MINORITY REPORT: NAOMI AND ATOMISWAVE
■ Before Sea of Thieves, there was
Pirates! from Sid Meier. And slightly
after Pirates! (bear with us) there was
Pirates! Gold, which tarted up the
original game. As well as the flashy
intro, Pirates! Gold featured improved
graphics and gameplay, and the CD32
version had the edge over other ports
thanks to its CD-quality audio. It’s not
the definitive version of the game, but
it was certainly the best available at
the time of its 1994 release PIRATES! GOLD
■ DEVELOPER: MICROPROSE
■ YEAR: 1994
■ This flight sim ran much faster
and looked prettier on the CD32 in
comparison with the bog-standard
Amiga version, and also added the
voice of a copilot to warn you about
upcoming dangers. And of course,
it came with the obligatory fancy
intro, a rite of passage for all CD32
ports. Also, it had menus that were
disguised as office scenes, a favourite
trick of Nineties flight sims that we
find oddly charming. GUNSHIP 2000
■ DEVELOPER: MICROPROSE
■ YEAR: 1994
■ Ah, the age of the Doom
clone! The arrival of id Software’s
masterpiece on PC made those
beige business machines cool, and
developers scrambled to imitate the
game’s gory gunplay. And none was
a more slavish imitation than Gloom.
Derivative though it may be, Gloom
played a mean game of 3D violence,
and the CD32 version ran smoothly
in fullscreen mode, unlike versions on
the less-powerful Amigas. GLOOM
■ DEVELOPER: BLACK MAGIC
■ YEAR: 1995■ Some people think that Broken Sword:
Shadow Of The Templars is the pinnacle of
Revolution Software’s development history,
but sadly they are quite, quite wrong. For it is
this, Beneath A Steel Sky, a cyberpunk romp
through an Australian city divided between
privileged penthouse dwellers and the
dispossessed who scrabble for survival at the
foot of the elite’s shining skyscrapers. Even 25
years later, the game looks remarkably good.
The Amiga original came on an astonishing
15 floppy disks, which meant switching areas
involved a tedious amount of disk swapping
and long pauses. So just from a practical point
of view, having the entire game on one CD was
a massive time-saver. But the Amiga CD32
version heralded another big improvement in
that voice acting was added throughout.
Revolution initially hired actors from The
Royal Shakespeare Company to record the
5,000 lines of dialogue over two days. But it
wasn’t happy with the results, and realised
that it needed to hire specialist voiceover
artists. So the script was rerecorded and
the results are impressive, if a little strange.
Although the game is set in Australia, most
characters have British or American accents,
and some spoken lines don’t match exactly
with the written version. As an early example
of the possibilities of the immense storage
offered by CDs over floppy disks, Beneath A
Steel Sky shines.BENEATH A STEEL SKY
» [CD3 2] You can’t hear it, of course,
but Beneath A Steel Sky is a superior cut on
the CD32 console thanks to its new soundtrack.■ PUBLISHER: REVOLUTION SOFTWARE ■ YEAR: 1994» [CD32] Not having to swap
through 15 floppy disks makes
this cyberpunk classic at lot
more appealing to play.■ Team17 and Superfrog were good
to the CD32, they ported the third
game in the excellent Alien Breed
series to the ill-fated machine, and
threw in a free copy of Alien Breed II.
Not only that, Tower Assault features
the flashy intro so common in CD32
ports, and this one is a beauty. Shot
in the Team17 building in Wakefield,
it’s packed with flashy effects and
stars Team17 staff members. ALIEN BREED:
TOWER ASSAULT
■ DEVELOPER: TEAM17
■ YEAR: 1994RETRO GAMER | 79MINORITY REPORT: AMIGA CD32
■ Its fancy cartoon graphics were eye-
catching, But the gameplay is tedious
and frustrating, a mix of dull side-
scrolling sections and even
duller 3D mazes.» LITIL DIVIL
■ GREMLIN GRAPHICS
■ 1993