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If you want to find out more about what the OS4Depot Adventures series is about, please click here for an explanation.

Are you ready for an adventure into the thick jungle of software called OS4Depot? Do you have supplies ready in the form of a cup of coffee or perhaps a bottle of soda? If yes, then let us enter uncharted AmigaOS 4 territory.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a game on OS4Depot called PC Maziacs. It was part of a small bundle called Crap Games Vol. 8. Spot from Up Rough! has released 21 such compilations of software he has ported to AmigaOS 4.

As it turns out, not all games included in the bundles are bad, since there are some gems in between. As an example, I discovered Flash Flood for AmigaOS 4 in Crap Games Vol. 11. This was actually a port of a well-known Commodore 64 game!

Now, as mentioned above, PC Maziacs was included with two other games; Slime Volley and Sets. Let us have a quick look at these first.

After launching Slime Volley, a menu appears. Here you can set some options, such as selecting the number of players (a networked mode is listed, but I have not tried this), fullscreen, amount of balls, speed, theme, and more.

Here is the Paper theme:

Here is the Classic theme:

Here is the Modern theme:

Of all the themes, I definitely like the one that looks drawn on paper the best. 🙂

The aim of the game is simple. It is a match of two opponents each trying to hit the ball and make it land on the other side without the opponent catching it.

I had a bit of fun testing the game. It was not a bad game at all. It is simple and not something you’ll spend hours on, but worth a look nonetheless. 🙂

Sets is the name of the next game. It was written by David Ashley. Your task is to figure out which cards belong together. According to the instructions, there are 81 cards in the game. 12 cards are shown at a time. The goal is to identify the sets. The upper left corner shows how many sets have been discovered out of many that exist. Clicking on cards selects them. If three cards are highlighted that are a valid undiscovered set, they’ll get marked. You can find more information in the documentation. The graphics are simple and there is no music or sound effects. After playing it, I thought to myself that some nice illustrations, sounds, a bit of music in the back, and perhaps an interface keeping track of a score would make it much more interesting.

Now for the big surprise in this collection, namely PC Maziacs! Yes, this one was very good. I was not expecting a game like this to be part of the Crap Games series from Spot. In my opinion, it deserves its own upload to OS4Depot (this I will ask Spot about on Amigans.net).

So, what is PC Maziacs? As it turns out, this is a remake of an old ZX Spectrum game called Maziacs. According to Wikipedia, Maziacs was written by Don Priestly, and based on his earlier ZX81 game Mazogs, which was published by Bug-Byte in 1982. It proved successful and Priestly then adapted it for the ZX Spectrum and MSX. It then got the name Maziacs and was published by DK’ Tronics.

PC Maziacs is a remake created by S. Romero for Windows and Linux in 2002. You can find the webpage of the project here.

Being a remake, the game has an old-school mode where you can play the game like it was back in the day.

It also has a modern mode with updated graphics.

It also has a menu with various options:

The game takes place in a randomly generated maze. Your goal is to find gold and then exit the level. To find the route to the gold, you can lean onto specific icons of human prisoners in the maze, and then parts of the route will light up for a limited time. You can also find food which increases health, as well as swords. Beware though, there are monsters everywhere and if you lose the fight, you are dead. If you are uncertain where you are (it is a maze after all), you can press M to see a map.

The graphics in the modern version look nice and the music playing in the background is good. I have not checked, but is it a song by Jester of Sanity? An old Amiga module? I’m not sure, but it did sound awfully familiar. I know I’ve heard it several times in the past. 🙂 The gameplay is also sturdy with easy-to-learn controls. I’ve read that the game is almost completed, but what is missing I do not know.

If you like old games, I definitely recommend playing PC Maziacs. It is a good game for sure. I really like the fact that you can switch between the classic version and the modern one. I’m very happy that I stumbled upon this one!

In this post, we’ve looked at another one of Spot’s Crap Games collections. The games included are not bad, and I think they deserve to be distributed separately if possible. 😉 Time will show what happens with this. At least, I hope some of you will take the chance to try these games. Who knows, you might enjoy them!

Thanks for joining me on another journey through OS4Depot. See you in the next one! 🙂