It's The Chaos Engine! Well, we don't actually get to The Chaos Engine. Ok, we don't get past the third level. But for two player co-op run and gun action, this is one of the best on the Amiga!
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Amigos Livestream 32 - The Chaos Engine
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Dreamkatcha Reviews: Moonstone
Amigos reviewed Moonstone in Episode 31
I almost didn't have the energy to write this post; I've been working like a dog, when I should be sleeping like a log. Moonstone though, wow! When I get home to you I find the things that you do make me feel alriiiiiiight! ...I think I just broke the Cheeseometer (tm).
It's Barbarian all grown up, the cave peeps have evolved! This time round we can roam through the vertical as well as horizontal planes a la Golden Axe, and the guts are unprecedentedly bloody. I wonder if this is what we'd have ended up with if Palace had continued to release sequels to their decapitate-em-up romps.
Moonstone is a genre-bending anachronism, and therein lies its metier. It's a hacking-slashing beat-em-up for people who don't like mindless, button-mashing beat-em-ups, spliced together with an RPG for people who don't like character-leveling, grinding drudgery. Breaking with tradition, the battles require a degree of strategy and stealth, and the developmental aspects are light and frothy so as not to detract too much from the gritty, gore-laden action; more twerking than grinding really. While the premise and unadulterated slaying remain whimsical, Moonstone, remarkably, still manages to evoke a real sense of peril and urgency.
What set this apart from the competition of the era was that when you won a bout, it actually felt like an accomplishment, that your skill, ducking, diving and opportunistic swipes had brought about the defeat of your foe, rather than pure luck and joystick abuse. The enemies are tough and the fatalities they inflict often feel cheap and unfair, yet that only keeps you coming back for more, fuelling your determination to even up the score, and ultimately beat the game.
Incidentally it's ironic that your perseverance in reaching and slaying the dragon is rewarded with an unrecoverable crash due to the publisher's lax attitude towards quality control and bug-testing before release. This isn't the only point at which the game glitches or freezes entirely, just the sure-fire crucial one that will inevitably see you hurling your broadsword at the monitor. I've read that you can find a fixed version over at the Moonstone Tavern web site these days, though I've never tried it personally.
The decapitations were largely lifted from Barbarian so weren't new, yet they seemed so much more visceral and shocking here; there's no standing on ceremony, they're as casual as supping a cup of tea on a Sunday morning. The gore in general is unapologetically in-your-face, and all a couple of years before the furore Mortal Kombat engendered. Looking back now it seems tame, especially compared to some of the depravity I witnessed recently in a Game Sack goriest games roundup recently. I don't pay much attention to modern gaming so I was genuinely sickening by some of these examples.
Something else that strikes you as you progress through the game is the sheer scale of the sprites. Some of the adversaries tower above our diminutive knight, literally breaking the confines of the screen, and their weapons alone can dwarf them in some cases. As if that wasn't enough, the sense of unease imbued by this motley crew of unearthly beasts is perfectly complimented by wile graphical illusions such as the jolting screen-shake effect whenever, for instance, a troll delivers a crushing blow with its tree trunk.
At the time, games were hampered by graphical and processing limitations which brought about a gaping chasm between artists' imagination and what could feasibly be executed on screen. I like to think this game did its bit to close that gap, and it certainly blew me away at the time.
I almost didn't have the energy to write this post; I've been working like a dog, when I should be sleeping like a log. Moonstone though, wow! When I get home to you I find the things that you do make me feel alriiiiiiight! ...I think I just broke the Cheeseometer (tm).
It's Barbarian all grown up, the cave peeps have evolved! This time round we can roam through the vertical as well as horizontal planes a la Golden Axe, and the guts are unprecedentedly bloody. I wonder if this is what we'd have ended up with if Palace had continued to release sequels to their decapitate-em-up romps.
Moonstone is a genre-bending anachronism, and therein lies its metier. It's a hacking-slashing beat-em-up for people who don't like mindless, button-mashing beat-em-ups, spliced together with an RPG for people who don't like character-leveling, grinding drudgery. Breaking with tradition, the battles require a degree of strategy and stealth, and the developmental aspects are light and frothy so as not to detract too much from the gritty, gore-laden action; more twerking than grinding really. While the premise and unadulterated slaying remain whimsical, Moonstone, remarkably, still manages to evoke a real sense of peril and urgency.
What set this apart from the competition of the era was that when you won a bout, it actually felt like an accomplishment, that your skill, ducking, diving and opportunistic swipes had brought about the defeat of your foe, rather than pure luck and joystick abuse. The enemies are tough and the fatalities they inflict often feel cheap and unfair, yet that only keeps you coming back for more, fuelling your determination to even up the score, and ultimately beat the game.
Incidentally it's ironic that your perseverance in reaching and slaying the dragon is rewarded with an unrecoverable crash due to the publisher's lax attitude towards quality control and bug-testing before release. This isn't the only point at which the game glitches or freezes entirely, just the sure-fire crucial one that will inevitably see you hurling your broadsword at the monitor. I've read that you can find a fixed version over at the Moonstone Tavern web site these days, though I've never tried it personally.
The decapitations were largely lifted from Barbarian so weren't new, yet they seemed so much more visceral and shocking here; there's no standing on ceremony, they're as casual as supping a cup of tea on a Sunday morning. The gore in general is unapologetically in-your-face, and all a couple of years before the furore Mortal Kombat engendered. Looking back now it seems tame, especially compared to some of the depravity I witnessed recently in a Game Sack goriest games roundup recently. I don't pay much attention to modern gaming so I was genuinely sickening by some of these examples.
Something else that strikes you as you progress through the game is the sheer scale of the sprites. Some of the adversaries tower above our diminutive knight, literally breaking the confines of the screen, and their weapons alone can dwarf them in some cases. As if that wasn't enough, the sense of unease imbued by this motley crew of unearthly beasts is perfectly complimented by wile graphical illusions such as the jolting screen-shake effect whenever, for instance, a troll delivers a crushing blow with its tree trunk.
At the time, games were hampered by graphical and processing limitations which brought about a gaping chasm between artists' imagination and what could feasibly be executed on screen. I like to think this game did its bit to close that gap, and it certainly blew me away at the time.
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Amigos Auction Watch: Feb 26
The latest from the world of eBay...
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Get them before they're gone!
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Played 'til my fingers bled, it was the summer of '92
In the late eighties and early nineties, the holy grail of games development was the formidable crusade of devising a plumber-beater for the home computers. One man adamant he'd be the one to nail it, is Ocean's one-time software director, Gary Bracey, and many would argue he hit the jackpot with The Addams Family. The positive reception it savoured must have come as a great relief to the entire team as it helped to lift them out of the dire movie-tie-in-game quagmire they were floundering in at the time following less than stellar releases such as Terminator 2, Total Recall and Darkman. Taking a sabbatical from their previous formulaic, genre-mish-mashing titles proved to be a step in the right direction.Released in 1992, the frightfully (sorry) polished 2D platformer was loosely based on the blockbuster movie of the previous year... I'm sure the name will come to me. It was 'loosely' based on the movie in the same way that the sagging pants, wannabe gang-bangers wear loosely follow the contours of their backsides.
In the film, the family's lawyer, Tully Alford, hatches a plot to inveigle an imposter into the fold posing as Gomez's long-lost brother, Fester, to plunder their burgeoning vault allowing him to pay off the debts he owes to a loan shark. While in Ocean's game, the lawyer takes the whole family - with the exception of Thing and butler, Lurch - hostage, incarcerating them in various quarters of the mansion and surrounding grounds.
As the head of the family, Gomez, it is your mission to stomp to a pulp the end of level bosses holding them captive and release them from their shackles... whether they like it or not (you may be familiar with the macabre, sado-masochistic vibe running throughout the original cartoon on which the film is based - all done in the best possible taste of course).
Reaching them is easier said than done as they reside at the end of some extremely expansive, labyrinthine levels littered with a coterie of comically oddball creatures and unfathomably animated inanimate objects. You'll encounter quiffed dudes riding in spinning tea cups, armless, goose-stepping green aliens, levitating, rotating Hindus, cleaver-waving chefs, bipedal goldfish bowls and teapots, and indecipherable beaked wildlife riding unicycles. Creepy? Kooky? Spooky? Oooky? A sepulcher-load of each is present and correct. Graphicians, Simon Butler and Warren Lancashire tick every box consummately.
A bit of trivia for you. Part of the original brief was to leave some of the landscapes barren of nasties to enhance the eidolic ambience, though when Simon realised he couldn't pick a fight in a deserted graveyard during the witching hour, he set about populating it with ghouls comme il faut to the scene. If he reads this and I'm never heard from again, will someone please feed my goldfish?
While you're preoccupied with reuniting the family, Lurch - the useless lump - idles on his bony backside, tinkling the ivories in the music room. With each member of the family you emancipate, his rendition of the theme tune transitions from a stilted, jangly assault on the lug-holes to an accurate facsimile of the score we hear in the opening title screen.
Luckily Thing's contribution is a bit more constructive. He appears whenever you head-butt an 'A' block to provide useful tips and words of wisdom to aid you in your quest; a contrivance not totally dissimilar to an earlier, popular block-busting runny-jumpy game.
Crips and crockery aren't the only in-game obstacles you will face; the environment itself is as much of a threat what with its medieval machinations of lethal airborne blades, spikes and swinging maces, the stoves' searing flames and the slippery ice-encrusted platforms and avalanches which define the freezer zone.
If The Addams Family's difficulty curve were a theme park, it would have you first cavorting on the pedalo-swans, sashaying onto the ball pool and strolling through the hedge-maze. Then abruptly - as you blithely emerge from the soporific shrubbery - handcuff you to Alton Towers' Smiler roller-coaster on which two ladies recently lost their legs! That's not a joke, it really happened.
You begin the game at the homestead's front door. Enter this and you are free to climb the staircase and choose to enter whichever door you please, each taking you to one of the games' five themed sectors, which include flying, swimming and gondola/steam train wayfaring segments. Some levels are a breeze, while others will leave you tearing your follicles out in frustration, yet what's refreshing is the opportunity to progress in a non-linear fashion in that it allows even the most incompetent players to cherry-pick the battles they attempt and to see a decent portion of what the game has to offer before being stumped.
Inertia. If you hate it in platform games, sorry to say, you'll find it in abundance here. Gomez doesn't stop instantly when you do, especially on the frozen tundra-alike level which will leave you sliding off the end of ledges to your doom, or right into the path of oncoming adversaries. Couple this complication with the smouldering, indestructible enemies found in the furnace and you'll be cursing like a melon farmer in a pre-watershed ITV movie.
Before reaching the climax - if you ever do - you'll be presented with the death caption and 'wahhh-wahhh-wahhh' commiseration ditty many, many times. As infuriating as this can be, it never deters you from bouncing back for 'just' one more go, even if you jot down a level's password and return to it a month later. The re-playability factor never wanes.
When you clone the quintessential platformer, you find that it comes gift-wrapped with hidden depths, literally. The Addams Family, like Mario, is jam-packed with secret bonus rooms chock-full of conducive power-ups such as invulnerability stardust, the Fez-copter which will have you reaching for the stars with each successive tap of the fire button, and revitalising extra lives, so many in fact that running out is never really an issue.
Money may make the world go round, but it can also prolong your existence on planet Addams where collecting 100 coins will reward you with a 1-up and passing the 25 coin milestone, an extra heart, while defeating a boss furnishes Gomez with the capacity to absorb an additional hit-point before he croaks. Note that everything you collect has a purpose; striving to fall into a diabetic coma is a sub-goal only found in Zool, thankfully.
We learn from Robocod that taking the easy, obvious exit is tantamount to shooting yourself in the fin. Ditto in The Addams Family, where jumping above an escape door and pushing up will often transport you behind the scenes. In the gallery you can enter the jaws of a bearskin rug, or drop down through the spine of a book in the library to reveal a secret bonus room. Particularly satisfying is jumping out of the brick framework of a level, beyond the platforms and into the ether to seek your fortune. Yes, I believe Mario got there first, once again.
Breaking with home computer tradition, the fire button has been assigned to the jump function, and this goes a long way to cementing the games' consoley feel. Playing with a joypad, this adds a welcome degree of control and sets the game apart from the crowd of up-to-jump-ers Amiga gamers are more familiar with. Joystick users might find their mileage varies.
Gomez's already-rapid movement and the boost the go-faster shoes power-up confers is clearly a nod towards the frantic game-play action favoured by the spiky blue hedgehog. Head-butting blocks to reveal hints is a trope conspicuously snagged from Mario, as is riding the inflated bullets fired by anthropomorphic canons. Much like in Mario everything except the end of level bosses can be dispatched with one carefully timed thwack to the noggin, ensuring the action is kept fluid and arcadey.
Whilst the game's visuals won't take your breath away in the same way seeing Shadow of the Beast for the first time did, they ooze a witty, whimsical charm that will leave you beaming from ear to ear, and possibly even printing out the graphicians' beautifully hand-drawn pixel art for your gaming craft projects... so I've heard. Simon and Warren really did a terrific job of tapping into the playful, ludicrous spirit of the source material.
Family or foe, the sprites are teeming with personality thanks to the intricately adroit animation and meticulous attention to detail present throughout. Stand still for more than a few seconds and Gomez will turn to the camera and tap his feet impatiently as if to say, "well what are you waiting for?". Cease running abruptly and you kick up a dust cloud that swirls around your ankles before settling. It's these neat, wry touches that leaves the competition choking in its wake. Eyewitnesses tell me the Giana Sisters were forced to drop the 'Great' from their moniker as it no longer complied with the Trade Descriptions Act, and Mick and Mack took early retirement in McDonald Land when Gomez came head-stomping onto the scene.
The quirky, catchy music provided by Ocean stalwart, Jonathan Dunn, is equally inventive. From the immaculate rendition of the iconic theme tune accompanying the opening title screen to the atmospheric in-game music and rousing, spirited boss-battle compositions, every note dove-tails seamlessly with the off-kilter prescribed motif.
I have it on good authority that more so than any other Ocean release, everyone involved with producing The Addams Family genuinely loved the experience, and their passion palpably shines through.
The Addams Family was released for all the popular 8-bit and 16-bit platforms of the time, even the largely defunct ones. The Mega Drive, SNES, Atari ST and Amiga incarnations were very similar game-play-wise, though a number of intriguing nuances exist which are worth examining.It was initially the intention to include parallax scrolling backgrounds in the Amiga version, though it was felt this would run the risk of having to ramp up the minimum specifications required to run the game, thereby excluding those Amiga gamers who owned the base level, vanilla machine. The difficult and unpopular decision was taken to exclude them entirely, and the performance benefit can clearly be seen in the game's smooth scrolling and lack of any discernible lag as the fervent action escalates.
Although the graphics in the Atari ST version are less colourful, much to the chagrin of Amigans, it did include parallax scrolling backgrounds. The pay-off, however, was botched screen scrolling. As Gomez hits the edge of the play-field, there's a pause while you nudge the boundary and the screen shifts forwards revealing the upcoming obstacles and landscape. It's no substitute for the real thing and introduced the show-stopping drawback of forcing you to make leaps of faith, which often end badly.
Given how easy it is to port between the ST and Amiga, the possibility of inserting the Atari's superior background graphics into the impoverished Amiga version has been discussed over on the English Amiga Board. Speculation has also been made as to the likelihood that the same backgrounds are already present yet concealed. Watch this space. Maybe we could swap the Amiga's superior music for the ST's tiled backgrounds and seal the deal with a spit-handshake, playground style.
The SNES and Mega Drive versions both display a persistent caption at the top of the screen revealing the name of the area you happen to be in. Perhaps this was a useful way of identifying the level players were struggling with when they called those £1 a minute helplines that were always more popular with console gamers.
Likewise, each of the 16-bit console interpretations feature parallax backgrounds, in addition to two extra weapons to compliment the head-bounce. Flinging golf balls or lancing opponents with the fencing foil (neatly relevant as these are two of Gomez's past-times) wouldn't have been possible in the Amiga or ST versions because the single fire button had already been assigned to jumping. 1-0 to the 'up for jump' brigade!The Mega Drive's background tiles are brighter than the SNES's, and some of the boss-battle music has been eschewed in place of additional sound effects.
Curiously the 'Orville' bird boss was censored in the SNES version. Its main means of attack is aerial defecation and it appears that Nintendo didn't feel this was appropriate fodder for their demographics' delicate sensibilities. I was once viciously assaulted by the mother of all pigeons who I assume was at the time struggling with IBS, and can attest to the fact that it is a traumatic experience no-one should have to endure, so maybe Nintendo had a point.
Fair enough, The Addams Family was never going to set the world ablaze, push the boundaries of the genre through cunning innovation, or cram the moustached, dungareed one into Things' box and nail the lid shut (unfortunately). Nevertheless, what it did do is bridge the chasm between computer and console gaming, draining the green hue from Amigans faces and making them less likely to jump ship. It demonstrated that the Amiga had the teeth to compete convincingly with Sega and Nintendo, and had the platform not met its untimely demise shortly after, it may have encouraged fence-sitting developers to experiment beyond their comfort zone.Oceans' blatant, unashamed clone is a sponge for tried and tested gaming accoutrements, yet despite being so derivative it remains one of the best examples of its type on the Amiga because it represents pure, distilled game-play. Its fully cognisant of its humble identity and plays to its strengths. It's the very definition of solid, dependable game-play, buoyed with tight, responsive controls, elegantly simple graphics and well designed maps.
It's not a 'rip-off' unless it's poorly implemented... or an Amiga-exclusive license that's being exploited. No, this is a loving, respectful homage. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Amigos reviewed The Addams Family on Episode 3.
Amigos reviewed The Addams Family on Episode 3.
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Amigos Plays Cool Spot
Cool Spot is the embodiment of 90's 'tude.
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Amigos Plays Castlevania
It looks pretty, but plays a lot better on the NES. Of course, that's just my excuse for being so bad at it.
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Chris Foulds' Amiga 1200
Amigos listener Chris Folds' has graciously shared a pic of his Amiga rig. Let's check it out!
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Chris says:
It's an Amiga 1200, with a A1208 expansion card with 8meg of RAM inside is a 4GB CF drive full of games thanks to WHDLoad.
I also have a PCMCIA / CF card reader for transferring files to it, two Zipsticks, and a Cyclone RX adapter so I can use wired PSX controllers for those longer gaming sessions.
In this picture I have it just hooked in via a SCART cable to a small, cheap Samsung LCD TV.
After messing around with external flicker fixers/scan doublers all with varying levels of quality I have decided to not waste my money any more and put some money to one side to buy an Indivision 1200 card and get lovely DVI out.
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Episode 33 - Winter Games
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Amigos Plays Bubble and Squeak
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Amigos Auction Watch - March 3
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There's Something About Calamari
Is it a Bond? Hmm, kind of. Is it a RoboCop? Yeah, sort of... ish. It's Robocod! He's part underwater secret agent, part armoured crime-fighter, all puntastic mud-skipper. You could look upon it as a cunning way of producing two movie tie-in games in one, side-stepping the whole costly business of forking out for a license, even if the resulting hybrid gumbo is an absurd parody. Gary Bracey must have choked on his morning coffee when he read that preview!
Robocod is the short-awaited consoley cute-em-up sequel to the 1990 platforming romp splash hit, James Pond, developed by Vectordean Ltd and Millennium Interactive for the Amiga, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes and Sega Mega Drive.
In the first outing, James' mission, should he have chosen to accept it (spoiler: he did) was to clean up the toxic, radioactive waste dumped in the ocean by the odious super-duper-mega-villain, Dr Maybe, plug the holes in leaking oil tankers (particularly disconcerting as Maybe didn't even have a 'License to Spill'!), and liberate a 'risk' of lobsters from incarceration (that's the collective noun for them, I looked it up; not that I'm fishing for compliments).
It was well received, though where it flounders is that it plays like a fish in water, and as everyone who has ever played a computer game knows, water-themed levels are always the most tedious, frustrating ones. You persevere with them because you know as soon as you re-emerge and towel off, the game will get exponentially better.
It was well received, though where it flounders is that it plays like a fish in water, and as everyone who has ever played a computer game knows, water-themed levels are always the most tedious, frustrating ones. You persevere with them because you know as soon as you re-emerge and towel off, the game will get exponentially better.
Millennium were clearly on the same soggy page; in the sequel, 99.99% of the game takes place on dry land and as a result it's far more fun to play. That said, if you yearn to play ye olde James Pond, you can revisit the first level by sinking into the titanic tub found in the bathroom level.Cue the return of Pond's arch Nemo-sis, Dr Maybe. Destroying the environment is so last year, and thus 1991 becomes the stage for an all-new nefarious conspiracy; this time the shellfish old codger intends to ruin Christmas for the world's sprogs by hijacking Santa's North Pole based toy factory and sabotaging the toys due for immediate dispatch.
An undisclosed number of them have been rigged with explosive devices and disguised as cute, huggable penguins. Although I'm no expert, this sounds suspiciously like terrorism, and we all know that's bad because we've declared war on this adjective and persist in launching torpedoes at it. F.I.5.H. - the super underwater espionage unit - agree, and have once again called upon our eponymous aquatic hero to save the day.
The Fish With the Golden Pun accepted this mission too; Millennium & Co. made a game all about it. Your goal is to infiltrate the toy factory, track down the dirty bombs and disarm them before they can dislodge any limbs. This will be no cake-walk as the Doc has reprogrammed the toys to attack any intruders, giving him thinking time to cobble together his ransom demands. At this stage we are not made aware of his motives; he may be hell-bent on popping kid's Bubbles of Hope (tm) just for the halibut. Who does he think he is, the Codfather?
Here's where the story begins to get a bit muddled. In the animated intro, the stars of a series of vintage McVitie's Penguin biscuit commercials sum up the situation with the following synopsis...
"Something fishy is afoot in the Arctic... (aside from penguins being spotted in the North Pole I presume they mean!)
Alvin... Dr Maybe has captured the toys!
Murray... And he has kidnapped our friends.
...Only RoboCod can help us now...
He must rescue the penguins... And defeat Dr Maybe!"
What makes the penguins think any of their friends have been captured in the first plaice? The ones to have been tampered with are actually inanimate toys camouflaged as loveable penguins according to the game's manual. Didn't Alvin and Murray bother to take a roll call? We used to do this every morning and afternoon in school. Nestling error there!
Should you kick the bucket, another cut-scene divulges their intention to turn our intrepid explorer into a breakfast platter of smoked kipper. So they're clueless and savages! 'Happy Feet' was a bare-faced lie!
