If you're at all familiar with the homebrew community for the Sega Master System, you've probably heard of the name "BadComputer" in the past.
The homebrew developer has been one of the most prolific creators designing and creating new experiences for Sega's legendary 8-bit machine, having previously released a bunch of impressive titles over the years including Frontier Force, Star Runner and Blast Arena.
Well, now it appears they are back with yet another title, with the developer having recently released the first demo for its new game over on itch.io — a promising vertically scrolling shoot 'em up entitled Razing Core.
According to BadComputer, Razing Core was developed using its own custom engine (primarily for the "collisions, behaviour, effects etc), with a lot of low level assistance and tooling help from devkitSMS. It features music from the chip tune composer Polaria Poyon, and has been designed to work on most emulators as well as real hardware.
The "Alpha Demo" for the game was launched a couple of days ago, on Saturday, July 26th, and features a a main menu for tweaking the settings or listening to the music, a short tutorial section demonstrating the three main attacks (Rapid Shot, Core, and Burst Charge), and a run through of the first stage of the game (which is apparently still a work-in-progress).
As you might expect, this stage sees players having to blast their away various different enemy types, while collecting different power-ups and trying to obtain a high score, and climaxes with a pair of boss fights against a group of large enemy ships. Admittedly, it doesn't take all that long to complete, but it is an exciting taste of what's to come and feature three difficulty levels if you want to go back to the very beginning and try your skills at some of the hardest setting.
You can grab the demo of the game here.