Amiga Power/AmigaPower37Disk1.ZIP/AP37.nfo

Text File | 2000-08-06 | 12KB | 274 lines

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 AMIGA POWER        Issue #37 coverdisk (.ADF/PAL)             May 1994
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 It's back.  Back!  BACK!  The second disk on the front of AMIGA POWER
 is back for good (well, for the foreseeable future, at least), and to
 celebrate we've gone complete-game crazy, with all the PD titles from
 our brand-new All-Time Top 100, plus some other ones, plus a... well,
 *look*.

 Introducing disk 37...


 BANSHEE

   A big chunk from out of Core Design's superb-looking new A1200-
   specific vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up.  If you haven't got an
   A1200 already, get one now and play this.


 THE BEST PD GAMES EVER!

   When we were compiling this year's brand-new All-Time Top 100 (turn
   to page 11 for the full rundown), we were more than a little
   surprised to find no less than five (count 'em!) Public Domain games
   sneaking into the listing while our backs were turned.  We thought
   that this was something worth shouting about, though (in these
   recession-conscious days), so we've stuck 'em all on a disk for you
   (except for Tetris Pro, which was on the cover just two issues ago),
   along with a few more choice cuts from the land of the free (game)
   which didn't quite make it.  But which ones are which?  You'll have
   to read the Top 100 to find out...


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 BANSHEE
 Authors: Core Design
 A1200 Only

 WHAT IT IS
 Banshee (orig. Irish folklore) noun.  A female spirit who wails and
 shrieks before a death in the family to which she is attached.

 HOW TO PLAY
 Interesting indeed, but quite what a screaming girlie ghost has to do
 with an aeroplane is beyond us.  Maybe the scream's being produced by
 the howling turbo-prop as it shrieks over the waves, and perhaps the
 impending death refers to the fiery waves of outgoing ordnance.  Or
 maybe the programmers just liked the sound of it.
    Who knows?  Who cares?  Not us for sure, because when a game demo's
 this good, they could have called it 'Mr Jolly-Tots Goes to Plimble-
 Land' and we'd still like it.  Resurrecting that tried-and-tested 1943
 formula (but only on the A1200, sorry A500 owners), Banshee pits your
 reflexes against slightly crap enemies.  Poor quality soldiers they
 may be, but when there's hundreds and hundreds of them, even
 pathetically slow guided missiles and badly-aimed bullets tend to get
 in your way.
    Power-ups are rewarded for blowing up something big, and if
 everything gets too intense, you can loop-the-loop your way out of
 danger (Player one - space bar, player two - numbers on the keypad) as
 long as the display on the left says you can.  Power ups remain even
 when you're killed (hurrah!) and are cumulative, so double hoorah, and
 many, but not all of them, are listed here:

 [propellor icon] These little propellors make you zip about quicker.
 [missile icon]  Notches up your firing to speed up that death thang.
 [stack icon]    This one has us stumped.  Hard hitting bullets, maybe.
 [diverge icon]  Gives you two diverging streams of fire.  Whoopee.
 [looping icon]  Yee-haw!!  It's a spare loop-the-loop power up thing.
 [arrows icon]   The ever so helpful 'two extra directions to fire in'
 [wrench icon] Cleverly repairs your plane in mid flight. A Good Thing.

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 SOKO BAN
 Author: John Hardie

 WHAT IT IS
 Calling all programmers, calling all programmers.  As you'll have
 almost certainly worked out by now, we're back up to two disks at the
 moment.  Now whereas some mags just spread out one disk worth of stuff
 over two to con you into thinking you're getting more ('Add value.' --
 A Publisher), we're determined to keep ours choc-a-block full of
 playable stuff.  This means that now more than ever, we need all
 manner of quality merchandise, so if you've got any, send it in and
 you WILL be rewarded.

 HOW TO PLAY
 John Hardie from West Lothian heard the call and sent us this tricky
 little puzzler.  Instructions are in the game, but basically you've
 got to race against the clock to push blocks about, which is a lot
 harder than it sounds.  You have to cover all of the 'block
 destination' squares with blocks, for reasons which we can't quite
 recall right now, and you can only push the blocks, not pull them.
 It's tough, so wear a hat.

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 PONG (Top 100)
 Author: Claudio Buraglio

 WHAT IT IS
 In 1972, Nolan Bushnell formed a small company in California and hired
 a young programmer called Allen Alcorn to come up with a game.  Three
 months later, they'd finished the prototype version, which they took
 down to Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale.  They taped a box onto the
 machine and asked for people to put quarters in it, and by the end of
 the next year, coin-op versions of this crude machine had raked in
 over $3 million.  The game was called Pong, the company was called
 Atari, and the rest is history...

 HOW TO PLAY

 PLAYER ONE KEYS:                     PLAYER TWO KEYS:
 Left Shift - Up                      Right Shift - Up
 Left Alt   - Down                    Right Alt   - Down
 Ctrl       - Serve                   Return      - Serve

 F1 - Cycles Player One controls
 F2 - Cycles Player Two controls
 F10 - Large/small bats
 Del - Reset score
 Help - Toggle colour/mono mode (use in conjunction with the number pad
        for that classic full-on black-and-white look)
 Space - Toggle through tennis/football/squash/practice
 + and - on keypad - Increases/decreases ball speed

 Holding down Help in combination with...
 Keypad 1-3 - Alters amount of blue
 Keypad 4-6 - Alters amount of green
 Keypad 7-9 - Alters amount of red

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 ASTEROIDS (Top 100)
 Author: Kris Schulte

