Agony Amiga 1992 Art and Magic Yves Grolet

Agony by Art & Magic

Art and Magic of France released Agony exclusively for the Amiga in 1992. Agony is a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up notable for its haunting visuals and instrumentals.

In Agony the player controls an apprentice by the name of Alestes who has been transformed into a mystical owl by his master, the sun wizard, Acanthropis. Going up against the forces of Mentor, the owl can fly in eight directions while firing its weapon, collecting power-ups and casting spells of cosmic power, of which there are eight.

Agony was programmed by Yves Grolet, its in-game music was composed by Jeroen Tel and its graphics were drawn and animated by Marc Albinet and Franck Sauer. Three of the above were also involved in the development of Ordilogic's Unreal of 1990.

Agony is stamped with an Amiga seal: one could never mistake Agony for an Atari ST or MS-DOS game. Agony displays in 64-color extra half-brite mode (EHB) at 320x256 resolution. The active drawspace is 288x192.

Rather than just scrolling in unchanging parallax, Agony's battlefields feature backdrops of raging seas, cascading waterfalls and blazing bushfires.

Truth be told, if computer games can be said to have "a soul" this is one of them. Agony is audiovisually supreme, practically artwork.

Agony features six worlds presented in full-screen 3-layer animated parallax scrolling, 3½ megs of graphics and up to 144 simultaneous on-screen colors. Audio-wise, Agony features 1½ megs of music and sound effects, and 17 different music tracks.

In addition, Agony features 50 different enemies and six end-level guardians.

However, Agony's gameplay does not match its audiovisuals. Thus, what Shadow of the Beast is to Amiga platformers Agony is to Amiga shoot 'em ups.

Agony was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not hard disk drive-installable.

cf.

• Unreal Amiga Ordilogic Systems 1990
• Amiga Shoot 'em Ups Listed in Chronological Order

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