Heliobane is the latest modern game to make the trip backwards in time. According to IndieRetroNews, this shoot 'em up started out on Steam and has now been rebuilt for the Amiga 1200 by a developer going by the name Coze. The headline also describes it as an "AI shoot 'em up," which is an interesting label for a game heading to a machine from the early nineties.
I'll be upfront. The original post is light on details. There's no feature list, no breakdown of levels or weapons, and no word on how the port was put together. What we do have is the core idea and one very happy player.
TIL THEY CROAK has one of the more stressful premises I've come across in a while. Someone has planted a bomb in your chest, your heart is about to blow, and the only thing keeping you alive is hitting people. Hard, and often.
The game calls itself a melee-only boomer shooter, which sounds like a contradiction until you think about it for a second. You keep the speed and the room-clearing rhythm of the genre, but you leave the guns at home. A beta sign-up is now open for anyone who wants to try it early.
Warlock, the newest Commodore 64 project from developer Haplo, is out now. It borrows the mood of old first-person fantasy shooters and drops it onto a top-down map. If you remember Heretic and still keep a breadbin computer within arm's reach, this one is worth a look.
Haplo isn't new to the scene. The developer's earlier C64 titles include Shift and Tenebra, both well regarded in retro circles. Warlock looks like the most ambitious of the three so far, at least on paper.
Heretic, Seen From Above
The idea behind Warlock is simple. Haplo wanted the intense, gloomy energy of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic, but from a completely different angle. Instead of peering down a corridor in first person, you look down on the action from above.
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.
SNK's P.O.W. (Prisoners of War) is one of those arcade brawlers that never quite got the home treatment it deserved. A developer known as ESKAY is changing that with a native AGA conversion for the Amiga 1200, built from the arcade code itself. A new alpha is already out, and you can now play it all the way through.
A Teenage Obsession Comes Full Circle
This one is personal. ESKAY owned the original P.O.W. arcade JAMMA board as a teenager, so the love for this game runs deep. Scene figures like Hoffman provided extra inspiration, and the project started with a partial version of the first level running on the A1200.
Relaxed Gamers is financed by advertising. You can choose how you want to use this website:
With advertising: we load an advertising script from a third-party ad network. The ad network may set cookies, use your IP address and device information, and may process data outside the EU. We also count your visits for our own visitor statistics (with a random ID stored in your browser).
Ad-free for €0.99 per month: no advertising and no advertising tracking. Cancel at any time.
You can change your decision at any time via "Cookie Settings" at the bottom of every page.
