Leander Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS] 

Follow me on Twitter @ / al82_retro
Get Great Retro Scene News @ www.vintageisth...
Developed by Travellers Tales and published by Psygnosis in 1991
Foreword: I included a full loop of the title music, so click the following time code to skip straight to the game: 5:26
Leander is an action-platform game released originally for the Amiga home computer with a port to the Atari ST later. A version was also released for the Sega Megadrive under the title of Legend of Galahad.
The objective of the game involves controlling Leander as he undertakes a mission to rescue princess Lucana from the clutches of the evil Thanatos. It's never made clear exactly who Thanatos is, or why he is so angry at the city of Honshu, but whatever his reasons he decided to attack the city and take the princess hostage.
The first thing that struck me about this game when I bought it is that the original game manual contained a fairly detailed back-story, especially for a game at the time of it's release.
The game is divided into 3 worlds, each containing 8 sub-stages. The first 7 sub-stages all involve finding an object and then locating the exit portal, whilst the 8th involves killing a boss. With a total of 24 levels, this makes the game quite long and, as it's extremely tough in some places, you'll have your work cut out for you. Fortunately, the developers included a password system to skip to a certain world.
The art style is fairly consistent with a lot of Psygnosis' other titles, including Ork, Agony and the Shadow of the Beast games. The main sprite is really well animated and the multi-coloured armour concept used to represent health is really nice.
Control of the main character is generally very good overall. The movement is responsive and the sprite is located centrally on the screen giving a decent amount of space between it and the edge of the play-field; this helped cut down on the number of times that enemies would spawn and collide with the player without warning.
There is a great audio score courtest of Matthew Simmonds (title screen) and Tim Wright (in-game music). The game does have sound effects too, but you can only have a choice of one playing at any time; being the Amiga, you would naturally choose the Amiga.
The biggest headache I had with this game was getting the damn thing to run! Trying to find a working version of the game proved difficult as several versions refused to work at all, whilst others would work only with specific WinUAE configurations.
To confound matters, Traveller's Tales deliberately released a broken version of the game to cracking groups of the day to discourage piracy. This deliberately broken version contains a platform in the cave in stage 1.4 that can't be jumped on, meaning that progress is impossible. Naturally, I only found this out after I'd started recording...
In the end, the final video you see here is taken from 2 separate versions. One version had a working main game, whilst the ending sequence was bugged and had no music, so I had to record the ending from another version (Melnok release) and then add it to the video.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video.
#retrogaming