Developed by Special FX and published by Ocean in 1990.

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I've covered C64 and Mega Drive conversions of Data East's arcade shoot 'em up in other videos on my channel and I was pretty impressed with both. This time around it's the Amiga's turn with Special FX handling the conversion to Commodore's 16-bit platform.

For those unfamiliar with the game, this is a run-and-gun shooter similar to Konami's Contra series where the protagonist must fight to free his family from the clutches of an evil terrorist organisation. The player must kill orange ninja-type bad guys and collect the keys that they drop in order to unlock weapons and supplies from the armoury that appears between stages.

I should note that I played this through using a copy of the game included as part of the WHDLoad game packs, which accounts for why the title screens pass so quickly (would normally be displayed the time it takes for the game to load off disk but running from a HDD means it disappears quickly). The reason I used this version is the inclusion of the option to use double brightness palette which drastically improves the vibrancy of the graphics; the original OCS release is terribly dull and it's difficult to make out what's going on, but this is a big improvement!

The Amiga version contains all the stages, weapons and power-ups from the arcade version and manages to cram them all into a single floppy disk; impressive stuff! Add in some faithfully recreated graphics and some top-notch music and you might think you have the perfect arcade package. Sadly, I found the controls in this version to be irksome and caused me to die repeatedly due to the way your character's sprite must rotate his aim. The game throws enemies at you from both sides requiring quick reactions, but the delay in waiting whilst you rotate through multiple frames of animation makes it very difficult to react quickly enough.

The other issue with the controls is that without a separate button to jump you're forced to hold the fire-button down if you want to aim upwards without jumping. Again, the rotational aiming makes this cumbersome and you'll often find yourself jumping when you wanted to aim upwards, usually into an oncoming enemy or projectile.

I think that, had the controls been implemented as straightforward 8-way directional controls WITHOUT the rotation animation then the game would be a lot better.

I think that Midnight Resistance on the Amiga looks and sounds the part of a good arcade conversion, but the controls and difficulty made for a less than enjoyable experience, especially in the later stages (the stealth jet boss section game me particular trouble). This isn't a terrible game, but I just found I didn't have as much fun with it as I'd hoped, especially when compared to excellent Mega Drive version.
#retrogaming

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