Nevertheless, Christmas just ain't Christmas without firing up James Pond 2 for a spot of retro platforming action. It's as much a part of the festive routine as the annual re-watching of 'It's a Wonderful Life' or listening to Wham, Slade and Wizzard. Remember though, a Robocod isn't just for Christmas; they need regular TLC and stretches throughout the year.
Luckily for us our fishy saviour has evolved between missions and is now sporting a fetching, turbot-charged, cybernetic Go-Go-Gadget-style expandosuit, allowing him to stretch his midriff indefinitely to reach overhead platforms.
Position yourself correctly and he'll grip onto their underside and reel in his legs saving a great deal of clenched-teeth precision jumping.
It also comes in very handy when your only option is to shimmy across a pit of lethal spikes.
For any scientists out there who are wondering, it's this same suit that makes it possible for him to breathe out of water. Clever!
Your tin can togs also feature a defensive shield powered by batteries. With each hit you lose one and become more vulnerable, though your supply can be replenished by collecting stars. The state of your health is represented by a fishunculus (see what I did there?) in the bottom left of the game's HUD.
Your remaining lives are indicated by the number of fingers held up, and your energy by the number of battery cells precariously balanced in Pond's other hand. As you absorb damage, your facial features pucker up in a grimace of pain until Pond can take no more and you croak. A similar mechanism was implemented in Ocean's Batman in 1989, though it was still a welcome novelty here. Batman also featured a penguin, and... I don't have the foggiest Scooby-Doo where I was going with this... perhaps it's a red herring.
Given that potential danger lies around every corner, Pond's ability to extend his viewing scope slightly is a welcome new tool. You do this by holding down the fire button and moving the joystick in a particular direction. The ability to plan ahead with these sneak-peak vignettes helps you avoid making leaps of faith and will save your flippers on many occasions.
While Pond doesn't have any weapons per se, you can accentuate the damage he is able to inflict by pulling down on the joystick as you pounce on a baddy causing him to contract into his 'roboball' manoeuvre. An added benefit of taking up this position is that you are immediately less vulnerable to mistimed head-stomps or collision hit-box anomalies.
While GTA is credited with teaching us that vehicles make perfectly adequate substitutes for weapons if you're caught short, Robocod got there first, six years earlier. You can hop inside a Noddy car, pilot a biplane or (steer?) a bath tub. Once cocooned in any one of these vehicles, ramming anything in your path will snuff it out of existence instantly, and allow you to move around the labyrinthine levels much more rapidly, or reach areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to on fin.Each vehicle comes with its own unique change of wardrobe. Sit in the car and a cap appears on your bonce. Pilot the plane and goggles and a scarf take their place, while taking a soak in the bath conjures up a bathing cap. It's these neat, humorous touches that set Robocod apart from the crowd of lazy production-line platformers that littered the shelves of WH Smith at the time... except it was John Menzies back then of course, and Snickers were Marathon bars.
The difficulty curve is mostly a smooth horizontal line with a few blips along the way indicating the forced-scrolling stages that can really test your reflexes, and patience. If you're not on the ball you can easily miss a pixel-perfect jump and be squished between the edge of the screen and an overly tall obstacle. While these are tough, the game rewards you with plenty of extra lives in the form of collectable golden ankhs, and energy batteries, which look like stars for no apparent reason. Chris bought a job lot for his Christmas card making project that year and had plenty left over?
The umbrella power-up can be used to slow down aerial free-falls, allowing you to land more accurately, or collect airborne artefacts which otherwise you'd whiz by too swiftly to snag.
Collecting a suit of armour confers invulnerability for a limited period of time, while the wings (or a dodgy centrally-parted 90s hair do a la Duncan of PJ and Duncan fame?) can be used to skip precarious platform-hopping sections entirely, or sail right past baddies you'd normally have to clear from your path.
Couple these with the odd life-saving way-point and completing the game becomes more an exercise in perseverance than genuine l33t mad skillz, especially given there's no opportunity to save your progress in the Amiga versions when played on original hardware.
In addition to the helpful performance-tweaking power-ups, unfortunately there is an over-abundance of collectable tat that serves no loftier function than to rack up a bloated high score. Points definitely don't make prizes here, and this isn't Magic Pockets after all.
Our insatiable fishy friend is forever gorging himself on junk food, and yet there's no handy diabetes-o-meteor (that's a pun for the next JP game, not a typo! - I was told to stop carping on about fish!) in sight to predict an impending hyperglycaemic attack. Where's the social responsibility, eh?
Kill or collect virtually everything in your path and you can expect to tip the scale at ten million points, merely for the hake of it!
Numerous gaming tropes have seemingly been lifted from the granddaddy of platform games, Mario, despite Robocod having been a long way down the development pipeline before Chris discovered the SNES and Super Mario World. For instance, you can head-butt blocks from beneath to dislodge power-ups, useful transport or even the odd curve-ball enemy or poison potion that will deplete your energy by one hit point. And what is it with early platformers and anthropomorphic, oversized bullets or canons?
Your means of dispatching enemies is another braying elephant in the room. The old faithful head-bounce is so intrinsically linked to Mario it's a wrench to play the game without that catchy 8-bit ditty chirping away at the back of your mind. Still I suppose it was an excellent way of disabling nasties without resorting to graphic violence of any kind so would have passed the Nanny State test. The ESRB wasn't founded until 1994, and PEGI in 2003, though that didn't seem to stop independent meddlers sticking their oar in prior to this.
One game that captured Chris's imagination in particular as a fledgling teenage console gamer was 'Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion', and its influence is lucidly apparent in Robocod.
The bouncy, perky feel-good animation and catchy soundtrack is distinctly Disney in spirit. It's bright, colourful and positively brimming with personality, charm and warmth. The springy, murderous pot plant especially puts me in mind of Fantasia, although I don't recall that specifically being a Disney character in anything at all.
If it wasn't for the tongue-in-cheek, absurdest, wry wit, it might have turned off the older kids who were looking for something a bit more edgy than whatever the parent-friendly Mouse-House had to offer.
The unbridled level of imagination (a sentient, walking Bertie Bassett is even in there, Bertie Bassett people!!!) is so, like, totally random... in a teenage Valley-Cali girl world where 'random' means zany, kooky and not at all RANDOM by the dictionary definition of the word. That would just be insulting to Chris and Steve Bak who spent an eternity blueprinting the visuals, coding and plotting out the landscapes respectively. Is there space here for a lame joke about platforms made of Liquorice Allsorts and eye candy? No? Hoki, moving on...
You begin your quest at the base of Santa Claus's tower swathed in wind-swept snowflakes that flit one way then the other in rapid succession. Each door leads to one of nine themed worlds; sports, games, bath-time, confectionery, circus, music and so on.
How you progress is somewhat linear in that you have to attempt them in the right order; the subsequent door in the sequence is unlocked once you have successfully tackled the one prior to it thanks to a glitch in Dr Maybe's short-circuiting security system. Apparently it wasn't designed to be operated under the Arctic's sub-zero temperatures.
There are 70 levels altogether and 4 bosses to vanquish before reaching Dr Maybe's loose-headed, jumbo snowman suit of doom. Each of the levels are completed by collecting a prerequisite number of penguins. The magic number is anyone's guess, but you'll know when you've reached your target because the beacons perched on top of the barber's pole exit point will flash indicating that it's open for business. Not that I'd bet my aquarium on it; you have to beware of the fake exits that will dump you right back at square one, forcing you to re-trace your steps from scratch. There's no way of telling which are which, you just have to learn through trial and error and memorise their positions for take 2.Complicating matters further is the oppor-tuna-ty to choose your exit from a range of options. At the end of one level there are four in fact, and only one represents the correct path.
Less conspicuous exits, those you have to deliberately go out of your way to locate, tend to lead to secret bonus stages plastered with power-ups and other collectables, so it's always worth skipping by any exits that seem to want to make your journey too easy.
Variety (and therefore longevity) is one thing that sets the bar for platform games owing to their tendency to fall foul of formulaic level design and repetitive game-play. Robocod trampolines over it with ease and doesn't stop to look back. There are several forced-scroll stages where haste is of the essence if you want to avoid being turned into fish paste. The most memorable takes place on top of a speeding train; you must traverse its length from back to front while low-flying harriers swoop down to lance you with their sneering noses. You'll be left breathless if you're lucky enough to duck-leap-duck-leap your way to safety without losing your footing.
Another diverse bonus stage sees you attempting to get your head around the world being turned upside down, literally. Your controls remain static so up is down and down is up until you reach the end of the level where normality is restored. Thankfully it's a deliberately stunted level with minimal obstacles given that you've got enough to cope with without added complexity.Not wacky enough for you? Try the jelly level. You'll never guess what the springy, wobbling platforms consist of. The mounds function like a bouncy castle allowing you to catapult yourself a squillion miles into the clouds, assuming vertigo doesn't get the better of you. You can boing your way into orbit, go and make a cup of tea, solve the Rubik's Cube and still be back in time to grab the joystick before touching base. If that's not discombobulating enough for you, try repeating the process upside down. You don't have to be crazy to work here... but it helps.
Exploration and discovery is Robocod's middle name (it's double-barrelled, he's posh like that), so don't skimp on scrutinizing every last nook and (bus-evicted) granny or you'll regret it when you finish the game and you've only seen a fraction of its delights.
If there's a ledge that seems to serve no porpoise, jump on it and push against the 'solid' wall to see where it might lead. If there's an eel-ly big vat of icing with an open top, leap in it head first. If you see a colossal tub on the bathroom stage, dive right in. You never know, it might just take you to a pixel-for-pixel recreation of the first level of the original James Pond game, should you wish to take a dip. Anything's possible.
Easter eggs abound! I'd make a pun about caviar what with it being sturgeon's eggs and all, but I fear it would be a bit tenchuous. A roeful idea r-eel-ly.
Early on you can collect a computer which turns the screen black and white for a limited time. In a later bonus stage the backdrop consists of love hearts and on one of these is etched the initials of Chris Sorrell and his then girlfriend Katie (they are now married and work together).
The 'Auto 9' pistol Bond - I mean Robocop - I mean Pond - is seen brandishing on the front cover of the box was inspired by a secret in-game bonus stage. You can find the special weapon in the sports zone if you know where to look.
Tap on the gargantuan ten pin bowling skittle to reveal it is hollow inside. Now caress its contours until you locate the hidden, hinged seam and prise it open. climb inside, grab the source code and use it on the computer terminal next to the golden football trophies.
From your inventory, select the programming expertise, imagination and pixel art prowess, combine them using the Pritt Stick and scissors to form a pulsing, green orb, and then insert it into the computer's slide-out deposit box.
Hit the big red button labelled, "don't activate under any circumstances, ever (I mean it)", wait 10 seconds and the system will begin to gurgle, gargle, vibrate, rotate and then eventually disintegrate releasing a chemical cocktail of dense noxious gases into the ether. When the plumes of unearthly smoke dissipate, a gleaming new Beretta 93R machine pistol wrapped in a bow and gift tag will emerge. This is no ordinary cyborg shooter, it has been heavily modified to incorporate a longer barrel with a stonkin' great compensator/flash hider shaped like a casket, plastic grips, and a taller rear sight to match the raised front sight.
Take it and shoot stuff thoroughly until it dies dead, as and when the inclination arises. The more you shoot a baddie, the more deaderer it becomes.
You must remember this? It was on GamesMaster way back when.
