Builderland (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
52Builderland: The Story of Melba, is a side scrolling puzzle game, released by Loriciel in 1990. It is one of the few games that caters for both PAL and NTSC, and is a rolling obstacle course filled with all kinds of items and traps. I remember this from back in the day, so lets check this out.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 3rd April 2021 (level 1) and 12th April 2021 (level 2, 3)
Narrated: 20th April 2021
Edited: 20-24th April 2021, July 2021 and 4-6 Jan 2021
Note: This was recorded on a stock A1200 setup even though it says A500 in the video. This was an A500 game, but some of the cracks didnt work unless it was A1200 setup.
Builderland was on the list to cover from the very start of the show back in 2011; along with Take 'Em Out, which was reviewed recently. This was a game shown to me when I still had a C64, and the sampled music and quality of this was easily above what I had to play on the C64. Back then I used the excuse of Defender of the Crown to prove that there was nothing the Amiga could do that the C64 couldnt do as well, and that's why I didnt get an Amiga in 1991, and kept my C64. Then suddenly everybody got an Amiga, and I had to wait a whole new year to get one, so this game seemed like forbidden fruit of paradise.
Coming back to this to play it, I could the puzzles were a bit more annoying than I remember, and I do remember getting far, over the desert, and maybe there is a cemetery level before the final castle? At any rate, I was never able to beat it. Recording was done with the help of savestates, and many repeat tries to get level 1 and level 2 done in 1 take. The mistakes in the video where real, and I couldn't get all of the tricks memorised per level.
I added some speech bubbles in the edit, and some other bits, but this one was straight forward without any delays. The final video had to be converted with Handbrake before youtube would accept it.
Danscore:
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This is one of those 'Amiga' Amiga games I fondly remember from back in the day. It seemed to have colourful (some might say Console quality) graphics, and a near take on the unstoppable robot formula which could be found in mid 80's Japanese arcades. We have to run in front of the 'walker' and clear up the path for his approach to a series of boss rooms. We then become the walker, and take on the bad buy. Builderland is yet another example of a genre that would work perfectly well on mobile platforms, as a scrolling tile shifter. This also has some atmosphere thanks to some music sampled directly through midi, and a nice map to chart our progress. Taking off the rose tinted spex from back then, Builderland was coded using AMOS, and feels like a Licenseware £3.99 title; but which actually sold for £24.99. It seems hard to justify this considering this game isn't FA/18 Interceptor or Lotus or Turrican 2. The level of difficulty ramps up in huge peaks, so the easy first few levels seem overly gruelling, and sometimes downright mean. The cutesy music on the walking section is also grating after a while, especially if I are trying to get through it with savestates to trial and error your way through it. I'd say as a PD game this gets 8, but as a full price commercial title, it only ranks as a 4 or maybe 5 out of 10. Fans of block zapping games will get bored with the puzzles, and puzzle fans will become infuriated long before they complete it, and get their money's worth.