I AM IRONCLAW!
Amiga Longplay [239] Peter Pan (Coktel Vision)(French version)
updated
L.E.D. = Lazer Enhanced Destruction.
Capital: 02:35
Netwood Forest: 03:48
Coral Sea: 05:08
Big Cave Tunnel: 06:24
Ruins Desert: 07:44
Million Valley: 09:04
Thunder Road: 10:24
Marine Snow Pipe: 11:48
Sky City: 13:13
"Outro" and highscores: 14:32
Taking the "?" can be a huge risk. They can do good things, but also bad things like reversing the controls, spam your bombs against your will, making you walk slower, think I had the screen turn upside down at one point too (wasn't recorded, happened during testing). And if you get one that makes you walk through walls, be careful to not be inside a wall when the effect stops working, or you get stuck.
This game uses a bigger screen-size than normal for an Amiga game (overscan), so using the default settings (which I never do for anything anyway, always my own custom configurations) in WinUAE (emulator) doesn't seem to show all the four corners of the border (it's usually one side missing). This is shown in all the screenshots on Hall of Light (Amiga game database), on the Lemon Amiga site, and also in videos on YouTube as no one used the correct settings. I did tho, yay for me *pats himself on the back*.
This game loads soooooo slow for some reason, and there's music during the loading, so I left all the loading in. Use the timestamps to skip them.
I found 3 different speeds of this game. One cracked version ran very slow (music too), another a bit faster. I use the .ipf version which ran the fastest. I didn't have NTSC toggled on, with it on it ran even faster (ofc).
There's some sound glitches in all versions and emulator settings I tried. YouTube has a video of this game recorded straight from the original hardware and it has it too. But another video on YouTube that is emulated didn't seem to have it, dunno what version and stuff they might have used.
Anyway, the version recorded from the original hardware ran the slowest. I usually rip the music so see the "intended speed", but the simple music ripper in the emulator didn't find a recognizable music format, so I didn't bother trying other ways. So went with the music/game speed this version has.
Level 1: 02:28
Level 2a: 04:51
Level 2b: 06:03
Level 3: 08:31
Level 4: 10:31
Level 5: 11:47
Ending: 13:53
You get 60 seconds to solve each level, which is OK, but it's weird they count UP to 60 instead of down to 0 from 60.
It says it has 6 levels, which it kind of does, but after you've completed those and choose to restart the puzzle, you get 6 new ones with pictures in the background which makes it much harder.
At the end of each 6 rounds, you are given an IQ score. Both of mine were awful, so I did the first 6 levels again, not just to "take revenge" on the bad IQ score comments, but also to do them all in time... this time, as I didn't finish level 5 and 6 before the timer ran out.
So... "Your IQ is that of a gnat!" - Well, fuck gnat! (pun on "that", I'm so funny :P)
Here's the different messages you can get, depending on how high/low you score:
- Better you don't know.
- Well....darn
- Awful!
- Not pretty.
- OK for Policework
- That of a gnat.
- Just a rumour.
- An illusion.
- Quite simply, fiction.
- I'm too nice to tell.
- A faery tale.
- Dreadful.
- Awful.
- You A Polititian?
- OK for Politics.
- Not A Threat to ME!
- Good For your Garden.
- Getting higher.....
- Above Average
- Excellent
- Very High.
- Quite majestic.
- A thing to behold!
- Amoung the stars!
- Unmeasurable.
- Higher than mine!!!
- Exalted, grand, noble.
- Unbelievable!!
- Are you cheating?
I could get the "Are you cheating?", but not worth it. "Higher than mine!!!" was good enough :)
When starting it I was met with a "boot screen" that required a password, so I read inside the executable and found some words and tried them out. Typing "sleepsickness" or even "sleep sickness" (as both are included and accepted) displays that the access code is "dallosreport", but typing "dallosreport" (nope, not "dallasreport") just throws "password error". Another couple of words I found in the executable was "the maze", and THAT seems to be the code to enter the game. So don't know why they accept other different things that are just nonsense stuff.
I've not heard "Dallos" before so googled it just out of interest, seems there's an anime TV series named that about space.
Maybe the intended title for the game might be "Dallos Report", dunno.
The text is parsed slowly on the "boot screen", as it's the speed it shows the letters after typing them, no matter how fast I typed.
I was a bit disappointed when I noticed there was only two rooms to solve. All the other ones had the exit to the next room already opened. The end boss fight was too easy, kinda hard to even lose (I never did, not even close on my first try, nor after when I goofed around to test the abilities). *Edit* - OK, went back to fight the boss to try to lose. Man, it's hard to lose, took forever before he killed me (I would have killed him several times by now), but nothing happens, just a black screen.
I randomly found out about this game when I checked YouTube for recent Amiga game videos. For some reason none of all the recordings of this game got past room 2, which tickled my interest in trying the game. I didn't pay attention to how they solved the first room, but on my first try it took like 1-2 minutes to figure out what to do. The second room however had me stuck for like 15 minutes, lol. I knew I again of course had to figure out the right combination of numbers/words to press, and had several ideas of what they were and in which order. Like: the words I needed to press was obvious from the info I got from each place, like the blood's "Pierce Your Soul", which obviously must be the knife, the tomb is of course rope, and the pipe is wrench. But the order to press them in was harder to figure out.
