It's 196 pages strong, with more than 60 Amiga games reviews, and additional articles covering Amiga models, art on the Amiga, the public domain scene, the best Amiga 1200 games, and "outsider" games.
Being a special issue some of the articles have been published previously, but there are also many new articles, and the majority of pages has been reworked or newly created. New articles include reviews of Alien Breed, Another World, Dune 2, The Great Giana Sisters, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer,
Stunt Car Racer, Wing Commander, Worms, and more.
Retro Gamer "Amiga" special issue costs 14.95EUR, and can be purchased at magazine stores, or online at Heise store.
Hyperion Entertainment CVBA show their commitment to AmigaOS: Today an update for AmigaOS 3.1.4 has been released, fixing some bugs, and adding some new features.
According to Hyperion's press release (see "Sources" below) this update aims to improve user experience and adds more workarounds to improve
compatibility with existing software.
It's mainly a bugfix update to AmigaOS 3.1.4, but there are also a couple of new features:
Danish and swedish translations
Setpatch updated
Audio.device compatibility improved
HDToolBox improved (default blocksize for large harddrives)
CrossDOS compatibility improved
The complete list of bug fixes is considerably longer, Hyperion says the change log
is more than 260KB in size. Changes include: updates to CDFileSystem, intution support, audio device, Format,
FastFileSystem, HDToolBox, Shell, several AmigaDOS commands,
DiskDoctor, and more.
It very much looks like 2019 will surpass many previous years in number of new games released for the Amiga. In fact it becomes pretty hard to keep up with all the new developments.
RESHOOT R
"RESHOOT" from 2016 by Richard Loewenstein looked awesome, and was kind of something new on Amiga, but Richard isn't done with us yet: now he's given us "RESHOOT R" with more assembler coded action, more bullets, extra weapons, more outlandish looking enemies, more insane sound effects, and more awesome pounding, hypnotizing music. It runs on AGA Amigas (CD32 included), claims to put up to 100 objects on screen at the same time, more than 400 colors, with transparency effects, still parallax-scrolling at 50Hz - no accelerator required, yet runs on 68020 to 68060, taking advantage of additional RAM if present.
Hats off, RESHOOT R rivals "T-Zero" in being the most advanced shoot'em up on the Amiga ever. ESCALATION!
Here's a gameplay video - but beware: this might be a bit of a spoiler!
Better buy the game, start playing, and have your jaw drop as you progress though the levels! It's insanely good!
Not finished yet, but with preview videos out, we can pretty safely assume a 2019 release. "Rygar" is a fantasy themed game for AGA Amigas, a remake of the 1986 Tecmo arcade game. Jump, shoot, dodge, run - somewhere in between "Lionheart", "Shadow of the Beast", and "Ghosts'n'Goblins". It already looks very good, and has some above-average game mechanics. Expect some more improvements and bugfixes, this is gonna be an exciting game.
Inspired by the classic "H.E.R.O." game, "BioJet" is a variation of the fly/dodge/explore genre for all Amigas (with 512KB FastRAM). This looks like a smooth, fun game, and has some interesting technical details (see Aminet readme). Last but not least: it's freeware!
One of the oldest gaming ideas got a massive update with "PONG 4K". You still try to catch and reflect a ball, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. "PONG 4K" is the successor to "PoNG4" - for Amiga CD32 only, has an intro video, CD soundtrack, lots of bleeps and blurps, dark yet colorful graphics, giving it a "Speedball" like dystopian future atmosphere, with parallax scrolling, four players simultaneously, gravity effects, obstacles, ... you name it. Originally released in 2018 it's got a commercial release in 2019. Pong is dead, long live PONG!
Dave May's "AirTaxi" is a 1994 game heavily-inspired by "SpaceTaxi", in fact it looks like a super-polished, enhanced version of the classic. A demo has long been on AmiNet, but recently the full version (.adf) has been released, and even an updated rework is considered by the author. "AirTaxi" can be played by up to 5 human players simultaneously (2 joysticks + 2 joysticks on parallel port + keyboard), and runs smoothly on any Amiga with 1MB ChipRAM and some acceleration (25Mhz). It's got speech, soundfx, obstacles, weather conditions, bad guys, nice little character animations, etc. - this looks very entertaining to play with a couple of friends!
