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51 Articles

Welcome to The AMIGA Book TM

It’s easy to take Commodore’s Amiga for granted, but it had a massive impact on the games industry and was an exciting successor to the Commodore 64. Many classic British developers, including DMA Design, Sensible So_ ware, The Bitmap Brothers and Team 17 found success on the 16-bit home computer, while popular franchises like Lemmings, Speedball, Worms and Syndicate are still going strong today. Commodore’s computer not only had a thriving demo scene, but its superior graphical capabilities allowed a new generation of artists to get to grips with the machine. It helped usher in a shining new era for videogames, and was more than able to hold its own against the increasingly popular consoles that were beginning to appear. To celebrate Commodore’s groundbreaking machine, we’ve personally trawled through the…

Welcome to The AMIGA Book TM

Year released: 1987 Original price: £599 Buy it now for: £20+ Associated magazines: Amiga World, Amiga Format, CU Amiga, Amiga Power, Amiga Action, Amiga Computing, Amiga Force, Amiga Mania, The One Why the Amiga 500 was great… Why wasn’t the Amiga great? During its early years, the A500 was the most desirable games machine on the planet thanks to several games that just wouldn’t have been possible anywhere other than the arcades. As the years passed, its graphics became less relevant but the ease of development meant that there were hundreds of programmers pumping out classic after classic on a seemingly weekly basis. “THE COMPUTER WOULD BE MORE EXPENSIVE TO PRODUCE THAN ITS RIVALS” For a home computer that’s so inextricably associated with the history and fate of Commodore, it’s…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

WORMS » RELEASED: 1995 » PUBLISHED BY: OCEAN » CREATED BY: TEAM 17 » BY THE SAME DEVELOPER: BODY BLOWS 01 You’d have thought that by 1995, ten years after the Amiga 1000’s launch, it had seen every one of its defining games already. Well, Andy Davidson and Yorkshire-based Team 17 obviously thought there was room for one more and the world agreed with them. Worms was an absolute sensation and went on to sell millions of copies across countless formats, sequels and spin-offs. It’s important to remember that the multiplayer strategy game began life on the Amiga, however, and was mostly a five year labour of love of just one man and a copy of Blitz Basic. And that was what was really great about the Amiga: it turned…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

AMIGA 500 and the rest...

01 DOJO DAN 02 POWERDROME 03 WEIRD DREAMS 04 ALIEN BREED 05 DISPOSABLE HERO 06 MAGIC POCKETS 07 CARRIER COMMAND 08 RAMPART 09 LAST NINJA REMIX 10 SIM CITY 11 WINGS 12 DRAGON’S LAIR 13 MIDWINTER 14 SHADOW OF THE BEAST 15 TOTAL ECLIPSE 16 AGONY 17 GAUNTLET II 18 GRID RUNNER 19 MEGA LO MANIA 20 VIRUS 21 ROBOCOP 22 AIRBORNE RANGER 23 EXILE 24 CRYSTAL KINGDOM DIZZY 25 MOONSTONE: A HARD DAYS KNIGHT 26 SKWEEK 27 PINBALL FANTASIES 28 WING COMMANDER 29 THE IMMORTAL 30 BUGGY BOY 31 FIRST SAMURAI 32 KATAKIS 33 OPERATION WOLF 34 STARDUST 35 FIRE AND ICE 36 ANOTHER WORLD 37 JETSTRIKE 38 NEBULUS 39 UNREAL 40 RAINBOW ISLANDS 41 COOL CROC TWINS 42 GUNSHIP 2000 43 BATTLE CHESS 44 F29 RETALIATOR 45 THEME…

AMIGA 500 and the rest...

Year Released: 1992 Original Price: £399 Buy it now for: £148 (New) £12+ (Used) Associated Magazines: Amiga Format, CU Amiga, Amiga Power, Amiga Action, Amiga Active, Amiga Computing, Amiga Force, Amiga Fun, Amiga Mania, The One, Total Amiga Why the Amiga 1200 was great… As the most powerful open-ended system, the Amiga had an army of developers who began life as bedroom programmers and risen to prominence. As such they were incredibly passionate about the Amiga community, and continued to create brilliant games long after it became apparent that the Amiga 1200 was on its last legs. Between 1994 and 2000, it felt special to be an Amiga owner because of the dedicated fans and developers who kept the dream alive. The sharew are scene The Amiga was a great…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

WORMS: DIRECTOR’S CUT » RELEASED: 1997 » PUBLISHED BY: TEAM 17 » CREATED BY: TEAM 17 » BY THE SAME DEVELOPER: WORMS 01 It would be criminal to have an Amiga top ten and not mention at least one game from the mega-hit Worms series. This exclusive Amiga title was the perfect farewell from Team 17 for the machine that had served it so well over the years, so it’s unsurprising that many Amiga and Worms fans consider it to be the best game from the entire franchise. Glorious 2D visuals, well-designed maps and some truly outrageous weapons – no one will forget the first time they used an old woman or a baseball bat on a hapless opponent – all combined to create what was easily the pinnacle of…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

AMIGA 1200 and the rest...

