Frankenstein (Commodore Amiga)

 

Frankenstein (Commodore Amiga) :

Baron Frankenstein has decided it is about time he got back to working on his favourite hobby, monster making...but as usual, the lazy bugger has decided that he needs to focus on the important task of building of the monster itself, and sends off poor Egor, his ever faithful assistant, to do all the busywork of finding the tools and body parts required for the experiments.

After getting physically booted off screen by the Baron to start your quest, you, as Egor, must wander all throughout the castle, surrounding grounds and village and gather everything up. Frankenstein will tell you what he needs next, and you have a bag to pop whatever item he's after into when you find it. And when you do, you have to travel all the way back to the lab to find out what's next on the list.

Egor doesn't even have a weapon to fight off all the horrible characters he'll meet along the way! All he has is a pathetic jump with which to try and avoid contact with the enemies, and so he'll forever be getting harassed and terrified by all manner of beasts.

This constant fear is what works as Egor's health, as every time he touches an enemy or trap, he'll become ever more frightened, going from being okay to a full blown panic! If he can find one of the local barmaids before he reaches a panic, he'll calm down a bit though. And if he successfully manages to bring the current item back to the lab, the meter will also reset to calm. If he does manage to lose it and freak out completely though, he'll run straight back to the Baron in the lab and be punished by squish-ment from a cartoonish anvil that the baron will drop on his head. 

The nasties are a varied bunch, with rats and bats, killer plants, ghosts, angry villagers, knights in armour and severed hands among the things you'll be facing, and everything has been designed well with all the characters and backgrounds having a nice spooky, cartoony feel to them. 

However, sometimes there are far too many enemies in one tiny area, and you'll get frustrated as your fear bar rapidly shoots towards panic and there's no way you can really avoid hitting the baddies. Also, whenever Egor does his jump move, the Amiga blurts out a horrible spring-type noise, and given the amount of jumping you'll be doing in this game, it can get very annoying, very quickly!

Having said that, it's still fun enough for a few goes, and it's interesting to see all the new enemies in the different areas and how well they fit into the cliches of our favourite made-monster tale! It's just a pity it wasn't a little bit better and less frustrating......

*~*

Weird Dreams (Atari ST, Amiga, C64, PC)

 Weird Dreams (Amiga, Atari ST, C64, PC) :

Properly freaky stuff! This game came with a rather large back story told in a 64 page novella which came with it ...to cut it short, you fancy this girl who turns out to be possessed by a demon who is a bit fed up and trapped in her body, only you don't know that and the aforementioned demonic chappy decides to faff about with your mind for some giggles. You start having crazy dreams after it gives you some pills to help "cure" you , and eventually end up in hospital where you start having another, and possibly your last, weird dream!

You have to try to work through various puzzles and defeat the various nasties which are living in your head thanks to that old demonic numpty inhabiting you lady friend...but this is a very tricky game, or at least I found it to be...

It is filled with freaky graphics and bizarre gameplay, and definitely deserves a go or two, but I just kept getting killed and watched a video of someone else playing it on Youtube instead...so here's the video, which obviously contains spoilers, so if you do fancy giving the game a bash without knowing anything, don't watch it!

Another way in which you might have come across this game back in the day,  was if you ever watched British Saturday Morning TV,  as a modified version of the game was used on ITV's MotorMouth program as part of their quiz game for kids...as can be seen in the video below!

But yeah, the final verdict is that it's just too damn tricky with not a lot to see, and you're better off watching someone else play it instead!

* ~ *

Alien Breed - Special Edition '92 (Commodore Amiga)

 

Alien Breed - Special Edition '92 (Commodore Amiga) :

If you owned an Amiga in the early nineties, chances are you had some version of Alien Breed.  I remember everybody talking about it at school, and as I only had a ZX Spectrum at the time, I was a bit jealous of all my Amiga owning friends, as this alien-blasting Gauntlet clone sounded amazing!

Skip forward to the late '90s and I was eventually making enough money that I was able to go to car boot sales and find my very own Amiga, for a lot less cash...and one that came bndled with a copy of  Alien Breed - Special Edition '92!  Finally I'd be able to sample it's brilliant-ness!

And it is indeed quite brilliant.  Maybe not quite as good as Gauntlet, which it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from, but it still holds up fairly well and is certainly fun enough to be a worthy Amiga classic!  Of course, another heavy inspiration is the Alien franchise, which should be obvious as soon as you see the box!

