Lionheart:the most wronged Amiga game ever

[spiff]

Well I for one don’t get how the heck ppl can say that lionheart had better gfx then beast?
Design/style of things, beast wins apart from the psygnosis owlheads. Everything goes in a fantasy theme and fits according to the level.

Beast: A lush forest level with sweet parallax and bright colours, and then the much darker dungeon, once again everything in the same style..
Lion: A good looking copper, and THEN some browgreen crap stuck on it that doesn’t come close to matching and on top of it all the mainsprite that got all the colors drained from the enemy sprites. The sprites them selves look pixelated compared to beast since they try to stick to much details and not enough shades.
And then there’s the music… and I don’t even think I need to comment on that.
To this day there’s still no beast remix that’s as good as the original.
As for gameplay.. I’d say they are about as bad both of them.

[manicx]

Originally Posted by spiff

Well I for one don’t get how the heck ppl can say that lionheart had better gfx then beast?

Because they played more than just the first level.

[Dastardly]

I played a few levels of Lionheart and completed Beast (with cheat) and I think Beast has better gfx.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by manicx

Because they played more than just the first level.

hah , touché! ;D

I think comparing them is not OK, the games were made like 10 years from each other. If having that into account Beast is the more impressive one out of the two, but putting that aside, it's a very different way of depicting things. I happen to like both, graphically, at the same level.

Lionheart may appeal more because it feels "smoother" than Shadow.

[DisposableHero]

3 years, not 10. I think Lionheart's a better game than Beast, once you get used to the controls you can make reasonable progress. And the graphics are stunning.

[Tolismlf]

http://hol.abime.net/?id=894

[mr_a500]

I agree that Lionheart is an unfairly underrated game, probably due to the fact that it came out so late.

It has awesome graphics - especially the way the grass/tree "platforms" (or whatever you call them) blend from one colour to another. The graphics aren't as consistently beautiful as in Beast 1 though and some parts like the flying and riding could have been better. Beast 1 has some flat looking sprites, but for the time it came out, it blew everything else away - even arcades.

Lionheart gameplay is better than Beast, but I hate the flying/riding parts. And some parts (like the flooding castle) are so hard that I haven't been able to complete even in cheat mode.

Back in 1990, when waiting for Beast 2 to come out, I was expecting it to look something like Lionheart - with improvements in gameplay, fancy-but-different parallax scrolling and other fancy tricks (like water). I was horribly disappointed with Beast 2. So for me, Lionheart is more of a Beast sequel than either Beast 2 or 3.

[Tolismlf]

Actually Lionheart is more a sequel to Rastan Saga.
Don't forget that even an ECS Amiga was way ahead of the coin-op machines of the 80s. Had 68000 CPU as most of the good coin-ops had, an extrmeley capable graphics chipset, not to mention pure multitasking If a programmer knew how to take care this little beast could make miracles happen. Even now its still a good gaming console, if you are addicted on the retro gaming (no silly Doom clones, no 3D etc).

[alexh]

http://thalion.atari.org/games/lionheart/lionheart.html

[keropi]

isn't there supposed to be an AGA version of the game?
I remember reading about the AGA version on a Greek magazine of the time, USER ...

[alexh]

There is no Lionheart AGA. I was told the authors began work on Lionheart 2 which *might* have been AGA but Thalion was in trouble and it was canned and they moved back to their home towns and started freelance work on "The misadventures of Flink" on CD32 & MegaCD. I *Think* some graphics exist for Lionheart 2 pixeled by the wonderful artist Henk Nieborg, I'll ask.

[Tolismlf]

Originally Posted by keropi

isn't there supposed to be an AGA version of the game?
I remember reading about the AGA version on a Greek magazine of the time, USER ...

I also think i had read something about it. Maybe there was a plan to produce an AGA version but cancelled, it's possible.

[Galahad/FLT]

Whilst technically Lionheart is the better of the two (Beast), Beast would get my vote for the end result. In 1989 Beast was a remarkable looking and moving game. Ok, the gameplay was a bit suspect, but as a demonstration of what the Amiga was capable of, Beast was responsible for selling more Amigas than Commodores lame TV adverts.

4 years later, Lionheart arrives. Whilst technically its very nice with its 1pixel parallax scroll, vibrant copper bars and nice graphics, it has problems.

The graphics look too flat because the copper fade underneath is too bright, making the graphics stand out too much. The sprite is nicely animated, but ultimately its too small to be detailed enough.

The music is nice, but then again, Beasts wasn't exactly crap either.

Thalion was the problem. They simply didn't have the funds to successfully market the game properly. Lionheart was a good enough looking game that Ocean or Psygnosis would have wanted to translate that to the SNES and the Megadrive. And in the case of the Megadrive, it would have showed just how much better the Amiga was in the graphics department, because the Megadrive simply wouldn't be able to compete with only 64 colours onscreen from its pallete of 512.

Fact is, Thalion were utterly incapable of distributing their games effectively. Rainbow Arts realised very early on that for them to succeed beyond their own country, they would have to have distribution partners in other countries, which is why they were so prolific. And this being a company that were branded as cheats by some because they didn't pay early developers properly!

No Second Prize was another great game by Thalion, very fast, quite detailed and all on an Amiga A5oo, but because they had such crap distribution, their good games never sold in as many volumes as they should.

Lionheart was too little too late. If it was a year earlier and with Ocean, Microprose or Psygnosis distributing it, it would have been a huge hit and then converted to other formats.

As it is, considering it had 4 years potential development skill from the time that Beast got released, it wasn't as good as it could be.

[frostwork]

Thalion RULES!
If they could be motivated to support Amiga1/Pegasos, the users would be
motivated till they are 103 years old!!!
Lionheart rules the world, Ambermoon rules the moon...
(very bad joke, I know: max 2/10)

[alexh]

Thalion closed it's doors for the last time 10 years ago it was their anniversary this year

Some of them are still in the Games Industry like Henk Nieborg (Lionheart), is freelance, Marc Rosocha (Wings of Death & Last Ninja) still has a company called Eclipse. Thalion founder Erik Simon works for games publisher JoWood, co-founder Holger Flöttmann owns his own publishing company called Ascaron To name but a few.

Also Ascaron=Ascon

[PiCiJi]

two screens from other games (Ambermoon and Cedric) which show Valdyn from Lionheart

[Joe Maroni]

awesome...

but why did alcatraz include valdyn into cedric....

[Von würst]

I dont know..But it looks like its made with the same engine.

[Chain]

finished without cheating very good game IMO