Planet Bob - Paradroid 90

RSS Bot · April 21, 2006

Hi there!

Ladies and Gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for, here comes

Paradroid 90

Programming: Andrew Braybrook, Dominic Robinson

Graphics: Michael A. Field, John Cumming, John W. Lilley

Musician: Jason Page

Ratings:

Amiga Joker: 62% Zzap: 90%

LemonAmiga: 8.25

Evolution:

This long awaited (well, at the time ) Amiga version, finally arrived 5 years after the groundbreaking C64 version. Somewhere between sequel and conversion, tagging it simply with "90", made sense and was also very honest.

Critics may quickly put it down with "Hey that's just the same game with revamped graphics and ruined scrolling", while fans may be all "Hoorray, everything is so much better now!"

The scrolling thing is an interesting point. I've heard quite some theories why the Amiga version only scrolls vertically, but moving all conspiracy theories aside, it's probably the most obvious thing, that is having a single engine for both the Amiga and Atari ST - so they just kept everything within the limitations of the Atari, thus having both platforms supported in the most economic way.

To make up for the scrolling limitation, Andrew did a simple trick: He just turned all decks by 90Â°, so you almost don't notice this limitation.

The artwork itself has been improved a lot, everything inside the decks is very detailed now, especially the droids themselves. Each droid as it's own, well animated set of sprites now, fully detailing their functions, weapons and movement system.

The rest of the deck artwork has also been improved, giving them all some functionality. See the screenshot of the ship hangar above! (You can actually enter the cockpit of the glider, and fire the engines of it )

The droids themselves have been improved with all sorts of additional weapons, like machine or x-ray guns. One is even armed with a flamethrower!

The gameplay has been enhanced in numerous little details. Now you have a detailed energy meter for example, so you can better judge the life-expectancy of your droid. Now all ships have different layouts. There's a beginners ship, the original C64 ship, and 6 other brandnew layouts. The game now has an option to be played with instant-transfer, i.e. it skipps the grappling game, hereby speeding up the gameplay a lot for action fans.

The game has also gotten an excellent soundtrack from Jason Page. There's even 2 completely different title tunes, which you get depending on wether you run the game with 512K or 1MB

Here's a tip for you: Download and install yourself the Deliplayer, then you can get every(?) Amiga tune composed by Jason from UnExoticA, of course both Paradroid 90 tunes as well

Really, try the 1MB version! Killer track!

(To get there, open "jpo.Paradroid_90_1Mb" in the Deliplayer, then Select Edit->Split into Subsongs, then select the last subsong from the list)

Fun in 2006:

Yup, it still got the magic! A classic in its own right, just like the C64 version

Greetings,

Manuel

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...&showentry=1493