Greetings earthcreatures!

This communication is to inform people waiting for my next release
in the Shareware domain of a slight delay before it gets released
for reasons I will explain presently.  I also thought it'd be a
good opportunity to do some kind of newsletter thang on this disk and
let people know how it's all been going; and also to present a
demonstration of the new game and invite feedback during the
creation process instead of afterwards, as usual.

Please spread the LLATEST folder wherever, but please keep
the files in the folder, including this text file, together
please.

LLAMASOFT can be communicated with at the usual address:

 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley, Hants RG26 6BN (U.K.)

The text file in the HARDCORE folder explains more about the demo
and gives instructions for playing the game.  HARDCORE will run
on any 68K-series Atari computer with one MB or more of RAM.
(The final version of the game will come in a 512K version, of
course, but I tend to work in 1M and then compress to 512K once
the game is completed).

As it stands, quite a lot of the hard work of programming Hardcore
has been done and the game could probably be completed in a month
or two.  However, as I mentioned at the start of this text, there
will be a longer-than-expected delay before it is finally released.
The reason for this is that I am working on a commercial game for
a certain large American manufacturer of computers, on a new system
which will be in your face sometime within the next year.  As
usual I have had to sign away the rights to several of my favourite
bodily parts and cannot reveal any details upon pain of their
painful and permanent removal, so you're not going to get any more
information on the new hardware from me, except that it's totally
excellent.

Anyway, I'm under contract to produce a game over the next four months,
and during the initial phase when I'm spending a lot of time learning
about the new hardware I won't really be able to sneak in any time
adding levels to Hardcore and finishing it off.  Hopefully when I've
mastered the new stuff and got a good basis of my new game running
I'll be able to phase in a bit more Hardcore time.  Whatever happens,
I will finish Hardcore as soon as I can, and release it in the usual
Shareware fashion.  In the meantime play the demo and let me have
some feedback on the game.  It's an unusual design, it looks
impossibly fast, but with the smart-assist mode it's actually not
too difficult to play - I reckon.  Check it out.  In final incarnation,
there will be 512/1M standard ST versions and equivalent versions
for the STE using DMA sample playback and blitter sprites.

The Shareware system is still working well for us.  'Revenge' has done
quite well on both ST and Amiga, although not quite as well as
Llamatron.  This is pretty much as I expected - Llamatron is one of the
best arcade games I have ever written and quite a difficult act to
follow.  'Revenge' is a good enough game but perhaps not so universally
appealing as Llamatron.

Our statistics tell us that ST owners are more likely to register
Shareware games than Amiga owners by a ratio of 70% to 30%.  Make
of that what you will.  We have had hundreds of registrations from
abroad, including a recent spate of orders from Japan, some of
which have been for Llamasoft back catalogue titles right back to
Vic-20 stuff!  It's extraordinary to think of someone sitting down
to a Vic-20 and playing Gridrunner in Japan, where so much awesome
videogame hardware is readily available!

Once again we take this opportunity to thank everyone who has made
the Shareware releases a success for us, especially those people
who sent letters of encouragement, criticism of the games and
interesting artifacts, CDs, disks, tapes and sundry items of weirdness.
We really appreciate it and we'll continue to produce shareware
products for ya.

I was amused to read an interview with some guy out of Budgie licenseware
in which he implied that the only reason Llamatron succeeded as
Shareware was that my name was well-known, and that if my name had
been Fintlewoodlewix instead of Minter we would have had 'three
registrations'.  Rrrrrubbish, piffle, tosh, spherical objects in a
fleshy pouch!  Quite a large proportion of our registrations were
from people who had never encountered either me or Llamasoft before.
Before I started doing Shareware, I hadn't had any large-scale
publicity for quite a while, and there are a whole lot of new users
who've started out on the ST and Amiga since I was a well-known
C64 programmer.  And if you look at the quality of some of the games
you see on coverdisks and then look at Llamatron, do you really think
that the only reason my game got onto a coverdisk was because of my
name?

The main factor in the success of Llamatron and Revenge is simply
this:  people play the game and discover that they can have just
as much fun with these games as they do with commercial games
costing thirty quid.  They are pleased, and so they pay.
And sure, on my future releases people will be influenced by my name
in the game, but only because I have earned that reputation by
releasing some good Shareware games.  People may well look at a
game because they know who the author was, but in Shareware they
will only PAY if they like the game.

