Chuck Rock is an early 90s side-scrolling platform game developed by Core Design and released for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. The game was later ported to the Acorn Archimedes, the Commodore 64 and some video game consoles.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Chuck Rock's ever loving wife (Ophella) has been kidnapped by an evil -and rather good looking- guy named Gary. Your mission is to rescue her as soon as possible, but it's not going to be a walk in the park as you have to battle against several nasties along your way! The story is set in the prehistoric age in which there are plenty of hungry dinosaurs just waiting for you... as well as creatures that come in quite different shapes and sizes (!) Note that not all of these creatures will harm you, rather than some of them will give you a lift across swamps or deep gaps that would otherwise be impassable! There are five different levels of platforms action, each one divided in 5 sub-levels! Of course you are bound to endure a few hits but if you sustain too many...you're dead, starting all over again! So, do you really want to see Ophella again? Then grab your joystick and go for it! The gameplay is really fun, following the typical action platform moves in all eight directions. You may jump on several platform in order to avoid enemies or grab a few bonuses, including energy portions (depicted as hearts).
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics on the Amiga are nice, very colorful, with plenty of details on screen. I would expect a few more scrolling effects at the background though (namely parallax-scrolling) but still, it does look good. The sprites move fast and most of them are very well designed. Comparably, the Amiga version has a few more colors compared to the Acorn Archimedes but the differences increase a lot compared to the ST version, the latter having way less colors as well as most of the background (and foreground) details missing! The game's sound is pretty good on the Amiga and features a nice intro music which is also playing during the game (Amiga version only).
GAMEPLAY VIDEO
In our video below you may watch six different versions of the game: Commodore 64, Sega Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs