Several factors played an important role in the game’s success. First it was the technology, mainly graphics and animations, which were smooth and incredibly advanced on the C-64. The music and non-linear gameplay were two other factors to ensure the great success of the game.

Hurrican is a freeware remake of Turrican for Windows based PCs. It stays true to the original game in many aspects. the game is freely downloadable from the developer website. Be warned though: It plays much better with a gamepad or joystick, and it stays true to its origins which means that it is a tough game.

The game can be played alone or with a friend in two player mode. Users on the keyboard will have to use more keys than usual to control the game. You control the character with the arrow keys, shoot with ctrl, jump with alt and use the secondary 360 degrees weapon beam with Shift. It is kinda unusual that the up key makes the character look up in the direction he is facing to shoot bullets in that direction. This takes some getting used to time on the keyboard.

New users should start with the tutorial that explains the game’s basics and offers some tips and tricks which will help you in the game. It is for instance possible to shoot faster by tapping on the fire key repeatedly, or to enter ball mode by pressing down and the space key simultaneously.

The game stays true to its heritage. This begins by the fake crack intro and continues with the music, animations, open level architecture and enemies that you come across.

Here is a video of the first Hurrican level.

Hurrican has been released in 2007. The last released version is 1.04 which ships with an level editor to create custom levels for the game. The game tested fine ona 64-bit edition of Windows 7. It should run on other Windows systems as well.

Great game for old school gamers who enjoyed playing the game on the C-64 or Amiga, and new gamers who may have never heard about the game but like these kind of action games (Contra, Metroid anyone).

Pushover is a remake of the Amiga classic. It is very true to the original game from what I can tell.

The game is portable and should run on most Windows PCs. I had no problems running it on a 64-bit edition of Windows 7. You control the ant in the level and can move around with the cursor keys. Dominoes can be picked up by walking right in front of them and pressing space. You can then walk with a single domino to another location and press space again to place it there. It should be obvious that the new location needs to be clear if you want to place your domino there.

To push dominoes you walk in front of the one that you want to push and press the up cursor. Your ant moves closer to that domino then, and you can press the left or right cursor key and space to give it a push. This push will hopefully be enough to push over all dominoes on the map.

There are different types of dominoes in the game, from standard dominoes over stoppers and bridge building dominoes to exploding dominoes and splitters. All different types of dominoes are introduced in the first levels to get a feel for them.

The original game on the Amiga offered 100 levels of game play and it is likely that the remake offers the same amount. The game is automatically saved after each successful level so that players can continue to play where they left of. The game ships with an editor that you can use to create your own levels. The game becomes very challenging at later stages.

I found a long play version of the original Amiga Push-Over game on Youtube, if later levels are identical as well it may help overcome situations where you do not know how to complete a specific level.

Pushover is a great remake of an Amiga classic. The game can be downloaded at the developer website at Ishisoft.

And so the idea was born to create a screensaver from a Youtube video. I really like the Amiga Longplay series at Youtube, where guys play old Amiga classic games. The videos show all of the game and have a playtime of many hours sometimes. I decided to download several of those videos, namely King of Chicago, Moonstone, Indiana Jones IV and Day of the Tentacle (PC) and create screensavers from them.

I’m using the Firefox Download Helper extension to download the videos from Youtube. You could also use Grab++ from Orbit Downloader or any other means of downloading the videos from Youtube. The videos are still in flv format and we need to use a converter to convert them to swf format.

I have been using a website called Media Convert to convert flv to swf files. It supports files with a size of up to 150 Megabyte.

If you prefer a offline application or have flv files with a size larger than 150 Megabyte you could use Super instead. Super is a media converter supporting most media file formats. It’s also a better idea if your upload speed is rather low.

Once the swf file has been created you can load Instant Storm and the creation of the screensaver from that Youtube video begins. The process is actually pretty straightforward. I have been using the Project Wizard which guides you to three steps.

The steps are to (1) name the screensaver, (2) select the swf file for it, (3) add a preview image if you like and (4) convert the swf file to the screensaver. A .exe file will be created which, when double-clicked, becomes the new screensaver for the system.

What I like about this solution is that you create a screensaver with video and sound. The process is really easy to follow through and you get some very nice results. It’s actually fun watching the screensaver for some time.

This technique is not limited to Youtube videos. You can basically convert any video files to swf files and create a screensaver from them using this method.

The alternative is emulation. Winuae is a great Amiga emulator, it´s free and easy to use once you get used to it. (*nix version, mac version, psp version) The difficult part is that you will need a kickstart rom to run amiga software. The only legal source that sells kickstart roms is the amiga forever compilation. A quick search on google revealed that several download sites offer downloads of kickstart roms. This is illegal and I advise against it. Once you got your kickstart rom you are ready to go..

Wait, something is missing: The games. Amiga games are available in .adf format which uae is able to read and run. Some famous company’s like Cinemaware are offering disk images of their amiga games for free on their websites. You can download games like Defender of the Crown, Wings, It came from the Desert, Rocket Ranger and many more by simply visiting their site and creating a user account. Once you´ve downloaded some disks you should start uae and do the following.

You need to configure uae the way that it knows where the amiga kickstart rom file is located. I suggest you create a subdirectory called kickstart in the uae folder and place all kickstart roms there. Click the rom tab and select your kickstart rom file as the main rom. (for amiga 500 and 2000 emulation this should be kickstart 1.3)

Click on quick start afterwards, then select disk image from floppy drive df0. Remember that the early amiga computers had no hard drive, everything was run from floppy disks. Browse to the disk image and double click it, the path and name should be displayed now. If the game has more than one disk repeat the process for df1. You are able to access four floppy drives by clicking on floppy drives in the configuration. Some games need even more (monkey island for example was delivered on nine floppy disks, imagine that.)

The last thing you need to do is to click start to start the emulation process. The emulator will run in a windows mode unless you´ve chosen to run in full screen. If loading times are slow you can speed up floppy load time which should work fine for most games. (up to 800%) Some games can be downloaded as hard drive versions which should also speed up loading times.

Some impressions of running games:

Last but not least. Do I think it is worth to use this emulator and pay for a kickstart rom ? Yes I do. Even though most games look bad when it comes to graphics and sound bad as well they are still great. They are fun to play and maybe some may even bring back some long lost childhood memories. Of a time when games were just games.

The game was using vector graphics and someone decided that it would be a nice idea to scale the vectors to offer a high res version of the game. You can see and download the results at the another world fanpage. Downloads are only available for pc but that should not be a problem for most. (with the Amiga system being nearly dead and all)