AMIGA alive

AMIGA alive

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Games galore #27: Turbo Tomato, Ms Pac-Man 500, Shadow Warrior, Devil's Temple, Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd

Among the many arcade style game releases, in this issue we also have a slightly unusual point-and-click adventure from Germany.

Turbo Tomato

Around July 2021 arcade action game "Turbo Tomato" by Nivrig games was released, and got an update to v1.1.0 in October.

It's a fast paced collect-and-evade game involving bombs, obviously tomato, and mutated vegetables. Doesn't that sound awesome? Yes it does, and you can even play it in 2-player-cooperative mode. Lots of levels, lots of enemies, and lots of explosions should keep you entertained for hours and hours.

You can get a digital edition of "Turbo Tomato", but real Amiga gamers choose the "Deluxe Collector's" edition - see link below video for both options. The collector's edition includes a 3.5 inch floppy, printed manual, poster, stickers - and a "Turbo Tomato" magnet for your fridge.

The game requires an Amiga with 1MB of ChipRAM and Kickstart 2.0, and can be installed to harddisk.

Here's the game's release trailer on NIVRIG's YouTube channel (2021-07-31):

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

Go to Bitmap Soft's website for more information, and get your copy of "Turbo Tomato":
https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk

Additional sources:
https://nivrig.itch.io/turbo-tomato
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2021-10-00036-EN.html


Ms Pac-Man 500

After developer Jean-Francois Fabre aka JOTD's "Pacman 500" comes "Ms Pac-Man 500" - another near-perfect arcade conversion. 

Many classic games running on coin-op machines in the 1980s got ported to home computers and consoles back in the day, at the time when they were successful at the arcades, or shortly after. "Pac Mac" and "Space Invaders" would be quite prominent examples, everyone wanted to have these games running on his/her machine - sometimes regardless of the price: "Pac Man" for the Atari VCS 2600 had to make huge sacrifices in graphics and sound, resulting in a game that looks vastly different from the arcade original. Some Amiga conversions are especially disappointing, where better quality would've been technically possible, but wasn't achieved due to lack of hardware programming know-how by the developers. In some cases, for whatever reasons, a game wouldn't be available for the Amiga at all. 

Nowadays a handful of experienced Amiga developers have come to change this situation for a growing list of games - for a couple of years now great arcade conversions keep popping up, among which are "Bubble Bobble" as "Tiny Bobble", "Gradius" as "Tinyus", and "Jackal", to name just a few.

Well, so here's "Ms Pac-Man", near-perfectly converted from the original, with all the levels, intro animation, intermissions, and so on, in smooth 50Hz framerate, for all Amigas with at least Kickstart1.3 and 512K RAM (or Kickstart 2.0 and 1MB RAM) - great work!

Here's a video from Jean-François Fabre's YouTube channel (2021-10-27):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGI-lNRBUw

Go to the game's itch.io website for more information and "name-your-own-price" download:
https://jotd666.itch.io/mspacman-500

Additional sources:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=108339
http://hol.abime.net/6483


Shadow Warrior

"Shadow Warrior" is another first person shooter that was ported to the Amiga by BSZili around April/May 2021. Just like his other "Build" game ports "Blood" and "Exhumed" ("Powerslave"), it requires a powerful Amiga (68040/68060/Vampire), and some game data files from one of the PC versions. An updated version of "Shadow Warrior" was recently released to AmiNet. 

It's quite a gory game, with a tone similar to "Duke Nuke'em 3D", but in terms of Amiga-first-person-shooters it's certainly also among the best, bringing "advanced" raycasting techniques from the PC to the Amiga. 

Here's a video of "Shadow Warrior" running on an Amiga 1200 / 68060@66MHz from anouk33's YouTube channel (2021-05-20):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhB97A3ZEIE

You can grab "Shadow Warrior" from AmiNet:
http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/jfsw

See AmiNet readme file for more information about game requirements, or just go here and download PC shareware version:
http://www.jonof.id.au/buildgames/sw.html

Additional sources:
https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=4661
http://bszili.morphos.me/
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1512859
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=106580

Devil's Temple - Son of Kung-Fu Master

What started as "Kung Fu Master Remastered" has become "Devil's Temple": Graeme Cowie was working on a remake of arcade beat'em-up classic "Kung Fu Master" for OCS Amigas, with a planned release date some time in early 2022, but the author's goals have changed a bit: Over time this remake has turned into a re-imagining of the idea, with very different graphics, additions in gameplay, an original soundtrack, and so on: Son of Kung-Fu Master!

A playable demo has been released, along with a teaser video, and pretty much everything about this game already looks and sounds great. Fans of beat'em-up games will love this new title, that obviously has elements from "Kung-Fu Master", but also "Renegade" and "Final Fight", all presented in full 16-bit Amiga quality.

Here's "Devil's Temple" teaser video from Graeme Cowie's YouTube channel (2022-04-04):


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-E7GFX-vWg

You can download latest "Devil's Temple" demo at:
https://mcgeezer.itch.io/kung-fu-remaster

Additional sources:
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=110293
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=107812
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2021-11-00027-DE.html

Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd

Author Timo Kloss has released his point-and-click adventure "Ermentrud - Held mit Pferd" ("Hero with horse"). Initial development of the game dates back about 20 years, when it was created on the Amiga using the author's own "Inga" graphic adventure engine. (You can find it on AmiNet.) For some reason it was never properly finished - until Dec. 2021, when Timo decided to fix it and stitch it together, and release it to the public. 

So we get a somehow incomplete, but well playable, good looking, outstanding sounding (~190MB WAV soundtrack!) graphic adventure that should give you at least a couple of hours of good fantasy entertainment, with its funny storyline and dialogue, about 20 game characters, and about 40 locations to visit.

"Ermentrud" is currently only available in German language, but for many platforms (AmigaOS 3.x with graphics card, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, Windows, MacOS), and obviously requires a harddisk.

Here's a trailer video from Inutilis Software's YouTube channel (2021-11-13):


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

Go to the game's web page for more information:
https://www.inutilis.com/portfolio/ermentrud-das-spiel/


...or download it right away from it's itch.io page:
https://inutilis.itch.io/ermentrud

Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2021-12-00026-DE.html
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2021-11-00038-EN.html
https://www.timokloss.com
https://twitter.com/timo_inutilis

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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for "Games galore #28"!


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