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Released back in 1992 this Columns clone was one of the very first homebrew games released for the computer. For those who have never played the original game by Sega it’s a block dropping puzzle game that is often compared to Tetris. The idea is to drop the “columns” into the pit to make up rows of the same colour. Each “column” is made up of 3 gems, each with their own colour. As you drop these gems you are able to change the order they appear in using the fire button. When you match 3 or more colours vertically, horizontally or diagonally they disappear. As the levels progress the “columns” drop faster and quicker reflexes are required in order to match the gems. If the gems manage to fill up the pit to the top then it’s game over. This is a fair clone of the game that uses the Falcon’s RGB mode exclusively. The graphics are not much better than a ST game and the sound consists of a slightly crackley Amiga mod. Still it’s an early game that is addictive to play and fills a nice void in this area for the Falcon.

This homebrew game for the Falcon is a horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up in the vein of classics like R-Type and Darius. It features some huge sprites, lots of power-ups and digitised sound. Shame it isn’t very good then, it looks like an Amiga game. In fact I would say that there isn’t much here that couldn’t be done on the Falcon’s predecessor, the Atari ST. The power-ups in Zodiax are a little different to many other shooters, rather than building up or bolting on they simply replace whatever you had before. So your shot will change from a laser to fireballs to bullet spray etc etc. The enemies are impressively large but also very boring and generic with no real intelligent attack patterns or variation. All you do in this game is fly along, avoid the scenery and blast away swarms of repetitive baddies. As I said the graphics look just like they have come from an Amiga game with that 32 colour shaded look to them. The sound simply consists of some speech and digitised effects. There is no music and strangely your own weapon doesn’t even make a sound so expect periods of spooky silence! The Falcon might be starved of games but it can sure do a lot better than this bore fest.