Tom Cooper, prolific games programmer and designer whose commercial games have included DarkWood, Hamsters, Ixion and Wavelength first made his name with a string of outstanding free games, one of which was Gyrinus 2, a game which several PD libraries used to promote their libraries for years.

Gyrinus 2 is still one of the best PD games, even though it's now several years old. It's a large platform game with several graphically diverse levels, and lots to discover, featuring some attractive cartoon- style graphics. It's not perfect, but it's great for free.

Lots of different versions are floating about, with version 3.5 being available for downloading from Stuttgart's FTP server. Earlier versions crashed when later levels were reached - 2.8 was widely distributed but is also rather on the buggy side. One PD library advertised version 3.6, but I've never actually seen it, so they may have been wrong. Tom Cooper, incidentally, told me he can't remember what the final version number was.

ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn/riscos/games/
ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/acorn/long/fun/games/gyrinus2.arc

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