Awesome (Amiga)

Developer:

Reflections

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

Amiga, Atari ST, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm looking at classic 90s shoot 'em up Awesome, which was suggested by the folks on my Discord. They realised I'd gotten caught in a bit of a rut last year, playing so many great games, and felt I should bring Super Adventures back to its roots. Its roots of me trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in some obscure old Amiga game.

You can tell that the game came out before the internet was a thing as Awesome is not a Google friendly title. It says on the box that it has an awesome t-shirt included, but search for 'awesome t-shirt' on image search and you'll be scrolling for a long while before you find it. That's a bit of a difference from Reflections' earlier game Shadow of the Beast, which has a very Googlable name. One thing the two games have in common is the box art, which was a painting by frequent Psygnosis collaborator Roger Dean. You could tell Psygnosis games right away at this point because they were the ones that looked like Yes albums. Edit: none of that is true, the cover is actually a painting from John Harris called MASS: The Building of FTL1, painted about 10 years earlier in 1979.

Alright I'm going to play this for an hour or so and I hope you like GIFs because I'm in the mood for some moving pixels.

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Okay what the hell? The game has a pre-rendered ray-traced CGI intro? It's not the first time I've seen a ray traced intro in an Amiga game, off the top of my head there's Syndicate, Rise of the Robots, Robinson's Requiem and Theme Park, but this came out in 1990. That's kind of early for these kinds of visuals in a video game. In fact this might be a contender for the earliest CGI intro, I honestly don't know. Leave me a comment if you can think of an earlier game with a 3D intro like this.

One thing I do know is that the game was released on Amiga, Atari ST and FM Towns, and as far as I can tell the intro looks the exact same on all three systems. The only compromise I can tell on the weaker Atari hardware is slightly worse colour and a lack of sound.

I'm a big fan of flashy custom-designed logo text, as you can probably guess, and that logo's plenty distinctive.

There are no difficulty options here so that simplifies things, though I do get to toggle the sound. Some early Amiga games give you a choice between music or sound effects, but this is all or nothing.

Wait, 'Game Over Seq On'? Why would I want to turn the game over cutscene off? Oh hang on, I just remembered that this is an Amiga game played from three floppy disks, and I pay a price for everything that's loaded into RAM. My first clue should've been all the waiting and disk swapping it took just to get this far.

'Stored Position' is an interesting option as well. I suppose it must just be an unusual way of phrasing 'Load Game' or 'Continue'. It's doing nothing right now though so I'm going to select 'Start New Game'.

Okay, starting a new game threw me straight into the action without any context. Seems like that intro cutscene is the only one I'm going to get.

I'm the green spaceship in the middle and I'm being harassed by all these other grey ships. This isn't a fixed screen shoot 'em up like Galaga though, as I'm able to fly all around this looping square section of space. Though it's more like it's flying around me.

Man I love that effect. It doesn't make any sense why the star field would move like tiny dots floating right beneath my ship, but it looks cool so I'm not questioning it. I like all the particle effects as well.

I've learned a few things already: the red number is the number of enemies left, the purple number is my health/shields, and green is my score. I've also learned that I can hold the fire button down to keep shooting, which really helps. One thing that's a bit of a mystery is why my health sometimes goes up instead of down. I've been studying the video and I still can't tell what's causing it.
 
Oh I should give you a link to the music on YouTube so you can hear these guitar samples yourself: Awesome music.

Alright, the enemies are all dead and the game's taken control away from me so it can re-engage the, uh, worp drive.

Hey I don't care what it's called as long as the stars streak nicely when it's turned on, and they do.

This extremely 90s looking computer interface came up after the worp and it seems to be waiting for me to do something. I just have to figure out what that is.

Oh, I can move the yellow cursor! That helps. Using it to click on 'SHIELD' and 'CANNON' at the top redistributes energy between my defences and my weapons, but nothing else I'm clicking on seems to do anything.

Ah, it turns out that 'EXIT' in the bottom right corner was the button I was looking for.

Hey level two is just like Asteroids, except with asteroids instead of, uh, asteroids. I suppose the biggest difference is that my ship's much bigger on screen, so I'm having to use my minimap to navigate. In fact I've been watching that thing more than the main screen.

There's not much strategy involved in shooting rocks, but I'm finding that flying backwards is a good idea in general. It means I'm moving away from the things trying to hurt me, while sending bullets towards them.

After clearing the asteroids out of the road I got back into worp and got to visit the shields/weapons power screen again. Not a whole lot had changed though so I left it alone.

Okay this is new. The front of my ship has detached and is flying around on its own.

