One word: WOW!

That teaser is awesome! I love the way the heading is slowly revealed with the story text.

Thanks guys! My inspiration was the effect used in the first ALIEN movie.

It doesn't matter how many times I've seen that movie over the years, this trailer (from 1979!!) still gives me goosebumps! The sign of a true classic.

Awesome teaser, James. This sounds really cool !

I mentioned in the original post that AB5 v2 will include all the levels from v1 (Episode I: Rebirth). It will also include another set of 12 new levels (Episode II: Evolution)!

Whilst the Rebirth levels were based on the Alien Breed Special Edition '92 levels from Team 17, the Evolution levels will likely be a mix of the Team 17 Alien Breed 1, Convergence, Valiance & Synergy levels. I'm intending to make the difficulty curve slightly sharper on these levels, although I have no idea how easy or hard people found the Rebirth levels.. I find them pretty easy, but then I know the levels inside out from playing ABSE'92 through hundreds of times over the last 20 years!

When starting a new game, a new selection screen comes up, and you choose whether you want to play the Rebirth or Evolution episode. Passcodes from v1 are still valid in v2, and entering a passcode from a game you had been playing in v1 will simply work as it did before, whereas any passcodes you receive when playing the Evolution levels will automatically load you back into the appropriate Evolution level. This is because internally the passcodes calculate the Rebirth levels as 0-11 and the Evolution levels as 12-23.

What's could be better than Alien Breed on a TI calculator? How about Alien Breed on 2 linked TI calculators?

The main new addition in AB5 v2 is that I've gotten around to implementing 2 player co-operative link play! This is something I've wanted to do for many years - back in 2000 I even attempted to make an Alien Breed "deathmatch" game, but failed miserably. The co-op feature of the Team 17 games was always an awesome feature that I enjoyed; Dad and I spent many years blasting away at aliens together when I was a kid!

I owe many thanks to Timendus for his Bell link library which I'm using. It's proved invaluable and syncing between the two calculators is running smoothly. In terms of performance, a link play game runs a couple of frames slower per second, due to the small packets being sent back and forth, but it's still nice and smooth.

With gameplay, it functions almost identically to the original Team 17 games. Both players must work together in the same area, ie. you can't venture more than a screen length away from each other, and you can't shoot each other. The only difference to the Team 17 games is that in the calculator version, the two players don't have collision detection with each other - you can walk through one another. This is simply because the levels in the calculator game are exactly half the length & width of the originals, thus the corridors are often narrower and so getting around each other would often be impossible.

In the event that one player runs out of lives, quits, or unplugs mid-game, the other player has the option to continue in single player mode. Once you revert to single player mode, you can't return to two player mode without starting a new link game. 2 player games can also be played on the original Episode I: Rebirth levels.

Wow this would be the first ever calc game to support coop gameplay if you pull this off!

Wow, new levels and now link play? That's awesome!