Photon Storm (Jeff Minter) (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
43đšī¸ This game was released in 1990 by Llamasoft and Arc Developments. A Photon Storm is a shower of light, but this game is about collecting Plutonium pods and shooting baddies, in a 360 degree top-down play field. We've seen Seek and Destroy already, so lets check out this game from Jeff Minter.
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Production Notes:
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Captured: 22nd and 23rd January 2019
Narrated 23rd January 2019
Edited: 23rd January - 15th February 2019
I dont know quite how I stumbled on this one. I think I was playing around with Blastar and Amnios, and tried to find other games in the same style. I did look into Super Gridrunner on the Amiga, but the quality of the graphics seemed to let that one down. So this one went into the '10 better games' pool.
It took maybe 5 plays before I made the video, and on each try I got a little further, and gained more respect for it. This game only had 1 comment on the Lemon Amiga database, so its not a classic, and seems completely forgotten. This was the furthest I ever got with the game, although I used footage from a previous run, just to introduce things before the big long run. I didnt realise I had recorded almost an hour!
Having saved about 3 months work by not researching any of the games in this series, the only time it came back to haunt me was with this. I had to stop the editor quite a few times to add things I had forgotten, but also I had to re-render the video several times for the same reason. The day after, I re-rendered it several more times. When I thought it was all done, I realised I hadnt gone to the Amiga Magazine Rack to find all the scores, and so my average score was wrong in the review. The Magazine Scores are:
The One - 81%
Zzap - 69%
The Games Machine - 65%
Amiga Format 62%
Lemon Amiga - 60%
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Average: 67.4 .
(e.g 7 out of 10)
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I re-rendered it all again (took an hour each time), just to say 'the scores are wrong'.
On the day of release, I noticed the sound sync was off, so re-rendered it again.
Danscore:
The Amiga is not famous for its top down shooters, perhaps Awesome and Amnios spring to mind, and also Seek and Destroy, and this game isnt famous at all. If you havent read the manual, you wont have a clue what to do, and deaths come very quickly until the player gets to know the controls. It takes a long time to go through the features in the video, but gameplay is very basic. New enemies are added with each level, to give something fresh, and make it more tense and interesting. The difficulty is steep but respectable, but those little grey shots from the aliens absolutely blend in with the stars, leading to some very unfair deaths, and on later levels the game expects some use of the Turbo to get away from the hardest enemies, leading to ploughing into things. The music is non existent, but the usual Minter sound effects make this memorable, and the game feels arcadey, perhaps more like a rip-off of the 1980s game Sinistar! - "Beware Coward!". If this was PD Id give it 7 out of 10, but paying more then a tenner for this seems a bit rich, so thats why I kept the rating at 6 out of 10 in the video (see above for actual average score).