SWIV Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]
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- čas přidán 19. 08. 2024
- Developed by Random Access and published by Storm in 1991.
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Special Weapons Intercept Vehicle (SWIV) is an arcade shooter developed for multiple home computing platforms including the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amiga. The game is a sequel to Silkworm, another popular shoot 'em up released a few years earlier that was remembered for it's asymmetrical multi-player with one player controlling an attack chopper, whilst the other drove along the ground in an armoured Jeep.
The premise here is very similar to it's predecessor, although the perspective has shifted from horizontal to top-down. Perspective aside, the objective remains the same; kill things to earn points and survive.
The helicopter can move freely over the battlefield and can avoid collisions with ground vehicles, whilst the Jeep must avoid ground clutter/obstacles but won't collide with aircraft. Both vehicles are armed with front-facing missiles that can only be upgraded by collecting power-up tokens dropped by Goose helicopters that appear periodically throughout the game.
The power-up tokens themselves can be shot to change the bonus that will be conveyed once collected. Perhaps the most useful of these is the spread shot that increases the cone of fire and is pretty much mandatory to survive in later stages of the game. Should you manage to shoot a power-up token fifty times then it will transform into a star that grants you eight-way simultaneous fire; great for hitting enemies from all angles but the shots lack any real power. I found that I couldn't switch back to the regular spread or cluster shots so had no option but to die to get rid of it.
One of the most distinctive features about the game is the complete absence of separate levels. Unlike most shooters, SWIV's gameplay is a single, uninterrupted level that loads progressively from the disk the further you get. The scrolling will occasionally stop as you take on a boss, but there is a complete lack of loading screens and is a really cool feature.
The other thing that stands out about SWIV is the crushing difficulty. Things start out easily enough, but the difficulty ramps up drastically after the first boss. The screen rapidly fills with enemies, many of which shoot multiple projectiles at you (some of which home in on you!) and it becomes almost complete luck when you somehow manage to survive some of the attack waves that you face. It's almost a relief when you manage to collect a force field bubble and get a few seconds to take a breather!
From a technical standpoint SWIV is certainly an impressive feat given the number of sprites that appear on screen at any given moment. However, on a stock Amiga 500 with 1mb of memory the game can slow down on a regular basis and the drop in frame-rate can make it very difficult to avoid oncoming enemies and bullets. There were numerous occasions where I would seem to explode at random; I even watched some of the recorded footage back and couldn't work out what killed me, so I can only conclude that certain sprites weren't rendering correctly when things got busy.
From an aesthetics view SWIV features some excellent graphics. The artwork is very detailed and all of the vehicle sprites are highly detailed and the animation of the helicopter rotor blades is a nice touch; everything about the artwork shouts high production values and this looks as good as any coin-op shooter of the day that you'd care to mention.
Perhaps even more impressive than the graphics are the sound effects. The game features some absolutely fantastic explosions and I remember my dad being particularly impressed when I used run this up on my A500 as a child! Even the smallest enemy meets it's demise with a massive conflagration and speaker-rumbling "kaboom"!
I remember that SWIV was probably the second or third Amiga game that I played and my Commodore 64 would be forever relegated to the attic. SWIV might be unforgiving, but it's still a great shooter and was certainly a showcase for what the Amiga could do at the time of release.
#retrogaming
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"I was given free rein when
it came to the visual design
for SWIV, so I crammed in as
much crazy stuff as I could:
giant spaceships leaving
corn circles in fields, dried-
up riverbeds littered with
supermarket trolleys and
concrete-slippered skeletons,
and loads of references to
'70s sci-fi shows. My favourite
section was a whole level that
we did as a homage to Xevious,
where we basically replicated
the backgrounds and sprites
from the classic arcade game."
-- Ned Langman, graphic artist (SWIV - Amiga)
This is an absolutely fantastic Amiga game.
Loved it and played it a lot back in the days.
I still can finish it but with the use of the credits.
When i first saw the ending animation on my A500 Plus, i couldn't believe my eyes!
2 days ago I've found case with A500 floppy disks at my parents house... Oh man, I grabbed Amiga from the basement instantly, connected to big TV and showed to my kids. They were really amazed by this computer! And Swiv is the best game ever for my 5year old kid. I'm back in '90 now :)
Me: "Helicopter how much rockets you can carry?"
Helicopter: "Yes"
17:16 It blew my mind that they included the crop circles in this game.
I had it running almost all the time on my A1200 on this years Gamescom (at the big Amiga booth in the Retro area) ☺
Fantastic memories. Thank you for uploading.
Playing this game as a kid in the early 90's with this SFX and graphics was revolutionary.
SWIV Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]: Great graphics, huge explosions and hard as nails! SWIV remains an impressive shooter for the Amiga computer!
Read the video description for my review!
Other hard shooters on the Amiga were that i could remember
Xenon 2 megablast
Disposable heroes
Project x(original version)
Project X was very hard as well.
@@ioet2007 You fought to save the world, and they canned you as a way to say "Thanks." Makes you wonder if serving your planet was worth all of it. Unless you got the vehicle and the keys as severance..
The text at the end is pure comedy gold! 43:06
At the time, it was the most audiovisually impressive shoot em up for the best computer of all time. And generally one of the most impressive and immersive games for this platform. And regardless of the platform, it is still the best shoot em up to this day.
However, if you take off the nostalgia goggles, the technical limitations of the AMIGA become apparent. Like frame rate drops or the “swallowing” of certain sounds.
Silkworm IV - I liked this much more than the Original!
This is not silkworm. It’s another title
I played this like hell but could never complete it! One of my favourite Amiga games for sure! 🙂👍🏻
I really liked this on the SNES. They called it Firepower 2000 in the US, though
Never played this game, but I had this intro sound track... which is absolutely stunning!!!!!
