K9 Racer
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Christian Darkin (aka The Production Centre) [website]
The only available demo of this takes the form of a broken link at Darkin’s site, credited to c1999, and efforts to get hold of the author have so far failed.
He does rave about the demo, though, and promises editable tracks in the finished version.
One of two Doctor Who related games from the creator of Tonygotchi (the desktop Prime Minister), this is a 3D racing game featuring K9s racing around things. The image (which is hardly promising of fantastic graphics, to be honest) is the only information we have. It looks like some sort of first-person racing game which had been made popular a few years previously with Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo, and then more recently Mario Kart 64 on the N64.
Doctor Who Adventure
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Wayne Peters (aka Crows Nest)
This was a long-time project of Wayne Peters, who built the Crow’s Nest Models, to create an adventure game. Initially planning to use AGAST, and then choosing to use Dark BASIC, this would be a puzzle game of the Final Fantasy style. Inspired by how bad he felt Destiny of the Doctors was, Wayne chose to create a game where wit and intelligence was used over gunpower. Although wanting to use a Final Fantasy style setup (3D characters on a 2D background), he at first had difficulty finding a good engine to achieve this with, so tried using AGAST to make a totally 2D game (see animation, vekiw). Eventually, however, he achieved his goals and began using Dark BASIC, which resulted in a number of 3D models, including the fourth Doctor (above).
By the time his website disappeared in 2005, Peters was still designing main characters, and coming up with a storyline. He had already vetoed the use of companions unless they are necessary to the plot, and decided he would like to have an exploreable TARDIS ‘world’, and several different locations to journey between.
In 2007 his site reappeared… as an archive of the work he had achieved.
The first version, created using Aghast, featured just two rooms – the TARDIS interior and a single planet exterior. To complete this, follow the solution here:
– Click screwdriver to pick it up.
– Right click, then click hand icon on top-left of screen.
– Grab black lever in central panel.
– Grab red lever on left-hand panel.
– Right click, then exit TARDIS by clicking on door.
– Click on speech icon on top-left of screen, then on alien to talk to him.
– Click on machine to fix it.
The second version, using DarkBasic simply demonstrates the movement of the Doctor and sees him running around a Dalek.
Further info is available here.
Doctor Who: The Dark Times
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Andrew Brockhouse (first using Games Factory, then Multimedia Fusion)
As the fourth Doctor and K9, the player must solve puzzles and destroy Daleks in this fast action game. Initially, this game was built using The Games Factory, and was intended to be a large multi-story piece featuring several “episodes”.
After countless problems with Games Factory, Andrew began using Multimedia Fusion, and made the decision to release the first episode, Skaro, by itself. A 10 level demo was completed (along with an earlier version programmed in Games Factory), and a near-finished version was sent to TME in 2000 before we lost contact with Andrew. The near-finished one features some cut scenes between every other level, featuring comic CG Ogrons (voiced by Andrew and his brother), Robomen and Daleks. The intention was to build this up to 50 levels and then go onto further ‘episodes’.
Downloads
Due to the size, and also because we were asked not to, we cannot offer the third demo (with the cut scenes) for download.
Review for TME by Sarah Hadley
The poor man’s Dalek Attack. It’s great fun to blast Daleks as the Fourth Doctor and K-9, which gives you a sort of dual-player perspective (maybe two players could squeeze around the keyboard and cooperate?). I love the platform game quality, the animated graphics, and the fact that there’s more than one way to finish and leave a level. My only gripes could easily be solved during creation of the full game: when K-9 runs out of power, he doesn’t just disappear or be replaced, so you have to restart the level if that occurs; the sound clips are too frequently played and get annoying quickly; and a document explaining how to do various things (operate the lifts, leave the level, etc) would be helpful. All in all, the game is entertaining, fun, and I really can’t wait for the full version. The best fan-made DW game yet!
Doctor Who: Time Lord
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Ric Lumb (aka Cheeky Monkey Games) [website]
Intended to be a cartoony arcade game featuring scenes from every Doctor Who story from 100,000 BC (referred to as An Unearthly Child) to the 1996 TV Movie, Lumb completed just two levels between 1998 and 2000 – one for the first Dalek serial, and one for The Three Doctors.
Had it been completed, the player would have moved chronologically through the series, but would move to the next regeneration if they die – which would, presumably, have involved playing Sylvester McCoy in the Key To Time season, if you weren’t doing too well.
