Lionheart:the most wronged Amiga game ever

[Tsak]

Ups, released in '93??? I was under the impression this was at least 2 years later. I personally found out about the game and got it at '95, possibly early '96. This changes quite a bit what I said above, lol

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Tsak

Ups, released in '93??? I was under the impression this was at least 2 years later. I personally found out about the game and got it at '95, possibly early '96. This changes quite a bit what I said above, lol

I thought it came out late 94 too, or around the time of Super Stardust because I only had an A1200 when I played it. Hmmm my 486 PC that shared the desk must have bust a nut watching a cheaper machine do things it could only dream of LOL

[Megalomaniac]

For the record, Lionheart spent 1 month in the Amiga Format Top 30 charts, at number 22. Maybe it did better in Germany? Still, it's striking that sims / adventures / strategy games usually dominated the UK charts outside Christmas - in that mid-year month Lionheart charted below Historyline, Nick Faldo's Golf, B17 Flying Fortress, AV-8B Harrier, Legends of Valour and Graham Taylor's Soccer Challenge (most of which spent multiple months on the chart) - on LemonAmiga it has more votes than all those games combined (and a higher average than all but Historyline). Dare I say it, but people who liked those those genres mostly bought them, and people who liked action games mostly pirated them?

Everyone wanted console-style platformers and beat 'em ups at that time, rather than sidescrollers with relatively light platform elements. Flashback was a contemporary very 'Amiga' game that did sell well, that has impressive animation but single-screen gameplay. Martyn Brown has said that Assassin was Team 17's least successful full-price game, and that was very well-reviewed around the same time, so perhaps this type of game wasnt't what Amiga owners wanted to pay for at the time?

On the more consoleseque side, Zool was probably the biggest selling Amiga game of the time, and while I'd say it has major flaws that stop it being anywhere near as good as the reviewers made out at the time, it IS fast and smooth. Putty seemed to sell well too, Superfrog didn't seem to do as well as you might think though. Later stuff like Ruff 'N' Tumble and Traps 'N' Treasures probably did even worse.

[mc68060]

Dare I say it, but people who liked those those genres mostly bought them, and people who liked action games mostly pirated them?

Makes sense because people who bought sims / adventures / strategy games were most likely older and had more money whereas platformers were mostly played by younger ones who didn't have much money and copied the games.

[Megalomaniac]

Precisely. Plus, with those games you generally needed the manual to fully understand them, whereas perhaps most platformers and shoot 'em ups could be deduced from practice and experimenting? Hence A320 Airbus getting a sequel and Lionheart not getting one, I guess.

[mc68060]

Zool is an exception to that rule of course but it might be because it got so hyped and heavily marketed as Sonic on the Amiga which could explain why it sold so well and its sales saved Gremlin as a company as an ex-employee recalled.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Quote: "This is the perfect Game"

So True ! ( with Turrican 2, BC.Kid, ect.)

[ Show youtube player ]

12:48

The RetroPals are so fun to watch

[mc68060]

Also don't forget that even if Lionheart didn't get the fame it deserved back then it's unofficial sequel Flink certainly did. If you compare Flink and Lionheart you can see that it's pretty much the same engine and the graphics style is also very similar.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by mc68060

Also don't forget that even if Lionheart didn't get the fame it deserved back then it's unofficial sequel Flink certainly did. If you compare Flink and Lionheart you can see that it's pretty much the same engine and the graphics style is also very similar.

A small story regarding Lionheart. The game was so great, that i said to myself in 1993, how can i pick that as a copy ? I have to buy the game and it has to be in my collection.

So, i phoned a shop located in Nice called Jessico. What was first very bizarre is that the price was very low : 99 francs (instead of 260 francs as usual).
Then, i tried to have a chat with the lady that owned the shop, and here is what she told me :

"The price has been defined by the distributor."

Next, i ask how the game was selling. She replied

"I have currently 4 copies of this game in my stock".

Then she added this :

"We have huge difficulties to get copies from the distributor in Germany, i am harassing them to have more, but they say they can't provide us more".

