Road Avenger, Out Now On Amiga CD32

Pixelglass Games returns with another LaserDisc/SEGA CD FMV game port, last years game was TIME GAL which was a solid port and a pretty unique game for the Amiga.

Road Avenger from DATA EAST is the third game in the ReImagine series, a label that carries unofficial fan projects and in general pretty interesting projects for us here at the AmigaGuru’s blog.

Road Avenger is like most other FMV Arcade games, you control the action by pressing a button or a direction on the stick depending on the onscreen prompt.

This is probably where most gamers would go – what? , that sucks!  Well, FMV games ain’t for everyone that is for sure.

It ain’t a secret that there are a gazillion FMV games that should (and could) have been ported to the Amiga back in the day, for some reason that never happened and we got stuck with a few titles for the CDTV and the CD32 and then nothing happened after that.

One of the reasons why we didn’t get more FMV games on the Amiga was due to the technical difficulties for sure and while the CD32 was more than capable with the FMV Module we never got to see all that many games supporting it.

Road Avenger actually had a different name at first, Road Blaster but for obvious reasons that were changed due to a certain ATARI CoinOp hit game.

Pixelglass Games have basically done what no one could do back in the day which is making a full speed movie player running on most hardware.

So what about the game then?

First of all, I have only tried the CD32 version and I can only base this review on that version.

The CD32 version never opens the CD32 boot menu and for some reason the CD32 reboots as soon as the CD starts spinning, I thought this meant the CD was broken/iso or a burn screw up which meant I made a lot of CD’s trying to get the game running, a small word of advice to my readers: THE CD32 IS SUPPOSED TO REBOOT.

Next up is the menu of the game, there’s no indication of it being a menu at all (just like in Time Gal),but its where there’s a brilliant intro song running and a text on the bottom saying ” START “,  flick left or right and up and down here to see the various options as there’s quite a lot of them really and best of all is the Practice and Easy mode for us who wants to play the game and not just see the game over video (yes the game is hard!)… (picture below shows the “start menu”.)

The game is smooth, the video playback runs brilliantly and never breaks the game and the controls are limited to two buttons or just the joystick (which works best for me) if you set it to that in the menu (forward for Turbo and back for Brake).

I find Road Avenger being a better game than Time Gal due to the setting, the video is cool and the action is pretty immersive if I dare say so.

The game is more or less standard FMV style and you will never be breath taken by what’s going on here but I bet you would have if this had been back in 1993, running on the same hardware.

All of the sounds are played through the Paula chip which means the game will run on any/most Amiga’s (?), with or without a CDRom if there’s an HDD present.

This time around you get several versions of the box art just to make it harder for you to find one you prefer, I went with the DVD cover option for now as I got spare ones of those.

The full game can be downloaded from the Pixelglass website but make sure you download the correct version as there are quite a few to pick from (here’s a direct download solution for you)…

Downloads

• RoadAvenger1.0-OCS-CD32.iso  (For CD32 and 2x Speed CD equipped OCS machines)
• RoadAvenger1.0-AGA.iso (For 4x Speed CD equipped AGA machines – will not work on CD32)
• RoadAvenger1.0-OCS.lha (For HDD equipped OCS machines)
• RoadAvenger1.0-AGA.lha (For HDD equipped AGA machines)
• RoadAvenger-Covers.zip (Featuring covers by Tsak, AmigaJay, and SteveUK)

I have not tried it on my Indigo machine yet, but based on my TIME GAL testing showed that it worked after a small update from Pixelglass, more info as soon as we have tested the game.

I included a YouTube playthrough video as I know there are lots of people out there who hate these kinds of games and just rather watch someone else play them instead, in other words – enjoy.

Pixelglass has done an awesome job here. I really can’t find anything to complain about and that certainly is a huge plus. The game deserves to be played and talked about as it’s not like we get these kinds of quality titles daily in our community anymore. Road Avenger might be a bit too much Japanese for some but, hey! come on and give it a go, you might love it like I did.

What are you waiting for?  AVENGE THEM!

Oh And let’s not forget to thank RoarTJ for his feature image for the blog post (Yes that’s me in the picture) :-).