Benefactor

A quick drop by this bloggo for those who still pay attention or come across it occasionally. I feel this urgent need to recommend largely-forgotten mid-90s Amiga platform puzzle game Benefactor

“Damn, we’re in a tight spot!”

which I’ve been meaning to play for ages (i.e. around two decades) and finally bothered getting around to recently. It’s a really lovely mixture of Lode Runner and Impossible Mission with a wee sprig of Lemmings chucked into the glass. Basically you control an athletic wee dude who has to rescue even wee-er and arguably even more athletic dudes across a variety of small-but-platformy levels whilst working out how to pull levers, open doors, swing across boiling tar etc. It’s lots of fun, has really really gorgeous graphics and the CD32 version has jolly music and can be played using an emulated CD32 pad which converts nicely to the buttons on most modern joypads rather than having to use the basic Miggy’s rubbish one-button set-up.
Amiga emulation, whilst very good these days, is a faff; but for those who can’t be arsed The Company have one-filed both the ECS and CD32 versions; just be aware a touch of faffing is still needed to get joypads working and sort the aspect ratio*. Of course, if you can find a version for the original hardware that’s even better, and you deserve the finest coconut in all the land.

*Because people who think it’s okay to play old games in the wrong aspect ratio are scum. Sorry to be blunt but the truth often is.

Does the “D” stand for “Derek”?

“In the footure, we all wear red jumpsuits with grey patches”

A friend of mine recently punted me in the direction of indie cyberpunk-ish isometric game DataJack which is very nice and all that and I’ll maybe write something about it here in the next month or so.

But what I wanted to talk about was what DataJack immediately reminded me of – the largely-forgotten 1991 arcade-adventure D-Generation.

When it came out, D-Generation won plenty of praise from the press for its gameplay but was criticised for its visuals which had an outdated, even amateurish look to them. This was a couple of years after Shadow of the Beast and only two years before Doom; 16-bit software was expected to look impressive. D-Generation didn’t and for that reason largely passed an awful lot of people by.

But discovering it again, what’s notable apart from the still-brilliant gameplay (a mixture of action and puzzle-solving) and unintrusive, Bioshock-style plot development (found largely via messages and through conversations rather than cut-scenes and exposition) is how little its “primitive” looks actually matter today and, in fact, how in the modern era of deliberately retro and visually spartan indie software D-Generation weirdly now looks more modern than a lot of its contemporaries.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any digital distribution retailers selling this game, so I can only link to its Abandonia page here. Note that the PC version doesn’t seem to have any joystick support, so playing or emulating the Amiga or ST version may be the best option for most people; there’s also a CD32 version if you can be bothered hunting-down/emulating that.