Games galore #7: EON, Super Metal Hero, Bagman, Legacy, Tapper, Verge World Icarus Rising

It's been a little while since Games galore #6 - we need to catch up a little, here are more games, and game announcements, from late 2019 and early 2020.

"EON" for AGA Amigas

"EON AGA" is a new Amiga game in development by Goblins / AmigaWave and Wonderboy Bobi (Francois Perez). It's the official port of "EON" for PC computers, created by Wonderboy Bobi in 2014.

In January 2020, a first video of "EON AGA" popped up on YouTube, and it immediately becomes obvious where this is heading. "EON" is a (very) "Shadow of the Beast"-inspired jump-and-run game, and as such it has big shoes to fill when run on an Amiga. "Shadow of the Beast" was a real stunner back in the day, and it still often serves as a demonstration of the original Amiga's graphics capabilities. Now "EON AGA" targets the later AGA-equipped machines, and of course it must not disappoint in the visual department - from what we can see in the videos so far, it easily succeeds, with nicely drawn, detailed graphics, lots of colors, and butter-smooth, fast, multi-layered parallax scrolling. It also already has some intro screens and atmospheric music.

"EON AGA" is still under development, we can expect a lot of improvements. It's main platform are stock Amiga 1200 and CD32 machines, but there have already been successful tests on next-generation/OS4 Amigas.

On June 28th, a new work-in-progress video was published on AmigaWave's YouTube channel ("EON AGA wip 02"):
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHWA4swXBG4

Visit "EON"'s facebook page for more details and updates:
https://www.facebook.com/eonamiga/

Additional sources:
https://twitter.com/CanalAmigaWave
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/06/eon-amiga-aga-shadow-of-beat.html
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/eon-dxg (2014 Windows version)

Super Metal Hero

"Super Metal Hero" by TenShu and Michael Gibs is a new platformer-shoot-em-up, to be published by Double Sided Games, with a release planned for Q4 2020. While earlier announcements stated the game would require a 68030 CPU and 4MB of FastRAM (see "Additional sources" below), now Double Sided Games' announcement just mentions a (stock?) Amiga 1200.

https://doublesidedgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/super-metal-hero-amiga-5-1024x614.png

"Super Metal Hero" seems to be somehow inspired by "(Mini) Metal Slug", which would partly explain the possible higher hardware requirements, but then this is just speculation, we'll have to wait for a final release to really know what hardware it runs on.

Whatever - it looks great, it sounds great, it moves great, it just oozes "arcade". This is certainly among the most exciting games of 2020.

Watch the latest gameplay teaser video for "Super Metal Hero" (July 29, 2020):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFgm87kbs8

You can go to Double Sided Games' website and read their full 2020 games line up, including "Super Metal Hero":
https://doublesidedgames.com/announcing-2020-games-line-up/

Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2020-02-00072-EN.html

Bagman

"Bagman" is an open-source remake of the 1982 arcade game, for Windows, NintendoDS and: Amiga! According to author Jotd, he's disassembled the original arcade game code to get the game mechanics (near) perfectly right.

"Bagman" original arcade game flyer
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Bagman_arcade_flyer.png

There are two separate Amiga versions available: a "big" one for machines with gfx boards, for which some FastRAM and acceleration is recommended to get decent performance and playability, and a "small" one, which only requires 2MB of memory, and should run at 50 FPS arcade-perfect speed. The "big" version also requires SDL and AHI, but offers a quite unique "panoramic" widescreen mode. Long story short: this looks like another fine retro release, with a proper Amiga port, and classic fun original game!

Watch the "version 2C" work-in-progress game video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj4rYteTrL4

Find more information about "Bagman" remake on Jotd's website:
https://jotd.pagesperso-orange.fr/bagman/index.html

If you wanna dig really deep, you can find "Bagman" sources and developer information on GitHub: https://github.com/jotd666/bagman

Additional sources:
http://www.amigarevive.eu/new-games/new-amiga-game-bagman-remake-wip/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagman_(video_game)
http://www.indieretronews.com/2019/12/bagman-arcade-classic-gets-early-alpha.html
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=51741
http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=7403

"Legacy" (2003) port

Legacy is a first-person turn-based RPG originally released in 2003. It got ported to the Amiga from around 2013 to 2019, but that version never got published. Thanks to EAB member BSzili, since February 2020 an Amiga demo version is available, and it doesn't look shabby at all.

It's a typical dungeon crawler, with nicely drawn graphics, that runs in 320x240, or 640x400 (640x480 RTG) pixels screen modes. System requirements are an ECS or AGA Amiga with Kickstart 3.0 or higher, 1MB ChipRAM, 4MB FastRAM, 68020 or better CPU, and harddrive. Graphics cards (RTG) are supported. If you're using the Amiga's native chipset you can install some patches for better performance (BlazeWCP for WB3.1, or SystemPatch for WB3.0)

Currently there's no definitive info if a full version will be released. But if you're really into playing "Legacy" after you've tried it on your Amiga, you can buy the original full version of the game (by Redshift, for PDA devices) and continue playing - the game-save data is compatible!

Here's a game video from famous YouTuber Saberman's channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oANXGTNj5os

You can download "Legacy" demo from BSzili's website:
http://bszili.morphos.me
(NOTE: 2020-08-02 "Legacy"download link currently broken)

Additional sources:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=100916
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/02/legacy-pda-dungeon-crawler-will-be.html
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/02/legacy-pda-dungeon-crawler-was-in-works.html
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2020-02-00073-DE.html
https://www.mobygames.com/game/legacy_

"Tapper" 1982 arcade game port

In March 2020 EAB member "Old_Bob" published news about his new port of classic arcade game "Tapper" to the Amiga. It requires an Amiga with OCS chipset and 1MB of ChipRAM. That's cool, no fancy stuff here.

The arcade game was great, the Commodore 64 version was great, all existing versions of "Tapper" are great fun to play, and this new Amiga port looks just as if it would continue this great tradition of serving beer at high speed and satisfying your customers. We're very happily looking forward to the final release.

Here's an updated demo video from April (work-in-progress V.02a):

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XhvQRtzvx8

Additional sources:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=101226
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2020-03-00024-EN.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapper_(video_game)
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/03/tapper-arcade-beer-drinking-classic.html

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tapper-31 (Windows, CPC, Atari 8bit, ColecoVision, Apple II versions)

Verge World Icarus Rising

Retro Bones Games presents "Verge World Icarus Rising", a voxelspace 3D racer with some shoot-em-up and exploration elements. You play as Nix, a smuggler on a desert planet, who needs to complete the "Death Run" challenge, in order to be accepted by the good guys and join the revolution against the tyrannical, corporate regime. Awesome.

You basically manoeuvre your air-/spacecraft through canyons at high speed. The game uses a voxelspace real-time raycasting graphics engine that's looks amazingly fast, and it's handdrawn titles, in-game pictures, and sprites are pixel art at it's finest, very reminiscent of 1950s/60s science-fiction artwork. The sound effects and music deserve special mentioning, as these too have been worked on to support the "classic sci-fi" atmosphere of the game.

Watch the latest work-in-progress demo video (June 4th, 2020):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfHUqd_KdzU

Go to Retro Bones' website for more information, and "Verge World Icarus Rising" demo download:
http://retrobones.com/

Additional sources:
https://www.facebook.com/RetroBonesGames/
http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/03/verge-world-icarus-rising-unusual-wip.html

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Bonus gaming news:

Inviyya update: Demo V2

We've met "Inviyya" before, we know that it's gonna be a great "R-Type" style shoot-em-up game - but just to remind you that you need "Inviyya", here's the latest demo version video (V2, of March 8th 2020) showing a couple of new features since the last one has been published:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD9G7CA4v5o

As always, go to Tigerskunk's website for more updates, and "Inviyya" demo download:
https://tigerskunk.itch.io/inviyya

Additional sources:
https://www.facebook.com/Inviyya/
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=84345
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=88840 
 

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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #8"!

Check out "Games galore" main page with all articles - click here!

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