In May 1990, a group of Hungarian gamers decided to create their own
game, inspired by the games they loved most, and adding those features
they missed in them:
WASTELAND was a post-holocaust drama; small communities of scattered survivors battling unintelligent monsters and radioactive mutants, exploring forgotten relics of the old world… barely more than that.—Oh, yes, and those lovely paragraphs! The world was quite static, the characters unresponsive and uninteractive, YET WE LIKED THEM. Our coder completed it once, Istvan is on the way to make it the second time playing a !SINGLE! character, and Zoli already played it 2 times over.
NEUROMANCER featured a brilliant new setting, very communicative cast of characters and interesting conversations with them, event following event along the gameplay, yet it lacked the long progressive gameplay and plenty of areas WASTELAND offers, not to mention Hack'n'Slash. At least so we felt when leasing our body parts at Chin's Body Shop.
DRAGON WARS was also great, having combat after combat, bright animated graphics, automapping, the possibility of using attributes, skills, items in any order to solve problems, for the same task even multiple solutions existed, but there was no LIFE, absolute lack of conversation and interaction with characters.
In 1992 they founded Cinematic Intuitive Dynamix (CID), a studio specialized in 3D computer animations and graphics. In 1994, Valhalla Paholy published a Hungarian version (the game was originally and is now again developed in English), which sold more than 1500 units. By 2001, Newcomer had grown into an enhanced version that was "appreciationware": you could download and play it for free, sending CID $10 would entitle you to hints should you ever get stuck.
CID are rather close-lipped about the plot of Newcomer. Basically
you wind up in a rather strange prison island after killing your wife
and her lover. Very strange, for example, that you have access to
weapons. There are several factions you can join, or you can try to
make your way on your own. Some plot elements, we are told, have an
intriguing similarity to the movie Escape from Absolom
, made
about three years after the first plans of Newcomer, and that's about
all we are told.
Technically, Newcomer uses a first-person view rather similar to Bard's Tale and Circuit's Edge. The combat and menu system is probably mostly similar to Wasteland, but there's only so much you can tell from the screenshots. Inventory graphics are a nice improvement.
In short, if you can be bothered to mess around with a C64 emulator, or even have a working C64 or C128 at home (it must have a SID chip in perfect condition), get yourself this game.