Fortunately, Lumb chose to release levels as he completed them, planning to string them together into one once he’d finished. The game was never meant to be particularly difficult, although the Daleks demo is debatably so. “[Timelord will be] varied but not too hard,” Ric told TME in July 2000, following the release of the Three Doctors demo, “mainly just fun. After all, with that many levels I really want people to be able to see them all. I’m just really trying to express my enthusiasm for the whole concept of Doctor Who especially the crap monsters which I absolutely adore! I don’t think Lara Croft will lose any sleep over this one!”
The final version of the demo available only features The Three Doctors level, in which the third Doctor must drive across the anti-matter planet, avoiding the Gel Guards, to get to Omega’s palace. Also available is the finished version of The Daleks, in which the first Doctor has to dash across a field littered with Daleks to get to his Sonic Screwdriver, which he can then use (via the ingenious ‘sonic blasts’) to destroy the Daleks and get back to the TARDIS. Two test versions of this Dalek level are also available (see below).
The Dalek demo advertises Nightmare of Eden, Planet of Fire and Silver Nemesis levels as ‘coming soon’, and the Cheeky Monkey website hinted at more, with the appearance of the Doctor Who Visual Database, which then promptly disappeared in 2002.
Timelord comes with its own CD player, which functions slightly differently depending on the system being used. When TME playtested it, it functioned only when the CD was in the drive before the game is begun, and peculiarly (and only on version 0.5) continued playing after the game had been quit.
Downloads
Controls
Use the keyboard’s arrow keys or a joystick to control movement, and CTRL to fire a Sonic Beam in the Daleks demos.
F2 : Restart.
F8 : View/hide menu.
Ctrl + P : Pause.
Ctrl + V : Swap between joystick and keyboard control.
Ctrl + S : Sound effects on and off.
Hints for Version 0.5
1. Best to take the low road on this one, via point ‘A’. If (as shown) there’s two Daleks there, it’s probably better to go through the middle route. You could also confuse the first Dalek by standing above-right to the mound directly to the TARDIS’ left for a bit, and then heading down, thus making it miss you. Once you’ve got the screwdriver, take it slowly (hiding behind empy casings where necessary – they won’t hurt) and you should get back unscathed. Note you can destroy casings if you fire at close range, and sometimes a nearby Dalek will be destroyed.
2. Ironically, this is much easier. The first Dalek might get tangled up with the TARDIS as it materialises, but keep your fingers crossed and it might be bounced away. There’s no way to escape the wrath of Dalek ‘B’, but once you’ve got up the stairs to the screwdriver the game’s a doddle. Just go through them one by one, and be patient when you get to the last one, Dalek ‘D’. It’ll be trapped by the dead casing of its partner ‘C’, so the best bet is keep firing and hope the method of destroying nearby casings described above holds true.
3. Nightmare. Depending on where the Daleks have wobbled to by the time theTARDIS arrives, it’s probably best to head via point ‘E’ and bump a couple of Daleks out the way. If you don’t have near-full energy for this one, give up, ‘cos no matter where you go, the blighters’ll have to be bumped. If there aren’t too many in the bottom left, try taking the same route as you did for level 1, then heading straight up to the screwdriver.
4. As long as you don’t mind losing a few energy points, this is fairly straightforward. Dance your way around the first Dalek, then nudge your way down the stairs, grab the screwdriver and run back up. Quickly destroy the first Dalek, then go through the rest. Once you’ve done all this, you’ll neatly loop back to level 1 and can start the fun all over…
Hints for Version 0.6
Follow the map as showm above.
Dalek Chess
Linux (Download)
Programmers: Corey Hollingsworth (coding) and Sarah Hadley (sound and music) [website]
From the website:
The ‘Dalek Chess Project’ is an open source Battle Chess game for Linux featuring the classic Doctor Who baddies, the Daleks, as game pieces. The tools of choice for developing this game have been POVRAY, gimp, SDL, and GNU Chess . It is important to me to use tools that are available for Linux and are free, since this project has no budget.
Today the game is still in its infancy. Some 3D models have been completed and some prototypes for the game engine have been written, but nothing approaching playable will be available any time soon. The current release being worked on is 0.1 or the Aridius release I like to call it.
Dalek Chess is an Open Source Battle Chess like game targeted at the Linux operating system. Instead of having medieval characters like the original Battle Chess, this game will feature Daleks, the classical villains from Doctor Who, as the game pieces.