Dotted about various levels are collectables that look remarkably like jars of baby food. I'd imagine this is a knowing tip of the hat to Robocop, who was forced to subsist on the stuff having been rehabilitated as a cyborg with a limited, soft diet as his only option for sustenance.
The Robocop franchise is harvested to tremendous effect once again in the "nine seconds to comply" continue screen, parodying ED-209's lines from the début movie...
[for demonstration, Mr. Kinney points a pistol at ED-209]
ED-209: [menacingly] Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply.
Dick Jones: I think you'd better do what he says, Mr. Kinney.
[Mr. Kinney drops the pistol on the floor. ED-209 advances, growling]
ED-209: You now have fifteen seconds to comply.
[Mr. Kinney turns to Dick Jones, who looks nervous]
ED-209: You are in direct violation of Penal Code 1.13, Section 9.
[entire room of people in full panic trying to stay out of the line of fire, especially Mr. Kinney]
ED-209: You have five seconds to comply.
Kinney: Help...! Help me!
ED-209: Four... three... two... one... I am now authorized to use physical force!
[ED-209 opens fire and shreds Mr. Kinney]
End of level bosses were disappointingly absent from James Pond 1. Here they are blinkin' enormous, and take great satisfaction from sticking two fish fingers up at the mere suggestion the Amiga may have limited processing power!
At the time we were still revelling in that novel phase where sprites had to adopt either one extreme or the other. Who would win in a fight, a nano-army of Lemmings or a humongous BC Kid dinosaur boss? These are the questions that keep me awake at night.
The surreal, cute, but gnarly-grimaced teddy bear and sentient-devil-car (is that you Christine?) guardians are super-sized renditions of enemies you've already encountered, except this time round one has been remodelled with a spiked backside, and the other flings mini-me vehicles at you.
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Subsequent bosses are less predictable; there's a double-whammy, mirror-image obese ballerina that has to be destroyed by employing duel Ponds that leap about her lair in tandem. While the throne-bound Queen of Hearts assailant discharges smirking playing cards onto our protagonist by flicking switches embedded in the arms, with overtones of that notorious cat-fondler, Dr. No, from the inaugural James Bond movie.
Subsequent bosses are less predictable; there's a double-whammy, mirror-image obese ballerina that has to be destroyed by employing duel Ponds that leap about her lair in tandem. While the throne-bound Queen of Hearts assailant discharges smirking playing cards onto our protagonist by flicking switches embedded in the arms, with overtones of that notorious cat-fondler, Dr. No, from the inaugural James Bond movie.
They may look overbearing at first glance, yet we soon realise that they tend to stick to predetermined patterns of movement, so once you are able to second-guess their next step, they are easy enough to dispatch with a bit of practice.
By teaming up with McVitie's to promote their "one of the chocolatiest biscuits in the world" Penguin confectionery, Robocod is often credited as being one of the first games to feature product placement, though it all depends which angler you're looking at it from.
If we are referring to the first appearance of a real-world, commercial product in a video game, then Midway's 1976 arcade racing game, Datsun 280 ZZZAP, takes that crown. The title makes no attempt to conceal the brand it set out to propagandise, and in 1983, Bally Midway sought to up the ante by marketing Budweiser to kids!
If we take into account celebrity endorsed sports games or those brandishing billboards, Robocod wasn't even the first Amiga game to endorse a commercial brand.
Nevertheless, the Penguin brand was an inspired choice in that it was utterly germane to Robocod's core Arctic theme (erm, assuming you ignore the fact that penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere, and mostly near the South Pole, in Antarctica). It was subtle, quirky, humorous and added an extra welcome dimension to the game-play. Other developer's agreed and it paved the way for the likes of Jaguar XJ220, Cool Spot, Zool, McDonald Land, Global Gladiators, Theme Park, Push Over, One Step Beyond and Superfrog.
If you were paying attention during the games' opening preamble you will have spotted that the two penguins setting the scene are known as Alvin and Murray.
Totally not even a little bit coincidentally these are also the names given to the talking penguins in McVitie's early 90s TV commercials.
They depicted the two pals shambling around the Arctic's ice shelves making mundane, human small-talk in a surreal talking penguin sort of scenario. It was surreal because they were, erm, penguins, and they were, umm, talking. That's something they don't normally do, I read it in a science book once.
The exquisite synergy between the boundless talents of Chris Sorrell and Leavon Archer and the ingenuity of the Amiga's - way ahead of its time - hardware give rise to a stunning array of visual voodoo.
The bright, vibrant, Disney-quality graphics are gorgeous throughout, though where the game really excels is in its employment of the Amiga's copper chip to produce psychedelic, demo-style parallax scrolling backgrounds. In some of the most striking examples we witness a transitional cycle of the entire colour spectrum, scrolling all the bitplanes individually from one horizontal scanline to another. It dislodged my Totes slipper-socks at the time, and even now all these years later has the power to make me smile on cue.
In the land of the rubber ducks, translucent, foreground sponge platforms have been superimposed over a background composed of bathroom tiles, and as you criss-cross the stage, what lies beneath is fleetingly revealed and concealed in a lattice framework of visual trickery.
Yes, in essence what I'm saying is the foreground is see-through. It doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but this was 1991 and personally I'd never seen anything like it before. It might be the case that it hadn't been done before. I'm all out of computer historians at the moment.
The jaw-dropping effects are deftly complimented by witty, inventive mechanics, animation and hand-drawn sprites. In toy land for instance, one level consists of a giant snakes and ladders board. Stumble into a ladder and you're beamed up to the next plane, touch a snake and you'll involuntarily slide down it to the one beneath as if to chastise your carelessness.
Fixed snake-slides aside, the entire scene is populated with the slithering variety transforming it into a deadly 'Temple of Doom' style pit.
Similarly, in the confectionery world, some of the floors are constructed from holey Aero bars and you progress up the level by hopping between floating blocks of chocolate. 
Better still, there's another level where you scoot across multi-layered Christmas fruit cake and ascend by way of individual, cherry-topped, iced sponge cakes, all set to a backdrop of red and white candy canes. It'll charm the pants off you, or at least make you want to ransack a Mr Kipling factory.
As you decline down a steep slope, you rapidly pick up momentum, your fins becoming a blurry smudge of super-human propulsion. Apply the brakes and you skid to a screeching halt equally swiftly, in an animation reminiscent of chase-caper cartoons such as 'Wile-E-Coyote and The Road Runner'. As if by magic, insta-grin! It's an involuntary reflex.
When Millennium squeezed so much magic into a half megabyte game like Robocod, it does make you wonder why Ocean struggled so much with working around the Amiga's processing limitations when coding Addams Family. Both are pure, unadulterated game-play on a stick, yet the latter is a background wasteland, and Robocod is, well, Robocod. Have you been living in a clamshell?
Representing the final part of the dream-team development quartet is the late, great Richard Joseph who provides the audio.
It's impossible to describe Robocod's soundtrack without using the words 'catchy' and 'memorable' yet this doesn't remotely begin to do it justice; it's practically an insult to his legacy.
Everything from the Robocop remix parody in the opening credits and the accelerated, synthesised mash-ups of 'Jingle Bells' and 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas' as heard in the bonus sections, to the buoyant, entirely original main game composition, reverberate with sheer class, and pitch-perfect relevance. The music is Robocod; you couldn't imagine the game without it.
It's bouncy, perky, jolly and jovial, complimenting Robocod's jaunty hip wobble swagger and personable nature like Tom's Jerry or Del Boy's Rodders. Hell, it's verging on an acoustic anti-dote to depression.
Anything else this sickly sweet and you'd waste no time encasing it in a block of concrete and burying it 20,000 leagues under the sea. Robocod gets a pass mostly because its acutely tongue-in-cheek and self-aware. It's no morality tale with a 'lesson for the day' finale, it's Care Bears with fangs. Irreverent fangs, now there's a thought.
The Amiga edition was the flagship product, and the one favoured by Chris himself who reveals that he had an extra month to fine-tune it owing to pressure to rush out the Mega Drive release.
Pond is agile and the controls tight and responsive, making precision jumping and Sonic-like dashing a breeze once you get the hang of it. The initial OCS/ECS iteration is stunning, and the subsequent Amiga releases served to build upon its solid foundations.
The AGA release was fleshed out with enhanced visuals and beefier acoustics, ramping up the volume to eleventy-stupid. That's a real setting on my Chinese knock-off stereo, and I can tell you, it's LOUD! The highlights include a trawler-load more animated, madcap parallax backdrops as seen in the bonus stages and exclusive extra levels.
Unusually for a CD32 port, this release wasn't simply the floppy version bunged on a CD. It takes the A1200's AGA code-base and augments it substantially with a full motion video, cartoony introductory synopsis to set the scene, and a 7 track Red Book CDDA soundtrack. Sure, the quality of the FMV is ropier than an industrial strength rope at a rope-pulling championship final, but then this was 1993 and it's perhaps the best we could expect for the time. If you can look beyond the grainy, whale-sized pixels, the animation itself has an offbeat charisma reminiscent of Danger Mouse, particularly for the hyperbolic, dramatic voice-over as adopted in a typical Colonel K briefing delivery. Millennium even capitalised on the chance to assign one of the joypad's buttons to the jump function.
Finally, the CD32 outing incorporates a 'Fi5h Files' trivia section. This is fundamentally a briefing document issued by your secret service employers detailing the profile's of Dr Maybe's henchmen, and a clue as to the antagonist's motivations for world domination.
There are a few interesting nods towards the series' future games and even 'games that weren't', though mostly these characters don't put in an appearance in the present game at all, so skipping it entirely won't exactly leave you wondering what the flipper is going on if you only own one of the floppy disk based versions.
The SNES and Mega Drive versions are comparable on the surface, at least in terms of game-play, even though Chris didn't contribute to the SNES release. The later console 'ports' didn't fare quite so well. Technically these are remakes - shoddy approximations to be honest - containing new graphics, levels and sound. Critically they suffer from the original team's lack of involvement.
Sound effects have been stripped from the Atari ST version and the backgrounds in the Mega Drive/SNES versions have generally been dumbed down and the game-play diluted. Some aren't as vibrant as their Amiga counterparts, and the copper effects and parallax motion have been dropped. The SNES version tries hard to recreate the psychedelic backgrounds, though the unfortunate pay-off is that they are too prominent and distracting. In the PlayStation 2 version this is compensated for through use of a darker background palette compared to the foreground.
As a consequence of the SNES's busy backgrounds, it suffers from frame-drops and stilted fluidity. Curiously, the upside down levels remain, except they have been flipped over, rendering them ridiculously easy. The SNES game also sports a super-sized score tally that can obscure your view at times. Incidentally, in the ST version it has been shifted to the lower right of the screen, and any jazzy background effects have largely been omitted. Disappointingly they are anaemically static, the game suffers from a lower frame rate and thus sludgier game play.
Robocod was made available for download via the PlayStation Network in 2009, and prior to this in a physical disk format on the PlayStation 1 and 2 in 2003 and 2006 respectively. These versions feature disparate animated introductory sequences, a password system or auto-save function, and rather than penguins, much like in the Game Boy Advance (2003) and Nintendo DS (2005) releases, you scour the icy milieu for elves in order to activate the exit beacons owing to the expiry of the licensing deal with McVitie's. The DS version does, however, benefit from the inclusion of a map which occupies the upper screen of the handheld device.
