Zool is a great platform game that made its debut on the Amiga in 1992 and was marked as the best-selling Amiga game of this year. Zool was also released for the Atari ST, PC (DOS), Acorn 32bit as well a the Mega Drive, the SNES, the Sega MS, the GameBoy and the Game Gear.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY
Zool is a "Ninja Of The 9th Dimension", forced to land on Earth. To gain ninja rankings he has to pass through six hostile lands. The game is an original arcade platform game, relying on smooth, fast moving action, colorful graphics and a wonderful intro soundtrack by Patrick Phelan that has inspired several modern electro/techno remixes. You control a "weird" ninja by running and jumping onto a variety of platforms, traps and...candies! Oh yes! You collect lollipops, Smarties and you fight with jelly pops and other candy-style creatures! You have to trigger the scattered check-points of each level in order to be able to progress to the next one and also to have a progressive start point every time you get killed by a moving chocolate (!) Zool is a classic (and...tasty!) arcade platform game that can offer much fun. Note that the game was bundled with the Amiga 1200 upon its first release on the computer market, but not with the AGA version of the game since it followed later. Generally the original Amiga OCS edition (and later, the AGA) is still widely considered to be among the finest platform games for these computers.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga (AGA) version looks better to its counterparts, having more details on each stage and using more colors on screen (around 60). The animation is smooth, much like the Amiga OCS (the ST/STE and PC versions have some framerate problems). As far as the sound, a wonderful intro music is available but the in-game sound is average, featuring only a few sound effects and strangely only a heart beating for your energy as a background sound!
CPU: Motorola 68EC020 14 MHz MEMORY: 2 MB, expandable to 10 MB max (2 MB Chip RAM + 8 MB Fast Ram) GRAPHICS: AGA chipset, supports 24-bit color palette (16.8 Million colors) and 256 to 262,144 on-screen colors in HAM-8 mode. Resolutions supported: 320x256 to 1280x512i (PAL) and 640x480 (VGA) SOUND: 4 channel 8 bit PCM, stereo output