At first I thought it maybe was 2, 1, 3, 1 (knife, wrench, rope, wrench), as that's the order the lights go. But that didn't work. Then I thought there's something about the red light and how it lights twice. Maybe I needed to do something with the pipe twice? Maybe something with the blood twice? Nothing worked. Then I thought MAYBE I don't need to push anything this time, it's just a distraction, and I needed to interact with the different items in the light's order, like interact with blood, then pipe, then tomb and then pipe again? If course that wasn't it :), I just wanted to try everything I could think of. So, I checked the game files, the different images... and BAM! I noticed these lights are in THREE DIFFERENT COLORS. On my screen when I played it I pretty much only saw red and two "dark colored ones". My monitor is of course perfectly calibrated, perfect RGB and all that, and I'm not color blind, but thanks to the bright area around the lights, they appear darker than they are (typical visual illusion effect thingy our eyes have in certain lighting conditions). The game window was small compared to the rest of my desktop, and the background of my desktop was pretty bright, so what only really popped to me was the red color. But of course, looking again now in the same conditions if I look closer, I see they are green and blue. I just assumed they were the same shade of dark colors due to the small window, bright background around the lights in the game and my desktop background, and I'm sitting casually too far away from my monitor lounging back in my couch. But yeah, when I viewed the picture of these lights in my image program (black background around them) I saw the colors immediately.
So, now the solution was obvious to me, it was of course: green, red, blue, red... which of course means: pipe, blood, tomb, pipe... and thus: wrench, knife, rope, wrench. So, if it wasn't for the color problem, this room would have taken me about 2 minutes instead :)
More info about the game and download link can be found here: lockeddoorpuzzle.itch.io/wrong-way-home
02:33 - Day 1
05:08 - Day 1 boss
06:03 - Day 2
09:19 - Day 2 boss
10:24 - Day 3
14:10 - Day 3 boss
15:05 - Day 4
19:28 - Day 4 boss
20:03 - Day 5
24:14 - Day 5 boss
25:03 - Day 6
28:08 - Day 6 boss
29:08 - Day 7
33:09 - Day 7 boss
A random Lily Munster picture from the show, she was kinda sexy :P - imgur.com/a/w2tr0KI
Pretty impressive as it runs perfect even on an Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM.
Reviews I've read compare this game to Raiden, another "bullet hell" shoot 'em up.
02:35 - World 1
09:32 - World 2
16:01 - World 3
20:29 - World 4
24:28 - "World 5", the game loops back to World 1, so I ended it here.
From the documentation:
*****************************************************
TECHNICAL FEATURES:
* more than 100 objects moving on screen
at the same time
* 50 (!) frames per second (fps)
(all conventional games with comparable number,
size and complexity of moving objects run at 17
or at most 25 fps only )
* Full performance on ALL AMIGAS (including A1000,A500)
* pioneering new graphics engine featuring
64 BOB's, 48 Sprites, 16 Colors
* copper driven blitter
* virtual sprite engine
* virtual playfield scrolling
* asynchronuous multi-process animation algorithm
* animation/control process separation
In other words:
The fastest arcade action game ever made for the AMIGA !
*****************************************************
Some more technical stuff, but in German:
*****************************************************
Vitual Playfield Scrolling: ( IFF ) - Graphic-Brushes beliebiger Größe,
können an jeder beliebigen Pixel - Position auf dem virtuellen Hinter-
grund plaziert werden, welcher mit beliebiger Geschwindigkeit gescrollt
werden kann. ( Größe des Virtual Playfields: bis zu 448 x 1684 Pixel )
Copper Controled Blitter: Alle Blitter-Operationen verlaufen Copper-
gesteuert, unabhängig von der CPU im Hintergrund ( Mit zunehmender An-
Zahl der BOBs erreicht dieses Verfahren gegenüber dem herkömmlichen
" Blitter-finished-Interrupt-Chaining ", wegen der relativ langsamen
Interrupt-Verarbeitung, eine Performance-Steigerung um bis zu 30%.
Interleaved Bitplane Format und Blitter Optimized Coodinate Fomat (BOC)
zur weiteren Reduzierund des " Blitter-Overheads ".
Animation/Control Process Separation: Dank dieser völlig neuartigen
Technik, bei der der gesamte Programmablauf in 3 unabhängige, asynchron
kommunizierende Prozesse aufgeteilt wird, ist die sichtbare Frame-Rate
( 50 Hz ) in keinster Weise durch die CPU-Berechnungen beschränkt, son-
dern ausschließlich durch den Blitter. Das heißt: selbst aufwendige
Berechnungen, wie z.B. 50 gleichzeitig laufende Zielsuch-Algorithmen
verlangsamen die Bildwiederholrate nicht!
Systemkonforme Programmierung, Kompatibilität: Trotz der auf die Spitze
getriebenen Ausreizung der Hardware, wurde das Programm so systemkon-
form wie möglich konzipiert. Der hardwarespezifische Teil des Programm-
codes ist über wohldefinierte Schnittstellen vom übrigen Programm abge-
kapselt, welches ausschließlich Standard-Systemfuntionen verwendet. So
läßt sich " Mega-Typhoon " z.B. problemlos auf Festplatte installieren
und wurde auf allen AMIGA-Modellen (A1000, A500, A2000, A12000, A4000)
erfolgreich getestet.
*****************************************************
"You are Vietnam war veteran Bret Conrad, who becomes an adventurer. Go everywhere on the world, find gold, walk in to the jungle... One day, you receive an old map about the lost city of Quetzacotl, and its cache of gold. You prepare your bag, gun, knife and let's go to the adventure!"
This is one of the hardest Amiga games I've played. Sooooooo crazy difficult. I lost count of how many times I died. This game was such a chore to get through, even when using savestates. There's one million ways to die.
Still tho, despite the difficulty, it's a pretty good game. It looks pretty good and the music is great.
The "?" on the main menu is "a sneak preview of the next Kinetica/U.S. Gold monster game!" (quoted from the manual)
I included just one of the deaths (as it's my fav), instead of spending a lot of time trying to find all of them. It's included at the end of the video - followed by the game over screen.
04:22 - Level 1 (Have to hurry to the right or a big-ass elephant comes and kills me)
06:10 - Level 2
10:19 - Level 3
16:45 - Level 4 (Poor sexy girl at 17:15)
18:19 - Level 5 (Using the machete a bit to show it off as I hadn't yet. It's weird it makes a sound when hitting upwards if I press UP + FIRE, but the same move with just UP doesn't play a sound)
22:29 - Ending (He always comes out with jump, so I exited the previous screen with a jump so it... "fits" better)
23:25 - A death, followed by the game over screen
Some stuff from the manual:
More than 27,000 man hours of development.
More than 7,000 frames of animation.
More than 4 megabytes of finished game compressed onto 2 double sided disks.
More than 600k of music and sound effects.
More than 8 megabytes of source code and basic data.
More than 18 megabytes of graphics compressed into 3 megabytes.
More than 140 different hero actions.
More than 1500 frames of hero animation.
More than 18,000 individual pieces of graphics.
One of my favorite games from my childhood (still own the original, like loads of other Amiga games, never threw the boxes or manuals out, like many sadly did and only kept the disks, I kept it all, yay for me!). Sure, it doesn't have the music (or slightly improved graphics) of the PC version, but it's still pretty good :).
I find it interesting that at 28:19, the door won't open if I yell the words there, I have to stand at the edge of the cliff to the right for some reason. Maybe it had better acoustics there or something? Guess it's just how the spell works, it needed the extra echo or something.
I was stuck on the sleeping goblin for a while, no matter what I tried - the ground kept making a cracking noise so he would wake up. Turns out (I guess, as this is what worked every time I tried it after I noticed) I have to wait a while first and not just go at him the second he closes his eyes. So... he apparently need to sleep for a bit before I can move without noise.
In the library at 01:00:14, I'm supposed to pull a book in the second to left aisle for the entrance in the aisle to the right of it to open, but it doesn't work for some reason. The book shows up when I use the pull option, but I just get the thumb down. However, one can just walk into the "door" anyway, but for some reason not before I've scrolled to the end of the right side of the screen (no, scrolling to the right first still won't make the pulling of the book work).
Today I found 4 versions, 3 of which have the same graphics error, but all 4 with the same broken tune on level 2. So, this time I used the version that didn't have glitched graphics.
I never care about scores in games, but after beating the game, my "score" was 98.40%, and I didn't even try. I didn't know this game's score worked like that, I just expected points and stuff, so didn't even think about the scores until after I beat it. So, in this case, just for the hell of it, I would not have let some soldiers escape so I could get 100%, as that sounds more fun than points :), but too late now. Still got to first place tho. Had to kill myself tho for the scores to show, because if you beat the game, it ends on the ending screen and won't follow with the highscores. When I killed myself at the last boss, I spawned at the spot you see at the end of the video, and I let the rest of the lives go there as well. Out of curiosity I checked to see if the % would go up if I killed the soldiers (again) on that screen, but it didn't. So seems each soldier = a %, and killing the same one twice doesn't add to it.
Anyway, KICK ASS music!
Annoying "beeping" in the sound, and every video on YouTube of this game has it too. Even one that is supposedly recorded on the real hardware. So doesn't seem like an emulation issue. I don't use an audio filter for most games I record via emulation (WinUAE) as I like the sound when it's clearer/crisp and plays more like the source audio files if listened to separately. With filters the audio is just too muffled, but this is the default setting and is what 99/100 people use. Thus, "beeps" might hear clearer with filters off, but still noticeable in those videos with filter on as well.
02:53 - Day One
09:03 - Day Two
14:36 - Day Three
21:36 - Ending
23:16 - Highscores
00:00 - Intro
02:22 - Sierra County
06:10 - The Big City
10:02 - The Border
14:11 - South America
20:08 - Credits
20:20 - Extras - some game over/death thingies
For info on recording/playing this type of game, check out the video description of "Mad Dog McCree" and/or "Who Shot Johnny Rock?"
I like this one more than my previous two ALG-games. They seem to have had a decent budget, the music was cool (they even made it sync to some light stuff here and there, like at 17:08 and 18:54), and it included a strip club :P
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Rookie missions
03:53 - Undercover missions
08:30 - SWAT missions
11:51 - Delta missions
20:10 - Credits
For info on recording/playing this type of game, check out the video description of "Mad Dog McCree" and/or "Who Shot Johnny Rock?"
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
A few minor editing errors. Happens easily when putting these type of videos together. For more info on recording/playing this type of game, check out the video description of "Mad Dog McCree" and/or "Who Shot Johnny Rock?"
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:03 - Credits
02:17 - How to play
02:54 - Time to play
13:07 - Ending
Extras (only picked what I thought was worth showing):
13:43 - The old man dying
14:19 - The undertaker you visit whenever you die
15:25 - The undertaker doesn't like when you shoot innocent people
16:07 - You're being shot (16:46 - poor horsey)
As with all my Amiga videos, I record them using WinUAE (an emulator) with its built-in avi recorder. But couldn't this time as it doesn't capture the audio for genlock stuff (or I just don't know how to make it happen), so had to resort to using a third party recording tool instead, which caused a bunch of problems.
Couldn't use the typical savestates method I normally do as I can't use WinUAE's own avi recorder, so had to come up with a new way. I re-encoded the video with a frame counter outside the game-display area, so I could more easily cut out unwanted mistakes and match the different parts together as I was constantly saving and loading states while recording one big video file.