The GBA, DS and PlayStation 2 versions all feature the same brief introductory sequence involving Pond emerging from a hollow, fake snowman with a clandestine telescope for a nose. Having spied Dr Maybe rigging explosives to an elf, he exits the make-shift, camouflaged observatory to begin his mission. The animation style is in harmony with the in-game graphics, and it quickly establishes the plot reasonably well.
The PlayStation 1's opening animation shares the same general theme, except Pond riding inside the fake snowman is dramatically launched out of a helicopter. Upon touch-down he explodes from its chest and pulling off his best superman impersonation speeds towards Santa's castle.
On route he nonchalantly dispatches a few baddies before disarming the elf-bomb and entering the building. The animation style is reminiscent of the very earliest, amateur flash games; it truly is an abomination!
Despite the enhanced processing muscle of the PlayStation 1 and 2, these releases introduce loading screens, and Robocod's signature inertia has been rendered null and void. The range of movement found in the Amiga version is also absent, making precision control a chore.
Many of the clever nuances that make Robocod such a joy to behold have been left on the cutting room floor for the remakes. The upside down and auto-scrolling levels, mirror-image ballerinas and quirky bonus stages are all missing. The levels are all new, yet seem extremely linear, generic and bland, possibly even auto-generated. Steve Bak who took care of the map layouts in the Amiga version wasn't involved so that's that mystery solved.
In 1993, the sequel - Operation Starfish - propelled the Robocod concept into orbit. It had aspirations of being Sonic on the moon in a space-cowboy cossie, yet the fun-factor was sorely neutered by unwieldy play mechanics, and it was largely met with a lukewarm reception. At a time when consoles were quickly eclipsing home computers as the dominant platform for arcade games, it saw its initial release on the Sega Mega Drive, while the Amiga had been relegated to a scant afterthought.
In the interim, Pond took a brief sojourn from planetary stewardship to star in the 1992 spin-off title, The Aquatic Games; a maritime-themed riff on the Olympic games. It's an enjoyable diversion in short bursts if you can track down one of those real-life human people to pit your wits against. It principally appealed to a younger demographic at the time; those kids who had yet to refine their lust for blood and carnage. Hmmf, primitive oafs.
A fourth outing dubbed 'The Curse of Count Piracula' was also in the works, though by then the planet was entranced with Doom-rapture and every new game had to be 3D or it wouldn't have been awarded shelf space. The project didn't make it to the launchpad, let alone the stratosphere, and beyond.
I had vague recollections of the Robocod character being used in an educational title produced for Thames Water to teach kids how water processing plants work. My epistemophilic urge got the better of me and I set about dredging the web to confirm I hadn't dreamt the whole thing.
Google was apparently playing its cards close to its chest, and I resurfaced empty netted, save for rooting out a comment by another curious Pond groupie who had similar vague recollections, yet alas no answers either.
As the sagely advice goes, "if in doubt, ask a policeman". There were none about due to cutbacks and an unprecedented escalation in mad-scientist-led terrorism shenanigans, so I dropped Thames Water a line instead.
Their very helpful and on-the-ball education manager knew exactly what I was waffling on about and got back to me within 24 hours to solve the mystery...
[Place-holder for comments once I get the OK to quote her.]
It seems my mistake was to use the keyword 'Robocod' in connection with 'Thames Water'. Evidently feeling under supreme pressure to deliver the goods for the globe's premium Amiga podcast, it didn't occur to me to instead try probing the 'toobs' for 'James Pond' and 'Thames Water'. You live and learn.
The latter returns quite a few hits including a web site where you can still buy the 1995 title for a fiver, and even a 4 page review in issue 17 of the Acorn users' magazine, Eureeka. Not quite the obscure enigma I first envisaged then!
James Pond and the Deathly Shallows (a Harry Potter pun for those of you older than your shoe size) was inflicted on iOS users in 2011. You can think of it as an atrocious, underwater 'Flappy Birds' cobbled together with one of those awful 'make a Flash game in under five minutes' drag and drop web tools. I've signed a covenant in blood, agreeing never to mention it again. I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same.
In 2013 a Pond-resuscitating Kickstarter project was announced. The aim was to develop a sequel worthy of the IP's proud heritage, and one with which fans of the original game would approve, especially given the way it has been mistreated in recent years. While Chris doesn't own the rights to his creation, he was brought on-board by Gameware Europe to lend the title that critical air of credibility, and hopefully to steer it in the right direction.
It made me smile to discover that Chris had been in talks with McVitie's with regards to reviving their sponsorship partnership, even if he was also open to offers from other investors. I wasn't quite so enthusiastic when I also learnt that he would consider making the new game 3D as he has always been keen to embrace current trends and modern technology.
Sadly, the campaign was cancelled 12 days prematurely after only 336 backers had pledged £16,000 of the £100,000 target that would have 'green lit' development. The downfall of the project was believed to be bringing it to the public's attention much too soon. There was far too little to show beyond blueprints and artists' impressions to generate sufficient enthusiasm and belief that a final product would transpire from the promises and good intentions.
I was absolutely gutted to hear it wasn't going to get off the starting docks. Docks! Gutted!
Chris hasn't closed the door on the idea entirely, and it's also possible that System 3 - who own the rights to certain elements of the Robocod franchise - could breathe new life into the character.
In fact they did announce they intended to reboot the series back in 2013 for modern platforms including the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, but an actual release has yet to emerge from the murky depths.
Millennium Interactive - the publishers-turned-developers Chris produced the original James Pond games for - was bought out by Sony Computer Entertainment in July 1997 and subsequently renamed SCE Cambridge Studio. Chris now resides in Canada where he runs his own game development company, SpoonSized Entertainment, with his wife Katie.
I fell in love with Robocod (the artist formerly known as 'Guppie') from the moment I clapped eyes on the cover disk cake level demo (Amiga Action issue 26, November 1991, disk 18 - just sayin', you know to paint the picture); sickeningly cutesy, yet still somehow edgy and subversive.
That year I pestered Santa to bring me the full game for Christmas (easier said than done given he'd already been run out of town by Dr Maybe!), and have completed it several times over the years without 'cake-hammer-earth-apple-tap-
If on the other hand you were a PC gamer at the time, you may have fond memories of the demo that came on one of PC Format's cover disks which allowed you to unlock the entire game with a cheat code. Spectacular own goal!.James Pond resolutely defined an era where a couple of guys had free reign to Monty Python-ise a game sans first putting it to a shareholder's vote, or applying to the EU for permission. The extendo-torso was an innovative, inspired play mechanic which breathed new life into an already weary genre.
Nevertheless, the aggregate of its movie-mashing, seafood smorgasbord, rather than a single revolutionary, killer feature made it one of the all-time classics; catchy, effervescent music, tongue-in-cheek humour, herculean end of level bosses, radiant, alluring visuals, myriad bonuses and secret rooms, multifarious game-play styles from shoot-em-up to forced-scroll platforming action, and silky-smooth 50/60 FPS parallax scrolling.The extent to which Robocod has become imprinted on my psyche can't be overestimated. Only the other day my brother overheard me humming the Robocod theme tune and smugly pointed out that he'd recognised it as the one from Robocop, half expecting me to award points for his astute observation skills.
'Cop' ...with a 'p' no less!!!
The only reasonable response was to pummel him unconscious with a goofy pink hippo until my incandescent, blind fury had abated.
We no longer speak.
Some things you can let go... some things.
The gloopy red stuff may be thicker than water, but nothing, nothing comes between a retro gamer and his pixelated Guppy.
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Amigos Plays Do! Run Run
It's Boat's favorite arcade game. How does the Amiga port hold up?
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Amigos Plays Arkanoid
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Allsorts of Bertie
I've been thinking a lot about Bertie Bassett recently. I believe Donnie Darko had a similar problem with rabbits.Ever since I first played the cover disk cake level demo of Robocod back in 1991 I've wondered what Basset's mascot was doing in the game.
All the magazines at the time pointed out that Millennium Interactive had struck a sponsorship deal with McVitie's who produce Penguin biscuits and that the confectionery and associated penguin characters would feature in the game.
Alvin and Murray open with an introductory animation and later appear as exit-opening collectables, while the biscuit wrappers put in an appearance as level backdrops, and also in the opening synopsis with the talking penguin ambassadors from the early 90s TV commercials.
Was a similar deal in place with Bassett's? Was it simply artist Chris Sorrell's affectionate homage to a favourite brand?
In the later ports of Robocod, the Bertie sprite received a dramatic colour palette swap; he's unmistakably Bertie, but in an incognito gingerbread cloak. No formal press announcement was issued to clarify the situation. Had Bassett's sued the Cambridge-based developers forcing them to censor subsequent releases?
In the later ports of Robocod, the Bertie sprite received a dramatic colour palette swap; he's unmistakably Bertie, but in an incognito gingerbread cloak. No formal press announcement was issued to clarify the situation. Had Bassett's sued the Cambridge-based developers forcing them to censor subsequent releases?
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| The 1992 Commodore 64 port of... something or other. It's hard to tell what exactly. |
Why was no-one asking these critical questions? Were insidious, conspiratorial forces responsible for the cover-up? A quarter of a century later I took up the mantle of unravelling this clandestine enigma of a conundrummy mystery by asking the developer himself.
"Wow - very impressive article! …Certainly I can see that the mantle of James Pond's fishy puns is being carried forward with pride :)
The Bertie Basset thing was a bit of a fiasco… In the original game we didn’t give nearly enough thought to how big companies might be protective of their signature characters. There was no agreement at all, and I think I recall that Bassett's made threatening noises in Millennium’s direction. Either way he was out for all versions after the Megadrive and Amiga originals, and we all started to be a bit more careful with our references! Replacing him with the gingerbread guy wasn’t my call but he wasn’t a bad substitute. ...I wasn’t aware that BB came back for subsequent versions! (Mostly because I had nothing to do with those, and after loading up a PlayStation disc I decided after playing for a couple of minutes that I’d already seen more than I cared to)."
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| The de-Bassetted Bertie sprite as he appeared in the 1993 MS-DOS release of Robocod |
"I don’t recall the inspiration for the baby-food bonus. I had been watching Robocop a lot around that time so perhaps that was it (can’t think why else I would have drawn a jar of baby food?!)."
I had high hopes for the 2013 James Pond revival Kickstarter, though sadly it was cancelled prematurely due to a failure to reach the funding target. Finally I took the opportunity to ask Chris if this was really the final curtain for the character that made Christmas '91 one of the most memorable and joyous for me as a kid.
"I’m sorry to say that I *am* 100% done with James Pond. …I would have been prepared to go back to his world back when we started that Kickstarter, but frankly that whole experience really soured me on personal retrospection. …Don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of what we did back on the Amiga, and feel tremendously honoured that people even remember the games after all this time (let alone write such lavish articles!), but I’m generally someone that strives to look forward rather than back. …The James Pond games were driven my my passion to become a better programmer, to make 'better things’, and that’s still my outlook on life. I felt somewhat tricked into becoming part of that campaign in the first place. They made it seem like they had a lot more going on than they did, and where I thought I was signing on to do little more than support the notion of a *good* new Pond game, it soon became clear that they had basically nothing to show, no ideas, and no plan for the campaign other than to make it seem like *my* initiative which it absolutely was not!Thanks again go to Chris for graciously giving up his time to nerd-out with a massive fan of his work. :)
I’m sorry my involvement with JP had to end on that sour note :( …Thanks again for being such a supporter of the games."