 WHAT IT IS
 Prepare for a 1979 flashback!  T-shirts were tight and horrible, pants
 were flared and horrible, Blondie, The Jam and Hot Chocolate were
 topping the music charts and Asteroids was the smash hit at the
 arcades.  Converted perfectly from the coin-up version by German coder
 Kris Schulte, this version shows you youngsters out there what arcade
 games used to be like before all of that colour nonsense reared its
 head.  As with Defender, for some odd A1200 reason, you can't press
 two keys at the same time, which if nothing else is one up for
 standard Amiga owners.  You can't win Asteroids, so it's just a
 question of how long before you lose.  Big rocks become little rocks,
 the screen wraps around on all sides and the small UFOs aim at you
 whereas the big ones fire randomly.  In the bad old days this was an
 A500-only game, but now A500+, A600 and A1200 owners can join in the
 fun too.  All hail AMIGA POWER!

 HOW TO PLAY
 Although you can use a joystick (up to thrust, down for hyperspace) we
 strongly recommend you use the keyboard (as long as you don't have an
 A1200), and that you start playing.  Right now.

 . - Thrust
 Z - Rotate left
 X - Rotate right
 Space - Hyperspace
 / - Fire

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 DEFENDER (Top 100)
 Authors: Acid Software

 WHAT IT IS
 Coin-op giant Williams' addition to the arcade games hall of fame came
 in 1982 with the introduction of the terrible fast, awfully frantic
 tiresomely perfect blast-everything-to-hell-and-rescue-the-Humanoids-
 'em-up Defender.  This version's written in Blitz Basic 2 by top
 Antipodean programming team Acid Software, and it's arcade-perfect
 apart from the hyperspace (there isn't one) and the laser beams (which
 are shorter) but we reckon you can live with that.

 HOW TO PLAY
 The keys work like this:

 A - Up
 Z - Down
 Space - Reverse
 ? - Thrust
 Shift - Fire
 Return - Smart Bomb

 ...or you can use the joystick for everything except Smart Bombs.

 Check the scanner at the top for green Landers, which are trying to
 make off with your purple Humanoids.  If you shoot a Lander that's
 grabbed a Humanoid and then place the Humanoid back on the ground, you
 get a bonus, but if it reaches the top, it turns into a Mutant which
 then follows you until one of you gets killed. Pods, Bombers, Swarmers
 and Baiters get in on the act by trying to kill you, but on the good
 side, you do get an extra life and smart bomb every 10,000 points.

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 LLAMATRON (Top 100)
 Author: Jeff Minter

 WHAT IT IS
 Jeff Minter's classic blaster may look a bit 8-bitty on these screen
 shots, but once the screen's filled with superfast monsters (and
 llamas) and there's outgoing fire in all directions, you tend to
 forget about this and concentrate on PD's finest hour.  Looking more
 Smash TV than most official versions of the frantic 360-degree
 coin-op, Llamatron's set in a near future where aliens are killing
 every sheep, goat and llama on the planet, which is shallow enough
 justification for all this slaughter.

 HOW TO PLAY
 If it doesn't look like a farm-yard animal, kill it.  If it does,
 rescue it and then kill everything else.  You fire automatically in
 the direction you're moving but the fire button locks the direction.
 Remember -- Shoot everything that doesn't have four legs.  Got that?

 WHAT IT IS (SLIGHT RETURN)
 NB  Llamatron is a Shareware game, so if you like it, you really ought
 to bung a fiver in the direction of Jeff Minter.  The address, we
 hope, can be found on the disk.  Jeff will send you some other nice
 stuff.  Do the right thing.

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 ALS
 Authors: Team 4½

 WHAT IT IS
 Here on AP we love two things -- old Spectrum games and up and coming
 programmers.  So how could we resist the following letter?

    Dear AP,
    Oh dear.  In classic Spectrum fashion, Team 4½ have started their
    career by sending you a stylishly poor game.  Try it on your Amiga
    and it should be hunky-funky-dory, but if not, well tie me down
    with a freshly poked Volvo, you might presume that ALS is "Kaputt"
    as the Germans might say.  Which it is, sort of.
    Hugs 'N' Kisses, C-Monster and Team 4½

 ALS stands for Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, an 8-bit classic first
 seen in the pages (and on the covertape) of our dear deparated sister
 magazine Your Sinclair.  And before you write in and complain -- we
 know, alright?

 HOW TO PLAY
 Oh, you'll work it out.

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 MONACO
 Author: David Taylor

 WHAT IT IS
 A conversion of original Sega coin-op Monaco GP which, embarrassingly,
 is still Stuart's all-time favourite driving game.

 HOW TO PLAY
 Race through the day.  Start off at the side of the track.  Accelerate
 and take over the pack.  Crash.  Race through the rain.  Start off at
 the side of the track.  Accelerate and take over the pack.  Crash.
 Race through the dead of night.  Start off at the side of the track.
 Accelerate and take over the pack.  Crash.  And so on.

 NB  Some A600 owners may experience problems running Monaco in 50Hz
 mode.  We're not quite sure why, but, er, sometimes it works and
 sometimes it doesn't.  So keep trying.  Sorry.

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 SPECIAL THANKS TO:  Amiga Action for all the dust.  Now why not eat
 some of ours, lads?

 Amiga Power is printed in the UK.  Copyright Future Publishing 1994

 Note:  All games were verified to load under one emulator or another.

 Docs re-keyed courtesy of Knuckles Dragon.  Original author uncertain.
 Please send clarification to:  [e-mail]