You don't see shareware authors going out of their way to rubbish
the idea of Licenseware, so I don't see why this guy out of
Budgie should set out to trash the Shareware idea.  After all both
ideas are about seeking an alternative to the established methods
of software distribution.  If you have code which turns people on,
you can make money at Shareware even if your name happens to be
Mr. Elizabeth Donkey-Fiddler.  Amen.

Work still progresses steadily on the Lightsynth project; we have
lots of groovy FX running and soom I'll be working on the user-
interfacing of the beast.  We've been to a few gigs, including
an excellent rave weekender at Skegness, where we had four of
the new liquid-crystal video projectors hooked up to our system.
Yum, yum.  We might be doing a little stuff at Glastonbury this
year in a chillout tent somewhere, so if you're there and on
the same planet and you see some funky graphics happening, come
in and check it out!

Like any diligent game designer, I've been devoting a lot of time
to research recently.  This important research has involved
the pressing of FIRE buttons, caressing of joypads and not a
small amount of shaft-wrenching of the Navigator on a variety of
excellent game systems and computers.  Out of all the games I've
been playing recently, my top fave is a recent Lynx release which
will warm the cockles and inflame the Swonnicles of any decent
red-blooded Llamatron junkie: ROBOTRON 2084.  Yup - an excellent
conversion of the original awesome Eugene Jarvis game which
was the inspiration for Llamatron.  The conversion really is top
hole stuff, with proper Robotron explosions and samples of the
original Williams sound effects.  Three differing control methods
are available, and once you're used to it you can aim and move
independantly almost as well as with the two joysticks of the arcade
original.  The playability of the game, once you master the controls,
is completely excellent and quickly leads to utter addiction.  You
sit down for a quick blast and half an hour you're still there
glued to the Lynx occasionally muttering things like "one more go"
and "I'll stop the next time I get over 100,000" and "no, make
that 200,000" and "hands off my Humanoids you scumbag Brains".
If you are a Llamatron junkie with a Lynx you need this game. If
you are a Llamatron junkie without a Lynx then you need a Lynx and
this game.  And please, please, please let the programmers
responsible be even now working on a version of Defender on the
Lynx.  In my opinion the best Lynx game to date.

While on the subject of the Lynx, I want to re-iterate the fact
that although there is a forthcoming Lynx game apparently called
Gridrunner, it has NOTHING TO DO with proper Gridrunner. It's a
completely different game and they may well change the name now
that they know that it's already been used, but if it does come
out as Gridrunner, you have been warned - it is not the original game.

When I was down at Atari recently I saw a lot of new Lynx releases
in various stages of development running on a development system.
There's some excellent stuff being made on the Lynx now.  Look out
for some top games over the next few months.

On the Megadrive front I've been spending time with Desert Strike,
which is a kind of super version of an old C64 title called Raid
On Bungeling Bay with missions.  It's a multidirectional scrolling
game with rather nice inertial control of your chopper, bit of
Choplifter thrown in for good measure and enough challenge to keep
you sat in front of the black Japanese object for some time.
Opa-Opa makes his first Megadrive appearance in Super Fantasy Zone,
which is pretty much the same game as the Master System original
but with more parallax scroll, new weapons and souped-up Bosses.
Nice if you liked the original, a good blast, but it's a shame the
gameplay wasn't extended a bit more like Fantasy Zone II on the
Master System.  I got my first go on the WonderMega combined
CD/Megadrive system the other day; the games I saw weren't particularly
amazing, but that's hardly surprising as it's very early days
yet.  The hardware is just some of the sexiest hardware I've ever
seen - the little lights around the CD hatch are just outrageous.

Other stars receiving the special attentions of the Yakly reflexes
include Pinball Dreams on the Amiga, which is an excellent pinball
simulator with four beautifully-drawn and well-planned tables and
convincing ball dynamics; and Geoff Crammond's wicked Formula One
Grand Prix.  Best graphic of recent months has to be the little
dinosaur Yoshi out of SMB IV on the Super Famicom - he's excellent
and deserves a game of his own.

***** GOOD NEWS FOR PC OWNERS *****

     LLAMATRON is coming!!

***********************************

That's about it really.  This has been a Furred I Communication
brought to you with help from the following items: PG Tips tea
bags, Coke, Twix bars dunked in tea, sheeps' knees, my Bassomatic CD,
a small circular Elastoplast (to cover my Lynx Robotron blister),
goats' ankles and Devpac Developer.

May the Force be with you and may your dreams frequently be of
assorted shaggy ungulates.

-- Y a K  May '92