Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: bath0011@fh-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Baetzler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Fire & Ice CD^32 (V1.04 AGA) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 8 Jun 1994 19:19:20 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 233 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2t55jo$nj1@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: bath0011@fh-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Baetzler) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, run, jump, arcade, AGA, CD32, CD-ROM, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Fire & Ice CD^32 (V1.04 AGA) BRIEF DESCRIPTION A cute but difficult "jump 'n run" game starring Cool Coyote on his way from the icy polar regions to the fiery hot deserts to save the planet. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Renegade Address: C1, Metropolitan Wharf Wapping Wall London E1 9SS LIST PRICE I paid DM 59.- (about $35 (US)) at a local store. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE A CD^32. Supposedly, the game runs on standard Amigas, but see the "BUGS" section, below. Fire & Ice supports the standard Amiga mouse and keyboard as well as one-button and multi-button joysticks and joypads as input devices. Considering the "quality" of the CD^32 controller, you might prefer using one of these alternatives. SOFTWARE None. COPY PROTECTION Invisible. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING CD^32 (PAL) A3000/25 with a CD300 CD-ROM drive. REVIEW After a gracefully short booting period, Fire & Ice presents you with the main title screen, featuring an animation of Cool Coyote jamming on a grand piano while highscores and game credits are displayed all around. Pressing the upper-right-hand button on the controller brings up the Option screen, where you can select a Trainer mode for the first four worlds as well as toggle the soundtrack on and off. Pressing the fire button starts the game with the currently active selections. The theme of Fire & Ice is Cool Coyote's quest through eight worlds in pursuit of the evil wizard Suten. Being a native of the arctic wastes, Cool Coyote's main weapon is ice pellets which will freeze his enemies so that he can shatter them by jumping on them or running through them. All other contacts with the enemy or the various traps are absolutely lethal and deduct one of the preciously few lives. Cool Coyote's arsenal is replenished by the devastating snow bombs as well as various collectible bonus weapons which are hidden in initially invisible ice blocks. Hitting an ice block for the first time makes it visible, while subsequent hits scatter the bonus weapons contained within. After some hits, the block caves in and disappears. In the game, the ice blocks do not serve only as extended armories, but also as stepping stones to hidden treasures or warp gates. In some regions, Cool Coyote can also enlist the aid of Coyote puppies which will follow him around and support his fire. By guiding these puppies to the respective level exits, Cool Coyote can also gain valuable extra lives. By far the most powerful weapon in the game is the snow bomb. Cool Coyote can carry up to seven of those at any given time. They are generated by seeding clouds with ice pellets so that they start to emit snow bomb crystals, which can then be collected. However, the clouds to not take kindly to this treatment and start to build up energy, which is subsequently released in a thunderstorm. The lightning generated is fatal to both Cool Coyote and his puppies. Each world of Fire & Ice is subdivided into five lands. To complete a land, Cool Coyote has to collect six pieces of a key that will open the exit gate. Usually, the pieces of the key are recovered by shattering the various enemies. Alternatively, there are hidden warp gates that will transport him to other lands and possibly hidden bonus zones. While it is possible to reach all lands of a world in one round, this is by no means necessary to complete a world. The final score will also give you a rating of how much of the worlds of Fire & Ice you have visited. The ten best scores and the player's initials are stored in the CD^32's non-volatile memory. The game starts off in Cool Coyote's home grounds somewhere in the arctic. By dodging snowball-throwing peskimos, dumb penguins and dive-bombing doves, he progresses to a mighty castle which just might be situated somewhere in Scotland. The next world sees Cool Coyote under water somewhere in the South Sea, and after that come the deadly rain forests. Beyond that, there's bound to be more. It's just that in the fourth world, Fire & Ice gets just too difficult for the average player like me. The game controls are just like you'd expect them to be in this kind of game: they're pretty sensitive, so that you'll need quite a bit of manual dexterity to get your Coyote where you want him to be. Having a good joystick or joypad helps a lot. The CD^32 joypad seems to me just a bit too insensitive for this kind of precision work. On the other hand, Fire & Ice can be set up to use three of the four buttons of the pad, so it isn't too bad, either. In this mode, the red and yellow buttons serve as fire buttons for the normal and extra weapons, while the blue button serves as a jump button. The in-game graphics are very good, and the animations of Cool Coyote and his adversaries are just great. Both foreground and background scroll smoothly, so there's no annoying flicker or anything. During the game, there are nice background soundtracks for each of the worlds. Depending on your taste, they can be played directly from CD or as a module from chip memory. Fire & Ice is pretty smart when playing CD sound, so that the loops in the tracks are virtually unnoticeable. On my system, Fire & Ice uses the full size of the PAL display during the game. However, the lower portion of the screen is dedicated to a world display that tracks your progress throughout the game. My guess would be that this display is not available when the game is started in NTSC mode, although I was unable to test this personally. The different NTSC timing and speed should not be a problem for the game, as there seems to be a dedicated NTSC version of the game on the CD-ROM. The startup seems to check for the type of system it runs on and switches the versions accordingly. DOCUMENTATION The CD-ROM comes with a 28-page, CD-sized booklet that gives the basic game instructions in English, German, French and Italian. The rather small and strange typeface used makes reading a bother for shortsighted people. While the instructions don't give away all of the useful hints, you'll find them pretty useful when starting the game. LIKES The game is very playable, and the presentation is just fine. While Fire & Ice does not use all of the features that might be possible with a CD-ROM, it succeeds just fine at being another great game for a great system. Kudos should go to the project coordinator for at least attempting to make the CD-ROM also usable for non-CD^32 owners. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS The overall playability of the game is marred by the extreme difficulty of the higher levels. Fire & Ice sorely lacks a checkpointing or save feature which would enable the player to start the game from a certain starting point instead of having to work through the whole game from the start again and again. The trainer mode is only a small consolation, as this mode will only let you play one world at a time, and only one of the first four worlds. When you consider the difficulty level of the fourth world, chances are quite high that you're never going to see the world after that. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS In direct comparison to the older, disk-based version of the game, the CD^32 version of Fire & Ice looks pretty good. While the gameplay itself isn't altered, there is now a superb soundtrack played from CD as well as beautiful backdrop graphics for all levels. Also, the annoying "look it up on the unreadable leaflet" copy protection has been removed from the game. BUGS According to the manual, Fire & Ice should also run on normal Amiga systems, too. However, a closer look at the startup script reveals that some system libraries are missing on the disc. The script tries to assign a "libs:" drawer that is not present on my copy of the CD. I have fiddled around with it a bit on my A3000, but to no avail. Maybe my chances would have been better if I had had an AGA machine for testing. Anyways, if you were able to run the game on a normal Amiga, let me know. VENDOR SUPPORT None mentioned. WARRANTY None mentioned. CONCLUSIONS Fire & Ice is definitely one of the best "jump 'n run" games around for the Amiga, and it hasn't suffered from the polish it's gotten in this new release. I heartily recommend it to anybody looking for a real challenge, and urge everybody else to take at least a look. My personal rating for Fire & Ice is three and a half stars out of five, on account of the exponentially rising difficulty level of the game. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1994 Thomas Baetzler. All rights reserved. You can contact me at: thb@mil.ka.sub.org (used to be quite reliable) bath0011@fh-karlsruhe.de (my "official" address for now) Medic BSS, 2:2476/454.2@fidonet (fido, neither fast nor reliable) Thomas Baetzler, Herrenstr. 62, 76133 Karlsruhe, FRG Voice: ++49 (0)721 29872 Medic BBS: ++49 (0)721 496821 --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews