Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: morton@wam.umd.edu (Rob Morton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Shadow of the Beast 3 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 11 Oct 1993 23:41:32 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 138 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <29cqvc$f6p@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: morton@wam.umd.edu (Rob Morton) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, arcade, puzzle, shoot-em-up, commercial PRODUCT NAME Shadow of the Beast 3 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Shadow of the Beast 3 (known for the rest of this article as Beast 3) is a side scrolling action game with puzzles, just to keep the mind working. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Psygnosis Address: 29 Saint Mary's Court Brookline, MA 02146 USA South Harrington Street Sefton Street Liverpool, United Kingdom L3 4BQ Telephone: (617) 731-3553 (USA) 051-709 5755 LIST PRICE Probably around $50.00. COPY PROTECTION Oh yeah. This game has disk based copy protection. I make backups of all my software using hardware copiers, and compared to other Psygnosis games this was milder. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A2000, 3 Megs of RAM, Kickstart 1.3 A500, 1 Meg RAM, Kickstart 2.04 A1000, 512K RAM, Kickstart 1.2 REVIEW Well, I hated the original Shadow Of The Beast, because it was just an arcade game with great graphics. Beast 2 had average graphics, with puzzles, but without using cheats it was way too hard. Beast 3 on the other hand seems to have the graphics and the puzzles. The puzzles start out easy and progressively get more difficult. It is the type of game that you can get better and the movements, so the levels that are hard at first become easier to do later. By getting easier with skill, it makes the game possible to complete, but makes the game not have as much replayability. You can see everything there is to see pretty quickly. I am not saying that it has no enjoyment after solving it, because I still enjoy playing it now, but I do not play it anywhere nearly as much as before. Controlling your character is very easy. It is all joystick control except for switching between items, and that does not have to be done in the heat of battle. I think by the time they got to the third Beast game, Psygnosis learned all of the tricks to programming a well controlled character and still leaving the graphics speed and sound intact. DOCUMENTATION The manual is very well organized. It starts out with the story of what you have done so far, and what is still left to do. After this they explain the controls very well. That is about all the documentation, but it is also all that is needed. LIKES AND DISLIKES Well if it is not too obvious by now, I liked this game. It was fun. There are not that many games that I like; actually, when my computer is on I rarely play games. For some reason, I just enjoyed this one. I am not the most skilled player for strategy, and am not that quick on shooters, and I found this game well made for my game-playing ability. I love graphics, and this game has them. Some of the backgrounds were astonishing. I also liked the music. It did not get annoying like some games do. The main thing I did not like was that it had disk based copy protection. This is an outdated concept that needs to be done away with. I will not buy a game that has it (my roommate owns Beast 3). It is also completely useless (I made backups of this game fairly easily). It should also be hard drive installable. The last thing that many people would probably like is for the game to be slightly harder and maybe longer. Longer I would like but not really harder. For all future games, I hope Psygnosis either learns that people have hard drives, or starts puttings its games on CD-ROM discs. This would make the games bigger, and left on one disk. I really hate disk swapping. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS This game has the graphics of Shadow of the Beast, and the puzzles from Shadow of the Beast 2. It is perfectly detailed. There really are no other games that have held my attention long enough to finish them, so I would have to say it is one of the best games I have played. BUGS None that I have found. VENDOR SUPPORT I never needed to talk to Psygnosis for anything. WARRANTY The warranty is that they guarantee the disks work, and are free from any viruses. CONCLUSIONS The game is great. I rate this game a 4 out of 5. If they removed the copy protection, then they would have had a 5. Rob Morton --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews