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Tuesday 26 February 2013

Wolfchild Maps Now Online

Here's an update I originally meant to post way back on the 30th of January, when the news broke, but for one reason or another I didn't get around to it. Sorry!

Core Design's "Wolfchild" has to rank as one of my favourite Amiga platformers. It looks great, plays well and features some fantastic music. It's one of those games that even now I'll fire-up a couple of times per year to have a go on. So, when English Amiga Board member CodyJarrett, announced that he'd ripped and uploaded the maps to the game I was extremely interested.

You can view the results of CodyJarrett's efforts by pointing your web browser over to the following link on the Amiga Hall of Light web site: http://hol.abime.net/1745/gamemap. Once there you can look through the layout of each level separately, or download the complete game map in one convenient zip file.

I don't know how long it took CodyJarret to rip the maps and get them into a suitable format for on and offline viewing, but I'm sure it wasn't a five minute job.


I always found Wolfchild to be an absolutely rock hard game, so I'm not convinced that the addition of a map to my gaming arsenal is going to change things, but you never know.

Right, time for another go!

Monday 25 February 2013

Final Fight AGA - WIP 2

Just when you thought that the Engligh Amiga Board's Lielo had given up on his Final Fight AGA conversion, he returns to the EAB with news of what's been updated since he last posted, along with a new work in progress video.

Here he is to bring us right up-to-date;
"3 months on and here's a quick update on the current state of this project.

Firstly, my thanks for the support/advice from all of you that have taken a look here, and my apologies for any misunderstanding on my behalf. The Blitz Support Suite provided much insight besides the cia tracker player whilst other considerations have led to the development environment becoming slightly more user friendly and in time customisable. I've been re-configuring some of the graphical aspects and doing some 'destruction testing; putting as much as I can into the memory and tailoring to suit where I can.

The demo shown here now uses 5 bitplanes with a layer of 8 attached sprites for the parallax, and runs at 50 fps for the most part, although enemy collisions were turned off some time ago during the testing process. I now have an 020 testing machine using an external FD to load the adf as the internal is unreliable. Results on this and 030 are similar, the 020 showing slowdown when other objects are blitted on top of 4 enemy onscreen with busy AI. The 030 showing slowdown when pushed a little more! The most recent development is the mapping of the first 'slum' section to save memory, I'm glad it works. Of course I may return to aspects of the previous graphics setup depending on several things, but this is the development setup for now. The development will focus on producing a playable game for the 020 which is optimised for 030. I'm considering using fast ram 030 blitting for static objects and stuff like that.

I'm thinking there will be a 'modern' options screen where various optimisations/comprimises can be considered e.g. force 50 fps/ blit every frame, max number of enemy.

There is still plenty of memory to play with (now) although the characters happily eat memory - atm just over 930kb left after loading from workbench.

The next thing to do is put the 'Hollywood' character in there and then the rest of the objects, then work on the AI and object interaction, if there's room then I can add some 'palette swap' characters before finally adding the little touches like enemies emerging from doors, and maybe some energy bars!? To me it's worthwhile spending a lot of time on this first section of the game as that's the core from which the rest of the game will build. It's been said before, (Bippy); but Final Fight is basically made up of variations upon a theme. Once the characters and weapons are in there the development should speed up.

I'll get another download going soon. Thanks for taking a look"

Footage from the latest version of the game can be found below.


As soon as I hear anything further regarding the Final Fight AGA project I'll let you know. In the meantime, you can follow the development thread for this title over on the English Amiga Board. Simply click on THIS link.

Sunday 24 February 2013

Passing The 10,000 Views Milestone

Wahey! The blog's recently passed 10,000 views!

When I started this blog around the middle of last October I did so with the main aim of encouraging myself to keep up to date with what was going on in the Amiga gaming scene. If one or two individuals also stumbled upon my postings and found them interesting or useful then I felt that would be a bonus.

As the days and weeks went by and I became familiar with the Blogger interface I started to keep an eye on the viewing stats. Initially the number of daily visitors to the blog was in single digits, but as time went on this quickly grew, and now it averages at around 90 to 100 page views per day. This number may seem low to many, but it's beyond anything I ever anticipated.

Since setting this blog live I've also discovered just how vibrant the current Amiga game development scene is. Sure, it's nowhere on the level of the ZX Spectrum homebrew scene, but it's still a bustling little side of our much loved machine.

