Space Trolls of Mahlsdorf - A fully-featured shoot ’em up for the ZX Spectrum by Papi & Sohn

Fancy playing a decent Shoot 'em up, then come and check out Papi & Sohn's Space Trolls of Mahlsdorf, a feature-packed new shoot ’em up for the ZX Spectrum. Built using Jonathan Cauldwell’s Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer (MPAGD), Bruce’s specialized Shmupkit, and as a Father and Son team, the title features a gauntlet of diverse alien invaders, plunging comets, relentless Jetmen, weapon power-ups, and a massive final boss encounter. While  skilled solo pilots can technically complete the challenging campaign alone, the game was specifically engineered to fill a massive gap in the retro homebrew scene by introducing a fully integrated co-op experience.

The project's true innovation lies in its rare three-player simultaneous gameplay mode, allowing a third friend or family member to seamlessly jump into the action. To accommodate three pilots on classic hardware, the control scheme assigns Sinclair joysticks to the first two players while the third commands the keyboard. Rather than featuring identical ships, each player is assigned a craft with distinct performance trade-offs, making tight team coordination and communication absolutely essential to survive the interstellar onslaught.

Dev Notes :

• Beyond MPAGD and Shmupkit, we used ZX-Paintbrush, SjASMPlus, and MPAGD Musicizer 2.1 by David Saphier to build the game. Music tracks are by DJ SerG, Nik-O, DJ Max, Bell, and Wally.
• Space Trolls of Mahlsdorf was tested on my ZX 128 Toastrack and my son’s Spectrum Next, as well as on the Speccy Emulator. It supports both ULA+ and standard ULA Palette.

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