Amiga Games - Bombjack - Classic Commodore Amiga Game

Bombjack Amiga
Tehkan (now Tecmo) had created this popular arcade game in 1984 and it already been converted to most 8-bit machines in 1986.

A 16-bit conversion was always on the cards and Bombjack arrived on the Commodore Amiga in 1989 - and whilst it was a playable game it was also a little disappointing.

ZX Spectrum Bombjack had been an awesome conversion, but on the Amiga we were treated to a lazy Atari ST port, which of course would just not do...



In this (by 1989 a retro arcade game) you controlled Jack - a 'superhero' who could leap incredibly high and gracefully glide to the ground.

He could diffuse bombs too by simply touching them - I suppose that's why he was called Bomb Jack. Anyway - in this arcade game a load of bombs (depicted in a cartoon style - black 'balls' with a fizzing lit fuze) had been placed in famous locations all around the world.

Just why is anyones guess!

The locations were:
The Sphinx and pyramids
The Acropolis
Neuschwanstein Castle
Miami Beach
Hollywood (LA)



The object of the game was to 'diffuse' the bombs and defeat the various enemies on each screen, with screen having one of the famous locations as a backdrop. The screens matched up with the original arcade game quite well.

Each of the screens usually had platforms on it too - you couldn't jump through these platforms but you could land on them and walk across them if you wanted to - giving a nice mix of arcade action and classic platform gaming.

Various nasties populated each screen such as robots, birds and deadly snails (yep, deadly snails!) which would take one of your three lives on contact with you.

You had to manouver around these nasties by leaping and 'floating' around the screen, you could also change direction in mid-air which was pretty cool.





Once you had collected/diffused the first bomb (they never exploded, no matter how long you let them fizzle away) another one's fuse would ignite.

You could collect them all in the order that they 'lit up' - but it didn't really matter if you didn't bother, you could still complete each game screen no matter in what order you collected them.

If you did collect them all in order a bonus was put your way. Collecting all twenty three in the active state resulted in a whopping 60,000 bonus points. Wahey!

Either way - once all the bombs on screen had been collected, you moved on to the next screen. Every so often a disk bearing the letter P arrived onscreen (A powerup which was familiar to all Commodore gamers) - collecting this immobilised the enemies and turned them into stationary smiling faces (for a few seconds - Pac Man style)which could be collected for yet more points. Wahey again!

An E disk added an extra life, while a B disk added points and increased the value of any subsequent bombs collected.

Once you had visited all of the screens and in true arcade game tradition, you were whisked back to the beginning - with the platform layout altered and the nasties even nastier.


I have to say that I enjoyed this arcade game and loved the ZX Spectrum version, but the version we got for the good old Amiga was a little flat.

It was still playable enough and captured some of the spirit of the original arcade game - but it just wasn't as good as it should have been.

With a little more effort this would have been the definitive home version of the arcade game, but it turned out to be just another 'decent conversion'. A real opportunity missed.

Still, give this old Commodore Amiga game a go, it certainly has a level of retro charm.

We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Bombjack. Alternatively you could try and play it online.

Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys.

GENRE: Arcade game
RELEASE DATE: 1989
RELEASED BY: Elite
DEVELOPER(S): Paradox Software
PRICE: £25.99 (UK)

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Amiga Games - Body Blows - Classic Commodore Amiga Game

Body Blows Amiga Those famous Commodore Amiga coders Team 17 (who authored many a great game) gave us a rival to Street Fighter in 1993 with Body Blows.

All of the usual features for an arcade style beat em up were in there; varying fighters, special moves and differing backgrounds as you progressed through the game.

Now Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were very good arcade games (And Mortal Kombat ended up being a very good Amiga Game) - could Body Blows go toe to toe or would it be finished off after three short rounds?



Like any good game of this type it offered two modes of play. Single player mode pitted you against the computer (after you had chosen your fighter) making you fight against six increasingly difficult opponents before finally taking on the hardest of them all 'Max'.

Give Max a kicking and your victory was complete.

Multi-player mode with a bunch of friends was also possible, allowing two, four or even eight players to take part in a knockout tournament. Great fun.

In classic arcade fashion (which Commodore gamers were familiar with) each fighter was blessed with a plethora of moves with lots of punches, kicks and flying attacks available to each.

Of course each character had special moves too which could be real fun - see 'Cossack' and his Superdrill move for example.



Another good feature in this game was that it allowed you to put the same characters against each other (which required a cheat in Street Fighter to accomplish) for a real evenly matched battle.

Great combo-attacks could be executed after a fair amount of practice too and huge bonus points were awared for winning a bout without taking a single blow - a perfect victory.

