GX4000 console including cartridge conversions and recent homebrews.
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#amstrad #retrogaming #gx4000 - Hry
Nice. The GX4000 had interesting specs especially coming from Amstrad, but it would have been a whole lot better if the CPC / 128 had the enhanced Sprites, HW Scrolling, DMA sound from day one back in 1984 instead of 1990 when 16 bits were rampant.
What stands out to me personally, is the great music and sound that the Amstrad has.
Love the channel... G'day from Australia 🦘
The sound is like being stabbed in the ears with a knitting needle while someone jingles spare change.
I had this console as a child. It traumatized me. But I recovered and now I live a normal life.
Hahahahaha! Brilliant!
@@TheLairdsLair XD great channel by the way. Congrats!
How did it "traumatize" you?
👍
Honestly, it was a good hardware that would have been interesting to play, if only they commercialized it in 1987, when there were only 8 bits console in Europe and 16 bits computers were just emerging. Of course, for XMas 90, the very same time Sega launched its Megadrive... Ahem... In one side GX4000 and Robocop 2, in the other Megadrive with Altered Beast. No chance!
But nowadays I really like this little console. With a C4CPC or a BackBit cart, we have a consolized CPC and it's possible to play more than 700 commercial or homebrew game on GX4000, patched to be fully playable without keyboard and using the 2-button joypad. Cybernoid or Barbarian on TV screen, quietly sitting on a sofa, it's still very pleasant 🤩
Happy memories of GX4000. Got it when it came out fun for a while then lent it to a friend and never saw it again (probably for the best). Did love Switchblade though.
So many awesome memories in this video! Especially the Ocean stuff - Batman, Robocop, Gryzor, Rainbow Islands etc.
These games look like a mix of Commodore 64/Atari Lynx/Sega Master System Frankensteined together.
Loved my trusty old CPC 464 with green screen monitor and still have it to this day. Was a great machine and could certainly keep up with the other 8 bit machines. Just a shame that some games were just lazy zx spectrum ports
I've never had any interest in the Amstrad line of micro computers (if I were ever tempted to get one I'd probably look into a Commodore 64 or Dragon 32) but gosh, I do love the design and look to the Amstrad GX4000... not the name though; that's a mouthful.
0:24 - I've heard good things about both Barbarian games... this knee kicking example probably wasn't the best way to showcase it.
5:01 - Lacking in the sound department but the visuals have a strong array of colours and the game looks decent. Crouch kicking seems to be the way to survive on Dragon Ninja's streets.
6:05 - Of the driving games so far, this one is the most pleasing to my ears. Fire & Forget 2 here seems pretty cool with the combat aspect and it's hopping enemies.
10:56 - The characters in Mystical here pop out well in this walking shoot em up and it seems to dabble in a bit of humour with it's designs.
11:49 - The GX4000 even had a fighting game to call it's own; who would have thought. With the many car games at the start I was wondering it's small game-pool was limited but it has more variety than expected. Sucks to be the blue haired fighter here though; he's blending in with a lot of the blue background (or was that his plan?)
13:37 - The animation of that spin-punch in Panza Kick Boxing looks awesome.
19:07 - A bit restrained in it's screen space but each screen transitions to the next one fluidly in Run the Gauntlet here. I do like top-down racers so this was pleasing to see and the music was great.
21:47 - I remember hearing that someone had ported the Sonic Master System game onto the Amstrad. They've done a really impressive job of it here.
25:02 - The Switchblade character sprite looks so cute. It makes me think more so of a Game Boy Colour game with it's styling.
Just to say that Sonic on the GX4000 is still in development and not finished as of yet
Which version of chase hq do you prefer. Spectrum or amstrad?
Also... is there any difference between tape/disc (464/6128) of chase hq and this version? Or is it literally just backwards compatible version on cart?
I marginally prefer the Spectrum version because it's a bit faster, but they are both great. I believe the 128k disk version also has speech that isn't in the 64k tape version (although don't quote me!).