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Episode 34 - Super Skidmarks
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Amigos Livestream 34 - Super Skidmarks
Beetles, Minis, Porsches, oh yeah!
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I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat
So why are we here? Playing as Valdyn aka Lionheart I should say, not what's the meaning of life? The jury is still out on that one I believe.
This being an action-platformer, the plot is a tad threadbare; the king's arch nemesis, Norka, has nicked off with a green gem stone known as the 'Lionheart', and without it the king can't persist in his kingly duties because it must be waved at his subjects at a 'showing festival'. Are you following this?Our hero, Lionheart, is the mug tasked with the challenge of recovering the eponymous stone, thereby restoring peace, order, justice and all that malarkey.Clearly he has to be the one to do it because he shares the name of the stone, and fate, something, blah, blah, blah. Oh and to throw an extra incentive-shaped spanner into the works, his girlfriend, Ilene, has been captured and tarred with the Han-Solo carbonite treatment. Not to worry though, Lionheart can break the spell by finding a hidden amulet within the secret volcano level... which you didn't hear from me because it's a secret. Ssssshhhhh. It all strikes me as a bit ESOL to be honest.
Regrettably, Valdyn is certainly the game's Achilles heel in that he's totally ineffectual as a warrior we could believe capable of vanquishing the dastardly Norka who is intent on enslaving the Cat People. Mid-swing it's as though he has a crisis of conscience, and can't come to terms with the notion of actually inflicting any damage on his adversaries. Maybe he's a dedicated pacifist, or his (lion) heart's just not in it. Either way it likely doesn't bode well for us!
Actually both his heels are of the Achilles variety - Cat People can't swim (which is also the little-known sequel to 'White Men Can't Jump' incidentally). He can paddle through a few feet of water without coming to any harm, yet if he's entirely immersed for even a millisecond, he's a goner. This must be a cat thing too; he sheaths his sword whenever you let go of the fire button as if he's weary and planning on calling it a day. What's that all about? You've got a long hacky-slashy expedition ahead of you yet chum, you may as well keep hold of your weapon. Part-timers! I don't know.
Half the critters he faces attack at ankle-biting level so naturally your instinct is to use your leg sweep manoeuvre to dispatch them. Alas, it's more of a fairy love tickle than the fierce, jabbing strike you'd expect; it's so unresponsive you can lose several hit points in between launching it and landing a blow, and being thwarted by inch-tall bugs is about as demoralising as working as a fisherman in the Sahara desert.By the same token his Fisher Price 'My First Pen-knife' - I mean mighty blade of steel - is wretchedly minuscule so you have to be nose to nose with an enemy before you can take a stab, making you unnecessarily vulnerable to incursion.
Actually the whole control mechanism is clumsy and frustrating. The 'hold down the fire button and point in a direction' scheme simply doesn't translate well to a rapid-fire platformer, given that it seriously restricts your ability to react swiftly enough to take evasive action, or launch surprise attacks.
In Valdyn's defence, he does have one clever trick up his slee... in his repertoire; the 'battle strike'. If you jump above your target, hold fire and pull down on the joystick you perform an extremely efficacious aerial sword-plunge stratagem that will often slay an enemy in one fell swoop. If not you can pretend you're playing Duck Tales on the NES and keep bouncing pogo style until they croak. It looks ludicrous, and there's an entirely plausible reason for this... it is ludicrous.
The platforming aspects of the game don't fare much better; some of them are so puny, precision jumping is required to make any progress at all, only you end up over or under-shooting them because Valdyn is such a blundering oaf.
Nevertheless, the fun really begins when you get to ride the Tauntaun-esque Dinoroo (or is it a Kangosaurus?). If you're hurtling along at break-neck speed and suddenly feel the urge to leap skywards to despatch an airborne baddy, Dino will stop dead in its tracks so as to remain in position to catch your fall and continue ferrying you across the terrain. It's quite comical.
Enemy artificial intelligence leaves a lot to be desired. Often - and even in 'Lionhard' mode - the bipedal lizard baddies will take one look at you and jump down the nearest pit to infinity, and who knows where? I doubt it's because you pose that much of a threat they'd rather face suicide than the wrath of your pen-knife, they're just a bit thick. I'm not convinced they even know you exist, which is just plain rude. When I set about to kill an opponent I think it's only common courtesy for your prey to pay some semblance of attention.
The first baddies of this breed you encounter are wearing green cloth, though as you progress they re-emerge wearing darker gear and put up a bit more opposition. I can't decide if this is a karate, coloured belt situation, or they've just put a wash on.
The end of level bosses are a sight to behold, even if not especially challenging. There's one that's composed of disjointed fireballs held in formation by, what, the force maybe? The lolloping, undulating puppet-like way it shambles about is reminiscent of the Fireys from the Labyrinth movie. The animation is bizarrely unsettling in an inventive, entrancing way that will make you smile... and probably get you killed as you forget to actually defend yourself against its attack. Maybe that's its real ace card; sweet, blissful death, mmm. Take me now, I'm yours.
Nonetheless, my personal favourite has to be the muscley (everyone in this game is ripped!), blue goblin Honey Monster boss. He nonchalantly bunny hops in your general direction - not really at you - with his arms ridgedly welded to his flanks, pauses momentarily, shrugs his shoulders - revealing they do actually operate independently of his body - and liberates his signature fireball. It's as if 'leg animator guy' was available for commission, but 'arm animator guy' was all booked up until Christmas, so instead Thalion adopted this nailed-down arm compromise. It's comedy gold genius in an absurdest 'Yellow Submarine' genuflection. I can't fathom why the Honey Monster Shrugball (tm) isn't already an internet meme of the highest order. Come on Amigos, make it so!
The game supports extra memory and two button joysticks - and just because they can - Thalion have even gone so far as to implement a before and after copper colour graduation interlation switch you can toggle by pressing 'i' on the keyboard, allowing you to tweak the colour blending in the backgrounds to suit your preference.
In-game music was often a scant after-thought in the early days. If there was any space left on the disks at all once the code and graphics were in place, musicians might have been offered a few paltry kilobytes worth of scraps in which to work. In light of this, what Matthias Steinwachs accomplished in Lionheart is all the more extraordinary.
His compositions are a fusion of traditional orchestral and more contemporary synthesized pieces. Perhaps surprisingly, they blend extremely well with the primitive, low-tech world of the Cat People.
The former pieces are overbearing, heavy, and invoke a palpable sense of gloom and oppression, while the latter assume a nimble elegance with a calculating aura. Combined they convey a deep sense of urgency and unease, foreboding, an unnatural order.
Punctuated by the blips and beeps of a data-crunching computer, the dramatic tension is broken suggesting mysterious forces are at work, that all is not as it seems. Are we being remotely observed by a deviant sorcerer manipulating a crystal ball? I don't feel entirely in control, that's for sure.
Post finale, the credits and shout-outs ramble on longer than 'War and Peace'. Erwin Kloibhofer even acknowledges his parents for giving birth to him, thereby making the game's creation possible, and you know I don't think he's joking; he is German after all. ;)
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From Lionheart's menu screen there's an 'info' option you can select which leads to a pre-emptive anti-piracy warning explaining that if we steal Thalion's games, they'll be forced out of business, stop making them and we'll only have ourselves to blame. True enough, they did go bust the following year, putting the kibosh on releasing the prospected follow up to Lionheart (fans will have to make do with Valdyn's cameo appearance in Thalion's RPG, Ambermoon instead), though some claim this had as much to do with their poor self-distribution network as the threat from piracy. It's a thorny, convoluted issue with no black and white answers.
Many developers burnt this way could have been bitter as they bowed out of the scene. Not Thalion; instead they graciously agreed to release their games into the public domain to be freely enjoyed for all eternity. What thoroughly decent, upstanding chaps!
Despite his inspiring façade, Lionheart and I never really hit it off, and I certainly won't be inviting him round for tea again. He drank from the toilet bowl, scratched up the furniture, ate my food and was then totally aloof towards me. The final straw was assassinating my canary in cold blood; he didn't even have the decency to eat it, just toyed with it like a squeaky novelty chew. Awful dinner date all round really.
That said, matched thematically, a better game doesn't really exist on the Amiga. What would the closest contenders be? Leander? Myth? The First or Second Samurai games? Deliverance? None were rated as highly as Lionheart, and certainly don't share the visual panache.
In light of all its show-shopping flaws I can't help ruminating that if Rastan had been ported to the Amiga, this game wouldn't even exist. Failing that, what I'd love to see is a mash-up of the two; take Rastan's vastly superior weaponry, authentic arcade game-play and control system, chuck them in a bubbling cauldron, stir in Lionheart's mesmerising visuals and atmosphere, leave to simmer, then serve piping hot with a side-salad of Thundercats folklore.
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Now playing in Squint-o-vision
Hold onto your hats readers, this is going to get ultra technical!
Computers haven't always come loaded with 64 uber-dynamic megatonnes of RAM and quadrupally-multi-hyper-threaded processors with 97 gigaplop cores. In the early days, games coders couldn't just let their imagination run riot without considering the limitations of the hardware they were working with, so creating a game that would scroll at a reasonable frame rate necessitated cutting some corners.
Often they literally did just that; whole digiwops of screen real estate were cordoned off, hacked away, blackened out, made static, all in a desperate attempt to reduce the strain on the computer's feeble ickle CPU. The most primitive computers wouldn't have had a separate processor for accelerating the graphics so the poor CPU had to carry the entire world on its shoulders, so to speak.
Leaving behind the hallowed 8-bit days of the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad, coders weren't quite so hampered by limited CPU grunt. The Amiga in particular was an exceedingly capable machine, yet right up until Commodore's demise, we continued to encounter what appeared to be 'Living in a Post Box' simulators what with their widescreen, letterbox shaped playfields.
It begs the question, why? Were the coders nostalgically attached to the humongous HUD aesthetic? Did they not know how to exploit the computer's full potential? Were they just shoddy programmers?
It certainly looks like the latter may be true; there is a tendency for games vaunting ludicrously over-inflated HUDs to be absolutely dire. OK, I'll preface this with a 3D FPS and RPG shaped exception to the rule; RPGs go hand in hand with information and statistical overload. All that stuff needs to go somewhere so it's sayonara screen space. That's forgivable in the days before coders devised more innovative ways to selectively conceal it.
Each of these genres were cutting edge in the late eighties and early nineties and needed a lot of resources to run smoothly. Again the casualty was the downtrodden playfield since reducing it meant you could maintain a smooth frame rate and still produce a game that was possibly-maybe worth playing -ish.
For other genres, there was no excuse, and it's these I intend to focus on in my top 10 countdown of the most unwarranted, overblown HUDs in Amiga games.
10. Strider II (1990) - developed by Tiertex, published by U.S. Gold/Capcom
Highly lauded, innovative side-scrolling platform game series originally released for the CP System arcade hardware in 1989 by Capcom, and subsequently ported to every system on the planet... and possibly some intergalactic ones too.
While much was lost in translation, the home ports were all met with a positive reception… which of course casts doubt on my ‘mega HUD = abysmal game’ theory. Yeah well, it’s still a waste of space, and Hiryu's mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries, so there.
The Strider I HUD was an unwieldy behemoth too, but II is ahead by a whisker.
