What About The Music? – Cybernoid On Amiga

If there’s one thing Jeroen Tel and I have in common, it’s that we both believe every great game needs an equally great soundtrack. That’s probably one of the main reasons I became such a huge fan of gaming in the ’80s. The Commodore 64’s legendary SID chip has always put a smile on my face. I might not be a musician myself, but I’ve always appreciated a great tune — often even more than impressive graphics or clever code. For that, we can thank both the SID and Paula chips for shaping how we remember those golden years of gaming.

The Cybernoid games, for instance, were always “those two games with the amazing music.” For me, the C64 versions remain the definitive ones. I still remember the day I fired them up on the Amiga for the first time — and my immediate reaction was: What happened to the music?

For many, the Cybernoid games marked Raffaele Cecco’s big breakthrough — and if his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because of another classic he worked on later: First Samurai by Vivid Image.

Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine is best remembered as a brutally difficult game with absolutely phenomenal music. But when I fired it up again recently, the first thing that hit me was… there’s no in-game music at all!

Then it dawned on me — back in the day, I never actually played Cybernoid much on the Amiga. I just loaded it up and sat there, listening to that incredible title theme on repeat.

I really like the Amiga music, no it ain’t as good as the Commodore 64 SID, but it got that pre-Soundtracker/Protracker sound to it and for some reason, it tickles my music bone quite a bit. YouTube to the rescue, someone already put it up (only the music).

Cybernoid uses grey and browns a bit too much for a 16-bit game, a typical problem with many games back in the Atari ST age of Amiga games.

Cybernoid still rocks in the music department, but how was the gameplay then? I decided to take a break after 10 minutes of dying and getting mad at everything, the game simply wasn’t any fun, and I really missed the opening music while playing.

I was playing this on my Amiga CD32, so I decided to give it one more try, but this time with running the opening music in Hippoplayer on my other Amiga sitting next to it, this is something I normally never do but I just had to give it a go, me liking the song and all that.

I completed the game about 4 hours later, the music made me ignore all the problems with the game, the confusing weaponry, the pickups and yes, getting lost all the time.

The thing, though, I really enjoyed some parts of it, and while there wasn’t anything groundbreaking about this game on the Amiga, I can certainly understand why many think of this one as a proper gem on the 8-bit format.  

The worst part with Cybernoid – The Fighting Machine for the Amiga was that it never took advantage of the hardware; there’s no Amiga magic to be seen anywhere, and sadly, there were quite a few slowdowns throughout my playthrough.

Cybernoid II – The Revenge came out a year after the first one, and this is one that I played a lot on the Amiga back in the day. I must admit that I do prefer the Commodore 64 version of this one too, but the Amiga version was certainly a huge upgrade from the first one, that’s for sure.

The gameplay remains pretty much unchanged from the first game, but everything feels so much more polished and refined; the use of colours helped too (yes, the first one was a bit too much sterile IMO).

The graphics, navigation and weapons feel better in this sequel, but maybe most of all is that it feels like a 16-bit game.

I decided to include the soundtrack for this too. I love this song, and I think Fredric Hahn did a great conversion of Jeroen Tel’s timeless Commodore 64 Classic.

Edit:  It seems my Whdload install was broken / old update or whatever, and therefore I were not able to turn on the SFX, yes, the game got SFX, but make sure you got it installed properly (Thanks Dom)

Personally, I’ve always felt that Cybernoid II: The Return is the stronger of the two games. It features improved graphics, flashier copper effects (that ending, though!), more enemies, more weapons, and an overall visual design that feels far more distinctive and polished.

Two great games and I really regret not getting the original Amiga release of Cybernoid 2 – The Return as well, I had the C64 version already and wanted to spend my hard-earned Paperboy route cash (I was 14) on other games, which means I ended up buying the Hewson Premier Collection bundle at a much later point, not sure if I even paid for it or the floppies and manuals were given to me for free (I can’t find the receipt anyway…)…

Solid games from the past that was edged by its 8bit versions but for some reason is still very playable to this date, revisit them and see for yourself.

Thanks to Hall Of Light for the screenshots.  The box shots are from my own collection, as always. Time to upload another box scan to HOL, it seems.

I found this Cybernoid 2 theme spacesynth remix while looking for the original soundtracks on the net, and i thought this was worth mentioning as it’s a bit different from the other remixes out there (and I like the Jan Hammer style 😉), enjoy.

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