I suppose the FTL drive section is going to stay behind in orbit while the lander at the front goes down to a planet. Either that or I've broken something.

Damn, I wasn't expecting the game to suddenly turn into Space Harrier! Well, as suddenly as it could do with all of the loading times.

This giant horned space serpent keeps charging at me out of nowhere, waiting a few seconds, then swooping back from off screen.

Hang on, I'll just show you:

That's some slick sprite scaling for an Amiga I reckon. There's not really much to the fight though, it just keeps doing this over and over again. I've being doing a terrible job of dodging it, but I had enough health to survive 10 rounds and finally blow it up. Took just over a minute. Felt longer.

I put this guy as the 'next game' clue last time to see if anyone could recognise him, and someone actually guessed he was from Lemmings on the Amiga. Which is 100% correct.

Lemmings (Amiga)

There he is, being drilled into by a hundred or so migratory rodents, on a stage called "What an AWESOME level". (He doesn't move around as much in this game.)

In fact three other Psygnosis games also made a cameo in Lemmings: Menace, Shadow of the Beast, and Shadow of the Beast II. Well, except in all the versions of Lemmings where they didn't.

Alright, I've reached the planet! I'm not doing all that bad for my first try.

What's next? A side-scrolling shoot 'em up section where I fly over the landscape?

No, it's another top-down shoot 'em up section. This is different though, as now my ship is rotating instead of the background. The controls are different as well, as I have to pull the joystick in the direction I want to go instead of the direction I want to turn.

The graphics have taken a real hit here, with my spaceship losing almost all its colours. Probably because there's a lot more going on in the background. The foreground's pretty busy as well, as I'm being harassed by octagonal spaceships. I blew a few of them up and an arrow appeared so I figured that was my cue to fly away. I'm pretty sure that number in the bottom left is a timer and I don't want to see what happens when it hits zero.

Hang on, I've reached the destination my GPS was sending me to and nothing's happening. I don't know what it wants me to do and the timer's running out!

LATER

Well my first run failed and I'm now I'm back at the start again. Wait, is that orb up there on the left a bomb or a pick up? I can shoot them and blow them up, which makes me think 'bomb', but I'm pretty sure it's got a letter E on it.

There's no obvious sign that driving into it harmed me or helped me, but what is clear is that the reason I haven't spotted one until now is that I'm holding the fire button down and everything in front of me is being obliterated. Doesn't seem like great design to let me blow up my loot.

That's interesting, I collected 10 discs after the level on my first attempt but only 3 of them on this second run. I don't know what a disc looks like, I'm not sure I've even seen one yet, so I don't know what's going on there.

Okay I've got a theory. I think the number was much higher the first time because I didn't know what I was doing and I was slamming into enemy ships more often. My theory is that the enemies drop health and disc pickups that I'm accidentally destroying along with them, and I'd actually be getting a lot more stuff if I started driving into enemies and colliding with them all instead of shooting them. I'll have to try that out later.

Alright I am back on the planet and this time I know what I'm supposed to do (because I glanced at the manual). All I need to do here is fly to the red circle the arrow's pointing me towards and then press the space bar.

Oh damn, that was quick. I guess it had already loaded this bit into memory.

Wait, am I walking around on foot now? This just keeps switching between gameplay styles! I'll never be able to turn the damn game off at this rate because there'll always be something new to show off.

The good news is that my spaceship has gotten some of its colours back. The bad news is that I've lost 14 precious seconds. So I'd better hurry up and get on with it then.
 

What the hell? I took a second to adjust to the new gameplay and suddenly the landing pad was lit up by security lasers!

Well at least it's taught me a lesson: my timer also doubles as my health and I don't get a moment of invulnerability after being hit. These things have taken 10 seconds off in a blink of an eye and the time's still dropping. You know you're doing well when the 'time is running out' music starts playing before you've even made it out of the first room.

Oh man that's a relief, there's an orb up here. This has to be extra time/health right?

It turned out that it was not. Worse, I wasted a second walking right to pick it up, so now I have even less health. And I still don't know what the thing is! Right, I guess I go left then.

Man, I don't like working out the timing right to walk through laser bolts at the best of times but it's even less fun when the timer is your life and you lose health just by waiting for them.

I've got a pistol but it doesn't seem to work on these blobs. I guess I'll just walk past them.
 
The timer looks pretty bleak, but I've got more time than it seems. Every second on the clock lasts about 2.4 seconds in real life, so I've actually got 12 seconds to finish this entire level right now. No pressure.

