Today I'm going to review my first retro game - 1942 for the Amiga.
After booting up from the disk, you are greeting with an upbeat tune, and an acceptable logo screen for what is presumably the software package used to develop the game:
So far, I'm up-beat about the game. However, once the loading screen is done, you are given your first taste of how truly awful with game is:
And yes, the gameplay is as hideous as the graphics. Given that the Amiga was graphically a cutting-edge machine, and given the quality of graphics we see in other Amiga games, this really is inexcusable.
Maybe this game would be better with a joystick, but I doubt it. The game response is choppy - every bit of movement is like prodding a block around, instead of flying an aircraft. I imagine its no surprise that everything looks like blocks.
The animation is not smooth - I'd estimate a bullet traveling towards you hops 20 pixels every step before "pausing" for a second so you can see it. The result is that your fire and enemy fire gets all jumbled up, and you can't tell what's inbound and outbound. Not to mention collision detection is completely messed - 1/2 the time a bullet is 10-20 pixels off my wing, and I explode. Nice.
Add onto this the rather annoying feature of the game to say "okay, suckers" whenever you respawn. I found myself shouting at the game "shut your pie-hole", because the "suckers" didn't even need to hit me!
All in all, this is a dreadful game that I couldn't recommend to anyone.
Scores
graphics: 1/5
sound: 1/5
music: 2/5
gameplay: 1/5
overall: 1/5