This is an absolutely fantastic Amiga game. Loved it and played it a lot back in the days. I still can finish it but with the use of the credits. When i first saw the ending animation on my A500 Plus, i couldn't believe my eyes!
"I was given free rein when it came to the visual design for SWIV, so I crammed in as much crazy stuff as I could: giant spaceships leaving corn circles in fields, dried- up riverbeds littered with supermarket trolleys and concrete-slippered skeletons, and loads of references to '70s sci-fi shows. My favourite section was a whole level that we did as a homage to Xevious, where we basically replicated the backgrounds and sprites from the classic arcade game." -- Ned Langman, graphic artist (SWIV - Amiga)
2 days ago I've found case with A500 floppy disks at my parents house... Oh man, I grabbed Amiga from the basement instantly, connected to big TV and showed to my kids. They were really amazed by this computer! And Swiv is the best game ever for my 5year old kid. I'm back in '90 now :)
SWIV Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]: Great graphics, huge explosions and hard as nails! SWIV remains an impressive shooter for the Amiga computer! Read the video description for my review!
@@ioet2007 You fought to save the world, and they canned you as a way to say "Thanks." Makes you wonder if serving your planet was worth all of it. Unless you got the vehicle and the keys as severance..
This game along with Silkworm is one of the first games that included "frame skipping" or "framerate independent physics", so basically when the CPU is overloaded, instead of slowing the game down, it just skips a frame of rendering, in a way that the speed itself is preserved, so you don't really notice the slowdown since there isn't any. It's just a framerate drop. At the time, this technique was extremely rare and games would just come to a crawl instead.
At the time, it was the most audiovisually impressive shoot em up for the best computer of all time. And generally one of the most impressive and immersive games for this platform. And regardless of the platform, it is still the best shoot em up to this day. However, if you take off the nostalgia goggles, the technical limitations of the AMIGA become apparent. Like frame rate drops or the “swallowing” of certain sounds.
In 1991, when SWIV came out, I was disappointed by it, and I never understood all the hype about this title. Ok, it was a full-screen 320x256 game (this was unusual on the Amiga, where most of its games had a smaller game area) and it managed to generate many objects on screen, but the framerate was limited at 25 (or less) fps, the colours on-screen were 16 (Battle Squadron come out 2 years before, it was a 32 colours game and it was so much better than this), the scrolling was very very slow, it had no background music and nothing that could differentiate it from similar games released in the past. And I didn't like that huge-one-single-level idea... Without levels, I didn't feel the progress in my efforts when I played this game. I liked the old Side Winder (a 1988 game!) a lot more than this...
My Amiga floppy disc was corrupted. The game crashed early. According to this video I didn't even make it 1/3 into the game. :( Now i know the ending at least.
Well, it's true that this vertical shoot'em up shows many many animated objects on a full screen (320x256) area but... It moves them at no more than 25fps... And when the screen is full of objects the framerate often drops to 16.67fps (sometimes even less than that). I did expect this on the Amiga when you use a more demanding 5-bitplanes mode (32 colors), but this game uses a standard 4-bitplanes mode (16 colors) so the result is a little disappointing. Probably the slowdowns are there because for each animated object there is a big shadow to draw, and that makes the rendering much heavier (it's like the engine has to draw 2x the number of animated objects). The scrolling is smooth but it's very slow: 1 pixel every 4 frames. I wonder if the slow scrolling was "by design" or it was a technical limit imposed by the continuous loading system. And having just a single big uninterrupted level that loads progressively from the disk was very cool at the time, but not a lot of fun as a player. There was no real sense of progression... You could not say something like: "Hey, I reached the 4th level!". Another disappointing thing to me was the lack of background music. Many european developers didn't understand the importance of a good background music in a videogame. The graphics, generally speaking, are good but I'm not much a fan of such dark & desaturated palettes. I like much more the vibrant graphics style of Battle Squadron (which, by the way, uses 32 colors, has a good background music + sound fx and is faster and smoother than SWIV. And Battle Squadron came out 2 years before SWIV!). All in all, SWIV was a good vertical shoot'em up for the Amiga, but I feel it didn't offer really anything more compared to similar titles. The developer of SWIV was a very good programmer (he programmed Silk Worm, Ninja Warriors and Rodland too) but its target for this game was achieving a big "quantity" of objects on a full screen area rather than achieving smoothness, and personally I think that in a shoot'em up smoothness should always have priority on quantity.
Battle Squadron is not a good game to play though. I actually thought Hybris was more fun than Battle Squadron. SWIV is a much better game. I agree with the music issue though.
@@robertwilson3866 At the time, Battle Squadron was the most arcade-like vertical shoot'em up you could get on a basic Amiga 500. Hybris was great too (it was made by the same programmer of Battle Squadron). SWIV was too slow to me, no background music, and I didn't like at all the idea of just one big level.
@@amigamagic5754 I think my problem with Battle Squadron is the power-ups were mostly dull and seemed to have been designed around the Amiga's limitations - to keep the speed up. That's the thing - you can either make a slick 50/60 fps schmup or drop the frame rate and add a load more graphical effects and playability.
@@amigamagic5754 Yes agree about the one big level. Not sure why there was no background music. A lot of Amiga games did that. Why is it so hard to split up 4 channels betweem music and SFX?
@@robertwilson3866 Well, I don't think the power-ups in Battle Squadron were so dull... Especially considering that game was released in 1989! And its power-ups were much more varied than those in SWIV (that came out 2 years later and added absolutely nothing to the shoot'em up genre on the Amiga).
still,thanx for the video,i always get calm and nostalgic when i see amiga games,and you took the effort....and you made it till the end,even if at times i was like "wtf are you doing!" good job,man!
The Amiga had some good and original games. But arcade conversions were mostly awful or in this case, copying ideas from other better arcades but missing something . This game's lack of soundtrack, the lack of extra fire buttons (for a bomb), the dull colour palette, the mish mash of enemies that don't always match the level theme, the lack of weapon variety and the slow frame rate. I had a look at Genesis shooters and the few Snes ones and Amiga just didn't match.
![SWIV Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