A secondary goal of the Dalek Chess Project is to create an open source Battle Chess engine which anyone with good computer graphics and database skills can produce a game of their own without having to modify the source code for the Dalek Chess Battle Chess engine. However, at times it is likely that some feature specific code will get passed into the BC engine for Dalek Chess that will have to be rethought in order to achieve the projects secondary goal.
The tools of choice for this game include SDL, gimp, POVRAY, and GNU Chess. All of which are Open Source utilities or API’s available for Linux.
The website, and these words, appeared in February 2001, and have yet to be updated.
Doctor Who: Caverns of Blood
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Ric Lumb (aka Cheeky Monkey Games) using Games Factory [website]
During 2001, Cheeky Monkey Games formed a brief alliance with fan producers Loyhargil, and work began on a game based on their audio adventure Caverns of Blood. After around 6 months of one image representing this game as forthcoming, the title was removed from the Cheeky Monkey Games website. In 2004, another grab appeared at the website, now officially listing it as an unfinished game, and then in 2005 the relevant page was removed entirely.
Doctor Who: The Morningstar Haunting
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Robert Dunlop (aka Argolis Productions) using Clickteam’s Games Factory
The final game Robert Dunlop was working on in conjunction with the Jeffrey Coburn fan series of audios (following on from his trilogy in 2000), before the games area of his website shut down in 2002, this RPG did not get past the design stages, with only the following image being published:
Doctor Who (Adventure Game) [aka Time Snare]
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: DuckButcher (using Adventure Game Studio [website])
On 12th April 2006, a gentleman by the name of DuckButcher began this thread in the AGS forum, announcing his intention to create a graphical Doctor Who adventure game using the Adventure Game Studio software, which in itself was inspired by the enhanced adventures released by LucasArts in the early 90s. He relays the story here:
The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane are anticipating a relaxing day on Morecambe Promenade in the year 1935 when suddenly the TARDIS is wrenched out of the Space-Time continuum by an unseen force. Crash landing in France in the second World War, they soon fall foul of the local occupying Nazis. Imprisoned in an occupied chateau, with the TARDIS stolen, and aided by the reluctant owner of the Chateau, the Doctor soon realises that something unnatural is going on. Who forced the TARDIS to crash land? Why is the Chateau’s library full of books that haven’t been written yet? What are the Nazis doing with alien machinery in the Chateau’s basement? And who, or what, is the Benefactor?
On September 22nd that year, he released the first demo, with fantastic opening animation and some wonderful jokes. A second demo followed in Summer 2007, and the final game is on the way…
The Dawn of the Daleks
PC Windows (Download)
Programmer: Cirius (using Adventure Game Studio [website])
Following from the above, user Cirius began this thread in the same AGS forum, dragging out a game he had been developing since 2006:
Set immediately following the events of The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Dawn of the Daleks is a personal project that will be my first ever public release. Presented in a classic Lucasarts style and utilising a modified MI-2 interface, players can dive back to the era of black and white sci-fi action as the Doctor and his companions thwart the malignant schemes of a newly arrived squad of daleks on Telos.
Isometric Who
PC Windows / Mac (Online)
Programmer: Christian Tate [website]
On November 12th 2006, Christian Tate of the Outpost Gallifrey forum began a thread in the fan art section dedicated to his isometric art, with cute pictures of the tenth Doctor, Martha, the ninth Doctor, Rose, Daleks Ood, and K.9. Reaction was extremely positive (and, in fact, led to a commission for him in the 25th issue of Doctor Who Adventures) and on the 24th he announced he was beginning work on a Space Invaders style game with Cybermen shooting at Daleks.
The game hasn’t come too far so far, and in fact his animated screenshot below does more than the live demo at his website. We await further developments with baited breath…
Top Trumps Adventures
Sony Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, Windows, Mobile Phones
Publisher: Eidos [website]
Developer: Ironstone Partners [website]
Top Trumps had been a popular card game with children from its inception in 1977 through to its initial demise in the late 80s. In 1999, Winning Moves bought the rights and relaunched Top Trumps, with new sets focussing often on popular culture such as The Simpsons, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars… and Doctor Who.
In Summer 2007, Ironstone Partners worked with Top Trumps to create videogame versions of some of its packs, under the names Horror & Predators and Dogs & Dinosaurs.
When the second set of Doctor Who Top Trumps cards was released in the Autumn, fans everywhere were surprised to see the following advert tucked in the back, promising one of Ironstone’s next projects would indeed be Doctor Who:
The Christmas 2007 issue of Gamesmaster magazine previewed this for an anticipated launch in Spring 2008…