This is just the standard 64k tape converted to run from a cartridge with no enhancements.
A lot of these are just 464 games transferred onto cartridge (inevitable since there aren't 50 games even when you count homebrew), which does the GX something of a disservice as it was much more capable hardware than people give it credit for. RoboCop 2 and Navy Seals, as well as the more modern port of Ghosts 'n' Goblins, give a better idea of what the hardware had the potential to do had it not been too little, too late.
Also pretty sure Prehistorik 2 with the Plus effects on, Rick Dangerous and Space Gun actually all require 128K of RAM and so won't actually run on a unmodified GX4000...
It does say GX4000 and CPC+ games ;-)
5:00 that is hilarious!!
Bad dude's verses dragon ninja...
Mum can i play in the arcade- they got bad dude's in!!
- we have bad dude's at home!!
......oof thats a conversion with concessions made.
Wait, what, they called it "dragon ninja" with bruce lee on the title screen???
So many questions...
GX4000 is a big GameGear, CMV.
No sprite flicker though.
Is there any difference between the 2 versions of “The Enforcer” in the video? Is one for GX4000 and the other for the CPC line?
No, it seems I put it in twice somehow, because I'm an idiot.
No worries - thanks for clearing that up 👍🏻
I have a Gx4000 in box never been out of it supposedly the power supply has a habit of failing.
Yeah, so I hear
Is this litterally like the amiga cd 32, as in its just an amstrad cpc 128k without keyboard?
Kinda yeah, it's a An Amstrad CPC464+ without a keyboard.
@@TheLairdsLair is that higher than the amstrad Cpc128k?
Just trying to work it out as I had one with a green monitor which i eventually got a colour one, and it had a discdrive on the side. I think my mate had the cpc464 which had the tape drive
My point is - IF the 128k was the stronger variant- how cheap was that of amstrad too use the lesser powerful one as a console...
I assume you had the CPC6128 then. That and the tape based CPC464 were replaced in 1990 by the CPC+ range, which also included the GX4000 console. Basically they increased the colour palette, gave it stereo sound, hardware sprites, cartridge port, hardware scrolling and a new OS. They were fully backwards compatible with the original CPC models and still had the same CPU.
They weren't very successful though, as by 1990 people had moved onto the ST/Amiga and games consoles. They were discontinued a year later.
@@TheLairdsLair thats it! That's the one i had...
Oh yeah i know the cpc range had some success of sorts; ok nowhere near amiga/st/ibm (as you basically said, it was aging by then anyway compared...)
I even remember the word processor/business type amstrad cpc.
So the + basically was the top variant of...
The word processor one was the Amstrad PCW.
The original Amstrad CPC was pretty successful in Western Europe - sales of 3 million, but the CPC+ was a huge failure.
Panzer Kickboxing and Sonic were the stand out games for me. No Slap Fight included?
Not seen the GX4000 version of that, I'll look it up.
@@TheLairdsLair czcams.com/video/Rl4pelWVnhI/video.html Alcon 2020 it plays really well!
Looks fantastic, had I known about it I definitely would have included it!
Always had better (more colourful) graphics than my C64, but I think C64 & Speccy were so entrenched in the market by the time Amstrad got a decent machine out, it made no sense to buy an Amstrad if you could get a Mega drive, Master system or NES by then. I do remember being a bit jelous of the Amstrad graphics on the back of the box and wishing the C64 ones were as good, but the Amstrad was nearly a decade newer by then (1990). I moved on to Mega drive e at the end of that year.
Amstrad has more or less the same library as the ZX Spectrum and C64 despite the 464 appearing a couple of years or so later. The total game number on wiki for example is completely false as it doesn't take into account the French, Spanish and other releases. The majority of these games run on a 464 or 6128 and the Amstrad has had access to colourful Mode 0 graphics since 84. The Plus range and GX4000 were too little too late compared to some of the competition in period but offer nice enhancements. Sonic is still in development though
I wish these games was on the TurboGrafx16. I wonder if they can be easily ported to the system.
