It’s suddenly occurred to me that no one has actually mentioned what we’re up to at the minute, which at best makes us look lazy and at worst like we’ve given up! “Never!!”, I hear you cry. Well, fear not, we’ve actually been very, very busy of late and it’s all going rather nicely indeed. To bring you up to date, I first need to fill you in on some more of the back story to our little group… by crikey this thing ain’t half making me nostalgic.

Anyway, back in the 90’s (pretty much all of it) the four of us who would one day found Psync Interactive were more or less only interested in one thing… playing Worms. Starting with Worms United and eventually moving on to Worms Armageddon we more or less became obsessed. It’s fair to say, without any exaggeration, that we could have given anyone on the planet a hell of a game and probably won. Actually, scrap that, stuff the modesty, we’d have ripped them to pieces and made them wish they’d never heard of the game in the first place! If there is such a thing as a professional Worms player then we were it. We were monsters and at times (most of the time actually) we hated each other because of it. Were we really friends back then? It’s possible that our feelings towards each other were more like the mutual respect shown by rival sportsman than actual friendship, but nonetheless we did spend a lot of time together, even if it was spent trying to massacre each other’s teams in the most embarrassing ways possible.

There irritatingly came a point in time when we finally realised that we had something of a problem and had to agree to stop playing for the good of the group. There’s only so many times a man can cope with waking up in the middle of the night screaming, because someone’s just placed a cluster bomb on his last worm’s head, before he starts to question his sanity. So, we put our lives as they were then to one side and started trying to get real ones. This amongst many other things, involved us forming Psync Int.

Fast forward to the time when we were finishing our degrees and we’d found a new lead programmer who needed an introduction to the group. We started talking about the ‘good old days’ and what games we used to like and then inevitably, we broke out Worms and started again. Fortunately, the craze didn’t last as long or become quite the obsession it had been before… otherwise I most likely wouldn’t be writing this now. In fact it had a much more positive effect on the group and led us to start a new project with the aim of providing the sort of entertainment that our beloved Worms had given us over the years.

Now, back to the present and our latest project, known as ‘BL!TZ: Requiem’, is a four player non network game just like the original ‘you know what’, but that’s pretty much where the comparison ends. If I was pressed to suggest similar games to our new one then I would struggle a bit, but I’d say it’s somewhere between Bomberman, Speedball and Thrill Kill… how good does that sound?

Progress, as I mentioned earlier, is going really well. The game is in fact now playable and we had our first test run just weeks ago, something that we all enjoyed massively, even if it did bring back the fear that we’d stop making games to become full time players again. Updates will surely follow and a download isn’t a million miles away either.

Just a word of warning though, you will need a friend or two if you want to play it. We could have got into making it a network game and adding artificial intelligence for computer controlled players, and one day we may well do that, but quite frankly, right here and now we’ve got bigger fish to fry. There’s a spot on a shelf in HMV with our name on it and we won’t be forgetting that any time soon.