And like those films, the game sees you scurrying around metal corridors, trying to keep enough ammo as you battle the hordes of enemies that are taking over your base/spaceship/whatever...

Health packs, ammo, money...all of these things are required and can be found lying around the place, but a lot of the time they're behind locked doors, so you'll be needing to find keys too, so you can get to all that much needed loot!

Wave after wave of alien scum will do their best to stop you from completing the various goals of your mission, and there's a lot to get through, with this Special Edition coming with an extra 12 missions, including some where you're in the dark and can only see the blueness of the alien beasties eyes (apparently at least, I haven't got far enough to see that yet!)....

If I have any gripes about the game, it's that it can be a bit fiddly to control.  You'll frequently get stuck on some of the scenery, and you'll be wishing that your little marine had eight-way directional shooting, which unfortunately he doesn't.....and this makes the game a lot harder than it feels it should be.  You do get more used to it the more you play, but it definitely takes away from the shine of the rest of the package...

But the game is still atmospheric and groovy enough that you'll forgive it's faults, especially when you hear the Star-Trek-esque door noises, the classic si-fi trope of a female computer voice and the funky title music!  Alien Breed then, is definitely one to play.....just remember that in space, no one can hear the narrator say "Green Marine is about to die!"

* ~ *

Zombie Apocalypse 1 & 2 (Commodore Amiga)

Just a very quick blog post today, as I'm really pushed for time, and there's not much to say about these games anyway!

Zombie Apocalypse 1 & 2 (Amiga) - 

Both of these games are PD (Public Domain) titles, the first being released in 1992 and  the sequel in 1994!

Both are also shooting gallery style games, where you control a crosshair via the mouse, and blast advancing zombies to smithereens!

They're pretty mindless fun for a while, but become pretty repetitive very quickly! Zombie Apocalypse II is the one to go for if you only want to play one though, as it has slightly better presentation, such as a groovy tune, and the extra gore when body parts pile up on the screen after you splatter the zombie hordes...Both games have grunts and moan from your undead enemies, but these can quickly become a bit grating too!

So yeah, if you want to waste 10-15 minutes mindlessly blasting zombies, you could do a lot worse than these games! Just don't expect anything more from them.....  

Oh, and don't get these games confused with the games of the same name that were released on Xbox 360 and PS3 a few years back...I haven't played any of those yet, but they just seem to be pretty standard Zombie-Robotron-style things...maybe I'll get round to them in a later blog post someday!?

Fright Night (Commodore Amiga)

Fright Night (Amiga) :

Another game I only recently discovered, this is a game based on cult 1985 horror movie Fright Night! You play as vampire Jerry Dandridge, as he roams his newly bought house looking for victims to satisfy his blood lust!

The victims have armed themselves with crucifixes and holy water, and they'll throw these at you as you approach them to sink your fangs in, so you'll need to try and avoid those or they'll hurt you and you'll lose vital energy. Also, some of the victims aren't particularly healthy and are filled with bad blood, so keep an eye out for those too, as drinking too much of that can be harmful to Jerry too!

You'll need to be sure to make it back to your coffin before sunrise too, or you'll end up rather crispy! This will move you on to the next night, or level, where you can start hunting down more victims! As you progress through the levels though, things get a little more difficult! Strange spirits and ghostly hands appear to try and stop you too, and these really drain your health rather quickly so extra care should be taken to avoid them...

It's a pretty fun arcade action game, alright for playing in small doses and ideal for a game or two to celebrate Halloween! I recommend you hunt it down and get your fangs into it sharpish!!!

Arachnophobia (Commodore Amiga)

Arachnophobia (Amiga) :

Ah yes...time for anyone with a hatred for things with more than six legs to look away! This BlueSky Software game is based on the 1990 movie of the same name and has you take control of bug exterminator Delbert McClintock, John Goodman's character in the movie

A deadly Venezuelan spider had hitched a ride in to town and got frisky with the local arachnids, creating an infertile but dangerous horde of offspring. Driving around a map that reminds me of the Ghostbusters game, Delbert must stop and go through the houses in eight different towns, killing all the spiders in each one. 