01 ALL NEW WORLD OF LEMMINGS 02 SUPER STARDUST 03 DREAMWEB 04 MYST 05 COLONIZATION 06 JAMES POND 3: OPERATION STARFISH 07 ROADKILL 08 PINBALL MANIA 09 SIMON THE SORCERER 10 1869 11 ALFRED CHICKEN 12 CHAOS ENGINE 13 JUNGLE STRIKE 14 GLOOM 15 DENNIS 16 QUASAR WARS 17 ACTION CAT 18) PRIMAL RAGE 19 RALLY CHAMPIONSHIPS 20 SLAMTILT 21 WHIZZ 22 BLOODFEST 23 FLYIN’ HIGH 24 COALA 25 OSCAR 26 GUARDIAN 27 OVERKILL 28 WASTED DREAMS 29 AIR BUCKS V1.2 30 DEATH MASK 31 BUBBLE HEROES 32 NAPALM 33 T-ZERO 34 PINBALL ILLUSIONS 35 GENETIC SPECIES 36 RISE OF THE ROBOTS 37 FIGHTIN’ SPIRIT 38 CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 39 KANG FU 40 THE LION KING 41 BURNOUT 42 HUMANS III: EVOLUTION LOST IN TIME… 43 STRANGERS 44 GLOOM 3: ZOMBIE…

AMIGA 1200 and the rest...

Backwards compatible? Oh yes. The beauty of the Amiga hardware under the hood of the CD32 meant that it was compatible with all previous Amiga software. Okay, there weren’t many previous Amiga games on compact disc except, of course, for the CDTV, which the CD32 was 100 per cent compatible with. Although Commodore’s previous CD-based console had played host to mostly dull edutainment titles, there were a couple of games worth holding on to. Old Amiga favourites Sim City and Lemmings were available and worked perfectly on a CD32 with an Amiga mouse. The best CDTV game, however, was The Case Of The Cautious Condor, a little-known adventure game, in which the player had 30 minutes to solve a murder by exploring a hand-drawn comic book world and eavesdropping on…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

DIGGERS » RELEASED: 1993 » PUBLISHED BY: COMMODORE » CREATED BY: MILLENNIUM INTERACTIVE » BY THE SAME DEVELOPER: JAMES POND2: ROBOCOD, GLOBAL EFFECT, VITAL LIGHT 01 One of the bundled launch titles for the star-crossed console, Diggers followed the antics of four mining concerns on the planet Zarg as they competed, with the help of the user, to rob the world of its resources. Diggers hasn’t aged well, as it clearly attempted to mimic the success other strategy/management games had seen on the Amiga. The joypad provided a frustrating interface experience, but fortunately Millenium had the foresight to allow mouse control. Clean, if uninspired, graphics and chirpy tunes made it an enjoyable title for the right gamer, but was probably a bad choice for a bundled game. It pissed on…

PERFECT TEN GAMES

AMIGA CD32 and the rest...

01 SKELETON KREW 02 GUARDIAN 03 CHAMBERS OF SHAOLIN 04 ULTIMATE BODY BLOWS 05 MORPH 06 FLINK 07 PREMIERE 08 FRONTIER: ELITE II 09 BRUTAL: PAWS OF FURY 10 POWER DRIVE 11 TROLLS 12 JAMES POND II: ROBOCOD 13 CANNON FODDER 14 THE LOST VIKINGS 15 SEEK & DESTROY 16 PIRATES! GOLD 17 FIELDS OF GLORY 18 THE CHAOS ENGINE 19 MEAN ARENAS 20 RISE OF THE ROBOTS 21 FURY OF THE FURRIES 22 CHUCK ROCK 23 SHADOW FIGHTER 24 UNIVERSE 25 BATTLE CHESS 26 FIRE & ICE 27 LIBERATION 28 ALFRED CHICKEN 29 THE LABYRINTH OF TIME 30 SOCCER KID 31 JUNGLE STRIKE 32 D-GENERATION 33 BEAVERS 34 PINBALL FANTASIES 35 STAR CRUSADER 36 NAUGHTY ONES 37 DIGGERS 38 BRUTAL SPORTS SERIES FOOTBALL 39 MARVIN’S MARVELLOUS ADVENTURE 40 GLOOM…

AMIGA CD32 and the rest...

Ultimate Guide: Lemmings

If you ever imitated another child’s bad behaviour when you were young, you were almost certainly asked: “if your friend jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?”. Of course, if you were like us you’d claim that you would in order to remain logically consistent, an act of dishonesty which only further frustrated the adult and saw us frogmarched to the nearest cliff. But if you were a lemming, that statement wouldn’t be a lie – those guys just love chucking themselves off objects. They also love wandering into jets of flame, drowning, and generally doing very un-clever things. Not real lemmings, mind – their suicidal urges are something of a misconception – but the critters found in DMA Designs’ Lemmings. The ‘save-’em-up’ premise behind the game plays…

