Channel Z 3/Channel Z - Issue 3 (1993-01)(Daz)(Disk 1 of 2).adf/reviews/reviews

Text File | 1991-10-14 | 9KB | 195 lines

 REVIEWS....

 Our reviews section covers All things to do with the AMIGA, from
 Games software to Hardware ! Heres this Issues offerings.....




 OVERKILL  by  MINDSCAPE,  Price £19.99,  Disks 2.



 Well I'd read the reviews, it sounded good, looked good from the screen
 shots and lets face it, it was ONLY for the A1200/A4000.
 So off I went to my faithful Virgin megastore, and there it was on the
 shelf with a big gold "A1200 Enhanced" sticker on it. I quickly took
 it to the cash desk, where I was confronted by the usual long haired
 hippy cashier, wearing a Metalica T-Shirt, and a glazed expression.

 "Can I help you, man?"
 "Yes please, is this game any good?" I was definately going to buy it
 but I just wanted to hear what he had to say.

 "Oh,right,yeah man, Overkill? er,what machine's it for?, Oh yeah, A1200,
  er, sorry dunno."

 It never ceases to amaze me how most of the staff in these computer stores
 dont know a thing about what they are selling. Anyway I bought it, and
 left him to light up a joint or something.

 Well what do you get for your hard earned £19.99.

 A rather smart poster of the box cover (with instructions for the game
 on the back), a mindscape catalogue, an epilepsy warning (not as stupid
 as it sounds), a leaflet flogging mindscapes Miracle piano teaching system
 and your two "OVERKILL" disks.
 Well I inserted the disks (Disk 2 into my external drive), after a short
 pause it came up, "Please insert disk 2". Yet another game that does not
 recognise an external drive.
 Once the game has loaded you are presented with a small map of the galaxy
 and the planets you can go to. Once this is done you are into the game
 proper.
 Now this is where something strange happens, on my TV, the screen is cut
 off at the very top and very bottom. Now I know there is nothing wrong
 with my TV or my Computer so it must be the programmers fault.
 (If anyone suffers from the same thing let me know through CHANNEL Z).

 If you've played any version of DEFENDER you will know what to expect
 from this game. You are in charge of a small craft and the joystick
 controls your direction of flight, your fire button will unleash a
 variety of different laser beams at the baddies. In place of a smart bomb,
 which destroyed everything on screen in the original Defender, you have a
 limited amount of shield which is turned on by the space bar.
 But you are not alone, you have help, support troops who can blow up the
 crystals which ar lying at the bottom of the screen. The troops are released
 from a small ship at the beginning of the level and once they reach a crystal
 they blow it up he (you can tell they are men, they've all got their mouths
 closed)  [ooh,er - ED]  will jump up and down until you pick him up and put
 him back down (near to another crystal)  The graphics change level to level.
 All have parallax scrolling, level two in particular, where the effect
 created is pretty stunning. When your ship is destroyed your pilot will
 run away from the ship before it explodes, very impressively I might add.
 Colours during the game have not been used very well and sounds during the
 game are very minimal. Where the game scores high is playability, no matter
 how many times I died, I always come back to it. That is very rare in AMIGA
 games now, it may not be graphically amazing but it keeps you coming back
 for more. Another thing is they are right in the magazines, no matter what
 happens on screen, no matter how many aliens there are, it never slows down.

 To sum it up, well, its defender with flashy graphics, its only for the A1200
 its very playable,it gets very hard very quickly, and unless you've got a
 joystick with autofire, life will be very difficult. Oh yes and I've
 managed to get to level four, and my dads bigger than your dad, my house
 is bigger than your house, Oh, er, sorry, got a bit carried away there.
 Well Ive never wrote a review before so I hope your a bit wiser about
 OVERKILL. It is difficult to write a review without screenshots but Ive
 done my best.
 Please buy the original copy of the game like I have, I know its expensive,
 but if Mindscape are good enough to lower the price of the game, at least
 you can support them.

 Ratings:

 GRAPHICS      : 75%
 SOUND EFFECTS : 45%
 MUSIC         : 20%
 PLAYABILITY   : 87%
 LASTABILITY   : 85%
                                                     Paul Horton.