Frank Wille's "Trap Runner" had a "party release" in 2018, but is still going strong in 2019 with an updated "final release", and recently the sourcecode has been released. The game is a "Giana Sisters" type jump-and-run with super cute graphics and sounds, very classic, and it also has the best storyline ever: rescue girl from bad guy. Add playability, intro screens, and of course this irresistable marshmellow-smurf-kindof character - you just can't go wrong with "Trap Runner".
You can buy a physical edition of the game, and you can also try your hands on the sourcecode. It's designed to be portable to other platforms, but there's some assembler code involved.
And we have one more that popped up recently: "Cuba 1898" by Irongate / José A. González P. is a neat sidescrolling jump'n'shoot that puts you right into the Spanish-American war of 1898. Well, kinda. Shoot enemies "Green Beret" style, collect boni - win a war!
Amiga games developers are pretty active these days - here's the latest release in Amiga shoot'em up games. And it's an impressive one.
"SkillGrid" is a new vertical shoot 'em up for AGA Amigas by Simone "RETREAM" Bevilacqua, who by the way is also responsible for the excellent BOH and Huenison games, among others, and has created a little gaming universe made of his creations.
So now he's released SkillGrid, which takes place in the same universe, and again has somehow to do with some Evil Masters - you can read the full saga on SkillGrid's homepage (see links below).
A couple of different editions are available, including a physical
"Deluxe Edition" with CD, floppy disks, 16-page booklet, postcards, badges, and
even a A3 sized poster! Very nice.
Here you can see SkillGrid in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLLtD4nr5ck
Judging from the screenshots, the music, and the video, this is an awesome game. Gameplay looks above-average, the action is frenetic, graphics are good to stunning, smooth and stylish, and then there are these outstanding music tracks (some of which almost speak out "I love Iron Maiden!") and sound effects.
Bevilacqua's work is really impressive, he's applying minimalistic gaming ideas from the smartphone-generation to the Amiga, and does so with amazing technical skill. The boxed "Deluxe Edition" of SkillGrid (or any of RETREAM's games, for that matter) is just beautiful, a must-have for any serious Amiga gamer.
Krzysztof "Bitplan" Donat from Poland has just released a nice tool to handle your ADF files, and do a bit more.
GoADF! is more than just your average ADF disk writing tool. It shows information about your ADF files, like filesystem type, used/free space on disk, and more, it can extract individual files from an ADF, it can mount ADFs as a logical drive to AmigaOS, of course it can write your ADF files to floppy disk, and it does a couple of other useful things.
It also has a nice Workbench GUI, and it's free. :-)
Yes, indeed, there used to be no facebook group specifically for Amiga BlitzBasic/AmiBlitz coders. This situation has just changed.
BlitzBasic, or AmiBlitz, is a BASIC dialect, originally developed specifically for the Amiga, keeping the Amiga hardware's special features in mind, allowing reasonably unexperienced coders to get great results, and quickly. Many games have been written in BlitzBasic, including the outstanding Lemmings-clone Blobz.
Surprisingly there wasn't a facebook group dedicated to Amiga BlitzBasic - until now. Amiga BlitzBasic coders now have a group on facebook to share, exchange, and chat about their BlitzBasic experiences.
The group's name is "Amiga BlitzBasic & AmiBlitz", it's a closed group, and as such of course you need to have a facebook account, and request to join the group.
Oh, that's a nice one: "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division", one of the best FPS games ever for the Amiga, originally released in 2001 (for the Amiga) can now be purchased as digital download.
"Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" was initially released for Windows in 1998, and was one of a couple of ambitious ports to the Amiga platform done by Hyperion. The digital download is only 14.95EUR, and you need a next-gen Amiga running AmigaOS4.1 or some decent - in other words: PowerPC - AmigaOS3 hardware to run the game.
