SWIV is a classic vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up that was considered a spiritual successor (not officially) to Tecmo's arcade game Silkworm. The game was initially released for the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST in 1991 and later for the Acorn Archimedes (1992). The game looks good, sounds wonderful and contains a great deal of frantic shooting action.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY As in the original Silkworm, you can choose to control either an armored jeep or a flying gunship to battle your way through the game's enemy territories and swarms. This also gives you two different playing styles and, although you might go pretty far with one vehicle, you could end up getting blown up straight away! Using the helicopter you have the advantage flying above any dangerous obstacles scattered around the ground (such as trees, mines etc) but the heli can only fire in one direction, which sometimes makes killing enemies a bit hard due to their enormous amount of firepower. On the other hand, you have the jeep with a mounted cannon. Maneuvering this 4WD car can be a little difficult (due to the total chaos that occurs on the ground) but it can jump over some obstacles making life a little bit easier. Shield power-ups can be found, which can be either picked up to afford temporary invincibility or detonated to destroy all enemies on-screen. Every so often, a boss enemy will attack you and will grant you with gun upgrades when killed.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics on the Atari ST version are nice and pretty close to the Amiga original version. The sprites are superbly drawn and the backgrounds give a military feel to the action. The sprites move fast and quite smooth (here we must note that the scrolling is fine, which is rather rare for an ST title). The game's sound, though lacking is good and offers a variety of sound effects like explosions and gunfire. The introductory tune is equally good, though neither the effects nor the music are sampled on this version.
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).