Coming soon

About This Game

STORY

In 1989 a notorious criminal known as the Shadow vanished from police custody while being transported to prison.

Nothing was heard of him until 1994 when a message was delivered to the United Nations demanding $1,000,000,000.00 otherwise a deadly virus would be released into the environment.

The was only one chance, the Black Widow was called in to find and destroy the Shadow in his lair and prevent the virus from being released.

GAMEPLAY

As the Black Widow, you have located the underground base of the Shadow and from a location above ground you must penetrate his defences, find the key cards to the lower depths and set explosives to destroy the base.

However the Shadow won't take this lying down, he's throwing everything he's got at you and you'll need to use the ammo crates and first aid kits you find to survive and, ultimately, destroy the base.

ABOUT

Black Widow II was originally released on the BBC Microcomputer back in 1994, the game was actually started in 1989, and left for 4 years while I went to University, when I'd finished I came back and while looking for work I decided to finish the game, by then it was too late in the life of the machine for a commercial release, so it was published on the subscription disc for Acorn Computing.

Fast forward to 2022 and I decided to try and get the game running in SmileBASIC on the Nintendo Switch, to this end I wrote a 6502 emulator in BASIC along with a simple simulator to pretend to be a BBC Micro.

This version is an expanded version of that, written in C++ using LibSDL2, there are two versions of the game, the normal basic version which is fairly close to the behaviour of the original, and the enhanced version which has new text as well as using more colours (the original was limited to just 4 colours at once).

As well as adding the enhanced version, I've also hooked achievements into the emulated game, as well as offering a full high score table, a front-end around the game, save states and even cheat modes, this will now be the definitive version of the game.

SAME GAME - DIFFERENT LOOKS

There are 4 seperate options for graphics, we have a the original classic BBC Micro Look, and a new VideoNULA expanded palette version. Then we have the enhanced version, this allows us to add more colours, this supports the original BBC Micro palette, or the new enhanced VideoNULA palette, all game versions play the same.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Generative AI has been used to take screenshots, logo and store assets, and create the trailer video, all the ingame content is from the original 1990s release of the game.