Game Of The Week - Swiv!


skeezix

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Let me preface by saying that I offer this as my Atari ST game of the week, but by no means do I mean to take an exclusive on that. Further, if you want to offer up your own GotW for any platform (C64, SNES, whatever, including the ST), feel free. In fact, if a few people want to do it we could do a combined thing, or put up a blog here in GP32x, post a weekly GotW cross paltform newsletter, or whatever. Still, I get ahead of myself :) Lastly, if you want to offer comment, suggestions, requests, just let me know :)

My goal for GotW is to highlight a lesser known but still interesting title (where 'interesting' can mean very good, or interesting to me for some other cryptic reason that I will endeaver to explain.) So I need not delve into the richness that is Lemmings, Dungeon Master or Civilization (play them _now_ my friends!), say, when I can instead strike a deal with … well, let me step you through the many fantastic titles you might have missed week by week shall I?

SWIV

Platform: Atari ST featured, though also popular on Amiga (and to a lesser extent on the C64 and Speccy IIRC)

Play Now: Your emulator of choice for those platforms; OutcaST for GP2x and GP2x Wiz (also known as CaSTaway for the PSP) are verified, since I wrote them :)

Atari ST ROM: Comes in many options, but I have a Medway Boys crack I must admit is most handy as it lacks any protection annoyances and includes a Trainer option




SWIV_Atari_ST_1991_1.gif



SWIV is a vertical shooter (a SHMUP for fans of the genre) which is both pretty good and interesting for its technical merits. Developed, I believe, by the same folks who ported Silkworm to the ST from the Arcade, it is in my books the spiritual successor to Xenon 1 (not Xenon 2: Megablast) and Silkworm itself. What it inherited from those titles was the playability of airborn (in this case Helicopter) or ground (Tank) and a two player game where both are in play at once. Designing the levels for a single player who could be either form (chosen at start of the game) must have proven challenging but they did an excellent job — the game is not overly difficult, and is relatively lengthy.

Silkworm itself is a decent port of an excellent Arcade title; in that game (a horizontal SHMUP) the players move right; the chopper can only fire foreward and the jeep can fire any direction but of course has limited movement options.. these limitations added teamwork strategy, but did make the level design a little painful. SWIV is this same sort of approach, though in vertical orientation.

While not the very best shooter on the platform, it garnered excellent reviews at the time for its playability and a few specific features; I admit I encountered it late in the ST game — a few years ago while developing an ST emulator in fact — but I highly recommend it to ST aficionados. It doesn't perform too many nasty hardware tricks if I recall, but does some very interesting things in the actual code. I should not know that except that it brought out some CPU emulation issues .. so I was in the unenviable position of working through their assembly code to debug my simulated CPUs operation and witnessed some of their trickery. While playing the game you will on occasion notice the floppy disk light up, without interupting game play — they were clever with their timing to pre-cache necessary sprites and level data during gameplay to avoid large 'level loading' pauses. They load before needing and unload after needing to free up memory, permitting the player to tromp through enormous levels without delay. They also do some trickery to keep a large number of sprites onscreen and in motion .. the most popular ST models had no hardware sprites so this was always a weak point in the machine, but the SWIV developers pulled it off better than most others.

In summary, SWIV is not a 'bullet hell' type of SHMUP per se, but it certainly was working its way there — you will regularly encounter dozens of enemies on screen at once in formation, or dozens of bullets to be avoided. Its a good looking and fun to play shooter where you can play as a tank or chopper.

Good times. Of course, I am a shooter man .. Sky Shark (Flying Shark) is my poison of choice and the first arcade cabinet I picked up.




jeff
 
Nice start. :)

It's just occurred to me that anything I play on the original hardware needs to support high res monochrome, because I'm using the VGA adaptor. So if you can recommend anything like that in future I'd love to hear about it.

For everything else, as they say, there's OutcaST.
 
SilkWorm In Vertical.

I remember ol' SWIV getting a bit of stick in later years because it was so BROWN -- but at the time it was a great blaster. I preferred the chopper (although in Silkworm I liked the jeep best).
 
PokeParadox posted on May 21 2009 at 11:53 AM) OMG Amiga version was great! (Very very hard said:
Never played it on ST though.
I think there was also Super SWIV and Mega SWIV released.
The amiga version is definatly superior, if only for the sound - the constant Bassy noise of the guns/missiles used to drive my mum insane when me and my mate played two-player SWIV for hours on end!

Yep, love the game. I have yet to finish it, will do one day though.

I loved the crop-circle-creating alien spaceship, very nice touch :)
 
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I think I have next week's game picked out already .. not a shmup, but also mediumly popular and great. I'll pick something more obscure for the one after though perhaps.

Really, I almost want to write about 5 of them right now, damn real life gets in the way :)

jeff
 
I've just installed OutcaST on my '2X for the first time. Awesome little emulator. :) Mini TOS desktop is so cute!

