Guardian, The Amiga’s Answer To Nintendo’s Starfox

Guardian was one of those games that wanted badly to cash in on Nintendo’s success Starfox franchise, did it work out for them?. Sales numbers were never released and while the game popped up on both CD32 and AGA formats it still never “took off” in terms of media coverage and marketing.

Acid went out and released games like Roadkill, Guardian, Gloom, Skidmarks and Woodys World in just a few years time, all great titles and it didn’t take long before the developer/publisher had established a seal of quality.

Guardian is a vector-based action game where you control a ship and your goal is, of course, to shoot everything and protect mankind.

The game is littered with great graphics and good controls although one has to get used to it before getting the hang of the quick turn feature.

The graphics and sound are way above average and most of all the game is a technical feat and use programming trickery by using various features of the Amiga chipset that supposedly should not have been possible.

The CD32 version has awesome exclusive CDDA music and it could have been the best of the two versions but the game is too demanding on the hardware, the game ends up being a bit too slow for its own good. That said, if you got an SX-1 or similar CD32 expansions which enables you to install fast memory, well then the game goes from ok to brilliant.

I tried the game on the SX-1 just recently, which is just a memory/expansion upgrade without CPU upgrade and yes the game is quite fluid but i remembered the game to be even smoother and faster so i fired it up on my A1200 with 030 and 060 CPU’s and while there was a small speed upgrade it wasn’t all that much of a jump up.

Guess what, yep i got several versions of this game too, 3 in fact and one of them ACID ATTACK bundle which was also part of my Skidmarks article a while back

While all 3 versions bear next to no differences to speak of i still went on and bought them, well actually the A1200 version above was gifted to me from a good friend in Sweden (Jonny Høgsten) back over a decade ago. The CD32 version was the first one i bought which is undoubtedly the best of the 3.

I don’t know how Guardian compares to Starfox really as i never played it all that much because most of my friends (and myself) never upgraded to SNES. Most of my friends jumped from Amiga to Playstation/PC.

We did rent a SNES a few times with some games and while Starfox was one of them we still ended up playing Donkey Kong Country, Mario etc instead.

I can safely say that Guardian is one of the games you need in your collection as while it may not worth a lot it is still a game that deserves your precious time. I would at least rate it in my top 50 Amiga games of all time.

Thanks to Hall Of Light For Screenshots.  Box shots are as always from my own Collection.