Suddenly swoopy things flew on screen out of nowhere in a shoot 'em up pattern! My dude lost his last three seconds and straight up exploded on the spot. This is why you should always always check before heading out of your ship that both air cylinders on your spacesuit actually contain air and not rocket fuel, hydrogen or some other heavily combustible substance. Nitro-glycerin, that's another thing you need to watch out for.

Fortunately I have a second guy! It turns out that it wasn't my pilot that left the ship and died, it was one of my troops, and I've got two more of them ready to go.

Oh no, surprise fish, capable of leaping miles into the air!

They only appeared when I walked down the walkway to trigger them, so I'm not sure what I was supposed to do there. Inch forward and then run back when they appeared? Hold down the fire button?

I guess I could've gone up instead of down.

More swoopy things out of nowhere! Seems like the best strategy for these guys is to stay put and shoot them. Standing still also costs me health, but walking into them costs more.

Okay, three space seconds left. That's not much but I can't give up!

More surprise fish. You're really not given much time to react in this game and they spawned behind me as well so I'm not sure dodging backwards would've even helped here. But this failed run has been invaluable as it's taught me what kind of dangers await on the bottom path. So I took my final guy up the top path instead... and got surprise fish'd there as well.

That fish attack left me with just one space second left, which is just enough for me to get absolutely nowhere.

Hang on, there are orbs this way. There weren't orbs the other way. This seems like absolutely crucial information that I can't make any use of right now because I just ran out of time and out of troops. It was nice of the game to actually give me some extra lives for this run and gun maze section but they weren't enough.

This is a very Shadow of the Beast style game over screen. I can definitely tell the game was by the same people. They'd phased out their moody pixelled game over screens by the time they made the Destruction Derby and Driver games however.

Now I have to decide if I have the patience to play through the shooting bit, the asteroids, the space serpent boss fight and the planet fight in order to have another three tries at the running around bit. Probably not, but I guess I might as well give it another go!

SEVERAL GAME OVER SCREENS LATER

I've done it, I've reached a boss guarding a staircase! There's no chance I'm going to defeat it in two space seconds though. Not with this puny gun.

Oh, OH, now it all makes sense! All those dead ends and alternative paths with useless orbs in them. I'm supposed to be figuring out the route that lets me collect the most orbs on the way to the boss... because they must be weapon power upgrades!

EVEN MORE GAME OVERS LATER

Man, this is just stupid. How am I supposed to win a boss fight with a fire-breathing dragon when I'm playing as a character that can't dodge fireballs? I assumed my charged up laser gun would be enough to take him down before he got me, but this just isn't working.

This isn't just a difficulty spike, this is a difficulty mountain, and you only get three tries at it before having to do all the space levels all over again. They're not all that challenging, I'm just bored of doing the same thing over and over just to earn another few seconds to figure out what to do in this boss fight.

Right, I've decided that this is actually impossible. The only winning move here is to turn the game off and walk away, and I will be very happy to do that. I've got so many better things I could be doing right now than headbutting this wall.

MUCH LATER

Okay so what you have to do is just stand here and the enemy can't hit you.

I only had two seconds left after beating him, but that was five seconds of real time so I made it to the staircase at the very last moment!

Oh damn, this is something different. I'm really glad I came back to the boss fight now as I could've missed out on all of this.

I love these monochrome green video game computer terminals with the grid in the background. The developers knew that computers would be much more advanced than this in the future, the game was developed for a computer more advanced than this, but they couldn't resist the classic 70s interface.

Seems that I can do a bit of trading here or figure out my next destination. I'll go to the shop first.

It's a purple screen this time! I love the glow coming in around the sides.

My ship was already carrying a cargo of medical supplies when I started the game so I dropped them off and got some fuel as payment. It seems like that's the only way to acquire fuel so I should probably take another delivery contract before I leave.

I also had 19 discs in my inventory this time thanks to my new strategy of ramming into enemy ships, so I sold them all to receive some credits. Then I spent half of them in the weapon shop getting a peripheral gun and a sonic mining laser.

I'm loving all these pixelled computer screens. They just keep coming!

Okay I should figure out my destination with this Navcom before deciding what contract I want to choose on the trading computer. I've started out on the innermost planet, so it seems like the most sensible thing to do is to head to the next planet along. That'll use the least fuel.

Unfortunately everything is too far away to reach with the 58 fuel I got from my cargo!

Fortunately one of those buttons on the right shows a simulation of the movement of the planets over time, so I can watch them all orbiting the star. The planets orbit at different speeds so sometimes two worlds will be on opposite sides of the system and sometimes they'll be right next to each other.

