Amiga Tribute: Brian The Lion

Brian The Lion from Brian The Lion

Part 16/24 of my Amiga tribute project >3

And this time it's one I've been itching to draw for some time, behold Brian The Lion
Hooo boy, where do I start with this one... for one, it's one great platformer, and I mean it, it's one of these that put even the big shots liek Mario or Sonic to shame >:3
Starting with the beautiful design, excellent music, amazing gameplay, and most importantly, it's MASSIVE size, and a challenging difficulty to boot >3
But lets go one thing at a a time. Like I said, the design is simply beautiful, all the stages are rich with details and have so many themes you surely wont get bored, especially the cemetery stage was a positive surprise (as I didn't exactly expect one), of course, each stage comes with it's own array of foes, even if many do the exact same thing, their variety set to match the stages is definitely a plus (especially since most games back then had the same baddies throughout the whole game). Hehe, though it still makes me chuckle how people thought the lava river was made of blood (but yeah, you can kinda get that felling seeing it on the map screen).
And the sound, when I say the OST was an excellent one, I mean it. This game actually has some of the best game tunes I have ever heard, especially since almost each stage has it's own separate track (only some of the extra stages re-use these), same goes for the bosses, etc. My favs were definitely the scrolling shooter and cemetery stage tracks >3
Next, gameplay and size, and trust me, when I said how massive it is, I wasn't kidding. I mean a multitude of stages here is so big, not many have ever seen them all. As in, a normal playthrough is around 40-50 minutes long (of course, plus any unfortunate accidents along the way), but a playthrough including all the bonus stages is roughtly around 3-4 hours long, so yeah, the game was bloody VAST.
And this is where the difficulty thing kicks in >3 you see, a normal playthrough alone proves to be quite a challenge, but attempting to find, let alone clear, the extra stages is what makes it bloody hard, and I mean Dark Souls level of hard 83
Ooooh, I can already see the disbelief on your faces >3 but hear this, you can only get so many spare hitpoints, lives or continues, these do not respawn when re-entering stages, and even any stores you might come across have a limited supply of itmes. Still think it's not as hard as DS? ;3 Trust me, this game is not to be taken lightly >:3

The only possible flaw I could list, is how obscure it is... I mean, it was only ever released for the Amiga, and it's console counterpart Amiga CD32, and it was only released in Europe alone. Effectively making the game fall into the abyss of obscurity. Especially since this game was released 2o years ago, yet this is the second piece of fanart for it to exist around the net, it's really sad :<

Other parts of the project - Shadow Of The Beast, Shadow Fighter, Zool, The Chaos Engine, Superfrog, Skeleton Krew, The Speris Legacy, Flashback, Agony, Brutal: Paws of Fury, Fightin' Spirit, Ruff 'N' Tumble, SwitchBlade, Lionheart, The Lost Vikings, Brian The Lion, Wolfchild, Gods, Entity, Franko: The Crazy Revenge, Hired Guns, Turrican, The Killing Game Show, Yo! Joe!


Brian The Lion (c) Psygnosis