The video needed to be re-encoded anyway as those I found online that were recommended for use with WinUAE had the wrong aspect ratio (you can tick the "keep aspect ratio" box on the Genlock tab in the emulator, but it only makes it a little bit more accurate, not fully). They also have interlace line stuff (and the seeking took too long for my taste, so made them seek instantly instead). I found on YouTube a higher res version of some of these ALG games without interlace + they were in 60fps instead of 29.970/30. So was thinking of using them for my longplays instead, but... fuck it, couldn't be bothered, and the ones I used were the "recommended" ones anyway, even though I myself could make better looking/running ones. Even with any scanline/interlace stuff turned off (afaik) in WinUAE, the emulator still added some of its own lines for some reason. You can see them in the white flash when shooting for example. These lines are not part of the video. Maybe the flash is an image by itself, dunno.
Another problem I had was getting a smooth video playback, like I get with real media players. In WinUAE via genlock it's random. Sometimes smooth, sometimes laggy (has nothing to do with how fast my computer is etc). Turning on "Standard Vsync" in the emulator helped a bit as it made the video frame rate more stable more of the time, but still stutter at least once per minute. So, I constantly quick saved and quick loaded, so whenever there was a stutter, I loaded and replayed the part until it ran smooth (I left some stutter in maybe here and there, but they are super minor). So yeah, LOADS of editing needed (https://i.imgur.com/TkJJn06.png).
Turning on the Vsync made the the sounds not part of the genlock video (like shooting, inserting coin, reloading...) play too fast. I solved this by setting my desktop refresh rate to 60 to match WinUAE's frame rate it was using for the game.
Then there's the accuracy problem of where you shoot as well. In the service menu of the game you can calibrate the aim, but that only seem to make the red dot match where the crosshair is, which is not enough to accurately be able to hit stuff. The accuracy is a lot about how wide/tall the video is and where it's positioned on the screen (yes, I even played around with the "genlock_offset_x/y" in the .uae). Seems the default non-correct aspect ratio that makes the video way too wide (IMO) makes it more accurate, but I wanted 1:1 aspect ratio. Wish we could change the width of this "flash" area, as it seems the hitboxes are based on this white area, so if we don't have the genlock video properly sized and positioned this white area is made for, shooting things will not be accurate. I made an example of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/bfMRqEX.jpeg.
So, anyway, with the video aspect ratio I chose to use, I often have to shoot far to the left or right of the things to hit them, and I sometimes try to mask this by randomly spraying the bullets on and around the target. IRL I would just hit them in the center with one bullet :) as I've played these games in the arcades before.
Oooor, maybe I just do something wrong and there was an easy solution to everything and I didn't have to go through all this trouble/effort to get a smooth video playback, or bad shooting accuracy because of things not lining up properly, and heck maybe I could even record with sound with WinUAE's avi output and use the standard way of saving/loading states. Well, so far I couldn't come up with anything better than what I've been doing after hours of research/testing.
Meh, text cap reached, had more to say.
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
This game was crazy hard. Would have cost me a million dollars to get to the end if I played it on the real thing.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:18 - Thingy
02:28 - Credits
03:36 - Time to play
16:26 - Ending
Extras (only picked what I thought was worth showing):
17:14 - The doctor and his nurse
18:12 - Funerals for the dead innocent people
18:58 - You're getting shot
As with all my Amiga videos, I record them using WinUAE (an emulator) with its built-in avi recorder. But couldn't this time as it doesn't capture the audio for genlock stuff (or I just don't know how to make it happen), so had to resort to using a third party recording tool instead, which caused a bunch of problems.
Couldn't use the typical savestates method I normally do as I can't use WinUAE's own avi recorder, so had to come up with a new way. I re-encoded the video with a frame counter outside the game-display area, so I could more easily cut out unwanted mistakes and match the different parts together as I was constantly saving and loading states while recording one big video file.
The video needed to be re-encoded anyway as those I found online that were recommended for use with WinUAE had the wrong aspect ratio (you can tick the "keep aspect ratio" box on the Genlock tab in the emulator, but it only makes it a little bit more accurate, not fully). They also have interlace line stuff (and the seeking took too long for my taste, so made them seek instantly instead). I found on YouTube a higher res version of some of these ALG games without interlace + they were in 60fps instead of 29.970/30. So was thinking of using them for my longplays instead, but... fuck it, couldn't be bothered, and the ones I used were the "recommended" ones anyway, even though I myself could make better looking/running ones. Even with any scanline/interlace stuff turned off (afaik) in WinUAE, the emulator still added some of its own lines for some reason. You can see them in the white flash when shooting for example. These lines are not part of the video. Maybe the flash is an image by itself, dunno.
Another problem I had was getting a smooth video playback, like I get with real media players. In WinUAE via genlock it's random. Sometimes smooth, sometimes laggy (has nothing to do with how fast my computer is etc). Turning on "Standard Vsync" in the emulator helped a bit as it made the video frame rate more stable more of the time, but still stutter at least once per minute. So, I constantly quick saved and quick loaded, so whenever there was a stutter, I loaded and replayed the part until it ran smooth (I left some stutter in maybe here and there, but they are super minor). So yeah, LOADS of editing needed (https://i.imgur.com/TkJJn06.png).
Turning on the Vsync made the the sounds not part of the genlock video (like shooting, inserting coin, reloading...) play too fast. I solved this by setting my desktop refresh rate to 60 to match WinUAE's frame rate it was using for the game.