For me as usual you usually ended up with a couple of fighters that you preferred and stuck to those when playing the game.

I remember Max being a real b*stard to beat - I don't think I ever did as far as I remember.



All in all this game was well recieved when it was released. It was a well polished game with decent characters which were nicely drawn (and pretty big), great looking four way scrolling backdrops, nifty in-game speech and great music both in-game and on the title screen.

Some of the special moves were very well done too - the ninja who sort of 'dissolved' into thin air ('Shadow!') was rather cool at the time!

Team 17 were synonymous with quality and they delivered a fine arcade game in the beat em up genre to us Amiga gamers. It perhaps lacked a little soul - but once you got the hang of it this game was well worth playing.

It kept me occupied until MK came out anyway - and was one of the better beat em ups in Commodore gaming history.

The only real downside to the game was the disk swapping and long load times between levels - but we can forgive it that as the game could be played on a standard Amiga 500.

We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Body Blows. Alternatively you could try and play it online.

Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys

GENRE: Arcade game (Beat em up)
RELEASE DATE: 1993 RELEASED BY: Team 17
DEVELOPER(S): Allister Brimble, Cedric McMillan Jnr, Alex Garnier, Nik Harbor, Daniel J Burke
PRICE: £25.99 (UK)

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Amiga Games - Blasteroids - Classic Commodore Amiga Game

• Blasteroids Amiga
  Ahh, now this is so retro, it's classic retro. It's golden age retro gaming.
  
  It was already part of classic gaming folklore when it was released in 1987. This was an update to the then already classic Asteroids.
  
  Asteroids was old hat by 1987, but this was a nice update for your Commodore Amiga, and if you were a fan of the original arcade game then you couldn't go far wrong with this one...
  
  Let's have a quick look at a simple yet playable game that graced most home computers at the time...
  
  

The gameplay for this arcade game is basically the same as for the original asteroids - the player (or players as the game was for one or two players) controlled a spaceship viewed from 'above' in a 2D representation of space.

The ship was controlled by rotating it and using thrust to give the ship forwards momentum (in the direction it was pointing). To slow down or completely stop moving, the player had to rotate the ship to face the direction it came from, and generate the right amount of thrust to nullify its momentum. The inertia effect was very cool, and once you got the hang of it some rather splendid moves could be made by the player.

The ship had a limited amount of fuel to generate thrust. This fuel came in the form of 'Energy' that was also used for the ship's shields which protected it against collisions and enemy fire. Once the energy supply was deleted the ship was kaput.

The ship could shoot to destroy asteroids and enemy ships. The ship could also be transformed at will into 3 different versions, namely the 'Speeder', the fastest version, the 'Fighter', which had the most firepower, and the 'Warrior', which could take more of a pounding.

The conversion from the arcade original to the Commodore Amiga was pretty well done and on the whole the game remained faithful to the coin-op version. All of the powerups were in there, including:

Shields - gave a limited amount of protection, indicated in HUD .
Blasters - gave the ship double shots, nice!
Extra Shot Power - Allowed shots to penetrate everything, nicer!
Ripstar - Caused the ship to spin furiously, firing in all directions.
Extra Fuel Capacity - increased fuel capacity, indicated by the HUD. Depleting fuel reserves to critical with this increased capacity reverted the ship to normal fuel capacity. Boooo.
Booster - increased movement speed for all ship forms. Cool!
Crystal Magnet - attracted loose Power Crystals to the ship. Cooler!
Cloak - ship turned invisible to enemies, preventing them from detecting the ship.



The only real issue with the game was the fact that it was basically a souped up version of Asteroids. No matter how many bells and whistles there were, different ships, powerups, 2 player co-op mode and pretty-ish backdrops, games had moved on a lot since the likes of Asteroids had first wowed us.

So - the game was fun to play, especially with 2 players, but after a while it did tend get a little repetetive.



I would say that the game was overpriced when it was released too, at £24.99 it was probably about a tenner too much.

We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Blasteroids. Alternatively you could try and play it online.

Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys

GENRE: Arcade game (Shoot em up)
RELEASE DATE: 1987
RELEASED BY: Mirrorsoft
DEVELOPER(S): Teaque Sofware
PRICE: £24.99 (UK)

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Amiga Longplay - Ballistix - Classic Commodore Amiga Game

Ballistix Commodore Amiga
Now this arcade game released by Psygnosis for the Commodore Amiga was something a little different in 1989.

If any of you owned (or played) a Crossfire set (by MB) you will know what this game is like.
It's very similar except you don't end up with blisters the size of a gobstopper on your trigger finger.

