Risky Woods is an action platform game developed in 1992 by Dinamic Software and Zeus Software and published by Electronic Arts Inc. for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC (MS-DOS). Later on the same year, a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive version was licensed by Sega.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY
The hero of the game is Rohan, a young warrior on a quest to save a number of deities kept prisoners inside stones (!) He is forced to fight against numerous ancient warriors and skeletons trying to prevent him from saving the gods, and also deal with a more deadly enemy: a potential fall from a platform which will instantly kill him and will decrease the total number of coins he collects. Rohan's weaponry is limited to knives, boomerangs and a few other throwing weapons that must be shot rapidly towards the enemies as they attack in groups! Each time an enemy sprite is down, one or more coins appear for you to collect. These coins can be used to increase your armor's strength (on the Sega Genesis version) while on the ST, Amiga and DOS versions you'll have to enter shops and pay to upgrade your weaponry Risky Woods is a standard action platform game, and nothing new has been incorporated to separate it from the rest of its genre, but it still is impressive (and tough).
GRAPHICS / SOUND The game on the Amiga has a multi-colored background. The entire background layer is created using sprites and the background pattern repeats every 64 pixels, using four 16-color sprites and redrawing them horizontally across each line. The scrolling is smooth and the sprites move faster than any other 16bit computer version. Sound-wise, the Amiga version has a remarkable intro tune along with a variety of sampled sound effects but, surprisingly, no in-game music.
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