Amiga game conversions

Further Reading: 20 Best Dystopian Games. It is debatable whether it was a wise decision to house all the best escapees in the same place. Each of the four men is housed in his own quarters and need to explore German areas to find the necessary escape items. The isometric view engine and graphics build a sense of location. There are disguises, a daily routine, keys, men acting as lookouts, solitary confinement, and, of course, tunnels.

Whistling The Great Escape tune during play is optional but recommended. Somehow, Doom appeared in , and it was called Corporation. The idea is to penetrate a multi-storey building as a secret agent with James Bond gadgets, including a jet pack. The corridors and rooms of the building are populated by robots and monster holograms. Corporation came with an offer to digitize your face and load it into the game via a floppy data disk. The others involve a mountain fortress, a cruise ship, and a missile factory in the desert.

The gameplay is similar to Laser Squad and UFO: Enemy Unknown with carefully equipped squads first deploying and then making turn-based moves based on a limited number of action points. The original version of Sabre Team for the Amiga was slow to process turns, but the version for the Amiga and CD32 resolves that problem. Special forces missions are always gripping, and games like Sabre Team and Hostages live on today in the form of tactical first-person shooters like Rainbow Six.

In the beginning, there was Crazy Cars and it was bad. Then there was Crazy Cars II and it was bad, too. Now it could race alongside the Lotus games and Jaguar XJ Apart from the licensed name change, the major difference between Crazy Cars III and Lamborghini American Challenge is the split-screen mode that allows two players to race against each other.

The driving model feels fluid and the races are spread across the U. There are cops, gambling, car upgrades, and everything else you might expect from a street racing game. This is a compilation of 20 Infocom text adventures that covers fantasy, science fiction, adventure, mystery, and horror. Infocom was the king of interactive fiction and The Lost Treasures is well named.

As well as six floppy disks, the chunky box contains a page manual and a handful of documents and maps. These are games that require a lot of reading. Bloodwych is a dungeon crawler RPG with distinctive box cover art by fantasy artist Chris Achilleos, who may be familiar to readers of Fighting Fantasy books.

The game distinguishes itself from RPGs like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder by its simultaneous two-player mode and split screen. Of course, multiplayer games that used a split screen had the unfortunate drawback of allowing your opponent to peek at your part of the screen.

Another interesting feature of Bloodwych is a detailed conversation system that allows you to talk to both enemies and members of your own party. There was an expansion called Bloodwych: The Extended Levels that added new places to explore. In the strategy game Millennium 2. In the sequel, Deuteros , mankind is back on the earth a millennium later and is now beginning to explore space and colonize other planets.

Using Earth City as a central command center, you can access training, research, production, and resource screens. The game starts slowly, as you work out how to build a mining rig, shuttle, and orbital factory, which will allow further space-based construction. The scope of Deuteros expands as you advance and burdensome tasks become automated as researchers come up with new inventions. The idea is to make the gems on the left side of the screen match the gems on the right side using certain color transformation rules.

Presenting the game is Kiki, a male fantasy Japanese girl who has brought along her friends. Yes, games were often aimed at the male members of the species in those days. The presentation is sparkling and the audio is top notch, with some excellent music and speech. The company Software refused to publish it.

Fly Harder is a shiny version of Thrust that was first released in Germany in and then more widely in In the UK it was sold for a very reasonable as an original budget title. Admittedly, there are only eight levels, but the game is challenging enough to last some time.

The aim of the game is to safely guide energy spheres across the map to overload reactors. The player controls a spaceship that is constantly being affected by gravity. In itself, controlling the ship is difficult enough but when a sphere is attached, its inertia causes extra problems. Fly Harder offers keyboard control remapping, a feature that was strangely not particularly common on the Amiga. But as with many releases on that console, the CD version differs little from the floppy release. Populous II.

Theme Park. These are all amazing Amiga games associated with Bullfrog. Flood is so named because waters rise, filling the levels and eventually causing the main character, Quiffy, to drown. The aim is to collect pieces of rubbish and escape. Although it could be described as a platform game, Quiffy can climb up walls and across ceilings as well as leaping about.

The weaponry includes a large flamethrower, a boomerang, and grenades that can be used to fight a strange bunch of enemies. A mysterious ghost follows Quiffy around and must be avoided.

It all adds up to a slightly bizarre game with an unmissable end sequence. As the game begins, the player is hurtling through space, through a solar system to a distant pinpoint, which becomes larger and is revealed as the planet Eris.

The spacecraft then proceeds to land on the planet. The sword of Damocles, in this case, is a comet that is about to hit Eris. Such an early 3D game has limitations of course, and the world is sparsely covered in buildings, with large empty spaces in between. However, as with Amiga games such as Hunter , the abstract 3D style adds to the charm. On 8-bit machines, its famous games were the likes of Uridium and Paradroid.