So you see, this kind of little chat shows that piracy can't explain everything.
Lionheart should have sold a lot, and it did what it could with the small amount of copies that were distributed on the market.

So in the end, it looks like the Turrican series :

-Shit distribution
-Squelettic amount of copies manufactured
-The game was sold directly in march/april 1993 as a budget game !

What a fuckin' disgrace really for the developers !

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

-The game was sold directly in march/april 1993 as a budget game !

No idea what went wrong in France, but in Germany Lionheart was sold as a full price game, albeit in the lower range of those:

(both price lists found in ASM 4/1993)

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by mc68060

Also don't forget that even if Lionheart didn't get the fame it deserved back then it's unofficial sequel Flink certainly did. If you compare Flink and Lionheart you can see that it's pretty much the same engine and the graphics style is also very similar.

Lionheart on OCS is much smoother than Flink on the AGA, with tons of parallaxes and colorful copper gradients. I'm not sure at all that they share the same engine.
Lionheart is tailored for the Amiga but Flink is tailored for the Megadrive. Clearly the Amiga version of Flink didn't had the same level of attention Lionheart had.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by TCD

No idea what went wrong in France, but in Germany Lionheart was sold as a full price game, albeit in the lower range of those:

(both price lists found in ASM 4/1993)

What went wrong ? The german distributor ! The price is made by the distributor, not the seller, which calculated its own price from the distributor retail price.....

[TCD]

In the UK the retail price was 27.99 pounds. Desert Strike was 29.99...

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by mc68060

Makes sense because people who bought sims / adventures / strategy games were most likely older and had more money whereas platformers were mostly played by younger ones who didn't have much money and copied the games.

Interesting point, also applies to things like code wheels with Rocket Ranger and one of the Monkey Island games.

The other game that immediately springs to mind is Beast 1, wonder how well that did in the charts. It didn't get the reviews it deserved, mostly because they were done by people who had zero skills for reviewing 'arcade quality' 50fps games in some Amiga only magazine staffed by people who had more experience playing Scrabble than Scramble

With Lionheart the only thing I can think of is the fact it was OCS in the time of AGA and 64, 128 and 256 colour Japanese console rival formats, but then that's true of many 1993 games.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by TCD

In the UK the retail price was 27.99 pounds. Desert Strike was 29.99...

I got Desert Strike in my local big shop, full price for my birthday.
My mother paid something like 225 francs (22,50 pounds) at the time.

[mc68060]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

With Lionheart the only thing I can think of is the fact it was OCS in the time of AGA and 64, 128 and 256 colour Japanese console rival formats, but then that's true of many 1993 games.

True but I think Lionheart doesn't look very OCSish due to clever use of palettes and the copper. If you compare it to Aladdin, for example, which is an AGA game and has 64 colors but still I think Lionheart looks better and it's not even AGA.

[paul1981]

I had a review of it in Amiga Action (March 1993), but it doesn't show off the graphics too well. Maybe that's why I totally forgot about it and seemingly discovered it for the first time in the 2000's.

https://amr.abime.net/review_49474

[Retro1234]

Just looking at the reviews and most are 80+ but the couple I read seem to moan about certain aspects.

Never played the Demo Disk but they often helped sell games.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Lionheart on OCS is much smoother than Flink on the AGA, with tons of parallaxes and colorful copper gradients. I'm not sure at all that they share the same engine.
Lionheart is tailored for the Amiga but Flink is tailored for the Megadrive. Clearly the Amiga version of Flink didn't had the same level of attention Lionheart had.

Lionheart, Flink and Ghost Battle all have Erwin Kloibhofer listed as coder and Henk Nieborg listed for graphics.
I know this cause I just looked at HOL and they all have a similar style.
But Although I remember liking Flink I did feel it was a bit of a down port from the MegaDrive version.

[mc68060]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

But Although I remember liking Flink I did feel it was a bit of a down port from the MegaDrive version.

Yeah, they should have included the intro. Would have been perfectly possible on the CD32.