The 80’s Classic Barbarian/Death Sword Remake Out Now On Amiga

Barbarian+ is actually a few months old by now, and the only reason it wasn’t covered back on the release was plain and simple – I refused to play it on an Emulator only and wanted to play through it on a real Amiga.

Most of you have probably heard about this game by now, but this site is read by many non-active Amiga owners too, which loves when i bring out old news.

Barbarian+ is a remake of the 30+-year-old C64/Amiga classic Barbarian (also known as Death Sword in America) from the mid to late ’80s, and most of the game is identical to the original, although there are a few surprises here and there.

The game features the fun two-player Versus mode that made the game so popular in the first place, fighting a friend with a sword and being able to cut his head off nearly beat that you should press that “T” button thing in IK+.

There are new arenas to fight in, but there are also the ones we remember from the original, too.

All of the locations got a massive upgrade in the graphics department, and there are even some small, simple but very effective animations going on in the background as well as blood trails and other neat stuff.

The game required AGA at one point but that is not so anymore, but it does require a 68020 CPU and it’s recommended that you got fast memory or else the game will play too slow to be fully enjoyed, the reason for this is many but one of them might be for the fact that it is an AMOS game.

I added some animgif’s for you guys to enjoy, as you can see the game looks rather good when animated, even more so than the still pictures.  Be sure to check this game out if you haven’t done it already.

I found the game to play a bit too slow on the CD32 (even with the SX1 and 8mb ram expansion) and while I love the new graphics i am sort of struggling to like the stiff old school type of controls, I must admit that I always liked the Commodore 64 version more than the Amiga version but that might be more down the fact that I got that version a few years before the Amiga version.

This is probably where you go, But i really can’t see that much of a graphical upgrade here, and so on. Well, this is normal as the remake is pretty similar, and it plays a trick on you by making you think it looks exactly the same while it really doesn’t…

There’s one very important thing to mention before we move on to the 1986 Commodore 64 original (and the original Amiga release, too, btw), and that is that Barbarian+ is FREE and available right now from here (Aminet).

This is the original Commodore 64 version, and it looks brilliant even today. This shows how “limited” the Amiga port really was in terms of how much of an upgrade it really was.

I always felt the C64 version was more precise and fluid, but it was more of a complaint towards the Amiga version, which really didn’t fix anything beyond a small graphical upgrade.

Talking about which, let’s look at the Amiga version, shall we…

As you can see from this picture from the original Amiga Barbarian game, it looks familiar, right?

I just had to take these pictures from Hall Of Light because they always got the best screenshots, right? 

It doesn’t look awful indeed, and there was an upgrade from the C64 beyond the graphics too, but it was yet another sloppy ST port which didn’t make use of any power of the Amiga hardware whatsoever.

So, at the end of the day, one has to ask if Barbarian+ was really *that* necessary. Well, in my opinion, i certainly think it was, as it upgrades just about everything and does it quite nicely, too. The efforts put into this shows and while it could have been better in terms of specs needed (it requires a 68020 and it’s on 6 Floppy disks and a faster CPU+Ram is also recommended) it has to be seen for what it is, a Fan-project and an enhancement made because the creators loved the original game, nothing more and nothing less.

Thanks to RoarTJ for Barbarian+Screenshots and to Hall Of Light for the C64+Amiga Classic Version Screenshots!