AMIGA POWER ISSUE 37 MAY 1994

BANSHEE (A1200)
A big chunk from out of Core Design's superb-looking new A1200-specific vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up. If you haven't got an A1200 already, get one now and play this. Banshee (orig. Irish folklore) noun. A female spirit who wails and shrieks before a death in the family to which she is attached.
Interesting indeed, but quite what a screaming girlie ghost has to do with an aeroplane is beyond us. Maybe the scream's being produced by the howling turbo-prop as it shrieks over the waves, and perhaps the impending death refers to the fiery waves of outgoing ordnance. Or maybe the programmers just liked the sound of it.

DISK 37-1 & DISK 37-2:

THE BEST PD GAMES EVER!
When we were compiling this year's brand-new All-Time Top 100 (turn to page 11 for the full rundown), we were more than a little surprised to find no less than five (count 'em!) Public Domain games sneaking into the listing while our backs were turned. We thought that this was something worth shouting about, though (in these recession-conscious days), so we've stuck 'em all on a disk for you (except for Tetris Pro, which was on the cover just two issues ago), along with a few more choice cuts from the land of the free (game) which didn't quite make it. But which ones are which? You'll have to read the Top 100 to find out...

- SOKO BAN
John Hardie from West Lothian heard the call and sent us this tricky little puzzler. Instructions are in the game, but basically you've got to race against the clock to push blocks about, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

- ALS
Here on AP we love two things -- old Spectrum games and up and coming programmers. So how could we resist the following letter?
Dear AP,
Oh dear. In classic Spectrum fashion, Team 4½ have started their career by sending you a stylishly poor game. Try it on your Amiga and it should be hunky-funky-dory, but if not, well tie me down with a freshly poked Volvo, you might presume that ALS is "Kaputt" as the Germans might say. Which it is, sort of. Hugs 'N' Kisses, C-Monster and Team 4½.

- MONACO
A conversion of original Sega coin-op Monaco GP which, embarrassingly, is still Stuart's all-time favourite driving game.

- PONG (Top 100)
In 1972, Nolan Bushnell formed a small company in California and hired a young programmer called Allen Alcorn to come up with a game. Three months later, they'd finished the prototype version, which they took down to Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale. They taped a box onto the machine and asked for people to put quarters in it, and by the end of the next year, coin-op versions of this crude machine had raked in over $3 million. The game was called Pong, the company was called Atari, and the rest is history...

- ASTEROIDS (Top 100)
Prepare for a 1979 flashback! T-shirts were tight and horrible, pants were flared and horrible, Blondie, The Jam and Hot Chocolate were topping the music charts and Asteroids was the smash hit at the arcades.

- DEFENDER (Top 100)
Coin-op giant Williams' addition to the arcade games hall of fame came in 1982 with the introduction of the terrible fast, awfully frantic tiresomely perfect blast-everything-to-hell-and- rescue-the-Humanoids- 'em-up Defender. 

- LLAMATRON (Top 100)
Jeff Minter's classic blaster may look a bit 8-bitty on these screen shots, but once the screen's filled with superfast monsters (and llamas) and there's outgoing fire in all directions, you tend to forget about this and concentrate on PD's finest hour. Looking more Smash TV than most official versions of the frantic 360-degree coin-op, Llamatron's set in a near future where aliens are killing every sheep, goat and llama on the planet, which is shallow enough justification for all this slaughter.