Then there's the accuracy problem of where you shoot as well. In the service menu of the game you can calibrate the aim, but that only seem to make the red dot match where the crosshair is, which is not enough to accurately be able to hit stuff. The accuracy is a lot about how wide/tall the video is and where it's positioned on the screen (yes, I even played around with the "genlock_offset_x/y" in the .uae). Seems the default non-correct aspect ratio that makes the video way too wide (IMO) makes it more accurate, but I wanted 1:1 aspect ratio. Wish we could change the width of this "flash" area, as it seems the hitboxes are based on this white area, so if we don't have the genlock video properly sized and positioned this white area is made for, shooting things will not be accurate. I made an example of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/bfMRqEX.jpeg (this example is for Mad Dog McCree, but same goes for most/all these ALG games in WinUAE)
So, anyway, with the video aspect ratio I chose to use, I often have to shoot far to the left or right of the things to hit them, and I sometimes try to mask this by randomly spraying the bullets on and around the target. IRL I would just hit them in the center with one bullet :) as I've played these games in the arcades before.
Oooor, maybe I just do something wrong and there was an easy solution to everything and I didn't have to go through all this trouble/effort to get a smooth video playback, or bad shooting accuracy because of things not lining up properly, and heck maybe I could even record with sound with WinUAE's avi output and use the standard way of saving/loading states. Well, so far I couldn't come up with anything better than what I've been doing after hours of research/testing.
Meh, text cap reached, had more to say.
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
"The second game from Simulmondo based on the Italian comics character Dylan Dog, "horror detective", is a first-person view adventure game largely based on Lovecraft's literary works and their mythology (Cthulhu, the Necronomicon). While you're called to investigate on the murder of a famous archaeologist, an unprecedented volcano activity is taking place, with the scientists unable to find an explanation. The game is divided in two parts, and is quite different from other Simulmondo productions based on Dylan Dog."
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
00:00 - Intro
06:29 - Character select
06:43 - Round 1
09:02 - Boss 1
10:41 - Round 2
16:00 - Boss 2
16:57 - Bonus round
17:30 - Round 3
21:40 - Boss 3
23:11 - Round 4
28:06 - Boss 4
29:24 - Round 5
36:11 - Boss 5
37:43 - Round 6
49:44 - Boss 6
51:13 - Ending
www.iamironclaw.com
discord.gg/U5cEchTUaW
I don't think I would ever in my life be able to complete this game without a walkthrough, as there are too many things that makes no sense. I have no idea how one is supposed to figure a lot of the stuff out that I encountered during this playthrough.
The Amiga version seem to miss a bunch of in-between screens/animations that the PC version has, which can make it hard to understand the story properly in the Amiga version.
25k healed is nothing, have had 30k+ many times.
For faster loading, I used the WHDLoad version, and an instrument in the music on the water level (the one with the octopus and "mermaid") is broken. Just basic A1200 settings in the emulator with 2mb chip and 8mb fast ram, also cycle-exact, so shouldn't be a settings issue.
Not only do WHDLoad games not like savestates, but it sometimes skip stuff, like images or whatever because it loads too fast, and sometimes things just doesn't... "seem right" compared to running it off a floppy disk. But what's good about the WHDLoad version of games (besides mainly loading faster and no disk swapping because it runs off a harddrive) is games runs fine on an Amiga 1200, so no timing/speed issues. Thus I could run this game in way faster/smoother speeds as it would run fine on A1200 speeds compared to running it off floppy disks on the same machine/system. This second longplay attempt became 13 mins shorter because of how much faster they were walking and doing things.
I look forward to doing the other two games in the series as well. They are longer and even have music.
The PC version has way more... artsy stuff (mainly some full-screen pictures) than the Amiga version, but the music in the Amiga version PWNs the PC version IMO, even if the PC version used SoundBlaster or whatever soundcards.
There are two versions - this one that I did, and then an updated version (v1.1) called "Castles: The Northern Campaign". They were both released in 1992, and the 1.1 version is only a data disk with which you need to use the normal Castles disks to create a new 3-disks set.
This updated version has some new conquests and graphics, a more extensive commodities market (e.g you can buy and sell stuff). More troop and combat options. Viking units too I think, and other stuff. New plot lines and messenger screens.
But I decided to do this standard version instead of the updated one, as this is the one most of us know and love, and is the "true" version IMO. If I did the other one, you would miss out on the original plot lines and stuff.
I played through it twice while learning, then did a final recording. I don't play amazingly well I guess, but enough to win (which is not hard in this game, at least not on the difficulty I chose). My castle design is crap, I just wanted to build 50 pieces or whatever. I tried to be as good of a King as I could, which seemed to have paid off as the ending result stuff seem to be everyone loved me.
There are two "game modes" (worlds) tho. The Real World and the Fantasy World. So after I completed the Real World, I did the fantasy one, at 1:32:15. I was excited to try the fantasy one, as I read it had dragons, orcs, elves and other magical stuff. But was kinda disappointed that it was all just in text-form during the "messenger" screens. Still tho, was fun to see what happened and how it played out. Each time you start a game in either worlds has kind of a different story. Some stuff I had happen during my training playthroughs didn't happen in these two recorded ones.
The Fantasy World playthough went better than the Real World one, as I learned a bit more during the longplay. So built the castle a little bit better, did some better management of stuff, also showed off how you can reverse the view so you can look behind the castle by pressing the F key, which I saw none of the videos on YouTube show. Same was with the T key, which you can push during the messenger screens to show the amount of gold and soldiers you have. One Amiga guide on YouTube of this game gave the advice that you need to write down these stats every now and then so you know how much you have when people ask for gold or troops from you, as "there's no way to view this info during the messenger screen". Well, just read the manual and you would know there was/is a way ;). There's more keys that does different things, but F and T were the important ones.