This game can be best described as a cross between football, air hockey and pinball - without the overall class and polish of either Speedball 2 or Pinball Dreams.

Once again Psygnosis treated us to some lavish cover and in game art that had little to do with game itself! They had a habit of that in most of their arcade type games. Still, it was nice to look at.

It's quite a strange arcade game due to the one player mode. In one player mode it really is one player - you don't have a computer opponent to battle with. Honestly, I'm not joking!

No - playing on your own means that the table is 'tilted' towards you, so the ball always runs towards the bottom of the screen where your 'goal' is. You must defend this area at all costs.

So, you aim your balls (which aim at a cursor and shoot) uphill at the 'game ball' or puck and try to force it into the opponents goal. Except there is no opponent.

It's actually quite fun for a while as the physics are well done and have the right sort of 'pinball' feel. The gruff anouncement of 'let the game commence' at the beginning was quite exciting too, for a couple of times at least.

To spice up the action there were powerups available and collecting the letters to spell RICOCHET gave you a bumper 1000 points extra.

The game zone was also littered with obstacles (in true classic arcade fashion), troughs, bombs and rebound points and so on to make the puck fly off in many different directions.

This is where the game really worked, a lot of frantic moments could be had as the puck was sent rebounding and rocketing back down the screen as you frantically fired your ammo at it trying to move it away from your goal area.


For me the most fun to be had was going for the two player option. Playing against a friend was better than the uphill battle of one player mode - and could keep you going for a couple of hours anyway. It must be said that after a while one player mode became a load of ballistix.

The sound effects were pretty good and had a good 'arcade feel' to them too, and they did match up with the gameplay quite nicely.

Not a bad effort and something a little different for those that like a spot of arcade gaming. Oh - and the loading screen had a pretty cool 'rolldown' effect too.


We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Ballistix. Alternatively you could try and play it online.

Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys

GENRE: Arcade game
RELEASE DATE: 1989
RELEASED BY: Psygnosis
DEVELOPER(S): Tony Edmondson, Martin Edmondson, Rick Chamberlain, Paul Howarth
PRICE: £7.99 - UK

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Amiga Games - Blood Money - Classic Commodore Amiga Game

Blood Money Amiga
First the was menace-e-e, now... Pysgnosis presents... a D.M.A Design game. Blooohd Mohneeyyy....

I'll get this out of the way first - I don't really like this game. As arcade games go, and those of the pure shoot em up variety, I think there were plenty of better ones on the Amiga.

Still, it did have some good points - one of which was the awesome Blood Money Intro as well as the haunting soundtrack, so let's have a look at one of many arcade games released by Psygnosis.



As usual with games released by Psygnosis the cover art had little to do with the game itself. It was pretty nicely drawn though.

The intro sequence had little to do with the game either - but at the time it was extremely impressive.

Anyway - in this arcade game you had four planets to 'plunder', and you started off with $200 in the shoot em up bank.

This $200 allowed you to start zapping on Planet 1 ($100 entry fee) or Planet 2 ($200 entry fee). Why you had to pay to be attacked by hordes of blood thirsty aliens is anyones guess.

In classic arcade tradition shooting the bad guys released bonuses - and in this game it was coins that were dropped. Picking them up increased your wad of cash.

At certain points in the level you would reach a supply locker where you could purchase from a variety of eight different weapons. The usual suspects were all here, missiles, speed up, rear firing rockets and so on.

Building up cash reserves also allowed you to enter Planet 3 or 4 - with each planet being suitably different from each other. You also got to pilot a different craft on each planet which was a nice twist.


The drawback in the game is well... the gameplay. The levels scroll slowly by, and enemies swarm over the screen. Sometimes indestructable nasties would shoot out at you from the sides of the playing area (not nice) and some parts of the playing area were 'dead ends'. About a minute into the game a radio tower type thingy 'reversed' your playing controls (unless you destroyed it) - talk about being thrown in at the deep end!

It was seldom that your reflexes would get you out of trouble - this game was more a case of learn the patterns of the aliens, learn the level layout, wash, rinse and repeat to complete a planet.

The music whilst being suitably haunting also becomes repetetive - although it could be switched off if you wanted to.

This game recieved loads of positive reviews when it came out - I bought it a few years later when it was released at £7.99 in the Sizzler range.

I'll maybe get flamed for this but I could never see what all the fuss was about.

We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Blood Money. Alternatively you could try and play it online.

Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys

GENRE: Arcade Game (Shoot Em Up)
RELEASE DATE: 1989
RELEASED BY: Psygnosis
DEVELOPER(S): Dave Jones, Tony Smith, David Whittaker, Ray Norrish
PRICE: £24.95 (£7.99 re-release) - UK

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