They are very different machines, so not as straightforward as you would think. What made Me laugh is the guy promoting the amstrad gx was going around saying it was more powerful than the super Nintendo lol.
Similar to sam trimbol of atari saying jag was more powerful than saturn and PlayStation by lots.
@@orderofmagnitude-TPATP Why didn't they just make an 16-bit instead of an 8-bit system in the 90s.
I have a GX4000 with eight games. Very strange console and really not great. Rated: Crazy Cars 2 3/10, Klax 7/10, Switch Blade 5/10, Burning Rubber 7/10, World of Sports 4/10, Batman 5/10, Robocop 2 6/10, Operation Thunderbolt 4/10.
Bit harsh on Switch Blade, that's probably my favourite game on the console. Pang and Plotting are really good too though.
But at the end of day all of those can be played on other machines and better versions too, making the console pretty pointless.
@@TheLairdsLair yeah, plus, many of the games are really expensive. Pang for example.
@@TheLairdsLair - these days, with a flash cart it makes a nice consolised CPC+ for TV play. Back in the day... well it could have been if it had a cassette input.
Many of the games featured in this video are mere .cpr conversions of base CPC games, so I have no idea why you would include them in this video. 🤔
The "too little too late" remark doing the rounds in this comment section is so ignorant, considering that the 8-bit market was still thriving in 1990 (when the 6128 Plus and GX4000 were released ) _and_ the fact that the 64GS (a repackaged c-64 with no hardware improvements whatsoever) was released in '92, two whole years after the GX4000..! So did the Master System II (again, a repackaging of the same hardware, just a more compact design).
It was a commercial mishandling on Amstrad's part, as well as the lack of support that killed the console, not the timeframe it was released in. 8-bit and 16-bit are two different markets and certainly not mutually exclusive, as has been proven time and time again.
By that reasoning, everyone of us gamers should own high-end PCs and nothing else, since any less capable hardware must be considered to be obsolete.
I'm hoping that the upcoming releases of Ghosts 'n' Goblins (by Golem13, not the already available version by Xiphos) and Sonic GX, two games that will showcase the capabilities of the hardware, will rekindle the interest of gamers and developers alike, so with proper Kickstarter campaigns we could start to see a plethora of truly amazing games for this awesome system.
So are most of the commercial GX4000 games, so what's your point?
The C64GS, was released in 1990 at the same time as the GX4000, no idea where you got 1992 from. And I wouldn't say the 8-bit market was thriving at all, it was definitely starting to die off at this point and some software houses had already moved on to just doing 16-bit games.
@@TheLairdsLair "so what's your point"?
I can't be plainer than I have been; regarding the commercial GX4000 games, even though most of them were crappy verbatim CPC ports, they were, at least, official commercial releases unlike the rest of the games featured in this video (those .cpr conversions of old CPC games). Including them helps perpetuate the (sadly often prevalent) false impression that the CPC and the 6128 Plus/GX4000 were practically the same system.
Unless you can't handle constructive criticism..?
I said both markets can - and do - coexist. This isn't an opinion, it's a fact...
As for the release date of that crappy 64GS thing, I vividly remember Wikipedia citing it as "1992", but it was a long time ago when I last looked it up. No matter, it was a repackaged c-64 anyway, unlike the GX4000 which was a huge improvement over its predecessor.
9:20 whoe that early contra thats not even called contra yet. wow. Gry Z Or. wtf? Then like a year later its contra on nintendo. lol
Gryzor is the European name for Contra in arcades.
Contra was renamed Probotector with robots in Europe so why not Gryzor on 8 bit systems 😅 ?
The sound on this device is awful, even the Atari had better sound.
This thing isn’t even as good as the NES 😖