Unreal Amiga 1990 Ordilogic Systems

Unreal Amiga 1990

Ordilogic Systems of France released Unreal for the Amiga in 1990. Unreal is a hack and slash side-scrolling platformer and first-person sprite-scaling rail-shooter.

Unreal was programmed by Yann Robert and Yves Grolet. Unreal graphics were drawn and animated by Franck Sauer, Mark Albinet and Francois Déon based on designs by Tim White. Unreal audio was composed by Charles Deenen and Reyn Ouwehand of Maniacs of Noise.

In assuming the role of Artaban the object of Unreal is to free Isolde from the clutches of Polymorphe, the Master of Darkness.

Unreal consists of eight levels. In the five rail-shooter levels the player controls the copper dragon, Dracus, in third-person perspective. Dracus moves in eight directions and destroys enemies with his dragonbreath as he avoids obstacles and collects power-ups.

In the three platformer levels the player controls the warrior, Artaban, wielding a sword that can sometimes be wreathed in flame by dipping the sword into a source of fire, which is a nice touch. Artaban can move left and right, jump and crouch. As well, Artaban slides along ice and gets blown back by gusts of wind.

Audio-wise, Unreal features five tracks of music and digitized sound effects such as howling wind, crackling fire and rushing water.

Needless to say, Unreal's audiovisuals are stunning. Unreal is aptly-named since its production values are indeed unreal for 1990, but Unreal's gameplay leaves something to be desired. I mean, the controls are responsive and the collision detection is fine, but there is not much in the way of interesting level or encounter design.

Unreal displays in 64-color extra half-brite mode (EHB). The rail-shooter drawspace is 256x200, and the scrolling drawspace is 322x192.

Unreal requires an Amiga 500, 1000 or 2000 with 512K of RAM. 1 meg of RAM is required for the sound effects.

Amiga Unreal was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not installable to hard disk drive.

Unreal IBM PC MS-DOS 1991

Tim McCarthy, Mike Talbot and Richard Cheek of Ubi-Soft ported the Amiga version of Unreal to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1991.

Unreal displays in 16-color VGA 320x200. Naturally, the audiovisuals are not on par with the original Amiga version of 1990. Note the wizard in the above image: MS-DOS Unreal is not a 1:1 port in terms of content.

Unreal was distributed on 2x 3.5" 720kB DD diskettes or 1x 3.5" 1.44MB HD diskettes and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via install c. The install size is 1.5 megs and consists of 171 files.

cf. Chronological list of similar computer games:

• Agony Amiga 1992 Art and Magic
• Sword of Sodan Amiga 1988 Discovery Software International
• Shadow of the Beast Amiga Reflections 1989
• Ghouls 'n Ghosts Amiga 1989 Software Creations
• Ghosts 'n Goblins Amiga 1990 Elite Systems
• Golden Axe Amiga 1990 Dementia
• Gods IBM PC MS-DOS Platformer Bitmap Brothers 1991
• Another World Amiga Éric Chahi 1991
• Flashback Amiga Delphine Software 1992
• Immortal IBM PC MS-DOS Sandcastle 1991
• Moonstone Amiga Rob Anderson 1991
• Deliverance Amiga Devinart 1992
• Lionheart Amiga Thalion Software 1993
• Turrican Games Amiga Manfred Trenz 1990-93

Indexes:

• Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
• Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
• The First REAL Amiga Game
• Best Amiga Games
• History of Computer Games 1976-2024