Ultimate Guide: Lemmings

Eye Of The Beholder 2: The Legend Of Darkmoon

RETROREVIVAL » AMIGA » WESTWOOD ASSOCIATES » 1992 Eye Of The Beholder was a huge success for Westwood Associates, cleverly blending the 3D corridor-based exploring of Dungeon Master with the official Dungeons & Dragons licence. For its 1991 sequel (the Amiga port arrived a year after the DOS version) Westwood really pushed the boat out delivering an epic RPG that exceeded the original in every way. Running on an enhanced version of the original engine, The Legend Of Darkmoon allowed you to import your heroes from the original game and boasted greatly enhanced visuals and far better dungeon design. Although it was once again set in a single location, the mysterious Darkmoon temple, the sequel featured outside locations and far better variety due to much of your adventure being set…

Eye Of The Beholder 2: The Legend Of Darkmoon

CLASSIC MOMENTS Syndicate

In other strategy games, you amass troops simply by producing them from a menu. Syndicate doesn’t offer anything quite so boring – to get your footsoldiers, you need to be a little more active in your recruitment. By which we mean, you’re going to have to walk around brainwashing civilians with the brilliantly-named Persuadertron. With this little device, no matter where you are you can quickly amass a sizeable fighting force, which will follow you through the streets obediently. Of course, not everyone is so easily persuaded. The average civilian will tag along with you without much in the way of resistance, but if you want to get the likes of police officers you’re going to have to have a sizeable following already. But get them you will, and eventually…

CLASSIC MOMENTS Syndicate

THE MAKING OF: SUPER CARS

If the history of gaming tells us anything, it’s that classic formats never really die. A good example is the top-down racer, which has been popular since the days of Atari’s pioneering Gran Track and Sprint series; and it battles on today, despite smartphones packing the kind of technology that would happily run, say, OutRun 2 (if someone at Sega would authorise a conversion – hint, hint). The same was true in the Amiga era. Just as some games creators were aiming to wow, with the likes of Shadow Of The Beast’s multiple layers of parallax scrolling and sampled pan-pipes, other Amiga developers were simply seeing the jump in technology as another means to create something that was a lot of fun to play. Enter Shaun Southern, fresh from working…

THE MAKING OF: SUPER CARS

THE ART OF AMIGA

Meet the expertes Name: Simon Butler Age: 54 Occupation: Game artist/designer Website: None Favourite own work: Nine Lives, the game sucked but I enjoyed doing the graphics Favourite Amiga game: Flashback, Another World and Speedball 2 Favourite Amiga artist: Garvan Corbett Name: Stoo Cambridge Age: 41 and a bit (no, not that bit, this bit) Occupation: Creative consultant Website: www.hobeka.com Favourite own work: Blobbit Favourite Amiga game: Cannon Fodder Favourite Amiga artist: Don’t have one Name: Andrew Morris Age: 21-ish Occupation: (Now) Property developer Website: None Favourite own work: Kid Chaos Favourite Amiga game: The Chaos Engine Favourite Amiga artist: Dan Malone Name: Jim Sachs Age: 62 Occupation: Software developer Website: www.fish-byte.com Favourite own work: Defender Of The Crown II Favourite Amiga game: Firepower Favourite Amiga artist: Brad Schenck Name: Eric W…

THE ART OF AMIGA

Rainbow Islands

RETROREVIVA AMIGA » GRAFTGOLD » 1990 Andrew Braybrook was one of the best programmers to ever appear on the Commodore 64. He created digital gold with every release and helped put both Graftgold and Hewson on the gaming map. He worked similar alchemy with the Amiga, delivering a string of interesting and innovative games, from Virocop, to Simulcra. For many Amiga owners, it’s his port of Rainbow Islands that will remain his crowning achievement on the 16-bit computer, as it’s quite simply magnificent. For those completely unaware, Rainbow Islands is the sequel to Taito’s arcade hit Bubble Bobble. Bub and Bob are now in human form and must tackle a series of monster-filled islands, with only rainbow power for protection. Tap the fire button and you’ll spit out a rainbow…

Rainbow Islands

SPEEDBALL BRUTAL 2 DELUXE

IN THE KNOW PUBLISHER: IMAGE WORKS DEVELOPER: THE BITMAP BROTHERS RELEASED: 1990 PLATFORM: VARIOUS GENRE: FUTURISTIC SPORTS “SPEEDBALL 101” ▪ Speedball 2 is a topdown, 2D, futuristic, deep and violent game that is part-ice hockey and part-American football. Each smooth-scrolling match is split into two halves lasting 90 seconds each, during which players score as many goals as possible while grabbing extra points by nobbling the opposition or aiming the ball at pointscoring stars. Good use of tactics and the score multiplier are essential to win a game. FEELING HUNGRY? IT’S RICHARD JOSEPH’S FAULT Discover why Speedball 2 loves its icecream Quite aside from the game’s intro being a computerised version of a song called Brutal Deluxe by a band called Nation 12 (a collaboration between the electronic pioneer John…

