Doody Calls - Turd World War Storms the Amiga 1200

Some games arrive with a serious pitch. Doody Calls - Turd World War is not one of them. It is a brand new top-down squad shooter for the Amiga 1200 from Software Amusements. The team built it from the ground up for the machine's AGA chipset, the upgraded graphics hardware that set the A1200 apart from earlier Amigas.

It's also based on an existing browser game, v1.33, which Software Amusements has reworked into what it calls a family-friendly tactical shooter. The colour scheme is mostly brown. You can probably guess why.

Bombs Away, Squad Alpha

You don't walk into battle here. You get dropped in by a "Poo-nook" helicopter and take command of Squad Alpha. That's a trio of AI teammates who apparently never stop talking. They aren't just there for show, either. According to the developer, they flank enemies and duck into cover on their own, so you aren't babysitting three bodies who walk into every bullet.

The campaign covers nine sectors. The names alone tell you what kind of game this is, from the Sewage Works all the way to the Good Ship Stinky. Spread across those sectors are 45 stages in total. The objectives include storming beaches and capturing mountains, and boss battles wait at the end of the line.

Brushes With Danger

The opposition has plenty of hardware. Expect Poo-copters, tanks and armoured jeeps rolling your way. To deal with them, your squad gets four different firearms and explosive Air Freshener grenades. When things get too close, there's always the toilet brush for melee work. I can't say I've ever seen that on a weapon wheel before.

The levels throw in environmental hazards too, with moving trains among them. So it's not just the enemy you have to keep an eye on.

There's also a lot here for anyone who likes to grind. A career mode offers 200 ranks to climb, and local leaderboards are saved to disk. Leave the main menu alone for a while and an attract mode kicks in, playing the game by itself the way arcade cabinets used to.

Four Players, One Screen

The feature that caught my eye most is multiplayer. Up to four people can share a single screen. This works with standard joysticks combined with the Alinea Computer Octodapter, a piece of hardware that adds the extra controller ports. Four friends, one Amiga, one very brown battlefield. That sounds like proper couch chaos.

Hardware Requirements

Here's the good news for anyone with an unexpanded machine. Doody Calls only needs a stock A1200 with 2 MB of chip RAM, which is the memory the Amiga's custom chips use for graphics and sound. Adding fast RAM, the extra general-purpose memory many owners install, will give the busy, particle-heavy action a noticeable performance boost. But it isn't required.

Our Take

The humour clearly won't be for everyone. Still, the most interesting thing here is what Software Amusements chose to build underneath the jokes. The game is a fresh AGA title made from scratch, not a port of a classic. It aims for AI squadmates that flank and take cover, four-player local play and a long career mode. That's a fairly ambitious feature list for a stock A1200.

It also fits into a busy few weeks for the machine. We've recently covered AGA conversions like the P.O.W. Amiga port and Castlevania AGA reaching version 1.0. This suggests the A1200 scene is producing both arcade ports and new, original-feeling designs at the same time.

Squad-based top-down shooting on the Amiga will probably remind veterans of Cannon Fodder. It is worth watching whether Doody Calls holds up on its own terms once players get their hands on it. The things to look at are how smart Squad Alpha really behaves, and how smoothly the action runs on a machine without fast RAM. The four-player mode is also worth watching. It depends on the Octodapter, so how many people actually try it may come down to how many owners pick up that hardware.