My favorite moments was... I think during the Fantasy World run, where this dude who kept killing my deer (or whatever the animal was) over and over again, and I kept pardoning him over and over again :P. Eventually the other knights weren't happy that I kept doing this so they wanted him dead or whatever, but I just ordered to let him be, let him hunt. Then one day he disappeared, so it was probably one of the knights who finally had enough :). Too bad, I kinda miss him now lol, we had many meetings.
To win the game you just need to have all the placed pieces completely built, and you'll then get the question if you are done with the castle (this probably only happens after you've built enough pieces, didn't test it). What happens then is the final battle begins and the computer comes at you with some units, just survive and you win, ez pz. The longer I played, the more the stories seem to kept unfolding, so I was kinda tempted to keep going during the fantasy one, but decided to finish the game so completed the last pieces of the castle and defeated the enemy. I got the evil magical portal to close (chose to send the nun there to close it, which seemed to work, wonder what would have happened if I picked another option), and my deer poaching buddy was killed or just disappeared (forgot), so decided to end it there :)
There was one thing about this game that annoyed me, it's how I often accidentally click away messages and stuff the second they appeared (especially the ones telling me from which direction the enemy comes), as I was currently busy clicking on stuff. So it was often important messages was unread as they came and disappeared just as fast.
I longplayed this game over 11 years ago and it really needed to be redone for many reasons. Back then I had trouble getting two of the tunes to play properly, and even this time around as well, as normal Amiga 500/1200 settings didn't suffice. Didn't matter the ROM, chipset, cycle-exact on or off, etc. But what finally worked was turning on "fastest possible" (weird, I know). Now all tunes played perfectly, so now that problem is fixed. And, the music plays too slow compared to the music modules, but plays perfectly if I use NTSC, so seems to be an NTSC game. So for once I longplayed a game in NTSC (60hz instead of PAL's 50hz).
So, this new version have better audio and picture quality, properly playing music, more moves and deaths shown, more pixels (as I cropped the old video a bit), and maybe other stuff.
All the different difficulties seem to do is to make it... harder. I guess more enemies spawn and stuff. At least on the gondola ride the enemy are way more hasty with throwing dynamite :)
There are a lot of ways to die, but for some reason I couldn't get any of the Egypt maze doors that go up and down to hit/hurt me, not even the spikey one. One would think those would be part of the deaths. Only way to "die" by them if I jump into the second one and fall down, as you see in one of the deaths at the end of the video.
The mummy fight is just stupidly easy compared to everything else. All you need to do is slice away right from the beginning, no need to move around. Just turn around to face him and slice until you win, as you seem to do more... DPS than he does :). I moved around and fought him from different angles just to show that stuff off. Same thing with the Arabs, no challenge, but using the two dodge moves is futile as there doesn't seem to be enough time to dodge the attacks. Maybe if I started dodging the first frame they attack, then it might work. Still tho, no need for the dodges, just slice away. I started off by showing those two moves before slicing away.
The bar fight is also easy, just punch left and right, and when the enemy ducks, you knee him, repeat. But I wanted it to look more of a challenge and last a bit longer, so used useless blocks/dodges and did random stuff. At the last few seconds I just punched and kneed, as one should to make it easy and fast.
The log fight was a bit harder, but it's way easier than I make it look, as you pretty much just duck, wait until they've attacked and they you hit them and duck again. So, again I just goof around to make it last longer and stuff. The last 3 enemies I do this strategy tho.
On the last fight with the knives, I couldn't land any of my backhanded slaps. The manual says I have to wait for him to attack first to get close enough. Well, I couldn't pull it off, so mainly just punched instead.
For some reason the sound quality is awful, especially at the end with the part where I'm back in queue and messing around in the menus, it got messed up.
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"The legendary elephant’s graveyard is the greatest undiscovered mystery of The Dark Continent. The harzardous quest for its discovery has cost the life of many explorers, one of whom was your father.
As his only son, you are curious to uncover the secrets that are so violently guarded from the outside world.
You now feel complied to succeed where your father failed."
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Using the torch is not needed as we can still see everything, just a bit darker, but I sometimes use it just so we can better see stuff, as things look better with light :). I don't use it though around bats, as they attack me then.
Sometimes I walk a bit slower to not trigger creatures under the ground coming up to hurt me.
You can get stuck in some places (at least this place...) if there's stuff at that height/level when you enter the screen. For example, at 11:22, if I enter the left screen too far up, I will get stuck inside the hut graphics and can't move. Well, if positioned "right", I could move to the left while walking on top of hut and in the middle of the fence in the back, high up above the enemy so he couldn't reach me, but I couldn't get back out.
The "insert disk 2" message is unavoidable when using floppy disks. Sometimes in games I just insert disk 2 shortly before the request, but that doesn't work with this game as it won't try to detect a disk until it needs it. Normally the computer recognizes when a new disk is inserted and automatically gets it ready for when it's needed by a game or whatever... but yeah, this game has that frozen until it needs to load data. What's even weirder with this game is even if I insert disk 2 shortly (or long) before it needs it, it will still say it wants disk 2 when it tries to load the disk as it will always assume disk 1 inserted. If I leave disk 1 inserted when it asks for disk 2, and press space, it won't even check if it's disk 2, it just happily load the next content from disk 1 while assuming you inserted disk 2, and yeah... when the next level starts, it's all garbled graphics :)
The scale thingy at the end has some broken graphics, and I used the IPF version, so guess it's just broken, unless it needed a very sensitive emulator setting/configuration. I checked YouTube and found another Amiga longplay of this game, it had the same broken graphics, and he too used IPF. And no, this can't have anything to do with the "insert disk 2" thingy, as I did it correctly when recording :). I only found out about all those problems during tests.
