Spanish Games (Página 1 de 2)

I was never too fond of Spanish games despite having a Spectrum and a CPC on my pre-Amiga days, which were the systems these people put down their best efforts. Puzzle-solving games were usually too unintelligible and action games, when not pure and strictly memory-based and joystick-incompatible, were slow and poorly executed attempts at arcade-style concepts. So I actually played very little and remember almost nothing in a particular basis. It was nice they chose the side-scroll action formulas more than anyone else and the themes and atmospheres were pretty cool at times, but I can't say much more. Topo Soft, Opera Soft and Dinamic were the most prolific, but I'm sure you can get some other suggestions (and perspective!) from some people here. The topic is always interesting. Just let's leave Gaelco for another thread.

I played (and bought -- the cover art was just too tempting) Lorna in its A500 iteration, by the way. I remember myself beating the second stage. And then lamenting it for wasting my time and money with such a poor game. 16-bit systems were a bit too much for Spanish programmers, it seems.

Edit: The original version of this:

http://www.retroworks.es/php/game_en.php?id=1

...is quite widely considered one of our finest classics, too.

Never heard of that before but I'm quite sure that didn't get an arcade release.

Walpurgis? I didn't know it. Is it a joystick game?

Narco Police is supposedly Spain's most competent 16-bit game from the early years. It sold even better in the UK, most likely because there were more A500 users there by then and the press quite liked it. I never cared too much about it due to its 3-D approach, I guess. I'm not sure you can play it without a keyboard, either, and I hate that. Most Spanish companies died even before the console boom, and their efforts for the A500 were really mirroring their poor financial situations.

As for La Abadía, there's a 'remake' for WIN by Calamity which essentially is the A500/ST version the game never officially got, if you use a 15-kHz low-res video card:

http://postback.geedorah.com/foros/view … 677#p10677

D/L: http://www.abadiadelcrimen.com/descarga.html

Original CPC graphics are also selectable, anyway.

Thanks for the pics. Did you check these ones too?:

http://computeremuzone.com/ficha.php?id … ec=amstrad

http://computeremuzone.com/ficha.php?id … ec=amstrad

I think I liked Sol Negro at some point.

Well, most, if not all, Amiga games were conceived for either, joystick or mouse as the main controller. Keyboard compatibilty was just an addendum, but it usually was there. I asked in this case because there's a 'point-and-click' phase, which leads me to think that it uses the mouse, hence, I'm not sure if the action phases are also conceived for the mouse. It's not usual to make you alternate between different controllers. But hey, it's the Amiga after all, and an amateur game at that, so.

No clue, but it's not the first time I see it, I'm sure. Azpiri is pretty good, but he's not without his faults, I'd say. His logos are kind of ugly many times and he can't really adapt his style to the game he's drawing for (it seems he was too used to it being the other way around). Just check the Sirwood one you posted. As a comic-book artist, he wasn't all that special, actually.

Spain had really good cover illustrators indeed (and very bad ones too; the budget was it all). Luis Royo [ > ] worked a lot for Dinamic. I always liked this piece too:

I'm thinking of moving this to the public forum. What about that?

I have the intention of playing Walpurgis now, but it won't be soon. If you don't get the solution elsewhere, let us know it.

Lovely. One thing you never find mentioned is that La Abadía is one of the few CPC games which didn't use the system's awful line-doubled presentation. They needed to sacrifice the number of possible on-screen colors, but still, it makes you lament that every other dev didn't take notes.

This brings to my mind that we don't know your gaming preferences, Calamity. Which are currently your favorite genres / titles, if you feel like sharing?

Very few Spanish publishers cared about the Amiga market already in 1992. You rarely found people who bought official releases for the platform in this very country, so 1992, with the console boom there, was just too late for it. So yeah -- piracy in the end, quite surely.

Steel Force is actually an arcade game:

http://maws.mameworld.info/maws/romset/stlforce

Mortal Race was too, but that's not in MAME. A shame, 'cause I love the genre and it looks interesting. If they ever got distributed in Spain it had to be in a very limited basis, but most likely they didn't cross the Italian frontier.

I'll try to find more on Chaos Maze and Deep Red later.

I knew there was something familiar about steel force, I played it in mame a few years back even.

All I found about the other stuff was the Island Dreams site http://web.jet.es/micky/ with pretty much the same info as Miguel's site.