Another interesting side to the Blogger stats are looking at the referring site information. So, where do the majority of visitors come from? Well, it didn't come as much of a surprise to see The English Amiga Board coming in at first place. It's more often than not the first place where news of a new Amiga game first lands, and out of all the Amiga forums I've visited the people there seem to be the most supportive towards new projects.  If you ignore the various google site referrals, second place goes to the Amiga.org forums, with the excellent Amiga link portal Brutal's Amiga Links, coming in a close third.

I'd just like to say a big thank you to all the people who have sent in comments or emails of encouragement over the past few months. The feedback has been amazing, and as long as the Amiga gaming scene continues to be as vibrant as it has been over the past 4 or 5 months I'll continue to update the blog as often as I can.

Here's hoping 2013 will be another exciting one for Amiga gamers, and here's to the blog reaching 100,000 page views!

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Tales of Gorluth Official Trailer

In Friday's blog post I updated you all on the development progress of Backbone created RPG "Tales of Gorluth", which I originally looked at way back on the 2nd of January.

Well, since my post on Friday there have been further developments, and yesterday Viddi, the developer, uploaded a really professional looking teaser trailer for his forthcoming game.

Take a look below, and make sure the speakers are turned up!

The music playing in the above trailer isn't some tune ripped from another source. No, this is actually taken from the soundtrack to the game! I personally feel this is some of the best music I've heard on the Amiga in many years, and can't wait to hear the rest of the tunes.

If you want to follow the development progress of "Tales of Gorluth", I recommend visiting this thread over on the English Amiga Board. If you've not read through the thread before you'll find it a fascinating document detailing the highs and lows of the development process, and I'm hoping that in a future posting Viddi reveals some details relating to the development of the music. Well, I can hope!

In the meantime, you may want to bookmark the official "Tales of Gorluth" web site, which can be found at: http://www.talesofgorluth.de

I'll bring you more news on this as and when it appears.

Lack of Updates - A Quick Explanation

Regular readers of the Amiga Gamer blog will know that I try my very best at updating it roughly every other day. Now, the more observant of you will notice that this is my first posting since Friday.

I must apologise for the lack of updates over the past few days. I've recently got myself a new job and have been busy getting back into the world of full-time employment.

Please understand that I'm not losing interest in the blog, but it is possible that I may not have as much time to devote to it as I have done previously. I shall ensure the blog is updated as often as I can. It's just that it may not be as often as it was before.

We shall see!

Friday 15 February 2013

Tales of Gorluth - an Action Adventure created with Backbone

Way back on the 2nd of January I reported on the development of an as yet unnamed action RPG created entirely in Backbone. Since then Viddi, the author of the game, has spent hours and hours developing the title still further.

A few days ago he was kind enough to release footage detailing how far he'd progressed, as well as revealing what he has planned as development continues.

Since Viddi's initial update back at the start of January he's now reduced the size of the playfield to ensure the game retains a decent speed. He's also created a new status panel, which you can see at the bottom of the screen.

Other updates include the squashing of a number of programming/development bugs, the addition of new monsters, weapons and items, and 12 levels have been designed and implemented, with work on level 13 now underway.

Viddi also tells us that "The soundtrack is going to be enormous", and that there are 12 tracks so far. The music is one of 'the' things that really stands out about this release. Yes, the graphics look lovely, but it's the music that's absolutely gorgeous. I don't know if these are compositions he's put together or if they're tunes he's 'borrowed'. I'm thinking (and hoping!) that it's the former.

Check out the latest footage of the game in action below, and make sure the volume's turned up;


Further developments include the registration of www.talesofgorluth.de, the addition of an online manual, the completion of the game's logo, and the main menu structured and implemented.

Could this be one of the Amiga game highlights of 2013? It's certainly starting to look that way.

To follow the progress of Tales of Gorluth, visit this thread over on the English Amiga Board.

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Amikill Vers 1.0 (Demo) Released

Fans of Operation Wolf style games may be interested to learn that a demo of Amigakill is now available for download.

Coded in AMOS, this zombie shooter is still in the very early stages of development, but progress so far seems to have been extremely swift.

There's currently a short thread discussing the game, over on the English Amiga Board forums. If you'd like to take part or simply read what's been talked about so far, I suggest visiting this link.

So far, the main subject of feedback has been the suggestion that the digitised backdrop is replaced with a nice pixelated image instead. At present things do look a little odd as the backdrop is a scan whilst the enemies are animated hand drawn sprites.

If you'd like to get the demo up and running on your own Amiga you can find the download link at http://clubamiten.blogspot.com.es. Amiten, author of Amikill, suggests that the game is run on at least an A1200.

