Burn Up The Skies! – Jetstrike

Retro gaming, a gaming scene that just keeps going and it is going so good that the prices on old collectibles are going through the roof.

Jetstrike is one of the gems of the past and somewhat still quite unknown, but getting a copy today can be a hard and costly affair.

Luckily i bought these games back when they were new and while i loved the games i could have spent my money better as this is one of the game series that i didn’t really play a lot until quite a few years later.

Jetstrike was quite a revolutionary game series and one that many just ignored for years as people compared it to games like Wings Of Fury and the likes, sidescrolling flying games.

The A500 version was quite the success yet no one played it so Shadow Software and Rasputin decided to do a sequel/follow up for the Amiga 1200 and later on for the CD32.

The OCS /ECS version was packed with features,

• The very uncommon (back then) Harddrive Install.
• 40 Different weapon systems
• 40+ Aircraft to fly
• Helicopters and planes
• 100+ campaign missions
• 2 player local multiplayer
• Flawless 50hz multidirectional scrolling

Jetstrike AGA managed to up every feature from the former version and while i like all 3 versions i always preferred this version.

Controls in these Jetstrike games can be quite hard and frustrating at first, but as soon as you get the hang of them, then the game will feel extremely rewarding and fun.

The graphics can be quite off-putting to many at first but once you realize the size and features of the games, but they will grow on you.

The AGA version is packed with features, here is some of them:

• 24bit graphics
• New “simple” control system options
• 200+ Campaign missions
• 8 player local multiplayer
• 60+ different aircrafts
• 60+ weapon systems
• Nukes
• Added a humorous touch to the story stuff.

The CD32 version didn’t add much new to the table other than CDDA soundtracks and a new intro.

The game also featured quite long loading times although if you had an SX-1 or similar add-ons with fast ram installed, well that helped a lot.

1x CDROM speed is slow, not sure if the CD32 was 1 or 2x but it is slow nonetheless.

Finding a boxed CD32 version today can be a very daunting mission as most big box versions were stopped due to production costs and Rasputin had money problems.

It was in 2001 that i met one of the developers behind the series and that was when i heard about the problems they had with the publisher Rasputin and why we would never see another game from them on the Amiga.

Rasputin had promised money since way back to the Jetstrike ECS dev period (1991/1992), but no money showed up and when the sequel/AGA version ideas came up Rasputin promised money yet again and that they would back pay several years too. No money, or next to no money appeared and since the gaming scene was quite bad back then there was not much point in going for a lawsuit etc.

Rasputin had 12 or so published games on the Amiga and 2 of them never surfaced due to the games never got finished.  The games that got published was ported to every Amiga platform and quite decently too yet most if not all of them was actually created in AMOS.

Shame how respected developers and publishers got themselves into such a mess and it just shows how bad the industry was back then.

I still hope for a sequel to this series and maybe most of all, their unreleased Flight sim that was abandoned in 1995. (Demo/Videos available on Aminet).

Thanks for reading.