Recap, are there any good Spanish auction sites? Ebay Spain is all I know about, and while there is the occasional Amstrad stuff and such, I am yet to find a single PC DOS Spanish release appear.

Yeah, they just used mode 0 (16 colors) for the intro screen, which was good, the rest of the game used colors but double resolution , so the detail was great... today it seems funny, but at the time those screenshots printed in game magazines were really impressive.

I suppose CPC game devs wanted to benefit from it's 16 colors mode at pixel level, compared to its direct competitor, the Spectrum's graphic mode, that had a slightly higher resolution with 15 colors but only selectable at character level, which led to the typical Spectrum-like graphics.

Actually I stopped playing games at all at early 90's, and just recently got an arcade cab and started getting back to it to make up for lost time. Actually my beloved gaming platform was the Sega Megadrive, being the ThunderForce saga the games I most enjoyed, and some other rare ones that I loved like Jewel Master and Ecco the Dolphin.

Today, my favourite games are 2D vertical shooters, the ones without pre-rendered 3D sprites which I mostly hate. But I'm kind of new to this and I'm planning to enjoy each individual title as if they were old bottles of wine. However, I still need to mount one of my two cabs monitor as vertical, which will do one of these days.

At the time of the Spanish 8-bits era, I specially enjoyed Opera games: La Abadía, Livingstone Supongo, Goody, by this order. I never liked Dynamic games too much, with some exceptions: Freddy Hardest, Phantis, Game Over. I didn't play Topo games at all.

From earlier Opera games I liked their originality and technical quality. Later, I think they tried to be more like Dynamic games, and they lacked their former originality and freshness. Specially when they started introducing horizontal scrolling. Scrolling in 8-bit games, even for 16-bit IBM-PC compatible systems conversions, was crap. Those machines weren't able to do a pixel by pixel scrolling at real-time, it had to be in blocks of 4-pixels, let alone do a full screen scrolling. So for me, it was much nicer to see Goody instatly switching from one screen to the next, with those big graphics, than Army Moves scrolling in a small box.

La Abadía del Crimen is a different case, if you compare it with other popular isometric games it's simply on another dimension. Someone said that the greatness of La Abadía is that they achieved the illusion of being in a real building. In most isometric games, each room looks independent, think of Batman. You memorize the map as a series of rooms in a squence. It's not like that in La Abadía, where you actually have the illusion of being in a real building, even despite its criticized system of "cameras" that switch their angle in each screen. So, characters that exit or are about to enter your current "screen", don't just pop in the view, you see them coming in as they move through the map, so sometimes you see a character that's walking its way through another screen in the map but that due to isometric representation it is indeed visible from your current view. And that is achieved even with non-scrolling graphics, unlike other isometric games like The Great Escape that implemented scrolling but their graphics have that "scenery look" compared to the solid and convincing architectural feel reached in La Abadía, that at some point when doing the remake made me believe there was actually a sort of 3D model of the building inside the game, which was an illusion of course.

Alfonso Azpiri was the most prolific artist in covers of Spanish games during the 80's. He worked for Dinamic, Topo, Opera and even any other small developer. In 2009 he released a book with all the works he did for this platforms. It's called 'Spectrum'. I organized an exposition [>] with some of his best works that visited several cities in Spain during 2009-2010.

As recap said another very important illustrator was Luis Royo, but almost all of their covers has been also used for other products like books. I'll name another drawer who worked for Opera and Iber: Juan Gimenez. He is also very popular in the comic world with titles like "The metabarons".

Well, this game was distributed by Dinamic, but it was programmed in Uruguay. I think it should not be considered Spanish. :)

Bad sequel. The first one was a clon of Gunsmoke. I suppose Topo got some agreement with Capcom to avoid legal problems, because the game was published in England with official support of Capcom and with the title Gunsmoke. It's curious, but there are more copies of Capcom arcades, like Metropolis/Trojan [>] or Satan/Black tiger [>]

The Spanish industry of videogame during the eighties was very amateur. A lot of games were made by programmers in their house, and then, they were offered to distributors. There was good local sales, but never got international success, except 4 o 5 titles in England. When Nintendo and Sega decided to expand their console market to Spain, almost all developers disappeared. They couldn't afford the investments to get the programming license for this platforms, and 16 bits computers needed specialized workers that they didn't want/couldn't to pay. And people didn't want to pay 40 € for a game. The 8 bits games were sold by less than 6€ in cassette format, and piracy was so tempting...