9. 5th Gear (1990) - developed by Microwish Software, published by Hewson
While much was lost in translation, the home ports were all met with a positive reception… which of course casts doubt on my ‘mega HUD = abysmal game’ theory. Yeah well, it’s still a waste of space, and Hiryu's mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries, so there.
The Strider I HUD was an unwieldy behemoth too, but II is ahead by a whisker.
9. 5th Gear (1990) - developed by Microwish Software, published by Hewson
You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s illegal because the game is criminally sub-par, but no, it has to do with your vehicle being armed with a weapon designed to obliterate the opposing drivers.
Gremlin’s Super Cars - released in the same year - leaves this dross choking on its dust.
I’m guessing the four people in the bottom panel are judging your performance, though the only indication they give as to whether or not they approve emerges a couple of seconds before the timer runs down. Even then only their mouths twitch a bit. I don’t think an aghast ‘O’ expression is a positive sign.
I don’t want to know why the sea looks like brown sludge. Oh, and there’s no music, and only a single sound effect, which I think is supposed to simulate the wind, but reminds me of one of those ancient spinning top toys where you push a rod down the centre of the spindle to activate.
7. ATAX (1988) - developed by Eclipse Software Design, published by Ramware
As the rebel leader you pilot the ATAX attack craft in your crusade to vanquish the 'oppressive Systems Government'. Hmmf, that government, always trying to crush the little people with its diabolical 'Systems', nothing changes.
Curiously, the mainstay of its offensive is balls of varying shapes, sizes and colours. You know, I imagine we’ll emerge from this skirmish without scratching up our paintwork too badly.
6. Joe Blade (1988) - developed by Colin Swinbourne and published by Players
You play as a lone wolf commando or vigilante plodding through the levels duffing up baddies and rescuing innocent people caught up in the crossfire.
The first game is notorious for being one of the earliest to be relegated to the German 'Index' for containing gratuitous violence, which just goes to show Germans do have a sense of humour after all.
The original game secures the plaudit owing to its letterbox aspect, in addition to the presence of a perma-title… even so, it was a close call!
5. Freddy Hardest in South Manhattan (1989) - developed by Iron Byte, published by Dinamic Software
An atrocious side-scrolling beat-em-up with endlessly respawning baddies in the Kung-Fu Master mould. Freddy was released 5 years later, though doesn’t advance the gameplay one iota.It permanently displays the games’ title in the upper HUD and two dragons and a picture of your character’s face in the lower HUD... none of which so much as twitch throughout the entirety of the game (which incidentally can be completed in ten minutes).
It was re-released by Codemasters as 'The Guardian Angel' for reasons that probably wouldn’t stand up in the European Court of Human Rights.
Take off, ascend a bit, descend to another runway and land safely. I suppose with a playfield that shape you could always pretend you’re wearing an ironmonger’s mask and welding together an ornamental model of an F-14A Tomcat for your mantle-piece.
3. 1000cc Turbo (1990) - developed by Max Design, published by Impressions
It’s not even clear that the bike console you see in the lower pane belongs to the bike you are actually riding in the upper pane because you can’t see any road beneath it, just a solid blue backdrop. Is it standing stationary in a showroom somewhere?
I can’t even stand split-screen two player games where hacking the playfield in half like this is an absolute necessity.
The biscuit has well and truly been taken… and chewed a bit… and spat back out again in disgust.
2. Red Heat (1989) - developed by Special FX, published by Ocean Worldwide
Playing as Soviet detective, Ivan Danko (Arnie Schwarzenegger), it's your objective to mosey on over to Chicago to root out the downright naughty drug-dealing meanie, Victor Rosta.
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The game opens with an animated approximation of James Belushi’s character, detective Art Ridzik, who serves to relay your mission briefing. 'Approximation' is the key word here - rather than pay an animator to inject some semblance of natural movement into his mouth muscles, Ocean decided in their infinite wisdom that the way to go would be to have his jaw repeatedly descend by a few pixels and then snap back into position to simulate speaking, leaving an intermittent thin sliver of black banding where his chin used to be connected to his face. Save for having a hand inserted up his derrière, he’s been transmogrified into a ventriloquist's dummy, it's that bad.
Red Heat is a scrolling beat-em-up - which unconventionally for the genre - sees you travel from right to left much of the time, punching, head-butting or shooting your way out of mischief. You pitch your wits against a coterie of adversaries including an oft-recycled Sly Stallone lookalike, and more perplexingly, a continuous stream of rocks that ‘fall’ horizontally without succumbing to any gravitational pull.
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As you can see, there's no good reason for the playing window to have been crammed into widescreen letterbox mode seeing as the 'HUD' is completely barren of any useful information, not even a self-congratulatory 'we made this' banner of any kind… not that you’d want to draw attention to this if you did!
You can't even argue that Ocean were going for the comedy censorship angle because if you look closely you'll see all the guys in the sauna are wearing manhood dignity-preserving towel sarongs which tie around the waist leaving the backside exposed. In any case, once Arnie gets dressed and we progress to the office level, the screen remains in letterbox mode.
Just when you think the game can't possibly get any more wretched, there's a button-mashing 'rock crushing' stage. No idea!
1. Dead Breath (1992) - developed by Ozkan Huvaj, published by Locus Design
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A point and click ‘graphic’ adventure comprising static pictures and amongst the most woeful Engrish I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness in a computer game.
“It’s standing magnificently in front of me. I’m effected from its greatness. I’m now full of sense.”
My sentiments exactly! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’ve just been accused of being stupid by a talking dog who intends to “eat me at his birdhday party”. I think that sounds preferable to playing this game. Ketchup or brown sauce?
Playing as Soviet detective, Ivan Danko (Arnie Schwarzenegger), it's your objective to mosey on over to Chicago to root out the downright naughty drug-dealing meanie, Victor Rosta.
Red Heat is a scrolling beat-em-up - which unconventionally for the genre - sees you travel from right to left much of the time, punching, head-butting or shooting your way out of mischief. You pitch your wits against a coterie of adversaries including an oft-recycled Sly Stallone lookalike, and more perplexingly, a continuous stream of rocks that ‘fall’ horizontally without succumbing to any gravitational pull.
You can't even argue that Ocean were going for the comedy censorship angle because if you look closely you'll see all the guys in the sauna are wearing manhood dignity-preserving towel sarongs which tie around the waist leaving the backside exposed. In any case, once Arnie gets dressed and we progress to the office level, the screen remains in letterbox mode.
Just when you think the game can't possibly get any more wretched, there's a button-mashing 'rock crushing' stage. No idea!
1. Dead Breath (1992) - developed by Ozkan Huvaj, published by Locus Design
“It’s standing magnificently in front of me. I’m effected from its greatness. I’m now full of sense.”
My sentiments exactly! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’ve just been accused of being stupid by a talking dog who intends to “eat me at his birdhday party”. I think that sounds preferable to playing this game. Ketchup or brown sauce?
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Come on twist again, twistin' time is here
Amigos reviewed Blood Money on Episode 25.
"First, there was Menace... Now, Psygnosis presents... A DMA Design game... BLOOD MONEY!!!"
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...is the legendary opening volley of digitised, sampled speech, which left you in no doubt as to what you were about to play... or read my review of. All very conducive information if you happened to have inserted a disk into your Amiga completely at random, or you'd bought a shoe box full of unlabelled floppies at a car boot sale I suppose. Thanks guys!
Blood Money is the cutesy, multi-directionally scrolling shoot-em-up sequel to Menace and was released for the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64 and DOS platforms initially in 1989. As you'd expect for a Psygnosis release, the presentation is slick, the graphics and animation stylish, and the sound polished within an inch of its life, but does it have game-play to match? Read on to find out...
"No!", is the bottom line. I realise we're busy people, and time is money!
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If you enjoyed Irem's Mr Heli you'll feel right at home here. Programmer, David Jones, admits this was the 'inspiration' for his second game for DMA, but speaking candidly, is that really the right word for it? Blood Money is fundamentally Mr Heli without legs.
Even so, cutesy helicopter-based schmups were a novelty back then (as they are now come to think of it), so this still felt like a new twist on an already crowded genre filled with R-Type clones.
Of course appearances can be deceptive so don't be fooled; Blood Money is no cakewalk despite the quaint visuals, and Ray Norrish's sublime, melancholy, chill-out trance mix soundtrack.
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The game encompasses four sprawling levels set around disparate themes (air, water, ice and fire), which you can choose to tackle in the order of your preference to a certain extent, depending on the state of your finances given that visiting some planets is more expensive than others.
Buoying the variety factor, each switch of scenery brings with it a different mode of transport; helicopter, submarine, space suit or fighter jet. Each of these vehicles comes equipped with unique attributes and weaponry, and they can be further upgraded with power-ups such as bombs, reverse missiles, multiple warheads, and shields, which you can purchase from various death-dealing emporiums dispersed throughout the landscape.
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Alien butchery doesn't come cheap; to earn enough money to fund your quest, you must slaughter everything in your path. As the E.T.s shuffle off this mortal coil, they relinquish coins which you are free to collect to swell your blood-soaked coffers. You've deposited your cast-off clothes and shoes at 'Cash 4 Clothes' and been remunerated at £5 a kilo, right? Well 'Cash 4 Kills' operates along very similar lines, hence the name, 'Blood Money'. Strangely enough, no-one seems to knock on my door asking if I have any alien cadavers I no longer need, so maybe there's a gap in the market for me. Ka-ching!
While the action isn't frantic, congeneric to an arcade, bullet-hell blitz shooter, the difficulty curve is as steep as Canton Avenue, Pittsburgh. This is somewhat a result of the game being so claustrophobic; once you factor in all the obstacles encroaching on your personal space, the effective play area is minuscule, so you're required to make snap judgements, execute them immediately, and with impeccable precision if you're to avoid incineration.
It doesn't help your cause when you consider that mere contact with most adversaries and inanimate objects alike will snuff out your lights instantaneously. This is despite the game incorporating an energy bar that suggests life and death may oscillate on a sliding scale.
That very astute, weirdy-beardy bloke hit the nail on the head when he wrote in the bible, "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to make any progress in Blood Money". I may be paraphrasing somewhat.
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Correspondingly, it's not always entirely clear where the backdrop ends and the foreground begins, causing you to either take evasive action unnecessarily, or perish hurtling headlong into an outcrop of rock.
Whenever you kick the bucket, you lose all your hard-earned power-ups, though luckily you don't have to endure the double humiliation of starting the level again from scratch.
The game is infinitely more fun when you chuck into the mix an extra human player, though I'm not entirely sure how much easier co-op play makes the game given that it introduces the added dimension of squabbling over limited coin collectables. Surviving the four leviathan stages hinges upon snatching enough moolah to be able to upgrade your weaponry. Slice the available resources in half and evidently you also slash your budget in half.
Blood Money is synonymous with that intro, the one with the pumping dance anthem, sampled digital speech (all 250k of it!) and treacherous asteroid field encounter animation. The one you still cite obliquely from time to time amongst your non-techy friends and colleagues, who assume you're two blades short of a rotorcraft.
For those of you down under, they may assume your "biggest unanswered question is, where is the dunny?" and helpfully point you in the direction of the nearest restroom. Pair that with "there's a whole lot more coming" and they'll either escort you there themselves post haste, or duck for cover!
For any trivia fans, the "where is the money?" sound-bite was lifted from a news broadcast that took place during Ronald Reagan's presidency in light of one of his many political scandals hitting the headlines; the November 1986 Iran Contra Affair. The same news snippet is sampled in Earth, Wind and Fire's track, 'System of Survival'.
