While the above line gives you some clue as to what dynAMIte is
(and yes, I will be spelling it in that annoying way all the
way through this review :), some of you will still be looking
like your brain has been replaced by putty. dynAMIte is a clone
of that great game Bomberman, whatever version you like to
think of. Personally, DynaBlaster Bomberman on the Amiga was
one of my favourite games, great fun as 5 player and had some
addictive tunes. What do you mean, you still don't know what it is? OK, here is
the complete low-down. Faced with an overhead 2D map of the game
arena, you can move up, down, left and right. Pressing the fire
button drops a bomb, which explodes after a short time, sending
out short bursts of flame. The object of the game is blow all
the other players up. Simple, yes? To keep it interesting, there are some other items on these
maps. The first is blocks which can be blown up, sometimes
revealing a power-up underneath. The second is blocks which
cannot be destroyed. The third is the power-ups (mentioned
previously) which can, for example, allow you to drop more
bombs simultaneously or make the flames of your explosion
longer. This kind of game is the purest form of gaming heaven, providing
you can mix the elements of fun, competition, and gameplay
together properly. Other niceties such as sound and graphics
also help, but after a while you'll will not notice them,
preferring to scan for the location of your next target.
However, I better describe that dynAMIte gives, or this will be
a pretty poor review. All of the following features will be compared to DynaBlaster
Bomberman (herein known as DBB), since it was great, and I have
not played many other Bomberman clones, although the ones I have
played have not come up to scratch.
This is the single most important factor in deciding how much
you like this game. If you cannot play it properly, you are not
going to like it. I'm happy to say that dynAMIte is good, but
not perfect. To attain perfection, it must look at DBB, the way
you could slide round the blocks was smooth. In dynAMIte, you
need to be aligned, with the horizontal or vertical you want to
move along, quite accurately, or any diagonal of the joystick
will cause your character to stick to the block. Apart from
this, assuming your machine is decent enough to run the game
smoothly, it works very well and the controls are responsive
enough to meet the high paced world of bombing. Combined with
the simple objective, the gameplay oozes out of what is a highly
playable game.
The sound in the game can be described as minimal. It lacks the
repetitive but addictive tune from DBB, but the effects are
better and wider ranging. Most power-ups have a different sound
effect each, and there are some nice comedy touches. For
example, the power-up which blows up all bombs on the screen
has the unmistakable sound of a Lemming saying "Oh No!", just
after you click on the Nuke button. The more bombs exploding at
once, the more meaty the explosion sounds. There are some other
excellent touches here (pun intended). AHI is used to provide
audio output, so everyone from Paula users to soundcard users
are supported.
dynAMIte really excels here. There is something like 7 or 8
graphics sets available with the game, covering such themes as
the Simpsons, Smurfs, Space, Snow, dynAMIte and original DBB.
There is even an Amiga theme where you get to play as...well,
I'll let you figure that out. You can also create your own
graphics in the game. All the supplied graphics sets are clear
and good looking, but like I said previously, you won't notice
them when the game gets exciting. Along with the 220-odd maps
supplied is a map editor so you can create your own. Which is
just as well, since some of the maps are totally unsuitable for
multiplayer games. The game display is created from a mixture
of MUI and drawing of the graphics - graphics card users are
supported using CGFX or P96 (whichever one they use) and AGA is
supported through graphics.library.
Which brings us nicely to here. The game is multiplayer only,
and is played over a TCP/IP network of some kind (be that a
serial cable, LAN or the Internet). Obviously playing over the
internet is best, as it gives you more victims, err I mean
opponents. You can play it as a one player game, but there is
nothing to do; the only objective, irrespective of number of
players, is to kill all the other players. You can also play a
multiplayer game on one machine, although this requires running
3 copies of the game (for a maximum of 3 player), making use of
2 joysticks and 1 player on keys. However, this is not
recommended unless you have a seriously fast Amiga. You won't
get tired of the Internet option, with plenty of people (and
servers) to fight against, or even chat with, using the built
in IRC window. Oh, and you can play with up to 8 players, which
is far more mayhem than DBB was capable of.
Running the game is fairly painless, although it did crash the
first time I installed it. I've never had any more problems
with it so I can only guess that the old versions of my
libraries had not been flushed before I tried it. You'll need an 030 or higher, AGA or graphics card, a TCP/IP
stack (such as AmiTCP, Miami, Genesis etc), and a couple of
other libraries and things. OS3.0 is specified as the minimum
version, but if you are using AGA (not sure about a graphics
card) then it actually appears that you will need OS3.1. Links
to these can be found on the download page of dynAMIte, although
I found that the Identify library I downloaded was corrupt and
had to get it from Aminet - in util/lib/IdentifyUsr.lha. I
managed to get the server and game both running on WinUAE,
playing across the Internet. However on this P2-400, the game
was quite unplayable and the server didn't perform too well.
Best use a real Amiga :) To play the game on someone else's server, you can just run the
dynAMIte program, put in the server details and go. You can
also run the server if you want to play locally, or have a
server available for the public, so people can play against you
on your machine. Setup for the server is just as easy as
running the game.
This is an excellent game, which works well in all areas of
playability, control, sound, graphics and performance. It is so
addictive that on the first night of playing it, I played for 3
hours without noticing where the time had went. The game being
so simple to use is also another bonus, and with all the extra
features, you shouldn't get bored with it for quite some time.
The game is freeware (yes, I did not believe this at first
either), and can be downloaded from the website at
http://amisource.de/dynamite. I daresay that print magazines
which have cover CDs or CD magazines will contain the full game
within the next month.
Any feedback on this review would be welcome. If there are any
errors in the text, please point them out, and send all your
messages to dave@blitz-2000.co.uk.