The character of D. Although developed for the Amiga , there was an enhanced AGA chipset version for the more powerful Amiga machine, which included a whole new world. Virocop was the final Amiga game from Graftgold and, as a parting gift, it was also an Amiga exclusive. Behind these generic fantasy names is a detailed role-playing game that is a kind of prequel to Bloodwych. The developers added some great little touches, such as a dragon who draws a map and a chicken option that causes the characters to run away Monty Python and the Holy Grail -style.

The world is traversed on an overview map, but the game changes to an isometric game upon entering certain locations. Each of the four characters possesses a special ability: hiding in shadow, a bardic melody, a berserker rage, and spellcasting.

The magic system is freeform and is the basis of a massive number of spell combinations. Runes provide magic effects, such as damage or healing, and are combined with ingredients to create spells.

Pushing the joystick right increases the throttle and pushing it left decreases it. Pulling the joystick back pulls the aircraft nose up and pushing it forwards pushes it down. As the view is from the side, this takes some getting used to, and initial attempts at taking off will probably result in a nasty crash.

There are 32 tracks to complete with city, forest, desert, and apocalypse themes, and three players can race at the same time with two on joystick and one on the keyboard.

There is no split-screen mode so racers must avoid falling behind. Micro Machines and the Super Cars games may be better known, but Nitro is an uncomplicated game that is well worth your time. In , Gremlin followed this up with Space Crusade , which was also based on a board game from the same two companies. Unlike HeroQuest , Space Crusade is viewed from a top-down perspective, which is less pretty but gives a good overview of the tactical situation.

During combat, the game changes to the more aesthetically pleasing isometric viewpoint. Each mission is set on an alien hulk and allows up to three players to board as Blood Angels, Imperial Fists, or Ultra Marines.

Each team of Space Marines takes turns moving and attacking aliens. Each system contains a variable number of planets, depending on the difficulty level, and an unpleasant alien at the other end who must be conquered. The ultimate bad guy, Rorn, is very difficult to defeat. Once purchased, an atmospheric processor can be used to terraform lifeless planets. From a central interface, other screens can be used to manage various planetary and interplanetary ships, set tax rates, and train troops, which can be sent to attack enemy planets.

Supremacy is really about numbers, and there is very little direct control over certain key events, such as battles. Destiny and his Tinhead Army. The gameplay is fluid and action is frantic.

The graphics are excellent and the enemy characters have a wonderful metallic look. I know I am being picky but put the arcade originals and the conversions side by side and you will see many problems pop up that we miss when not having the original visible for a comparison. And even if graphics, sounds sometimes cannot possibly match the arcade the gameplay should at least be as good.

Often that was not the case alas. I have the project to re-do some of the Amiga arcade ports in a way that takes better advantage of the Amiga capabilities and have started working for quite a bit already but alas on and off depending on available spare time on an engine usable for driving games which I plan to use for Pole Position, Hang On, Super Hang On, Chase HQ, etc.

Thanks for the feedback. However I played Super Hang On today and still like it despite the flickering — but I guess everything is subjective and lots comes from the nostalgia berries. You are correct the excellent New Zealand story should have made the list. I agree most are not perfect, but should have been for the power of the machine but talking to coders from that period they said they were on fixed cost, fixed timeline contracts and never had access to source code nor graphical or sound assets most of the time so it was a real recreation job.

Ahah, indeed, our opinion of Super Hang On seems to differ so much that I would almost think that you were intoxicated on these nostalgia berries when you last played it. Joke apart, yes, you are right, these kittens were on horrendous schedules and sometimes it seems almost a miracle that early games were playable at all given the unreasonably tight constraints under which they were made.

The industry has gotten only sightly alas better over time but when I entered it in 98 I still went through pretty nightmarish schedules for the best of 7 years before things settled down so I can imagine how unproductive the early game coding environments were.

Added by Kim Lemon on Feb 12, Viewed times. Expand vote statistics. No reviews yet! Be the first one to review it. Although frequent loading from floppy disks may be a real problem, I have felt nothing from it with whdload version.

I know there are lots of really awkward coin-op conversions on our platform, but this game is definitely not one of them. What did they do to the game??? It's really an awful conversion!!! Jerky movements, bad controls, totally no zoom effects And, worst of all, a terrible loading system: loads at every door, and in many sections the loading time is greater than the playing time!

A total failure! When I saw the Amiga version review in a magazine I was putt of by the screenshots I later on got a copy of the game and played it a lot But my first impression as i read ACE magazine was right - the graphics had a bad colorful scheme just like the 16 colour ST version They probably are the same - just check the st version and judge by yourself.

Instead of gray metallic walls you get a ocean blurred blue ones - and the aliens seem a bright green cardboard print on top of these! Animation wise was far from perfect either. Music was good, but you could only hear to music or sound effects which were not bad but not good either. Game play was much like any other OP. Wolf clone style - I think it did not capture the whole essence of the arcade, but was decent enough