Those of you who don't have access to an Amiga, or simply don't have the time or inclination to install this on your system can find footage of the game in action below.

Sunday 10 February 2013

AmiQuake AGA V1.11 - Footage and Final Released

I'm not sure how I missed this one, but on the 31st January Novacoder uploaded footage of version 1.11 of his AmiQuake port to YouTube.

What's exciting about this is that it shows not only the game up and running, but how well it performs being played. You'll need a decent spec 68060 machine to get this running at a good speed, but for those of you lucky enough to have such set-ups it looks like you'll be in for a real treat.

Take a look...


Here's Novacoder;
"This is an actual recording of a game that I was playing yesterday so it gives a good idea of how fast is is now, even when lots of bad guys are on screen at once".
If you want to get this up and running on your Amiga, you can download what Novacoder tells us is the final release, at this Aminet link.

Before you do that, though, you need to make sure your set-up matches these requirements:

1) An AGA Amiga
2) A very fast 68060 processor (with FPU)
3) 32MB of FASTRAM
4) The original game or demo

Looking at the footage (my Amiga's just not powerful enough to run this) it looks as if Novacoder's completed yet another amazing project. If he turns his attentions to something else I'll be sure to report on it.

Friday 8 February 2013

DOSBox Amiga 0.74 - Wing Commander 2

As you can see from the navigation bar on the right-hand-side, one of the most read updates I've posted to this blog relates to the Amiga port of DOSBOX, an application enabling you to run old MSDOS titles on your trusty Miggy.

NovaCoder's work developing this for the Amiga continues, and at version 0.74 he decided it was time to demonstrate Wing Commander 2 running on the Amiga. Yes, it's slow and you'll need a decent speed 060 processor, but as the emulator's not even reached version 1 yet it's already generating some impressive results.

Take a look at the video below to see it in action;

Naturally, as soon as further news breaks on this fascinating project I'll update the blog.

*** UPDATE *** Since posting this blog Novacoder has significantly improved the performance of DOSBox Amiga, and has uploaded new footage of Wing Commander 2 in action.

Thursday 7 February 2013

Top Amiga Games 2012 - Results!

Towards the end of January I reported that the Obligement web site were asking you to vote for your "Top Amiga Games of 2012", giving you the chance to nominate your favourite Amiga game releases over the past 12 months.

Well, the closing date for nominations has now closed, and the top three results have been revealed as being;

1 - Sqrxz by Retroguru
2 - Sqrxz 2 by Retroguru
3 - Super Sprint by State Of The Art, Philippe Guichardon

I can't comment on Sqrxz 2, as I've not yet had a chance to play it, but I found the original to be well polished but extremely frustrating, and judging from responses on the English Amiga Board, the sequel is even more irritating.

The Super Sprint ST conversion was one of my favourite Amiga releases of the past 12 months, so I'm pleased to see that it's been ranked. It's a smashing game, wonderfully playable, and you can find out more about it and two other ST to Amiga conversions by reading this old blog post of mine from November last year.


Super Sprint - ST version running on an Amiga

The top 2012 games for OS 4.0, MorphOS and AROS were also tallied-up, and if those interest you, you can find them here: http://obligement.free.fr/hitparade/award2012.php

My thanks go to the guys over at http://www.amigans.net for the heads-up on this one.

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Discovering The Joys of "Fayoh 2"

One of the many things I love about the Amiga is that even after owning a machine for over two decades I'm still stumbling upon games that, for whatever reason, I missed when they were originally released.

My most recent discovery is the 1998 release Fayoh 2, an AGA only platform arcade adventure, which, although worked on by a number of bedroom programmers, has been polished to an extremely high standard. I'd actually go as far as saying that if you paid £14.99 or £19.99 for this back in the day you wouldn't feel cheated at all.

The game begins with you entering the main tower of Don Jockface (this is what it says in the instructions!), a room filled with numerous mirrors that lead to strange areas of the black gum's home. Entering an unlocked mirror is as simple as moving your character in front of it, and then pulling down.

Once you've entered an area you're unable to leave until you've found all the hidden stars located there. Once that task's complete you must return to the mirror you used to enter, and you'll then be returned back to the main tower, ready to enter the next section.

At the bottom of the tower you'll find two very special mirrors. The first enables you to save your progress in one of the three save slots (yes, the game is so big that saving your progress is essential), and the second is a bonus room, giving you the chance to trade your points against extra lives.

