HIGHWAY HAWKS (AMIGA - FULL GAME)
21Zeus presents Highway Hawks (un-emulated) for the Amiga A500, a classic I never even knew about (till 2014) from the golden era of amiga gaming which must not be forgotten alongside the software house and all programmers that were involved in making this game.
Year of release: 1989
Well until I saw this on a fellow retomer's channel (TheSadowsNose - https://www.youtube.com/user/Theshadowsnose), I never even knew this game existed, in fact many of us never knew about this game, for 25 years I had no idea about this game and now i've managed to get my hands on it and play it myself, I am totally shocked how addictive and fast paced this driver game is.
The game starts off with a little looped sampled music,...nothing special, then a skull appears quite randomly and quite irrelevant to the game,...it fires up, eyes pop out and it says Highway Hawks in a rather creepy voice, what this has to do with the game is beyond me but I like out of the blue random stuff :-)
The idea is simple, you race through the stages shooting cars (1 hit) and avoiding large trucks or you can shoot their back doors so they open to reveal bonuses or oil spillages, you can completely destroy the trucks but they take many hits, there is also a mad bomber car who is quite a handful, if he hits you once it's game over,..no second chances in this game.
On the way you must collect the stars on the road which gain you extra fuel otherwise if you don't it's again game over, there is also time bridges which you must jump up to gain extra time but for the life of me I have no idea how to perform the jump, i've tried holding the fire button down longer, the mouse buttons and all keys on the amiga but no luck :-(
You also pass over rivers but beware if you fall into them otherwise,..yes you guessed it,...game over.
You'll gain money for your distance and vehicles shot, you can then spend those fortunes on power-up's and even faster cars if you get enough loot, but again sadly I just couldn't work out how to purchase anything.
This game never ends, there are 5 different roads to race (all included here, making it a sort of longplay) and then it rolls back to road 1.
The smoothness and frames per second of the road is astonishing (sadly only really appreciated on a real television), very impressive indeed, it actually comes across in 3D, especially round corners passing the big trucks,...very nice effect, also has a couple layers of parallax scrolling in the horizon, it's also very addictive and can be just as fun trying to get to top speed without even shooting anything and avoiding everything.
For what looks like a cheap average loading screen, this really is hiding a little gem of a racer, you gotta give it a go!!!
This is usually compared to the amiga version of Road Blasters but let me tell you, i'd rather play this than that tripe, believe me I know how unjoyable Road Blasters is, after all I did produce the first ever longplay of it and nearly fell into a coma with boredom, check it out yourself: http://youtu.be/c7kyVbkQby0
This is such a cool little game, I guarantee you you'll like it :-)
Hope all you Amiga fans enjoy this upload.
Please note: NONE of my game uploads are emulated in any way whatsoever, they are 100% original recordings by myself taken directly from the original hardware the game was intended for, that way you know you're watching the real thing.
I will also always state weather i am using any cheats in the game, if not mentioned then i am not using any.
Check out my channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/ZEUSDAZ/videos), dedicated to gamers who loved the games of yesteryear.
Feel free to leave comments on my channel and vid's.
Keeping the memory of the Amiga and it's cool games alive!!!