Anyway, here's what the scale thingy is supposed to look like:
https://i.imgur.com/aFavUtx.png (it also has an end picture that we didn't get to see in the IPF version... maybe the whdload version has these issues fixed, dunno)
Seems we got only non-toxic enemies for once :/
Music title: Loopster (by Kevin MacLeod from the album Sheep Reliability)
Tag thingy: overwatch, overwatch 2, mercy, mercy otp, 4000 hours, 4000+ mercy hours, ironclaw, 4000
You guessed it, you’re playing Michael Fairbanks and it’s your duty, nay privilege, to unravel the mystery of the Mayas.
So, you buy/sell/trade to get that you need, and if it wasn't for a walkthrough, I would have no idea what to do in some of the parts of this game, as some stuff didn't make sense to me, or a couple of others I've read reviews from. Some of the stuff you find try to give clues for what to do, but they can still be way too vague and cryptic that probably most people still wouldn't understand what to do. But... I'm not a bright person anyway, so maybe it's just me :P
You can die in several ways, and usually a picture of what happened is shown. Like driving off a bridge shows a picture of you doing just that. But most deaths seem to just show the one I added to the end of the video (the best one imo), which is why I just picked that one, as I couldn't be bothered to collect all of them. The text at the bottom of the death picture got messed up as I forgot to apply the correct settings/resolution. It's supposed to be pixelated, but not like that.
Not too bad for a game released in 1989. It kinda reminds me of Colorado, which is not strange as both games are by Silmarils.
There's two main things I don't like in OW2:
1: Getting ongoing matches - mainly because someone might have picked Mercy already and won't give her to me :), which is why I prefer to queue with someone as it much more likely we get a fresh match then (especially if they are second healer, and play another healer ofc).
2: People who leave, usually for stupid reasons. I'm only OK with leavers who do it because of maybe a DC or they had to go, but I'm sure 95% of the cases I experience are just people who leave because they think we will lose. Something like this should be reportable, some sort of punishment anyway (other than losing some endorsements, and getting an XP penalty, which just takes way too many leaves to have it happen anyway), IMO.
Now... I'm not a tryhard or REALLY angry about all this, just mildly annoyed on the behalf of the rest of the team, and I don't personally care much whether we win or lose, I just want to play, BUT, I just find it so mean and selfish leaving the team undermanned (sometimes it can be minutes before the slot or slots are filled, sometimes the match ends as there's not enough players), as most people (the rest of the team) probably really want to win and it kinda ruins the game for them. This usually just cascades into more leaving, and even if new one joins, they often leave as well as they think the ones they replaced left for the same reason. So, it's just like... bad sportsmanship and behavior. I personally don't leave matches for any reason, doesn't matter how bad it goes or how toxic people might be to me (I'm a nice guy so it's not often anyone has a reason to be mean to me, but it still happens sometimes because some people are just messed up on the inside and lash out on innocent people).
This video is just a mild case tho, but I wanted to upload an OW2 video and things went well anyway. Most of the time more people leave as soon as someone starts to leave :)
I had fun making the thumbnail with AI stuff :), will probably use AI to make all future OW2 thumbs as well.
Tag thingy: overwatch, overwatch 2, mercy, mercy otp, 4000 hours, 4000+ mercy hours, ironclaw, 4000
I enjoyed playing through it, but it was a bit too easy. Never got stuck, was just straight forward what to do most of the time, and when I didn't know, I knew like 1 min after as I just quickly ran around talking to people (clicking through all dialogue until I noticed something new has happened), then loaded a saved state and continued with the new stuff I learned.
I found a bug. The inventory button thingy at the bottom right corner can be clicked on the main menu and during the intro, even though its icon is not shown.
Seems like the developer wanted people to run it in NTSC, so one version had it forced to NTSC, but some people had issues with it because if they don't have a monitor that supports it, things would look weird (or whatever it was, only had a quick read), so he made new version where it's using the one the system is already using natively, and if someone wanted to switch between them, they had the option via ToolType.
Anyway, after I read that I thought maybe I should longplay this in NTSC, because I did find the music in the beginning sounding a bit slow, especially the time between the trumpets (like at 3:20). I mean, if that's how it's intended to sound, that's OK of course. But if I made the music I would have sped it up a bit. And I checked some clips of this game on YouTube and everyone ran it in PAL. So I listened to the music in an external music player and it plays at the same speed as PAL. So, I guess it's not really meant to be at NTSC speed. So, I decided on PAL (as usual).
There's a small jump at 37:54 as I used a savestate here and 3 of the frames (both video and audio ofc) got corrupted.
Info about the game (who made it, how long it took to make, how it was made, etc) + download link can be found here: steamknight.itch.io/neonnoir
While moving on the board, the players take turns (default option), but there's an option to make it "realtime", so one gotta think and move fast as the computer will just go for it.
After I completed one of the boards, I didn't feel like completing the rest of the boards, as it's just the same thing all over again, but with different board-looks and backgrounds when fighting (and sounds too).
I selected music for the fights, as sound effects got repetitive and annoying really fast. Later after beating the computer, I show a bit of the other boards and switched to sound effects so we get to hear some of those too.
After showing the other boards I did two practice fights in the "BATTLE" thingy to show some of that stuff as well, and picked two dinosaurs I think we didn't get to see in action earlier, or not much anyway.
And finally, the nice "encyclopaedia".
BTW, there's a black line at the bottom of the video, it's because the "encyclopaedia" is 1 pixel taller than everything else in the game.
I was surprised the flying dinosaur-thingy wasn't anything else but a background occurrence every now and then, as I couldn't attack it with any of the three dinosaurs, and it couldn't attack them. I couldn't find a manual though, so maybe there's more to it and I didn't figure it out.
