Amiga Tribute: SwitchBlade

Hiro from the SwitchBlade series.

Part 13/24 of my Amiga tribute project >3

Woohoo, overhalfway done, and on time too, this month it's the SwitchBlade series.

I must admit, Switchblade 1 is one of the games I missed, yet Switchblae 2 I have played, cursed for it's difficulty (sometimes magnified by certain flaws), but really loved at the same tiem, and I friggin' beat it too >D
If you ever thought that NES had some hard games, you'd be surprised how frustrating (yet rewarding) were some of the Amiga titles >D and these two games were some prime examples of this. Like I said, I never played SB1, but heard enough (and seen parts of the playthrough), to havea good picture of how it looks, stuff like enemies appearing out of nowhere right before you or the infamous recoil issue, which made you stunned for a split second upon impact by the enemy, like in most games, but WITHOUT the brief invincibility that other games have, so often a single enemy could deplete your HP meter quite much (if not outright kill you...), and the enclosed space didn't exactly made manoeuvring around 'em too easy, plus, the controls didn't make it easy as is...
SB2 on the other hand, while improving on both controls and the recoil, had way more of sheer difficulty, though that's only if you got past the first 2 levels, one which was a reminiscent of the first game's underground maze, and the second which made you jump on platforms to hake your way to the top of a rather large mountain, both VERY long (around 20 minutes for each, and that's only if you already know what to do), yet it only gets better afterwards (damn, I LOVE the city level during a rainstorm), plus, while the recoil issue was indeed improved, it's still kinda present in the underground tunnels part |D

The only really irking part is the music... I mean, it is great, the title tracks for both games are kickass, the ingame track for SB1 is also cool and atmospheric and all, but it plays non stop for the WHOLE BLOODY GAME... it gets really irritating over time when the same loop plays again and again... SB2 on the other hand, has no music at all save for the title track, which gets equally irritating (though yeah, you can play something else on another device and all |D)

Also worth noting, is that while the game was made in a very manga-like style, it was actually made in UK |D

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!


Hiro (c) Gremlin Interactive