SPEEDBALL BRUTAL 2 DELUXE

HISTORY OF SPEEDBALL

SPEEDBALL ▪ The Bitmap Brothers planned a game based on real tennis, the sport from which lawn tennis is derived but Mastertronic decided against it. After hitting the pub and redesigning the game on the back of a cigarette packet, Speedball was born. Praised for its action, it was also criticised for jerky scrolling. SPEEDBALL 2: BRUTAL DELUXE ▪ This eight-directional frantic sweat-‘em-up of catch-and-throw was a huge improvement on the first game, racking up the tension by emphasising the amassing of points over the simplicity of scoring goals, and providing a level of depth rarely seen in any sports game, let alone one based on a fictional pursuit. SPEEDBALL 2100 ▪ Speedball 2100 was a 3D version of the series for the PlayStation, “but it didn’t do too well…

HISTORY OF SPEEDBALL

BARGE PADS ▪ By plating up the shoulders of your attackers, their ability to power forward and knock the opposing players away is greatly increased. BRAIN BOOST ▪ Attackers, above all, need to have a sense of intelligence about them so injecting their noggins with a bit of cleverness wouldn’t go amiss. BITMAP SHADES ▪ Getting one-up on the opposition and ensuring they are thumped to the ground is important in Speedball 2. The shades enhance aggression. POWER GLOVES ▪ Speedball 2 is all about the throwing and these Power Gloves bring with them better throwing prowess. CHEST GUARD ▪ As the opposition charges towards your team, it pays to give the defence some added protection. Defensive ability is enhanced with the chest guard. SPEED BOOTS ▪ As the name…

SHOOT WELL ▪ “You have to learn how to hit the intermediate angle on shooting,” says Robert Trevellyan. “Move the joystick to the side in between pressing the button to release the b all and the ball leaving the player’s hand.” STAR ATTACKS ▪ Getting goals isn’t easy but getting stars are, so make your way to the sides of the pitch and hurl away for points. Get all the stars and bank the points. HEAD FOR THE MULTIPLIER ▪ The best way to get a good lead is to ensure that every point you gain is optimised. The only way of doing that is by throwing balls into the multiplier early on. HANG AROUND ▪ You should aim to linger around the multiplier and see off challenges with a…

SKATEBALL ■ Speedball 2 is often claimed to have been inspired by the movie Rollerball but Mike denies it. Skateball, on the other hand, most likely was. As an ultra-violent futuristic version of ice hockey mixed with football, the matches could be won by destroying the opposition, or by scoring five goals. KILLERBALL ■ Chucking together roller-skating and American football, Killerball is a five-a-side blast which became another of gaming history’s cruel titles when it was released in 1989. Players can muscle the ball off the opposition by flattening them to the ground before trying to push the ball into stupidly small holes in the wall. BILL LAIMBEER’S COMBAT BASKETBALL ■ The NBA’s website says Bill Laimbeer was “one of the most notorious players ever to throw an elbow,” but…

BEAUTY OF THE BEASTS

Shadow Of The Beast Having finished the Amiga game Ballistix, a budget Crossfire-style game for Psygnosis that shares the same fantasy aesthetics as the Shadow series, Reflections co-founder Martin Edmondson began reading Addison-Wesley’s Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and, becoming interested in parallax scrolling techniques, found a cornerstone for the studio’s next game. “I did a technical sketch laying out the points and speeds at which different parallax layers should scroll and where to swap between the two playfields to produce a deep parallax effect,“ he recalls. ”For its time the Amiga’s co-processor (the ‘copper’) was an amazingly powerful bit of hardware that allowed you to precisely control all sorts of things at raster line level, including colour changes and hardware scrolling rates.” Martin was impressed by the power of the…

BEAUTY OF THE BEASTS

CONVERSIONS OF THE BEAST

MEGA DRIVE If you think the Amiga version was challenging, we dare you to try the Mega Drive port by Victor Technologies. Its notorious difficulty stems from the bizarre speed at which the game scrolls. With enemies running towards you as if you’re controlling Ringo Starr and the game is set at the height of Beatlemania, it makes hitting them extremely difficult. And given the fact that you only get one life, the gameplay boils down to a joyless memory test, with you remembering the enemy order and attack patterns to inch slowly through the game. LYNX The Lynx delivers a great port that loses none of the game’s famed parallax scrolling, crisp visuals or marvellous music, though the fact that this is one of the only ports on which…

CONVERSIONS OF THE BEAST

RESURRECTING PUTTY SQUAD

IN THE KNOW » PUBLISHER: SYSTEM 3 » DEVELOPER: JOHN TWIDDY » RELEASED: 2013 » PLATFORM: AMIGA 1200 » GENRE: PLATFORME Few Amiga owners will forget 24 December 2013 for it was the day that the impossible happened. Some 19 years after its original release date, the Amiga 1200 version of Putty Squad was finally released. For many Amiga owners it was nothing short of a Christmas miracle. So why on earth would an ancient computer game get published nearly two decades after its original release? To begin this answer we’ll need to go back to issue 64 of Retro Gamer when we interviewed System 3’s John Twiddy about his impressive career. John revealed to us that he had not only converted the Amiga version of Putty Squad to PC,…