If this game would be released as a 2-player Coop Indie Shoot'em up remake on steam, then it would surely sell well.
Great is it not, good old Amiga had it all Graphips and the sound effects, the sound effects just fabulous.
god how i have/do/and will forever love this game!
Amazing shooter, the best on the Amiga, just like being in the arcades!
I love end game intro music, please close your eyes and listen 43:35
SWIV: The game in which nobody wants to play the jeep.
amiga 500 the best computer in the world!
One of my favorites.
My Amiga floppy disc was corrupted. The game crashed early. According to this video I didn't even make it 1/3 into the game. :( Now i know the ending at least.
Great game!
The tower collapsing at the end looks very like the one at the end of turrican?...
loved this one! amazing to see the end for the very first time! (never cheated *any* game!!)
Great shooter, one of the best in vertical for Amiga. Also very ingenious the realtime loading from floppy. Good sfx but no music
Cursing R.A. Salvatore brought me here :) He talked in 2018 how he used swive as a cursed word in one of his books :)
I LOVE THIS GAME
In 1991, when SWIV came out, I was disappointed by it, and I never understood all the hype about this title.
Ok, it was a full-screen 320x256 game (this was unusual on the Amiga, where most of its games had a smaller game area) and it managed to generate many objects on screen, but the framerate was limited at 25 (or less) fps, the colours on-screen were 16 (Battle Squadron come out 2 years before, it was a 32 colours game and it was so much better than this), the scrolling was very very slow, it had no background music and nothing that could differentiate it from similar games released in the past. And I didn't like that huge-one-single-level idea... Without levels, I didn't feel the progress in my efforts when I played this game.
I liked the old Side Winder (a 1988 game!) a lot more than this...
43:18 - lets hope they gave him decent severance pay ;-)
Well, it's true that this vertical shoot'em up shows many many animated objects on a full screen (320x256) area but... It moves them at no more than 25fps... And when the screen is full of objects the framerate often drops to 16.67fps (sometimes even less than that). I did expect this on the Amiga when you use a more demanding 5-bitplanes mode (32 colors), but this game uses a standard 4-bitplanes mode (16 colors) so the result is a little disappointing. Probably the slowdowns are there because for each animated object there is a big shadow to draw, and that makes the rendering much heavier (it's like the engine has to draw 2x the number of animated objects).
The scrolling is smooth but it's very slow: 1 pixel every 4 frames. I wonder if the slow scrolling was "by design" or it was a technical limit imposed by the continuous loading system. And having just a single big uninterrupted level that loads progressively from the disk was very cool at the time, but not a lot of fun as a player. There was no real sense of progression... You could not say something like: "Hey, I reached the 4th level!". Another disappointing thing to me was the lack of background music. Many european developers didn't understand the importance of a good background music in a videogame.
The graphics, generally speaking, are good but I'm not much a fan of such dark & desaturated palettes. I like much more the vibrant graphics style of Battle Squadron (which, by the way, uses 32 colors, has a good background music + sound fx and is faster and smoother than SWIV. And Battle Squadron came out 2 years before SWIV!).
All in all, SWIV was a good vertical shoot'em up for the Amiga, but I feel it didn't offer really anything more compared to similar titles. The developer of SWIV was a very good programmer (he programmed Silk Worm, Ninja Warriors and Rodland too) but its target for this game was achieving a big "quantity" of objects on a full screen area rather than achieving smoothness, and personally I think that in a shoot'em up smoothness should always have priority on quantity.
Battle Squadron is not a good game to play though. I actually thought Hybris was more fun than Battle Squadron. SWIV is a much better game. I agree with the music issue though.
@@robertwilson3866 At the time, Battle Squadron was the most arcade-like vertical shoot'em up you could get on a basic Amiga 500. Hybris was great too (it was made by the same programmer of Battle Squadron).
SWIV was too slow to me, no background music, and I didn't like at all the idea of just one big level.
@@amigamagic5754 I think my problem with Battle Squadron is the power-ups were mostly dull and seemed to have been designed around the Amiga's limitations - to keep the speed up. That's the thing - you can either make a slick 50/60 fps schmup or drop the frame rate and add a load more graphical effects and playability.
@@amigamagic5754 Yes agree about the one big level. Not sure why there was no background music. A lot of Amiga games did that. Why is it so hard to split up 4 channels betweem music and SFX?
@@robertwilson3866 Well, I don't think the power-ups in Battle Squadron were so dull... Especially considering that game was released in 1989! And its power-ups were much more varied than those in SWIV (that came out 2 years later and added absolutely nothing to the shoot'em up genre on the Amiga).
but the framerate... :)
Awesome gameplay mate.
The end music when you clock the game is mean:)
Awesome game!
16:00 xevious?
Yes of course ! The "green part" of SWIV is a tribute to Xevious.
I played it. It is brain addictive
My best result was around thé 37mn
You made John Boy look like an amateur 😆
man,i love this game but its a fucking headache to see you play...
still,thanx for the video,i always get calm and nostalgic when i see amiga games,and you took the effort....and you made it till the end,even if at times i was like "wtf are you doing!" good job,man!
Ralpunga..
Wow looks great but why no music? Way to ruin the game Sales Curve - 2 channels for the SFX, 2 for the music. Easy!
Could only complete this with cheats 😅
The Amiga had some good and original games. But arcade conversions were mostly awful or in this case, copying ideas from other better arcades but missing something . This game's lack of soundtrack, the lack of extra fire buttons (for a bomb), the dull colour palette, the mish mash of enemies that don't always match the level theme, the lack of weapon variety and the slow frame rate. I had a look at Genesis shooters and the few Snes ones and Amiga just didn't match.
Sega Genesis version is better.