Shadow of the Beast

The Good
Everyone knew that the Commodore Amiga beat the audiovisual pants off all the home computers and game consoles of the late 80's, but few games drove that fact home like Shadow of the Beast. Conceived as an answer to the superior graphics and sound found in arcade games at the time, it stands as one of the best looking and sounding side-scrollers ever made.

The graphics are truly superb... they're rich with color, and the silky-smooth multilayered background scrolling creates a dizzying pseudo-3D effect. The art direction is typical 80's Psygnosis, which means intricately detailed backgrounds with many smooth, rounded edges, and twisted, bizarre creatures. It has a distinctly European flavor (speaking as a Yank), which adds to the game's slightly surreal atmosphere.

Nothing, however, contributes to that atmosphere more than David Whittaker's moody, richly textured soundtrack. Composed entirely in the MODule format that first appeared on the Amiga, it evokes an eerie, lonely, almost otherwordly feel. The first time I wandered right from the start point into the "danger zone" and the theme music's tempo increased and suddenly developed a pounding beat was a true experience, to be sure.

The Bad
Okay, sound and graphics aside, Shadow of the Beast really isn't that good as a game. It plays like your standard side-scrolling actioner, only worse... the game is entirely linear, the difficulty is unforgiving, and the controls are stiff as all get-out. I guess that after shoving all those brilliant visuals and musical tracks into the Amiga's 512kb of RAM, there wasn't any room left for good gameplay.

You only get 12 health points and one life before your beast-man's "hearts explode" and you find yourself looking at a closeup of his festering corpse and listening to the (wonderfully composed) "awww, you're dead" music. And there are so many cheap hits and instant kills in this game that getting through it is mostly a matter of memorization, not skill. Health-restoring items are few and far between, too.

Sometimes, the "do it in order or you're screwed" linearity of the game reaches King's Quest proportions. For instance, when you're in the "Roots" level, make sure you get the power ball that lets you throw waves of energy before you fight the boss, but don't use it on any of his minions - it'll disappear, and you'll have to face him with your bare fists (and he kills you in one hit).

The Bottom Line
Shadow of the Beast is worth experiencing for the graphics and sound alone. However, I don't know how I'd feel if I'd bought this game for $50 back in 1989. At least I'd have something to "wow" my friends with when they started bragging about how wicked awesome Super Mario was.

The Good
The cover art of this game will only make people wonder at what the hell that game could be about. I was only introduced to this game a year ago by a good friend of mine. I hadn't heard much of the company Psygnosis outside of this game, yet this game could very easily be in my top five today. Overall, it is sort of a Metroid-lite. There's a bit of exploration; nothing Super Metroid of Symphony of the Night depth, but you have to go to certain areas of the game before others, or else you're going to get screwed over.

Graphics: Shadow of the Beast always amazed me with its graphics, any version. Watching as your character (I never did know his name..) runs along, the different background layers all scroll along at different speeds. The mountain-filled background scrolls more slowly than the fence up close, and I've always been a fan of that little effect. I would stare at it all day while playing, but I've actually got to pay attention to what I'm doing, you know?

The cover art does hint at one thing of the game: the creatures in the game are all things you haven't seen before, for the most part. All of the sprites are nicely detailed on the Genesis, and the bosses are even larger and heavily detailed. Sure, the boss sprites don't have a whole lot of motion to them, but that's one of the few nit-picks I have with this game.

Aside from that, what else can I say about the graphics but them being beautiful? The sprites are detailed and fit well in with the mood of the game, and the backgrounds are just gorgeous.

Overall Graphics score: 9/10 - These graphics amaze me yet today; I just can't stop playing the game to simply look at the graphical part of it.

Gameplay: Shadow of the Beast is a platformer with some hints of exploration in it. You can either jump or attack; a punch on the ground, or a kick mid-air. You'll also get some upgrades to your punch or a gun later on, but those are only temporary. It may seem like a small amount of controls, but 2D platformers never needed a lot of controls anyway.

You go from one area to the next, picking up an item or upgrade you need to get past one area's boss or to even enter another area period. At first you may get confused at what to do, but once you figure out what to do playing the game again becomes that much more clear. You have 12 hit points- a little heart moniter on the top of the screen tells you so. You get hit, you lose one. Simple enough, right? Also, lying around are smaller health-ups that recover your 2 hit points, while there are some Full Health bottles as well. Not too much to take in, now is it?

Overall Gameplay score: 8.5/10 - The game plays well, even if it doesn't have a whole lot of depth. But you certainly don't need a lot of depth to have a lot of fun, and Shadow of the Beast is full of that. The only thing really detracting from my score is the insane difficulty of later areas of the game. I have yet to beat it myself, but have witnessed my friend doing it.