RESURRECTING PUTTY SQUAD

MORE MISSING AMIGA GEMS

SNOW BROS STATUS: RELEASED ■ This stunning conversion was by Ocean France and was coded by Pierre Adane. Pierre was responsible for the excellent Amiga conversion of Pang, and Snow Bros is equally impressive, featuring stunningly accurate levels, brilliant animation and super-tight gameplay. The Amiga version was discovered in 2006 and Denis Lechevalier (DLFRSilver) was involved with its release. LIQUID KIDS STATUS: RELEASED ■ This delightful platformer by Taito is another Ocean France Amiga game that never saw the light of day. An English Amiga Board member called The Wolf tracked down the original code in 2003 and it’s now available to play. Coded by Michel Janicki and Pierre-Eric Loriaux, with graphics by Thierry Levastre, it’s another solid platformer. It’s not quite up to the standard of Snow Bros, but…

MORE MISSING AMIGA GEMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TWIDDY

What’s it like seeing Amiga Putty Squad in action after all this time? It is great to see it up and running again. It was a bit of a shock looking at the low resolution compared with what we have become used to on modern consoles. I also found it quite difficult to get used to the old controls. Nowadays we are used to having so many buttons and controls on a joystick whereas, in those days, it was a matter of crow-barring all the functionality into a single button. It made me realise just how many aspects of the original game have slowly been changed over the past year in the new incarnations. How much work have you had to do with the project? Most of my involvement was…

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TWIDDY

Supremacy: Your Will Be Done

RETROREVIVAL » AMIGA » PROBE SOFTWARE » 1990 When I talk to younger friends about gaming, one of the things they tend to struggle with is the concept that players could be drawn into an experience which suggested more than it showed, due to the use of text-based or menudriven interfaces with fairly minimal visuals. However, anyone that has logged enough time in front of the Football Manager games knows that this is entirely possible – and in the strategy world, Supremacy is a game that manages to draw a similar level of involvement from its players. The game’s premise of interplanetary conquest is simple enough, with the goal being to colonise a succession of planets, in direct opposition to a foe who is attempting the same. You never see…

Supremacy: Your Will Be Done

To readers of a certain age the name Cinemaware will evoke cherished memories of storming castles, battling giant ants or soaring into the air to fight Nazis. The company’s distinctive releases, beginning with Defender Of The Crown, showcased the graphic power of a new generation of home computers, particularly Commodore’s Amiga. And the stories they told were timeless cinematic archetypes – historical epics, silent comedies, Fifties sci-fimonster movies or Saturday morning matinee-serials with broad-jawed rocket-pack wearing heroes. “Several of us were raised as gamers on the Amiga, coming from computers like the C64 and Apple II,” says Darren Falcus, development director of the modern incarnation of the celebrated company. “Cinemaware, along with maybe LucasArts and Psygnosis, was the leading developer of the time. Its games were cuttingedge in terms of…

THE MAKING OF: THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND

“WE WROTE THE SCRIPT AS WE WERE DOING THE PROGRAMMING. YOU COULD NOT DO THAT TODAY” RON GILBERT The Secret Of Monkey Island is one title that comes to mind as being one of the all time classics of adventure gaming. Stuffed with logical puzzles, offbeat humour, sword fighting and some truly memorable characters, The Secret of Monkey Island is a prime example of how to create an adventure that can stand the test of time and endure forever. It would be some time from Ron Gilbert’s arrival at LucasFilm Games before Monkey Island would begin development. To begin with, his main role was that of the humble conversion. “My first job in the industry was with a company called Human Engineered Software where I was doing C64 programming,” remarks…

THE MAKING OF: THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND

RETROREVIVAL » AMIGA » GREMLIN GRAPHICS » 1992 Sonic The Hedgehog was a huge success for Sega and its Mega Drive. In fact, such was his popularity; he caused a string of copycat clones, from Busby The Bobcat to Super Frog. With a port of the game looking more and more unlikely for the Amiga, Gremlin Graphics created its own mascot in the form of Zool, a ninja from the nth dimension. The cute ninja was massively hyped upon release, even going so far as to be bundled with Commodore’s new flagship computer, the Amiga 1200. While it ultimately lacked the tight controls and clever level design of Sonic, it nevertheless proved a huge hit on the Amiga, getting ported to numerous other consoles, including Sega’s Mega Drive. Zool, like…

DEVELOPER LOOKBACK BEING SENSIBLE

IN BRIEF Jon Hare and Chris Yates meet at school and form a band. They also get jobs together at a company called LT Software. Eventually they decide there is more money in creating games, consigning their music to a hobby. They produce Twister: Mother Of Charlotte for System 3 before deciding to go it alone, forming Sensible Software. The pair create lots of games primarily for the Commodore 64 and Amiga, including the brilliant Sensible Soccer, Wizball and Cannon Fodder. But the shift to 3D games proves difficult and they eventually sell Sensi to Codemasters. The heat was sweltering. Hundreds of sweaty people were milling around and computers were turned on all around the building. To entertain them there was a sizeable number of largely unfinished games, but putting…

