Shadow of the Beast Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]

Developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis in 1989.

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Foreword: Re-upload to take advantage of YouTube 60 FPS support!

If we were to experiment with word association, you might say Amiga and I would respond with "Shadow of the Beast".

The Amiga had many great games in it's library throughout it's lifespan, but Shadow of the Beast is a showcase for the very essence of what the Amiga computer was all about and why it was such a revolutionary machine for it's time. No self-respecting Amiga fan could possibly own a YouTube channel and NOT have a video of Shadow of the Beast.

The game has an intriguing story line. A young child named Aarbron is kidnapped by servants of the evil beast lord, Maletoth. The child is subject to untold magical and alchemical mutations; as a result, he becomes one of Maletoth's most powerful minions. However, upon witnessing the execution of his own father, Aarbron regains memory of his past life and seeks revenge against Maletoth.

Firstly, let's deal with the elephant in the room. As a game, Shadow of the Beast isn't great, there's no escaping that fact. Success in the game predominantly focuses on remembering enemy placement, attack patterns and the player's ability to react. There are numerous scenarios where you can die instantly without any kind of sign-posting to warn you to the fact, and a whole host of other, questionable design decisions. Some overly fussy sprite collision detection makes combat unpleasantly difficult; the bottom line is, it's not particularly fun to play.

Now, simply put these issues to the back of your mind and try and take yourself back to 1989. Imagine that, up until now, your experience of computer games had been limited to the games available on the popular 8bit micros of the time, such as the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad.

Now, imagine loading Shadow of the Beast up for the first time. I could almost guarantee that everybody's reaction would have been the same: from the moment that you hear the opening introduction music begin to play through the speakers, you'd have been busy trying to remove your jaw from ground level.

For the time, Shadow of the Beast was a technical masterpiece. Never had a game exhibited such amazing graphics, with up to twelve levels of parallax scrolling on the play-field at once. The level of detail in the artwork, main beast sprite included, was nothing short of breathtaking. In fact, the art style demonstrated in SOTB seemed to become synonymous with Psygnosis; many games published by them in the future seemed to exhibit a very similar colour palette and graphical style. Whether this was intentional or not, it's difficult to say.

Perhaps even more phenomenal than the graphics was the sound. The compositions written by David Whittaker are undeniably great, but the quality of the samples he used in the tracks is also part of the reason why the music is so memorable. The Amiga was equipped with an extremely advanced sound-chip and it was certainly able to deliver the goods. For me, the music was the greatest thing about the game.

Shadow of the Beast was ported to just about every major console available at the time. Some versions, such as the PC Engine and FM Towns Marty, even included full CD audio scores, but the Amiga original remains the definitive version (in my opinion).

It was recently announced that Shadow of the Beast is being remade for the PlayStation 4. Let us hope that it is as revolutionary as the Amiga version was.
#retrogaming