Games section
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Games section
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Years after Turrican conquered the Amiga a clone is sold as a successor.
Crystal Interactive Software seem to be specialized on improving old game ideas. After the success of "Bubble Heroes", a clone of BubbleBobble, the latest is a Turrican style game named "Land of Genesis". Will the nostalgic feeling win or is the game idea too old?
Land of Genesis has lingered a bit longer under development after being expected to be released by Epic Marketing a year ago. Now, it is nearly ready and I had a look at the demo version.
LoG requires an Amiga with 68020, AGA, 2 MByte Chip-RAM and 3 MByte Fast-RAM or better. In addition you need a CD-ROM drive and at least 9 MByte of free hard disk space. But if you want to watch all of the animations and enjoy extras like 512 colours, transparency, extra backgrounds, extra parallax and the incredible artificial intelligence you should have an 68040 with 8 MByte Fast-RAM and 80 MByte of free hard disk space. In addition there are 12 audio tracks on the shiny disk as well as 45 seconds of rendered movie. Well, that's the bare numbers.
But what about the story of Land of Genesis? Well, it seems that the developers spent days on that. This is the background story in its original length: Land of Genesis plays in the future. Some genetically altered humans, which are the result of a secret experiment, got control over the bases on Mars where the experiments took place. Jan has to go to Mars to kill those monstrous creatures. This is no longer the background story, that's me again. That's it!
But actually the story does not matter - let's start the demo version. The title graphics are phantastic.
The demo version starts with the usual fadein of the logos. This has been well made. The option screen looks more than good. It was done by a good renderer. Unfortunately there is no intro except some screenshots, but it promises to be good. And so, full of expectations, I start my first game.
Unfortunately the graphics cannot fulfil the promise of the title graphics. Although it is well done and could have been a hit some years ago, because there is real parallax scrolling, animated backgrounds in incredible colors and transparency effects, but unfortunately this is not enough for anyone due to the current technology.
The sound effects also don't follow my idea of "creating atmosphere". But a real soundtrack is to follow, which might create more atmosphere. In the end LoG is a well done piece of software, but users of a high end Amiga especially should first play the demo version and check if they like the a bit old fashioned technology. Those of you who own a middle class Amiga and have a "Turrican" tattoo on the butt can order it without any hesitation. There is more than enough action.
Five worlds with some of them divided into sublevels and 180(!) different opponents should not bore. Before you enter a new world you have to win a battle against a Level finish opponent, which is not weak at all. Also shooter elements à la Katakis are built into Land of Genesis. So you can remove the fingers from the fire buttons after you lost all of your lives or you liberated Mars.
Anyway, I will keep you informed. And if it follows the plans of the developers you will find an article on this page. But also the (German magazine) Amiga Future (where this article was printed first) will report about the game.