DEVELOPER LOOKBACK BEING SENSIBLE

CLASSIC MOMENTS Flashback

Sometimes, reaching your goal doesn’t feel like much of a reward. For Conrad Hart, making it to the third stage of Flashback is just such a pyrrhic victory – he’s just spent his time working a series of jobs, and now he has the credits necessary to buy some false identity papers. The purpose of all this is to gain entry into Death Tower, a deadly TV game show. As you might have guessed from the name, it’s not quite Blockbusters. Death Tower is a turning point in the game, raising the stakes after a couple of stages in which success rests more heavily on your platforming skills than your reflexes. For one stage, Conrad gets to engage in some tense action reminiscent of The Running Man, as he battles…

CLASSIC MOMENTS Flashback

THE MAKING OF: HIRED GUNS

IN THE KNOW » PUBLISHER: PSYGNOSIS » DEVELOPER: DMA DESIGN » RELEASED: 1993 » PLATFORM: AMIGA, PC » GENRE: RPG “HIRED GUNS 101” ▪ Hired Guns is a first-person sci-fidungeon crawler with a four way split screen. Whether navigating through cavernous levels, shooting bio-engineered creatures or puzzle solving, it’s possible for one player to control four characters simultaneously. As a first-person dungeon crawler with FPS elements, a science fiction setting and four-way split screen gameplay, Hired Guns is unique. And for Amiga owners in 1993, unprecedented. Whilst dungeon crawlers like Dungeon Master and Eye Of The Beholder previously enthralled gamers, they didn’t boast a grimy cyberpunk visual style, tense four-way co-operative play or the vast array of characters and weapons seen in Hired Guns. Instead of competitive play emerging in…

THE MAKING OF: HIRED GUNS

DEVELOPER LOOKBACK TEAM 17

IN BRIEF Starting life as a humble distributor of shareware and demos, Team 17 became one of the most prolific Amiga developers and publishers of the early nineties. Early titles like Alien Breed and Superfrog brought Team 17 fame until its breakthrough hit, Worms, brought it fortune. Team 17’s early years as a self-funded developer paved the way for the independence it enjoys today and its status as a celebrity publisher in the Amiga days had talented artists and coders queuing up to make games for the teamsters. WORMS RULES To this day, Worms remains Team 17’s strongest and most successful franchise. What’s interesting is that the concept behind Worms isn’t really that original, as it shares lots of familiarities with Scorched Tanks and other artillery games. The genius of…

DEVELOPER LOOKBACK TEAM 17

FULL CONTACT [1991] Systems: Amiga 500 Team 17’s demo background shone through in the amazing intro sequence to this one-onone fighting game. Gameplay left a lot to be desired, however, and paled in comparison to the superior IK+. The introduction, realistic graphics and brilliant soundtrack are all still great now, but this really isn’t worth playing and, as Team 17’s debut title, it showed little sign of the brilliance that was to come. ALIEN BREED [1991] Systems: Amiga 500 Rico Holmes and Andreas Tadic fused Gauntlet with Alien to create one of the greatest co-operative games on the Amiga. Some prefer Chaos Engine for the run ‘n’ gun fun but Alien Breed’s emphasis on complicated mazes, ammo conservation and the smart use of keys made it far more playable. The…

THE MAKING OF: PINBALL DREAMS

In 1988, a group of Swedish teenagers were members of an Amiga demo scene and began experimenting with new technology. Their name was ‘The Silents’ and they went by the acronym TSL, (said to stand for ‘Trans-Atlantic Speed League’). It was this group that pioneered the idea of developing games commercially. “The demo group who we were part of (The Silents, or TSL), spent part of the summer of 1989 in a summer house in the south of Sweden.” explains Andreas about the game’s origins. “One of our Danish members showed some pinball tables he’d been drawing. Olof, Fredrik and I had been thinking about moving away from demos to games, and this was the igniting spark. A pinball game also did seem like a pretty light-weight first game.” IN…

THE MAKING OF: PINBALL DREAMS

TOP 25 AMIGA 500

Datastorm ▪ DEVELOPER: VISIONARY DESIGN TECHNOLOGIES ▪ YEAR: 1989 ▪ GENRE: SHOOT-’EM-UP 25 This Defender clone may have lacked true originality but it sure made up for it with sheer, fluid speed and flawless execution. Varied enemy armies spawned in their droves as you hurtled through the horizontally-scrolling landscape in search of eight pods, and unless you had lightning fast reactions to avoid and blast them away, early death in a thousand colourful pixels was inevitable. Datastorm pushed the Amiga’s technology to the max. Populous II: Trials Of The Olympian Gods ▪ DEVELOPER: BULLFROG ▪ YEAR: 1991 ▪ GENRE: GOD SIM 24 Although some may say Populous II is a classic game but only by association of the original, its release in 1991 came during a golden, defining era for…

