Powerdrome (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
81Powerdrome is an NTSC Amiga game developed Michael Powell and published by Electronic Arts in 1989. Just like Indy 500 and F1GP, this game likes a bit of horsepower to get the best from it. I was almost totally unfamiliar with this, so let's check it out.
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Production Notes:
Captured: 26th October 2020
Narrated: 26th April 2021
Edited: 20th November 2020, August 2021, and January 2022
Note:
This was meant to be the second review of the series, and at least I expect this review to be featured quite early on. But although I posted this game up in many votes, other games always seemed to win, pushing the release date back even further. That's why some of the narration refers to the series starting, when in fact this is the final video in this first part of series 6.
Powerdrome is not really a lesser-known game, as the magazine adverts were everywhere, at least here in the UK. I remember booting this up in my early days of emulation, to catch up on what I missed from back in the day, only to discover the game was almost uncontrollable - so I never got further than the first oval track. Then, on 29th October 2015, I watched a demonstration and introduction guide by Lukozer, and this opened up the game to some degree, and at least enough to record some footage of it for The Amiga Years documentary in 2016, which was probably unused.
Fast forward to 2019, when I began to write a list of titles for this series. I didn't know at that time that most of the games I ended up making playguides for this series would be fan requests. Having things out of my control was something I found daunting to begin with, but in the end I feel everything turned out well. But I wanted to get a few classics recorded as highlights of the series, and this, along with Warhead, was captured within the first week of the recording sessions.
Due to me pressing the Championship button by mistake during this run, I ended up having to play the game again, and skip to the later courses. The footage of this retry wasn't recorded, even though it was a lot better than my initial try. For some reason I forgot to change the pitch/roll option upon restating, and this meant I was flying sideways for much of those later races!
The footage got corrupted because back in those days, WinUAE used to oscillate between 59fps and 61fps in NTSC mode, so every second sometimes there is a dropped frame whenever the emulator cpu speed went over 60fps. This makes some of the footage look very choppy, especially when turning.
A few bits of extra info was added in post, including photograph and the story of the game as printed on the box art, which I found on Mobygames. The author credit scrolls on to the screen twice when I mention his name twice, as otherwise it looked like I had forgotten to add the name credit to one or the other. I also added the fact the author went on to Subwar 2050, which is another game I had hoped to cover at some point.
Danscore
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When I think of 1980's games, it's easy to remember the classic platformers and scrolling shooters; mostly of the 8 bit variety. On the Amiga I think about a succession of lame Atari ST ports, and games which did not approach the limitations of the hardware. Electronic Arts were very fond on the Amiga, and received the very first Z-Machine Dev kit from Amiga.inc themselves. It wasn't long before we got D-Paint, but also FA/18 Interceptor, Indianapolis 500, and Powerdrome. These really were made to push the hardware, and back in 1989, they really needed a faster CPU than what the humble 'Stock' Amiga could deliver. In a way, the company pushed users to upgrade, and Interceptor (and The Settlers) certainly made me realise that I needed to spend £350 on a Derringer accelerator board for my A500 - which was not a casual expense for a kid on a YTS youth training scheme at that time. It is games like these which fired up the imagination, enough to see that they were at least 5 or 6 years ahead of their time. In 1985, Revs opened the door for first person 3D games, at a time when this seemed impossible. But 3D on the Amiga was often very slow, with the likes of the Freescape games, and even F1GP was barely playable on a stock A500. It took games like this to show off the future in terms on potential, and trust me, the fact that 'line draw' and 'area fill' was a hardware command inside the Amiga meant that in theory we could have had many more of 3D games, and not just flight simulators.
Powerdrome features real-time damage modelling, real-time weather effects, and lots of features to tweak. With a workable mouse sensitivity and setup, and with the centring field on a high number, it is fun, and I give at 7.5 out of 10.
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