Developed by DMA Design and published by Ocean in 1990

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I saw the trailer for the PS4 reboot/remake of the Amiga classic, Shadow of the Beast and I was left quite optimistic by what I saw. I then remembered that I'd recorded a longplay of the C64 version way back in 2012 when I first started this channel and that the video quality was pretty rubbish, so I decided to do a new recording with improved video quality and do a review at the same time!

For those unfamiliar with the game, it was originally released for the Commodore Amiga computer and it was, for it's time, something of a technical marvel, with fancy graphics and superb audio. Sadly, the game was incredibly frustrating to play, possessing high difficulty and multiple dead ends where the player could reach the end of the game, only to find that they'd failed to collect a key or item right back near the start. Fun to play it was not.

Considering just how technologically advanced the Amiga version was, one has to wonder why anyone would bother trying to convert the game to a notably less powerful 8-bit system. Well, put your cynicism on hold, give the game a try and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Sure, the game plays very similarly to the Amiga version, so many of the gameplay criticisms with that version apply to this version as well. However, the fact that the player's starting health points are more than doubled from 12 to 25 is a huge improvement and you stand a much better chance of making it beyond the first boss.

Richard Swinfen did a really top notch job on the coding for this version. The game features multiple levels of parallax scrolling, much like it's more powerful sibling, which is quite an achievement given the disparity between the two machines. The game runs at a consistently solid frame rate throughout, without any noticeable glitches or compromises being made.

Most of the original Amiga content has been transferred to the C64 version in tact. In fact, the only omissions I did notice were the bouncing eyeballs (presumably the C64 was unable to reproduce the sprite squashing/expansion effects effectively) and the removal of the jet-pack shooting stage towards the end of the game. In honesty, I always though the change in gameplay from platformer to shoot 'em up to be quite jarring, so the C64 actually feels more consistent in terms of gameplay and feels the better for it's removal.

Whilst the graphics were never going to match the Amiga version, they're still very good and most of the enemy designs are present, if in a slightly chunkier, lower resolution format. Particularly impressive are some of the larger sprites, such as the bosses and flying dragons that proved that the C64 was still a capable machine.

Anyone who has played the Amiga version will be familiar with the awesome music by David Whittaker. Fredrik Segerfalk had the unenviable task of rewriting the tunes for the C64 and, by and large, did an extremely good job.

I think the reason why the game works as well as it does in large part due to the fact that the game shipped on a cartridge. Despite being frighteningly expensive (£20), it meant that the game loaded instantly and there was a complete lack of loading times between the various sections of the game. For someone regularly frustrated by rewinding multi-load tape games, this was a total revolution as far as I was concerned; not having to wait seven or eight minutes for a game to load was a rare treat!

If you could spare the cash then Shadow of the Beast on the C64 is actually a pretty darn solid conversion that plays better than the original Amiga version.
#retrogaming

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