I just have to find out how many days it'll take for Aquoss and Tundrars to be at their closest, then I'll know how long to stay in the hotel. Seems like you really need to collect those discs to sell, as if you don't have the money to rent a hotel room the next planet will be too far away to reach.

Alright I've got a new cargo of military equipment and a couple of new weapons to try out. I can only choose one to equip at a time however, so I'm going to go with the peripheral gun.

Turns out the peripheral guns attach to the side and fire off little red lens flares diagonally. This is great because it means my ship finally looks like it did in the intro!

The new guns aren't being much help against the new aliens I'm fighting though. I'm taking so much damage here because every time I kill one it explodes into a cloud of these spore things and I end up colliding with them. I'm at 148 shields at the moment so it would've been cool if the game had made the health orbs a bit more obvious. I mean I can't even be sure these things even drop any.

It was a close thing but I was able to win the fight with just 28 shields left and reach the computer screen again. Now I'm going to have to reallocate some power from my guns to my shields so I don't immediately explode on the next round. Okay when I was flying to planet #1 I fought aliens on the first stage, then asteroids, then a space snake, so I should swap my peripheral gun for my sonic mining laser and get ready to mine some rocks.

Oh no, they tricked me! My sonic mining laser likely does nothing against these sodding mine layers on the second stage.

Of course I didn't know they were mines at first, because when I see a shiny orb in space I rush into it, especially when it has the same logo on it as my weapon upgrades! Now I have even less shields.

My doom was swift and inevitable but at least I've learned one thing from all this: that 'stored position' option on the main menu lets you continue at the last planet you reached. So it's basically a 'continue' option, except with longer loading times. There's no option to save progress to disk though, so when you turn the machine off (or the game crashes) you're back to square one.


CONCLUSION

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Awesome was apparently made simultaneously with Shadow of the Beast II and I can believe it. When developer Reflections teamed up with publisher Psygnosis they used their powers of programming and artwork combined to produce clever visuals that sold computer systems. Unfortunately they weren't so great at gameplay.

For an Amiga game from 1990 this looks and sounds great, and it even moves fast too. It's pretty good on the Atari ST as well. Games like Xenon 2 wish they were as slick as this. It just wasn't all that fun to play. I wouldn't say that style over substance is the problem, as it's got 4-5 different gameplay styles here and it seems to have a decent variety of enemies. But I never really found myself eager to go back to any of the different levels. The game's a bit of a pain in the ass to be honest.

I think I liked the space shooting at the start the best. Though the trouble with flying around in a huge shiny spaceship is that it doesn't leave much room on screen for all the other ships you're fighting. I was staring at the radar a lot of the time, which is a helpful little gadget to have but not quite as pretty to look at. My main issue with this mode was that there are apparently pickups to be collected but they're so hard to spot and easy to destroy that I had more luck ramming into the enemies than I did shooting them.

My least favourite part of the game was the planet levels, and I'm sure the developers were aware that they're a difficulty spike as it's the only part that gives you multiple lives... that you have to buy back afterwards. If you're into a challenge the game's got that in spades, but the challenge comes from enemies that spring out of nowhere and a player character that only has the most basic movement. If it had at least let me strafe by holding down fire that would've been a big help.

It's a shame really, because I like the concept of being able to visit the trading computer, take on jobs and choose my next destination, but it seems like it's just about making enough money to stay in the hotel. You need to wait until the planets are close together to have enough fuel for the trip, so if you don't have the money you're apparently stuck. There's no way to go out and get more. And if it updates your 'saved position' at every new planet, then you can't even try again from the last planet. You just failed your whole run.

I had a glance at the manual and it turns out that you're the crew of the Starship Elapidae, a Cobra class ship. Which is a bit backwards, as the cobra belongs to the elapidae family of snakes, but whatever. Hey, I just realised that the ship's supposed to look like a snake! Anyway, the goal of the game is to get out of the Octarian system before it's annihilated by the Homikahn's Promethean cannon, so you have to hop from planet to planet and reach the outermost world. That means you're not actually flying around the galaxy like in Elite, you're just travelling through eight levels in order. Well, maybe you can skip one if you're good enough to have the fuel for it. But if you're after a pixel art top-down Freelancer this isn't what you want, and it's definitely not what I want.

It's a real shame really, because there aren't many space games that let you walk out of the spaceship like this and it would've been nice to have found a good one here.

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Thanks for reading! I obviously appreciate it as without you reading my words I'm just a crazy person typing to myself about a 30 year old Amiga game.

In fact you should type up some words of your own in the comments below. Maybe share what you think about Awesome, or take a guess at what the next game will be. You've got two weeks, good luck! (It's not chess).