 BODY BLOWS GALACTIC (A1200/A4000)  by Team 17,   Price £29.99,  Disks 2
 (refered to as GALACTIC)




 Well, first of all lets have a look at what you get for your money.
 First there is the rather sexy black box with a nice piece of artwork
 on the front showing six of the fighters, after opening the box,you are
 confronted by a quite thin manual, the first two pages of this are in
 English,and the rest of the book is in different languages, exept for the
 back six pages which cover the joystick movements, and all the special
 moves that each player can pull off! After reading the manual you then
 come accross your TWO game disks, but, this is the rather nice bit,
 you then come accross a THIRD disk which contains a demo of OVERDRIVE and
 a COMPLETE game called APACHE. Yes, a FREE game, although its a limited
 edition, so if you want to get APACHE you'd better go and buy GALACTIC
 right now!

 First a quick look at APACHE, its a helicopter pick'em up game that is
 very similar to CHOPLIFTER, but its had the usual Team 17 work over
 and now has multilevel parralax scrolling, sampled speach and lovely
 graphics! Thats enough for APACHE anyway, we're here to review GALACTIC
 so lets get on with it!

 The first thing that struck me while I was reading the Manual was a short
 line that said - "Galactic supports external disk drives and memory"!

 YES! ! a game that actually likes an external drive! The game is only on
 two disks so this means NO disk swapping EVER ! ! !

 If however you don't have an external diskdrive, DON'T WORRY, as the
 disk swapping during the game is kept to a bare minimum !
 When you load the game, the first thing you come accross is the BODY BLOWS
 title screen, but with a quick press of the fire button, you are taken to
 the options screen where you can choose near enough anything!
 The nice thing about GALACTIC is that you can choose to be ANY of the
 fighters, even the bad guys, there are twelve fighters to choose from each
 with their own characteristics and special moves. They are,

 DINO,DRAGON,WARRA,PHANTOM,INFERNO,DAN,LAZER,KAI-TI,JUNIOR,TEKNO,AZONA and
 PUPPET.

 The only two fighters that have survived from the first game "BODY BLOWS"
 are DAN and JUNIOR. Each player has a total of twelve different movements,
 not including the usual kicking and punching moves, like TEKNO who can do
 the RETRO THRUST and THUNDER SHOT !
 The moves are very easy to pull off and there is even a quick guide at the
 back of the manual on how to do them.

 Graphicly the game is very nice to look at with 256 colour graphics and
 parralax scrolling on some levels, what really caught my eye was the sky
 on the planet ECLIPSE ( you travel to different planets during the game)
 which is red and yellow and is scrolling towards the monitor screen,
 and the water that you have to stand in whilst on the planet FEMINION
 which is constantly moving, also on FEMINION there are three waterfalls
 in the backdrop, these look very familier to the waterfalls on the
 great SEGA game SONIC (you have heard of SONIC have'nt you?)

 The graphics are well drawn and the colours have been used to the full,
 with the fighters being well drawn and visible against the backgrounds.
 Team 17 have added a nice touch to the Two player game, if you both choose
 the same fighter, each fighter will be drawn in a different colour,
 AKA STREET FIGHTER 2.

 Two of the fighters to look out for are DINO who is a dinosaur with a little
 green dude on his back that he throws at the enemy ! This is called the
 SLINGSHOT ! Also there is  PHANTOM who is very fast and flys all over the
 place and can even sink into the ground.

 This is definatly a game to look out for, go out and buy it NOW !


 Before I stop typing I think I should mention a small bit of text in the
 manual that caught my eye -

 PIRACY
       Copying or using an illegal copy of this game is a crime. Piracy
 is putting further games development at risk. This may turn out to be
 the last dedicated AMIGA product Team 17 produce if Piracy  does not cease.
 The future of AMIGA games is in the hands of true AMIGA fans. Support the
 AMIGA - a game worth playing is a game worth buying.

                                             (c) Team 17 Software Ltd
                                                 All right reserved

 So take note, there NOT joking.

GRAPHICS     - 90%
SOUND/MUSIC  - 87%
LASTABILITY  - 89%
PLAYABILITY  - 86%

                                                       Darren.