Zogging Hell!!!

Possibly the most short lived and most unsuccessful game console ever, the GX4000 is a Amstrad CPC+ model in disguise. In disguise as a Cylon attack ship from Battle Star Galactica in fact. Launched in 1990, the console was withdrawn from sale only a few months later, with discounts being offered shortly after the release. It's easy to see why. This was an 8bit console launched at the peak of the 16bit era. It's specs are generally weaker than the Atari ST launched five years earlier and laughable compared to the coming crop of 16bit consoles like the SNES and Megadrive. Games were very thin on the ground, most of those released were simple conversions of CPC games with little enhancement, bar of course the loading times. However most of these were already available on the CPC on tape for about an eighth of the price.. Nowadays, bar the pack in game Burnin' Rubber, you'll be hard pressed to find other games for the system. Actually the system itself looks quite nice, bar the joypads, which are an abomination in looks and in use. If it had been released about five years earlier it would have been a winner, as it is more powerful than any of the other 8bit consoles such as NES, Master System and 7800. And lets face it, it's still better than Commodore's appalling C64 GS console released at the same time...

Specs

Zilog Z80A processor running at 4mhz

Graphics - Up to 32 colours on screen from a pallette of 4096 with a resolution of between 160 x 200 and 640 x 200.

Sound - General Instruments AY-3-8910 DMA sound chip producing 3 channel mono sound.

64KBytes RAM, 16 KBytes VRam, 32KBytes ROM

Hardware scrolling and sprites.

Ports - 2 x Digital controller, 1 x Analogue controller, Light gun connector, Audio and RGB output, Scart connector.

Info from Wikipedia and old-computers.com

Games Reviews

Burnin' Rubber

Well as good a place to start as any I suppose. Burnin' Rubber was the GX4000's pack in game, and by far the most abundant GX4000 game about. It's a Lotus clone, with nice graphics, and reasonably good playability. There are a few nice effects, such as the day turning into night, sparks flying from the side of your car when you scrape a wall, horrendous amounts of smoke from the tyres as you scream round another bend and some interesting crashes. To be fair to Burnin' Rubber it could quite easily pass itself off as a ST or Amiga game, such are the quality of the 8bit GX4000's graphics and the obvious amount of care and attention that have been lavished on it. As far as pack in games go, it's not a bad effort, but hardly a Super Mario killer.

Zogging Hell Rating: 7/10