The origins of the line, "there's a whole lot more coming", and the female voice that lends the "yeaaaah, yeaaaah" interjection aren't clear, though the same samples appear in Cosmosis' 1998 track, 'Pigs in Space', and Epic MegaGames' 1992 DOS title, 'Jill of the Jungle' respectively. Most likely they were taken from a stock sound samples library disc.
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The other speech sample heard in the introductory animation, "oi you, shut your mouth and look at my wad" doesn't seem to be so fondly remembered. Do people miss it? Is the reference so obvious people automatically know where it's from?
Whatever the case may be, they are the words of a fictional caricature known as 'Loadsamoney', a comedy creation devised by British comedian, Harry Enfield, and first unveiled on Channel 4's 'Saturday Live'. Astonishingly he went on to release the 1988 no. 4 chart hit, 'Loadsamoney (Doin' Up The House)', and milked it senseless with a live sell-out tour. That did happen, honestly!
The underlying 'Hit It' composition was sampled from the beginning of the 1988 Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock track, 'It Takes Two'.
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We have British artist, Peter Andrew Jones, to thank for the box art illustration; it's an adapted variation of that devised for the 1973 novel Protector by Larry Niven.
Ray Norrish's in-game music track was included without consent in the 1995 Amiga game, 'Tower of Souls', developed by Parys Technografx.
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The AT-AT-esque adversaries that appear early on are brought to life by Tony Smith with a whopping 18 frames of animation and became the inspiration for one of DMA's later Amiga games, Walker.
Blood Money was also released for the Atari ST, DOS and Commodore 64 platforms, and several notable variations exist between the ports. The C64 game incorporates a simple loading screen game to keep you amused while you wait for the main event, though the option to select the order in which you tackle the levels has been cut.
The DOS port includes no music, only primitive sound effects, where the Amiga version features both, though only one or the other can be selected at any given time. Ordinarily this would be seen as a major failing, here it's a bonus as the same track is repeated throughout the entire game so will have you tearing your ears off in frustration if you don't opt to mute it. Likewise, the C64 version is a one-tune wonder and you can't engage sound effects and music simultaneously.
The Atari ST interpretation dispenses with the Amiga's iconic asteroid field sequence, runs more slowly and Ray Norrish's acoustic masterpiece has been switched with a very poor substitute composed by Paul Tonge.
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The difficulty level was drastically ramped up for the Amiga version ensuring it earnt every ounce of its reputation as a 'Marmite' game. Furthermore, it showcases an advanced colour palette and makes use of a blitter rather than hardware scrolling to ensure sprites are drawn quickly.
If you didn't get round to reading the manual when you first played Blood Money, or weren't in possession of one because you were a dirty rotten pirate, you may have missed the crux of the premise.
You're not laying your fragile life on the line, blasting aliens to save humanity from some nefarious doom-monger, or to rescue a beloved damsel in distress.
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Instead you play as the bored Venusian oik, Spondulix (19th century slang for money as it happens), who having tapped a wad of 'bread and honey' from Mummy and Daddy, jets off to the holiday planet Thanatopia to seek thrills and (blood) spills by embarking on an intergalactic safari hunt... while punters pay to watch the carnage on the satellite TV channel, 'ASP'.
I'm having flashbacks of a muscley man in colourful, skin-tight lycra running, running, always running. I can't fathom why, I'm sure it will come to me.
I've studied a bit of economics so I'm in a prime position to impart a nugget of wisdom here. Any theme park that hails killing off its guests as its USP should probably seek to re-evaluate the core concepts of its business model. There, you can have that one for free.
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None of this is spelled out in the game's opening preamble so could potentially strike you as a clever plot twist. It does make you wonder though why DMA didn't keep it under wraps entirely. It would have made a gratifying Easter egg of a reward for dedicated gamers who have suffered (and I mean suffered) through to the bitter end.
For those of us who had done our homework, or knew a die-hard schmup aficionado who had already beaten the game, the punchline would have landed with all the impact of a joke you'd penned yourself.
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Then again, perhaps it wasn't such a shot in the foot for DMA. When your game is harder than Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson attending a nail-eating convention, togged up in an Ironman cossie, who is ever going to witness this denouement to discover whether or not it's a worthy finale?
"First, there was Menace... Now, Psygnosis presents... A DMA Design game... BLOOD MONEY!!!"
...is the legendary opening volley of digitised, sampled speech, which left you in no doubt as to what you were about to play... or read my review of. All very conducive information if you happened to have inserted a disk into your Amiga completely at random, or you'd bought a shoe box full of unlabelled floppies at a car boot sale I suppose. Thanks guys!Blood Money is the cutesy, multi-directionally scrolling shoot-em-up sequel to Menace and was released for the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64 and DOS platforms initially in 1989. As you'd expect for a Psygnosis release, the presentation is slick, the graphics and animation stylish, and the sound polished within an inch of its life, but does it have game-play to match? Read on to find out...
"No!", is the bottom line. I realise we're busy people, and time is money!
Even so, cutesy helicopter-based schmups were a novelty back then (as they are now come to think of it), so this still felt like a new twist on an already crowded genre filled with R-Type clones.
Of course appearances can be deceptive so don't be fooled; Blood Money is no cakewalk despite the quaint visuals, and Ray Norrish's sublime, melancholy, chill-out trance mix soundtrack.
Buoying the variety factor, each switch of scenery brings with it a different mode of transport; helicopter, submarine, space suit or fighter jet. Each of these vehicles comes equipped with unique attributes and weaponry, and they can be further upgraded with power-ups such as bombs, reverse missiles, multiple warheads, and shields, which you can purchase from various death-dealing emporiums dispersed throughout the landscape.
While the action isn't frantic, congeneric to an arcade, bullet-hell blitz shooter, the difficulty curve is as steep as Canton Avenue, Pittsburgh. This is somewhat a result of the game being so claustrophobic; once you factor in all the obstacles encroaching on your personal space, the effective play area is minuscule, so you're required to make snap judgements, execute them immediately, and with impeccable precision if you're to avoid incineration.
It doesn't help your cause when you consider that mere contact with most adversaries and inanimate objects alike will snuff out your lights instantaneously. This is despite the game incorporating an energy bar that suggests life and death may oscillate on a sliding scale.
That very astute, weirdy-beardy bloke hit the nail on the head when he wrote in the bible, "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to make any progress in Blood Money". I may be paraphrasing somewhat.
Correspondingly, it's not always entirely clear where the backdrop ends and the foreground begins, causing you to either take evasive action unnecessarily, or perish hurtling headlong into an outcrop of rock.Whenever you kick the bucket, you lose all your hard-earned power-ups, though luckily you don't have to endure the double humiliation of starting the level again from scratch.
The game is infinitely more fun when you chuck into the mix an extra human player, though I'm not entirely sure how much easier co-op play makes the game given that it introduces the added dimension of squabbling over limited coin collectables. Surviving the four leviathan stages hinges upon snatching enough moolah to be able to upgrade your weaponry. Slice the available resources in half and evidently you also slash your budget in half.
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| The second biggest unanswered question is, "why does your ship seem to seek out the asteroids like a magnet rather than taking evasive action?" |
For those of you down under, they may assume your "biggest unanswered question is, where is the dunny?" and helpfully point you in the direction of the nearest restroom. Pair that with "there's a whole lot more coming" and they'll either escort you there themselves post haste, or duck for cover!
For any trivia fans, the "where is the money?" sound-bite was lifted from a news broadcast that took place during Ronald Reagan's presidency in light of one of his many political scandals hitting the headlines; the November 1986 Iran Contra Affair. The same news snippet is sampled in Earth, Wind and Fire's track, 'System of Survival'.
The origins of the line, "there's a whole lot more coming", and the female voice that lends the "yeaaaah, yeaaaah" interjection aren't clear, though the same samples appear in Cosmosis' 1998 track, 'Pigs in Space', and Epic MegaGames' 1992 DOS title, 'Jill of the Jungle' respectively. Most likely they were taken from a stock sound samples library disc.
Whatever the case may be, they are the words of a fictional caricature known as 'Loadsamoney', a comedy creation devised by British comedian, Harry Enfield, and first unveiled on Channel 4's 'Saturday Live'. Astonishingly he went on to release the 1988 no. 4 chart hit, 'Loadsamoney (Doin' Up The House)', and milked it senseless with a live sell-out tour. That did happen, honestly!
The underlying 'Hit It' composition was sampled from the beginning of the 1988 Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock track, 'It Takes Two'.
We have British artist, Peter Andrew Jones, to thank for the box art illustration; it's an adapted variation of that devised for the 1973 novel Protector by Larry Niven.Ray Norrish's in-game music track was included without consent in the 1995 Amiga game, 'Tower of Souls', developed by Parys Technografx.
Blood Money was also released for the Atari ST, DOS and Commodore 64 platforms, and several notable variations exist between the ports. The C64 game incorporates a simple loading screen game to keep you amused while you wait for the main event, though the option to select the order in which you tackle the levels has been cut.
The DOS port includes no music, only primitive sound effects, where the Amiga version features both, though only one or the other can be selected at any given time. Ordinarily this would be seen as a major failing, here it's a bonus as the same track is repeated throughout the entire game so will have you tearing your ears off in frustration if you don't opt to mute it. Likewise, the C64 version is a one-tune wonder and you can't engage sound effects and music simultaneously.
The Atari ST interpretation dispenses with the Amiga's iconic asteroid field sequence, runs more slowly and Ray Norrish's acoustic masterpiece has been switched with a very poor substitute composed by Paul Tonge.
If you didn't get round to reading the manual when you first played Blood Money, or weren't in possession of one because you were a dirty rotten pirate, you may have missed the crux of the premise.
You're not laying your fragile life on the line, blasting aliens to save humanity from some nefarious doom-monger, or to rescue a beloved damsel in distress.
Instead you play as the bored Venusian oik, Spondulix (19th century slang for money as it happens), who having tapped a wad of 'bread and honey' from Mummy and Daddy, jets off to the holiday planet Thanatopia to seek thrills and (blood) spills by embarking on an intergalactic safari hunt... while punters pay to watch the carnage on the satellite TV channel, 'ASP'.I'm having flashbacks of a muscley man in colourful, skin-tight lycra running, running, always running. I can't fathom why, I'm sure it will come to me.
I've studied a bit of economics so I'm in a prime position to impart a nugget of wisdom here. Any theme park that hails killing off its guests as its USP should probably seek to re-evaluate the core concepts of its business model. There, you can have that one for free.
For those of us who had done our homework, or knew a die-hard schmup aficionado who had already beaten the game, the punchline would have landed with all the impact of a joke you'd penned yourself.
Then again, perhaps it wasn't such a shot in the foot for DMA. When your game is harder than Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson attending a nail-eating convention, togged up in an Ironman cossie, who is ever going to witness this denouement to discover whether or not it's a worthy finale?
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1080p composite images of entire Amiga game levels
Amigos reviewed The Addams Family on episode 3.
Over at Deviant Art TheGouldFish has been busily creating stunning HD maps of some of the most popular Amiga game classics.
They're constructed by snagging the backdrops using the map ripping tool, Maptapper, and stitching them together with multiple in-game screenshots of the enemies and animated segments to populate the landscapes.
Wow, what an arduous task that must have been! I'm glad he took the trouble though - the results are beautiful!
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