Hannibal (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
51⚔️ Hannibal is a turn-based strategy game released by Starbyte Software in 1992. Its is slow paced and with no music, this is a quirky game which probably very few reviewers would cover. Lets give this one a shot, and see how far we can get.
English TXT file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K1hMWcClLxU45hMbBXs9uhyatUS4I1m2/view?usp=sharing
V1.1 - edit by lifeschool
https://www.patreon.com/lemontubeamiga
Production Notes:
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Captured: 12th July 2019 (using game saves)
Narrated: 26th July 2019
Edited: 12th July - 10th August 2019
What is a Roman Holiday? It is "An entertainment event or period that relies on the exploitation, suffering, or failure of others." So instead of the usual series, we have a selection of games were I attempt to fight huge battles, race chariots, fight wild animals, and build empires - the hard way - from a Galley Slave all the way up. Its meant to be a holiday from the usual reviews, and you get to see me suffer in these strategy games.
I played Hannibal for the longest time of all the games Im covering in this mini-series, and I probably spent a couple of months. The game starts hard but once the first Roman armies are defeated very early in the game, I found it was really addictive, and I just wanted to play it for hours, building up forces, and exploring.
In the vid, you can see Carthage falls straight away, but on my actual play I had a legion waiting outside of the city which I rolled in to my army just in time before the attack, and therefore had more units than the Romans (just!), and survived - with practically nothing. I forgot to bring in the new legion when I came to record the footage, and I also chose a bad tactic looking at how quickly I was decimated.
Attacking Benghazi was another mistake, and I reloaded a save to recover from it. Attacking Crete was a huge mistake, considering the voyage alone was effectively a one-way trip before the food ran out. In the video I try to recover by moving over the island, but afterwards I gave up and went back to another previous save. You might see this as cheating fate, but if a 'game' is meant to be all about 'fun', then its certainly no fun to have to build up vast legions from scratch again each time you decide on the wrong choices.
I tried to capture the Spanish Silver mines, but the siege lasted weeks, and I ran out of food. This time I left the area and brought my remaining troops back to friendly land, and didnt use a save to recover. Later on, I captured all the towns along the East Coast road, and suddenly the whole of Spain became allied to me. This is a quick way to do it, if I had known. It was a valuable lesson.
A lot of work and hours went into the editing. I didnt include many popups or captions either. But these long videos involve lots of trims and moving audio around to cover gaps, and in this case all the audio had to be moved due to speaking before or after things on the screen had happened, or because I was stammering or drying up.
Most of my pronunciations will be wrong, as I dont know how to say them, and even if I do, I still pronounce them how I normally pronounce them, like Ter-acc-oh instead of Terra-co. Im also still saying Shipio instead of Skipio. The game appears to be in PAL, although the map screens seem to be in NTSC. Looking at the in-game images on the disk, they are IFF files, and they are 640 x 400 in size - which is NTSC.
Just before launch, I noticed YouTube had cut off the end credits. I tried to upload a compressed version before the deadline, but this is full of compression artefacts. After a full week of uploading, the video is still missing the end titles, but they are on the video I uploaded! So I sacrificed the old crystal clear video for nothing.
Danscore:
Hannibal is good but after the heat of the first battles, things can slow down quite a lot. On my play, the enemy wandered off into Eastern Europe and got stuck in a siege, leaving me to run around freely. There are some elements of history here, and I love how all the places in the game have Roman names, - even Manchester, Liverpool and many small towns you might not expect. Plundering towns and raising armies is fun but can be repetitive after a while, and players wander though the game on auto-pilot. The graphics are a cut above some games, and the image for the sea battle, and the ending screen, are presented in fine detail - while some images of the road and sailing ships are in low res, they are still drawn with some flair and imagination. The audio is non existent after the intro, and so its best to play this with some tunes in the background. Overall, I'd say this can be fairly addictive, although after I'd whittled the Romans down to a few token legions, I couldnt bring myself to play it further and conquer Rome. Some of the translations were wrong, and I had to hack the game to understand the battle section. Overall I'd give it 7 out of 10.