Soundtrack: There are maybe a total of six songs to this game, but do I ever love them. They're very ambient in nature, and once I first heard them I never forgot them. The main theme while you're walking about ground really gives you a good sense of the the mood this game is supposed to bring across you. Mysterious, yet soothing. All of the themes can easily fall in that category. The theme walking up to the castle, which I have simply dubbed "Attack", is more upbeat than the rest and gives you the sense of being assaulted by too many enemies; which you are. Only a few themes to the game, yet they all fit so perfectly.

Overall Soundtrack score: 10/10 - I'll say it of yet another aspect of this game, the soundtrack is simply beautiful. They fit the game perfectly, and they're quite addictive as well.

The Bad
Storyline: I can't properly gauge the storyline, since I don't know much of it. You're trying to become human, I know that much. I know it isn't deep, but since I know nothing of it, I can't give it a proper grade.

Overall Storyline score: N/A - The story isn't exactly bad, as the section I've put it in, but I just don't know enough to say anything good or bad about it.

The Bottom Line
Shadow of the Beast is a rare gem, and definately a lesser-known title. But you know a game has a lasting effect when you often comment on things with "That looks like it's from Shadow of the Beast," or, "that sounds like Shadow of the Beast". I've done this countless times, and that's the sign of finding a game which is truly a classic.

The Good
While not as visually or aurally impressive as the original Amiga version, it captures the essence of the game perfectly. Graphically, it's perhaps the best conversion (and we're talking about the PAL version, not the souped-up NTSC-J) of the game, forgiving how they turned Aarbron purple. One of the most impressive features of the game is the number of enemies: there's a good number of one-offs, and most of the regulars are only repeated an handful of times, with little of the palette swaps a lot of 16-bit games are so fond of. It also maintains the multi-layered parallax scrolling, but sadly the gorgeous effect is only shown in the plains, with the underground and the castle (where most of the action takes place) rendered in a bit of a dull fashion. The music, while not being a match to the original tracker files is pretty acceptable and fits the pace in the game quite nicely, but for some reason there's no sound from the kicks and punches.

Then, there's something in the game that makes it incredibly challenging. It's not the best looking game in the platform, and certainly isn't the most playable or the best story development, yet I find myself having a go at it almost everyday. Forgetting for a while that the game oozes style, it might be argued that as the game is the same as the previous and as the next will be, there's a need to search for perfection - making all the way from in the underground base or one of the "flying things" sequence without dropping a single hit point, for instance. While a few games are only rewarding once the player beats it (and a few others, not even then), Beast makes the player proud even for completing some of the tougher sections. And that's perhaps what's fascinating me in the game.

The Bad
The difficulty level perhaps is only matched in Gods, also a port of an outstanding Amiga game troubled by poorly calculated frame rates. While not impossible per se (in fact, it's easier in some parts than the Amiga version), the game draws its absurdly high difficulty level from three sources: the close timing required to hit the waves of enemies that follow the player, some portions of level design and the complex pattern of the obstacles. While in games like Sonic the Hedgehog (arguably the only game all Mega Drive gamers played) the player is rewarded by having sharp reflexes and jump calculation skills, in Beast it's all a matter of studying the the timing and patterns of the traps (such as the thorns coming out of the ground) and enemies. However, the difference in knowing where the next enemy will come from isn't one between "losing" and "winning", more one of "surviving for a few more minutes", so reflexes and sharp decisions are still required. I've mentioned level design in the start. While the game is pretty much linear, a lot of new players will make a lot of mistakes such as starting in the wrong direction or not picking some objects up (which I won't go into details, missing them the first times around is just part of the learning), just to get killed some minutes later. Even with the cheat code on, the player must be very careful to explore every inch of the levels to avoid being stuck for missing an item.

However, the high difficulty level is there for a reason, as the game is very short, being perfectly possible to complete it in less than 30 minutes. Of course, to do so, the player has to spend a few dozens of hours learning the best ways to avoid damage or simply cheat (and even then, it will take a while), but it doesn't make a complete run less short. I guess all the graphic layers, different enemies and music were included at the expense of a larger game world (let's not forget the original game was included in two floppies), and the difficulty level was tweaked a few notches up to cover that.

The Bottom Line
Beast isn't one of those games that one can recommend, and in most cases, it's an acquired taste. Some flaws prevent the game from getting higher marks, such as some lack of detail in graphics (as the Japanese version showed, it was perfectly possible to do better and closer to the Amiga version, but I've found some of the monsters better designed in the PAL/NTSC-U version) and the strange omission of sound effects. The gameplay is penalized for having simplified controls and being extremely hard, but that's part of the charm.

Hardly one of those "must have" titles, but an interesting title from the golden years of the Amiga that was perfectly ported into a home console.