TOP 25 AMIGA 500

THE MAKING OF: JETSTRIK

IN THE KNOW PUBLISHER: RASPUTIN SOFTWARE DEVELOPER: SHADOW SOFTWARE RELEASED: 1994 PLATFORM: AMIGA, AMIGA CD32, PC_DOS GENRE: FLIGHT.SIM/SHOOT.‘EM.UP The idea behind Jetstrike is a simple one: pick any plane from the dozens available in your hanger, load it up with weapons, and fly out across a scrolling landscape, dealing out as much damage to the enemy SPUDD (Society of Particularly Undesirable Dastardly Dudes) installations as possible. And if you end up going down in a huge fireball and bailing out, pick another aircraft and do it all again. A mixture of Defender, Harrier Attack and every Top Gun cliché you ever heard (in a good way, mind) it’s silly, hard as nails and absolute buckets of fun. For the creators, Aaron and Adam Fothergill, it was the culmination of…

THE MAKING OF: JETSTRIK

SIX DEFINING JETSTRIKE MOMENTS

PICKING YOUR PLANE ■ For an arcade style shoot-‘em-up the amount of flyable aircraft you get is dazzling, from the 40 different machines in the original Amiga 500 version to around 60 in the A1200 and CD32 releases. And picking the right one for a specific mission is crucial, particularly as some are completely unarmed. YOU ARE HERE ■ Part of the fun of the Jetstrike was seeing what kind of monumentally spectacular (and painful looking) crashes you could achieve, either through enemy fire or your own blind stupidity. And the game would always praise your efforts with a pithy one-liner and point out exactly where you ended up. BOMBS AWAY ■ One of the most enjoyable aspects of Jetstrike is bombing ground targets, from armoured convoys to bunkers, battleships…

SIX DEFINING JETSTRIKE MOMENTS

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight

One of the greatest things about Moonstone is just how epic the whole game feels. This in part is thanks to an incredibly moody soundtrack by the late Richard Joseph, but it’s also down to the excellent animated opening that sets the adventure perfectly. As the sombre score builds, cloaked druids make their way into Stonehenge. As they enter the holy site, the perspective moves overhead, only to cut to a bearded druid who summons lightning as his followers chant around him. A knight soon enters the sacred area and kneels so he can be anointed. It’s a simple sequence, but an extremely powerful one that lingers in the memory for quite some time. BIO There were plenty of one-on-one fighters available for the Amiga, but few were as epic,…

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight

The Amiga Underground

GLOSSARY Your handy phrase guide to the Amiga underground DEMOS – Real-time animations, making use of the Amiga hardware to show off the creator’s programming prowess. FREEWARE – Public domain software that is freely distributable. Users traditionally pay for only the physical media, ie the price of a disk. PUBLIC DOMAIN/PD: An umbrella term for non-commercial software in free, or nearly/mostly free, distribution. SHAREWARE – PD software that invites users to register with a nominal fee, often in exchange for extra/full content. When Jack Tramiel began producing home computers at Commodore, he did so under a brilliant mantra. “Computers for the masses, not the classes.” The slogan was meant to indicate affordability, but with the Amiga it seemed to take on a whole new level of interpretation. Amiga was very…

The Amiga Underground

RETROREVIVAL: Turrican

» AMIGA » RAINBOW ARTS » 1990 RETROREVIVAL Turrican may have started off life on the Commodore 64, but it typified everything that was great about the Amiga. Created by Manfred Trenz, it took inspiration from Metroid and an obscure Konami arcade game called Psycho Nips Oscar, but had enough of its own elements to make it stand apart from the games that had inspired it. Created by Manfred Trenz, it took inspiration from Metroid and an obscure Konami arcade game called Psycho Nips Oscar, but had enough of its own elements to make it stand apart from the games that had inspired it. The real beauty of Turrican comes in its huge levels and smart weapon design. While it’s possible to simply race from left to right for the…

RETROREVIVAL: Turrican

CLASSIC GAME: Ruff ‘N’ Tumble

There aren’t too many bosses in Ruff ‘N’ Tumble, but the ones on offer are pretty cool. In fact, if we’re completely honest then we have to admit that we’ve a bit of a soft spot for this cute mechanical owl from the finale of the Forest world. He’s not only gigantic, but amazingly well animated, further highlighting the skill of developer Wunderkind. His swooping gait and homing laser attack will certainly flummox you at first and cost you a fair few lives, but he’s not too hard to dispatch, providing of course that you know what you’re doing… Just grab a decent weapon as you exit the last of the Forest levels and position yourself at the bottom-left-hand corner of the screen so that you can leap over his…

CLASSIC GAME: Ruff ‘N’ Tumble

THE MAKING OF: WALKER

IN THE KNOW PUBLISHER: Psygnosis DEVELOPER: DMA Design RELEASED: 1993 PLATFORM: Amiga PLATFORM: Shoot-’em-up There’s a moment near the beginning of Walker as our plucky mechanised killing machine enters war-torn Berlin circa 1944. Planes fly overhead dropping tiny paratroopers that drift slowly down the screen, chucking the occasional grenade your way. Until, that is, you let rip with your 30mm calibre cannons on their canopies and they plummet to earth with an unedifying splat. It’s the first of many violently absurdist little touches in a game that pits a 40-foot cross between ED-209 and a giant robot chicken against hordes of hopelessly outgunned ant-like troops through past, present and future combat zones. “I blame Paul Verhoeven,” laughs programmer Ian Dunlop, citing the less than subtle Dutch director of Robocop and…