As stated in the other thread, I don't really know the ST catalogue so I'm just going to add your weekly game. SWIV is deliciously unforgiving. I added Xenon 2 as well, because it's against the law not to. New life has been breathed into my GP2X tonight. :D
 
I'm actually using my 2x a fair amount of late for this stuff .. missed it. Been too busy the last few months and not enough retro!

I need to finish the OutcaST Wiz port soon .. this whole month is insane for me, but next month should have a few things out. (Yes, its also on Panda, and all same version as the 2x.)

jeff
 
Just dug my old A500 out and put Stunt Car Racer on, 3 hours went buy before i noticed the time!

Played well on the ST too, but if i recall correctly i'm sure the ST version had a wireframe track instead of the Amiga's Vector based one.
 
I would doubt that; its possible, but I think Stunt Car Racer was solid on the ST. More to point.. the ST was a faster machine in terms of math (slightly so, at least on-par-with); the Amiga shone in other regards, though its possible they could've had a better poly filler piece of code. Usually 3d games faired better on the ST if they were different at all. (The Amiga was more capable, but I would argue for the first few years that more games on Amiga and St were actualyl ST ports and thus nearly identical on the Amiga, possibly with a better title track. It was after a few years where the devs started actually using the Amiga hardware and beating out the ST. The later model Amigas also did catch on, whereas the ST was perma-stuck in its 1986 formation.. few moved to STEs, etc.)

Anyway, I would bet that title is nearly identical on both machines, but I forget :)

jeff
 
I was wondering about that, is porting from the GP2X to the Wiz super hard or is it pretty straight forward?

Anyway looking forward to some ST goodness on the OLED Wiz, it will be interesting to see and will probably look just like those old ST RGB monitors. That is one thing I did notice back in the day, the ST monitors looked like they had much better color than the Amiga monitor. The colors were more deep and saturated and the black level better while the Amiga monitor was a bit washed out. That was only the monitor though as the Amiga computer itself actually had more colors.

I tried SWIV on the SNES emu with Wiz last night, that game is brutal. I wussed out and went to Space Megaforce..

There is a Wiz version of Outcast?!? Where I couldn't find it.
 
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; the Amiga shone in other regards, though its possible they could've had a better poly filler piece of code. Usually 3d games faired better on the ST if they were different at all.
I noticed this. Some examples include Falcon and Carrier Command. They were faster/smoother on the ST than the Amiga. The must have been solely because the ST's CPU was 8Mhz and the Amiga's was 7.12Mhz a full 10% slower! Sacrilege!
 
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I like this "game of the week" idea - although i know nothing of ST games, i was an Amiga boy!! :)

Swiv is a cool game, whiled away a lot of hours on the Amiga version.

Think i'll post up a game of the week, on a different platform soon! :D
 
I too have never owned or played any Atari ST games. I'm liking this thread as it sheds light on the games I could be missing out on. I have now got SWIV and liking it. B)
 
Tag5 posted on May 23 2009 at 05:54 PM said:
I too have never owned or played any Atari ST games. I'm liking this thread as it sheds light on the games I could be missing out on. I have now got SWIV and liking it. B)

I agree. I've been remiss with OutcaST but it has found a home on my F200 (after I bumped some stuff) with some Automation CDs. Simply awesome. I'll look forward to more recommendations.
 
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On your gp2x (F200 or F100) if you flash Open2x you get the SDHC support (or I think notaz or someone made a hack to get the gph kernel to support it.) In the end, 8 or 16 GB on your 2x is plenty ;)

Glad people are liking the thread; I'll post a new one soon for GotW #2 :)

The 3d-games being smoother on the ST is definately just the extra 10% CPU, and perhaps ever so slightyly the fact the OS is doing a little less.

jeff

Oh, and Wiz Outcast is not posted yet; it has a few big gotchas I've not finish up yet.. this month I'm being worked to death, and what little time I've had has been biking with my baby girl or fiddling with MAss Effect .. but should be having free time again soon. Porting to small platforms is often a pain (ie: to original PAlm OS) due to all kinds of machine specifid oddities; porting to modern machines (ie: real OSes, like Linux on them), is always pretty trivial, and the Pandora and Wiz are no exception; porting from gp2x SDL to Wiz/Panda SDL is of course trivial, but most GP2x stuff was lower level than that, but others have already re-implemented relatively lower level compatibility layers... and its pretty easy to just go up a level to SDL if you want (but we prefer to stay lower to the metal for perfomrnace naturally.) So all told, one can do a 1-day port to Wiz or Pandora, and/or more days to get lower to the metal or improve it. As in all ports tghe last few years, the initial 'quick hack' port is easy, but the trick is in conforming or adding UIs, and then the big whack is perfomance tuning if its a heavy app/emu/game. (ITs hard to talk 'in general' since it depends on the type of app a lot, but let me say.. its easto port to wiz and pandora. Hows that? :) For that matter I've got Hatari on both machines too working. It was never designed for handhelds, its a more full emu.. but as our machines are getting beefier they can handle it, so Hatari is generally better than OutcaST, just without my goofy GUIs on top :)
 
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