He's armed with a can of bug spray, and you can aim the joystick in the required direction depending on where the spiders are, and give them a blast of the repellent...be careful though, as some of the little feckers will jump at you, making it easy to miss them as they try to chew your face off and web up your insides!!

You also get a couple of gas bombs that you can set on the floor, and these will wipe out all the spiders in that room....unless of course it's a queen spider! Yes, in every town there will be a queen that you have to track down and kill. She's not always easy to find, but the compass on the map screen will handily point in the general direction of where she might be hanging out...

You'll discover her nests everywhere though, and these need to be taken out to stop spiders spawning in the houses. Also, if you find yourself running low on spray, a quick jump on top of a spider should squish it in to a sticky, bloody mess...a trick worth remembering when you're in a tight spot. If you run completely out of spray, you'll need to leave the house for another can y'see...but this spawns all the spiders back to life when you re-enter...

As I just mentioned, gas bombs will only slow the queen spiders down when you find them...not kill them....and spray is pretty useless against them too. No, these silk spinners need a special kind of finishing off! Somewhere in town there will be a red can lying around. This allows you to spray fire once you aquire some matches, which will also be lying around somewhere...it's worth checking where the queen is first though before you light up and waste the spray, as I've been told the queen sometimes isn't in the same house as some of the matches, meaning you might light up only to discover you've no flame spray left when you actually need it!

It's a fairly enjoyable little bug hunt, and the spiders move around in a suitably creepy way. It can get a bit repetitive I guess, but in the short time I've played it it's never really become a problem. Whilst looking for the box art I discovered a little extra something awaits those who clean out all the towns too, so I'll definitely be going back to the game later to try and do just that! And also try to avoid the screen below that greets you every time you die....

Ghost Battle (Amiga)

Ghost Battle (Amiga) :

If there's one set of terrifying fiends that people seemed to be a lot less scared of back in the day, it's lawyers! Thalion clearly weren't frightened of them at all, as this game blatantly steals most of its ideas straight from Capcom's Ghosts 'n' Goblins series...

You play as a chap who has had the unfortunate (and yet seemingly very common) upset of his lady friend being nabbed by some great-big-nasty sort, and have to wander through the platform-filled levels defeating zombies, witches, demons, creepy crawlies and all the other usual suspects from these types of games...and it's so blatant in its thievery that there's even those Venus Flytrap type nasties to get past!  There's spikes that pop up to hinder your progress, moving platforms to navigate and you'll be needing a key for coming in at the end of level one too! 

It doesn't quite live up to the task of properly emulating Capcom's success though. There's a lot more awkward jumps, the collision detection can be a bit iffy sometimes and some enemies can't seem to be killed and have to be jumped over to be avoided...which just ends up with you getting jostled annoyingly back & forth as you attempt to clear them.

And yet despite its problems, it remains a fun platformer, with a groovy soundtrack and pretty good graphics, even if the main character's arms do look like they should be his legs ...and vice versa! Still, it's worthy of at least a couple of plays on a cold, October night...and so far I've gotten a tiny bit further every time I play it..so it's keeping me going back to see just how far I can get! It's a grower, I reckon...

Super Cauldron (Amiga)

Cauldron was a fun little game with subject matter perfect for Halloween..so surely a super-charged version on a beast so much more powerful than the Speccy as the Amiga would be brilliant, right!?

Well, oh dear....although first impressions are good as you feast your eyes on the gorgeous graphics, as soon as the heroine Zmira starts moving, it all starts to fall apart. Some weird kind of scrolling makes it really hard to tell what's happening on screen, and it jumps and lurches all over the place.

You start equipped with rocks as a weapon, which are pretty damn tricky to get to grips with due to their trajectory, but you'll get better with practice, and you can pick up broom icons and take to the skies, which is nice...but it was at that point I got confused...

Where the hell do I go? The level's only a few screens wide, and there didn't seem to be any exits? And so for about 20 minutes I tried to kill as many enemies as possible to see if anything happened. It was only by pure accident that I discovered the secret entrances to underground levels at the tree stumps! Now to be fair, I don't have the manual and maybe they're mentioned in that...but it seems a bit daft to hide the exits to a level in such obscure places!

And it's bloody tricky....and well, not very interesting! I dunno, it just seems to lack a certain something, and somehow seemed to irritate me right from the start...It's certainly not a patch on it's predecessor!