Ishar III

STORY / GAMEPLAY
All Ishar games boast exceptional 3D graphics for their time, a huge game world, alternate solutions to puzzles and, the best of all features, different personalities and goals of each party members that make gameplay tenfold more colorful and fun; Ishar III is the best of the series. You start you journey controlling Zubaran or you can also import characters from any other game of the series and set off to hunt the dragon of Sith, the last survivor of the Great Black Dragons. In order to accomplish that, you need to go through a number of gates, each one warping you to a different time period. Each time period, like the islands of Ishar 2, has its own, unique landscapes and weather conditions. It's a quite large and pretty tough game that will occupy you for at least 20 hours of gameplay! Without any maps or walkthroughs, you can expect a good week (or more) of hardcore gaming, before finishing Ishar III. This Silmarils' trilogy, published from 1992 to 1994, is one of the few RPG series native to the Amiga and possibly the only RPG series of the 90s coming from France. Note that all three Ishar games are also available for the Atari ST and they are among those games few that supported the Atari Falcon.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
All three Ishar games feature exceptional graphics, with detailed backgrounds and digitized characters! The third part of the series is even more improved. The Atari ST/E version uses some special trickery to display the graphics in 32 colors, instead of the usual 16. The visual details of the castles and forests, and the colors used, are certainly pretty good, and the ST version can compete whatsoever with the Amiga. Sound-wise, the game on the ST features a few nice digitized tunes (at the main menu and in other certain occasions), and several digitized sound effects during gameplay as in all other platforms (Amiga OCS/ECS/AGA and Atari Falcon). Note that Ishar III runs only on the Atari ST/E with 1MB of Chip RAM (1040 ST/STE models or memory expanded 520s).