I got stuck for a bit when I tried playing as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, because now I have to eat the other dinosaurs, but they would sometimes not come out in time, or they would run away and I would die from starvation. But I luckily noticed that if I don't move, my health doesn't go down as fast and I can just wait for a dinosaur to appear. Another thing I noticed is the enemy comes from the opposite side... for example, once you cross half the screen, they appear from the half you came from, which you can use to your tactical advantage with all three. Which is why I hurry to the other half of the screen with the Stegosaurus (didn't with the Bronto as I wanted to show off the struggle) in case a T-Rex comes after me, which would be from the side I came from, so I can eat as much as possible and continue to the right. Otherwise I would have to run back to the previous screen to the left if I didn't make it far enough, as the T-Rex would come from the right, and the game doesn't allow for any dinosaur to run past each other above or below.
I didn't try to make a "proper" dinosaur in the end as I just wanted to make a weird looking one, and also show that some parts will end up outside the white area. There were even pieces where all three parts would end up outside the area on the top. Weird they didn't center the design, starting with the head in the middle to the left of the white area, instead of top left.
This game has not been longplayed before, couldn't find a single video walkthrough (at least not on YouTube), only a text-based one, which had several errors, steps forgotten and stuff in it. So had to figure some stuff out by myself (which is how games SHOULD be played :), I know, but takes forever then to get to the end). This is nothing new for me when going by a written walkthrough to see errors that gets you stuck. What helps me out is just checking the game files for clues, like in the case of the box, that the written solution says to first "look box", then again "look box", so I tried everything I could think of after doing the first "look box". So, text-searched for this box in the game files (there's always several instances of everything, so had to read in many different places for clues), anyway, turns out I needed to "move box" to reveal the vial. So "look box" then "move box" (probably don't need to "look box" first ofc, but it adds more info about stuff).
Another issue I had was with the game itself. It's when it displays more text than fits the text box, so it auto-scrolls outside so we can't read it (unless we pause the video). And while the game have many hotkeys to use, none controlled the scroll, so couldn't scroll back up. I realized at the very end of the game (lol) that those times the text scrolled past because it was too much, I should just have switched to "Text Only" mode in the menu. I even read the manual and it didn't even mention this "hint". Most text-based games PAUSE when the text box is full (some have arrows for scrolling), so you press enter or whatever and it continues to scroll.
**rant incoming**
And the poor spelling/grammar I kept seeing in the game was annoying, but kinda used to it, I read a lot of comments everywhere online every day (even on professional news sites, etc, I even see it in AAA games), and it doesn't matter if they are native English or not, young or old, even an English teacher, they all do it constantly. Like 's stuff where it shouldn't be, like "I like cookie's, they taste good", "Nice dog's. Mind if I pet them?", "Sweden is famous for it's meatballs". An example from this game is "There are four mask's hanging here". And don't get me started on there/their/they're and other similar things.
I know, I'm not perfect either, nor even a native English speaker, but I still at least care a bit about my grammar. When I correct someone on the internet, they are usually like "well its teh internet so who cares, and i can spell perfect if i want too", which IMO is BS most of the time. I actually have to stop and think, go out of my way to misspell and do broken grammar to the extent I often see (I'm OK with abbreviations like "imo" instead of "IMO", and typos), so for me it's easier and faster to just do it right.
**rant over**
Sorry, the game made me a bit agitated.
6.5 out of 10 claws.
Anyway, here's a quote from MobyGames of what this game is about:
McGee at the Fun Fair is the third game in the McGee series. Like the previous two games it is an educational game for young children that is entirely wordless so that it can be played by the child alone without any help from a parent. The gameplay is identical to the previous games but this time McGee has traveled to a fun fair and along with him comes a friend called Tony. The fair consists of a few different locations and for each there are four icons to click on that cause the two characters to interact with the environment in different ways. This includes watching the various entertainers (a clown, a juggler and a one man band for instance), having fun on the playground and eating ice cream. The game does not have an end sequence so the player can explore the locations freely for any length of time.
I sat it as "Made for kids", which this game is, but it disables the comments section.
Anyway, here's a quote from MobyGames of what this game is about:
"Katie's Farm is a sequel to McGee. Like that game it is an educational game for young children that is entirely wordless so that it can be played independently without assistance from an adult. The gameplay is identical to the first game but this time it takes place at a farm and McGee is joined by a second character, his cousin Katie. The farm consists of a few different locations (barn, paddock, hen house etc.) and for each there are four icons to click on which cause the two characters to interact with the environment in different ways. This include meeting different animals (cows, horses, chickens etc.), playing with a scarecrow and jumping in a haystack. There's no end to the game so the player can explore the farm freely."
I sat it as "Made for kids", which this game is, but it disables the comments section.
Anyway, here's a quote from MobyGames of what this game is about:
"McGee is an educational game for young children (ages 2 to 6). The game is entirely wordless and tells its story through graphics and sound making it possible for the child to play the game without help from an adult. The idea is that the child in this way should become familiar and confident with the computer and grow a sense of discovery.
In the game the player takes control of a child protagonist called McGee and gets to explore his home. The house consists of a couple of rooms and in each room there are a few objects that can be interacted with. All interaction is done by clicking on the four different icons that appear in each room. When doing so a short animation will start and McGee will do something, for example play with a ball, take a bath or hide under the carpet. There is no specific objective to the game and the player can move around freely between the rooms and interact with things over and over again."
I sat it as "Made for kids", which this game is, but it disables the comments section.
Tutorial levels + normal levels + secret bonus level (press left 7 times and right 3 times on the main menu). I did the secret level without music, as it started to get a bit too repetitive.
The game is free and can be downloaded here: blockyskies.com