THE MAKING OF: WALKER

I remember when I was first building that engine, I never thought it would be used beyond Maniac Mansion, it was just a tool to get that game done,” declares a bemused Ron Gilbert. “The fact that a lot of LucasArts adventures that followed used that engine, and then when I started Humongous Entertainment we licenced the SCUMM system and used that engine for all the kids games we built, and the fact it’s still being used today is quite amazing to me.” “Considering how haphazardly put together and poorly programmed the whole thing was, that’s more amazing!” quips Ron’s Monkey Island collaborator Tim Schafer, who is sitting in on our call to Double Fine headquarters in San Francisco. Jovial banter between longtime friends aside, it’s an astonishing achievement. The…

SIMON THE SORCERER

“FROM THE OPENING SCREEN SIMON IN THE KNOW THE SORCERER MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR THAT YOU WERE ABOUT TO PLAY A LOVINGLY CRAFTED ADVENTURE WITH A WITTY SCRIPT AND SUPERB VOICE ACTING” In the early Nineties you couldn’t swing a joypad in a games shop without hitting a graphic adventure game. The likes of LucasArts and Sierra churned them out almost quicker than gamers could complete them and there was little sign of the genre’s eventual fall from grace. King of the adventure castle was, undoubtedly, The Secret of Monkey Island, a LucasArts game that combined mind bending puzzles with a side-splitting script and a cheeky central character. LucasArts made millions on the back of Monkey Island’s success so it was no surprise when other adventure designers sought to mimic…

SIMON THE SORCERER

THE MAKING OF WORMS

The story of Worms is a ‘rags to riches’ tale that was common in the Eighties but had become a true rarity with the advent of the 16-bit era. So when Worms became a worldwide phenomenon, sellling over five million copies, many gamers were surprised to find it had almost singlehandedly been created by one man and his Amiga. Unaware of what the future held for him, Andy Davidson began work on Worms for his own amusement in 1990, some five years before the game’s commercial release. “It started life as a version of the old simple tank games that had been around since the 8-bit days”, explains Andy. “It was called Artillery then and ran on the cutting-edge hardware that was a Casio graph-plotting calculator! It was just an…

THE MAKING OF WORMS

RETRO REVIVAL: ALIEN BREED: SPECIAL EDITION ’92

RETROREVIVA » AMIGA » TEAM 17 » 1991 Once upon a time I traded in a SNES collection of around 50 Japanese games for an Amiga 1200. It remains one of the biggest mistakes of my gaming life. I’d been entranced by the likes of The Eye Of The Beholder and Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis, crucially forgetting that two of my favourite types of games, shmups and arcade offerings, weren’t as well represented on the Amiga systems. Thank goodness then for Team 17’s Alien Breed. With its impressive visuals and atmospheric soundtrack, it reminded me of all the console and arcade games I used to enjoy on my SNES. It was a fantastic price to boot. I can remember almost wincing in pain when I handed over…

RETRO REVIVAL: ALIEN BREED: SPECIAL EDITION ’92

COLLECTOR’S GUIDE: AMIGA 500

» Manufacturer: Commodore » Models: Amiga 500, Amiga 500+ » Launched: 1987 » Country of origin: United States Why it’s collectable Following up on a machine as commercially popular as the Commodore 64 was never going to be an easy task, but few would argue that the Amiga wasn’t a worthy successor. 1987’s iconic Amiga 500 would secure the line’s status with some of the finest 16-bit games of the era, making it ideal for collecting, while thousands of kids discovered that the computer bought to help with their homework was more than capable of competing with rival platforms of the time. The Amiga 500’s custom chipset was the reason for its immense power; a selection of co-processors handled tasks such as audio and video, leaving the main CPU free…

COLLECTOR’S GUIDE: AMIGA 500

THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

What makes it so special? » The story behind The Great Giana Sisters is the stuff of legend, but the involvement of Manfred Trenz and Chris Hülsbeck – who both worked on Turrican – also helps add a certain degree of desirability to the game. Why should you play it? » Even if you ignore its back story, the game is fantastic fun. It’s not quite up to the majesty of Nintendo’s original platformer, but its quality is immediately obvious. Many platformers, particularly on the Amiga, failed to capture the magic of their console counterparts, but this wasn’t the case with The Great Giana Sisters. What makes it hard to find? » What makes it so hard to find? The game is heavily influenced by Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros, and…

THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

Behind the scenes Discover how Amiga classics like Walker, Monkey Island, Worms, Putty Squad and The Lotus Series were created Essential developers Celebrate the origins of revered game designers: from Sensible Software and Cinemaware to Team 17 Inside the hardware Read about the development of your favourite hardware, from the Amiga 1200 to the Amiga 500 Amazing features From the ultimate guide to Lemmings to everything you need to know about the Amiga demo scene, and much more Classic games Pinball Dreams, SWOS, Speedball 2, Shadow Of The Beast, Simon The Sorcerer and other iconic games celebrated inside…

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