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Thalamus
£19.99

Nice graphics and nice sound do not a game make, I once heard it said. To my mind, large and all-encompassing as it is, the only way Thalamus could have made a deserving hit out of this would have been to completely redesign the 8-bit game. They haven't.

You are Hawkeye. You have to travel over lots of scrolling landscapes. To complete each landscape, you have to collect four pieces of a puzzle. Finding the puzzle isn't a problem, after all, there aren't a lot of different places to look, only left or right.

To make what might not quite be the hardest decision you've ever had to make, you use your hawk eyes. At the top of the screen, there are two hawk faces. Whenever there is something to be found, be it part of a puzzle, or extra ammunition or energy, one of the hawk's eyes flashes. This denotes whether the item is to your left or right.

The only thing stopping you from getting to the item are the enemies.
These are basically lots of dumb sprites who run at you from both sides and deplete your energy if you touch them. Some are big, some are small, all of them are incredibly stupid.

So, we've established the game is the same. Any chance to the graphics is almost negligible, apart from the fact that they are in a higher resolution. Some of the sprites are blocky,and the animation on the main sprite is the same. Funnily enough, the scrolling has suffered and now rather than scroll smoothly, it vibrates minutely in a 'slightly out of focus' sort of way.

I wasn't inspired by the 64 version, and I'm just as uninspired by the Amiga version. A dull game, and one definitely not worth buying.



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Thalamus, Amiga £19.99

The classic 64 original earned a Gold Medal back in Issue 40. Now the Amiga game (Thalamus's debut 16-bit program) is here.

The population of Xamox are in underground caverns, hiding from the Skyrksis - an alien race of Nomads. Hawkeye is created by the Xamoxians to take on and destroy the intruders.

Twelve horizontally scrolling zones of platforms and ledges make up the play area and Hawkeye is armed with four types of gun from a pistol to a bazooka. Hawkeye's task is to locate the four puzzle sections placed randomly around each zone. While searching for these, Hawkeye must leap gaps, avoid robot mines and the many Skyrksis aliens and Guardians.


Phil King This really isn't very different from the 64 version, and hardly uses the Amiga's immense graphics and sound capabilities. For a start, the parallax scrolling has only two layers and the scenery is dull with a bland colour scheme. In-game sound is also unimpressive, consisting of a simple 'heartbeat' background noise and typical shooting effects. The only compensation is that the simple 'run and shoot' gameplay is just as addictive as in the great original.
Robin Hogg Hawkeye simply blew away all other platform games on the 64. However the technical brilliance behind that opus has not rubbed off on the Amiga game with limited colours used in each level and a near total absence of parallax scrolling. Little better than the 64 version in appearance it's graphically very average. Thankfully the platform action playability of the 64 game is still here, but I'd hoped for something more spectacular.