The author describes the game as a Super Mario World clone, but I'd disagree. With the maps laid out as they are you'll often find the need to return to areas you've already visited, either to exit the level or to collect items you missed when you first passed through. To me it has the arcade platform feel of Super Mario World and the adventuring aspect of the Spectrum classic Jet Set Willy.


As you can see from the YouTube footage above, the game looks beautiful, and very console-like, with bright colours and some lovely parallax scrolling, a feature so often neglected on the Amiga. Music is also to an extremely high standard, with what seems like a massive number of in-game tunes, which sound great and really add to the atmosphere.

The controls also seem to have had a lot of love and care put into them. Your character has a small bit of inertia, but is really easy to control, and best of all it's fire to jump and not up!

Staying on the subject of the controls a moment longer, and this is where the game offers some real variety. One level you'll be running and jumping your way around, the next you'll have picked up a helicopter power-up and be hovering about the game, and the next you'll have transformed into a fish, and descending into the depths. This differing set of control schemes all work really well, and peppered throughout the game ensure that things are kept fresh and interesting.

Surely the game must have some negative points, and it does. The difficulty level is set extremely high, and clearing many of the areas may see you pulling your hair out after you die time and time again. The other issue is that when you die the area you're in gets completely reset. So, if you've just spent the last five minutes collecting every cherry, bonus and killing every monster, you're going to have to do it all over again.

My final gripe is that sometimes it's difficult to work out what will kill you and what won't. Sure, you'll only make the mistake once, but what I thought was a yellow platform turned out to be a pit of lava, and a stretch of water which looked innocent enough soon lost me a life.

Minor niggles aside, I'd rank this as one of the Amiga's best platform games, and one that deserves your attention as soon as possible. It's a real shame the author has long since abandoned our favourite platform, as he has some serious talent, and it's a big loss to the Amiga scene.

Those of you who are after further reading may be interested to learn that you can find a fascinating interview with Fayoh 2 programmer, Marcus Johansson over on the AmigaPD web site. The game was also AmigaPD's "Game of The Month" for June 2011, of which you can read about here.

If this blog post has whetted your appetite, you can download the full version of "Fayoh 2" from The Aminet.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

The Top 10 Worst Amiga Games - Review

In Sunday’s blog post I gave a brief heads-up on Lemon Amiga’s latest video production “The Top 10 Worst Amiga Games”, and pointed you in the direction of the trailer and links to the PayPal page.

Why a PayPal link? Well, this time a small donation was being asked for before you could access the full video. Sure, the amount requested was only $3 USD / £1.89, but was it worth the money? It was time to find out...

Upon starting the video you’re greeting with a nice intro sequence featuring numerous characters from many classic Amiga games. This is all complimented by some nice mod music, and rounded off with the Amiga’s “Say” application providing the voice-over.

Dan from Lemon Amiga then chips-in, gives some brief background information about this latest video, and explains that Matt “Matt Chat” Baton and Filmnstuff will also be reviewing titles for this production.

So, what of the titles? Well, I don’t want to spoil things and reveal the 10 games nominated as “The Top 10 Worst Amiga Games of All Time”, but compared to some Amiga games I’ve had the misfortune to play during my years as an Amiga owner, a number of the titles shown in the video are nowhere near the standard of the Amiga’s worst. That said, there are some truly terrible titles that have made it into the Lemon Amiga top 10, and deservedly so!

Having watched numerous Lemon Amiga videos I was already familiar with Dan’s style of commentary and reviewing. Call me boring, but I like the way he covers a title. His voice overs are clear, informative, and reviews are often peppered with nice nuggets of background information about each game.

Moving on, and Matt “Matt Chat” Barton’s review style is similar to Dan’s. It’s well paced, comes across as having spent time researching each game, and again is full of tidbits of information about each title.

Finally, there’s Filmnstuff, and it’s here that I struggled somewhat. His reviews have more of a comedy slant to them, and along with the vast amounts of swearing in them, just seemed really out of place when sat amongst Dan and Matt’s reviewing style. I enjoyed the comedy, just not the swearing. (Sorry. I guess I’m just getting old!)

So, is the video worth shelling out $3 USD / £1.89 for? That’s a difficult one. Running at just over 40 minutes there’s no doubt that this would have taken a serious amount of time to put together. In fact, in the background notes to the full version, Dan explains that the project took about 3 weeks of editing, with the last 4 days being spent filtering out any bugs and adding in a few extra things. So, it’s clear that a serious amount of love has gone into producing this.

On the other hand you have to remember that the money won’t be going to fund any future Lemon Amiga produced videos. Dan seems to be about to give the Amiga scene a break, so the profits generated from this video will simply be divided between Dan, Matt and Filmnstuff.

If I knew the money was going back into helping produce further Lemon Amiga produced videos then I wouldn’t hesitate saying that it’s worth the money. As it’s not you need to think of how much enjoyment you’ve had from Dan’s, Matt’s and FilmnStuff’s videos over the years, as it’s only then can you decide whether it’s worth shelling out for. Perhaps you'd simply like to donate as a way of saying "Thank you".

It’ll be a real shame if Dan decides to call time on the Amiga scene, and a real loss to the community. Here’s hoping that his time away will be a short-lived one.

*** UPDATE *** Since submitting this blog post there has now been a change of plan. Dan, Matt and Filmnstuff have now decided to make the film FREE to view, and only ask that you make a donation (link is contained in the info section of the clip) if you wish to do so. The video can be found HERE!

Monday 4 February 2013

AmiQuake 2 AGA - Beta 5 Demonstration

In the final few days of 2012 I reported that NovaCoder was busy working on an AGA port of the legendary first person shooter, Quake 2. Well, it would seem that work is still underway on this ambitious but exciting project, as a YouTube clip from the beta 5 version of the game has just been uploaded to the video sharing web site.

The video doesn't demonstrate any wandering around rooms or corridors, but does show how well things work when the player attempts to look up, down and around their current location.

The test hardware is an Amiga 1200 with 75mhz Blizzard accelerator, which I'm assuming is an 060.

You can see beta 5 in action below;


As soon as I hear any further news regarding this project I'll let you know via the blog.

Sunday 3 February 2013

Top 10 Worst Amiga Games Fundraiser

If you've followed the blog over the past few months you can't have failed to notice my plugging of Lemon Amiga's "Top 10 Amiga Games You've Probably Never Heard of" YouTube videos. This short, three-part series highlighted many forgotten classic Amiga titles that, for whatever reason, failed to receive the love they deserved the first time around.

The videos were well put together, and as each one weighed-in at over one hour in length, there was certainly some serious viewing to be had.

Following on from the success of this series, the Lemon Amiga team have now out together a "Top 10 Worst Amiga Games" video, only this time they're asking for a small PayPal donation before you can watch the episode.

Here's the trailer;


Dan from Lemon Amiga explains what the video's about and how it came together;
"Hi guys, I'm having a fund-raiser event by way of a video!

I wanted to make something extra special for you - something to bow out with for a while, a little swan song maybe (or at least for the foreseeable future).

For this video I've enrolled Matt Chat's Matt Barton, and the ever popular Filmnstuff, to co-host this with me, and we'll take turns to look at these games and review them".
So, why the request for donations? Well, you can find out why there's a small donation of $3 USD required before you can access the video, along with a download/payment link, by clicking HERE.

If you'd like to see some of the Lemon Amiga team's previous productions before you decide to splash out on this video, you can find links to their "Top 10 Amiga Games You've Probably Never Heard of" series here:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

My thanks go to the Lemon Amiga team for getting in touch and giving me the heads-up on this one.

Friday 1 February 2013

Plouf - English Language Version Released!

It's the start of a new month, and with the first post of February I bring news of a new game. Well, when I say new, it's new-ish.

Almost twenty years ago the AMOS coded title "Plouf" was released for the Amiga, albeit with a French translation only. Now, thanks to the efforts of the original author, this game has been dug out of his personal archive, translated into English, recompiled and made available for download.

Here's the author with some background information about the game;
"18 years ago I was learning the ropes of coding on an Amiga 500. Using AMOS, a game-oriented Basic, I played with creating games and demos. I was not as persevering as nowadays: most of those creations got started and abandoned a few weeks later, but I did manage to finish one of those game attempts: Plouf!"
He continues;
"Some time ago I decided to release it as free software. I bought a NULL-modem cable and transfered the source code to my laptop.

There was one problem though: all text was in French :( I wanted to at least translate all visible strings to English. One would think it would just be a matter of opening the source code with a modern editor and run the AMOS Compiler to regenerate binaries... It's not that simple: the format of .AMOS files is binary: it bundles the source code and the program assets. This means it can only be edited with AMOS Editor. I thus ran AMOS Editor in UAE to do all my edits... I can confirm editors have made a lot of progress since 1994..."
3 player simultaneous action

For a more in-depth write-up detailing just how the English version came into being, as well as download links to the binary and AMOS source code, point your web browser over to: http://agateau.com/2013/01/22/plouf/

My thanks go to the Amiga News team for the heads-up on this one.