Risky Woods is an action platform game, initially created for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC (MS-DOS) in 1992 and later that year a Megadrive port followed. A typical action adventure in which all you need to do is move left to right, jumping over platforms, killing beasties and rescuing monks. A typical gameplay but with good visuals and sound.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The hero of the game is Rohan, a young man who tries to save some deities that were put prisoners inside some stones (!) Rohan's enemies are numerous ancient warriors and skeletons who try to prevent him from saving the gods, so his quest is quite hard. Rohan must also face a more dangerous enemy; the potential fall from a platform which will instantly kill him and will decrease the total coins he gathers. Rohan's weaponry is limited to knives, boomerangs and a few other throwing weapons. Remember to throw your projectiles quickly towards the enemies since they sometimes attack in groups! Each time an enemy is downed it drops one or more coins. These coins (existing only in the Sega Megadrive version) are used to increase your armor's strength (rather than paying at shops and upgrade your weaponry as in the Amiga, ST and PC versions.)
GRAPHICS / SOUND I expected the Megadrive version to be at least better than the Amiga, due to the extra graphics power of the console. But visually the Megadrive version looks almost identical to the Commodore's 16bit home computer, perhaps having some more colors on-screen. The sprites move well and the backgrounds scrolling is pretty fast without any glitches. The sound of the game is finely tuned, featuring some stereo music themes and sounds FX that, I think, are inferior to the Amiga version.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Amiga (original version)
Hardware information
Megadrive (EU) / Genesis (Jap)
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz in PAL, 7.67 MHz in NTSC / Secondary Zilog Z80 at 3.55 MHz in PAL, 3.58 MHz in NTSC MEMORY: Main: 64Kb RAM + 8Kb / Video RAM: 64Kb / Audio RAM 8Kb GRAPHICS: VDP Chip: 256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240 / 512 colors (1536 using shadow-highlight mode),64 x 9-bit words of color RAM, 4 lines of 15 colors plus transparent, allowing 61 on-screen colors / Sprites: Up to 64 on-screen, 16/20 per line, 256/320 pixels per line, per-sprite priority / Interlace Mode 1 (no increase in resolution and Mode 2 (2x vertical resolution) SOUND: Main: Yamaha YM2612 @ 7,16MHz with six FM channels, four operators each / Secondary: TI SN76489 with 4-channel PSG + 3 Sq Wave channels.