There’s been regular updates about the progress of a Amiga release of the arcade game Rygar on the websites I visit. It’s going to be an AGA game, so my Amiga 500 won’t be able to run it and so I’m not really interested in the project. Apparently there’s never been a port of the game for the Amiga platform. I do however have the game for the Atari Lynx, which I have recently got a screen update for. So I’m aching to play games on the Lynx. I decided to give Rygar a try. My first impression was “Oh my god, what a simple game, this can’t be any fun”. The graphics are good, but the gameplay is just like, not there! There are only a few enemy types and they move quite slow, although that can be caused by hardware limitations of the Lynx. The music is very monotonous and the levels (at least the first ones) all look the same. Why would anyone want to play this and make a conversion for the Amiga? And why does it need to be AGA? OCS/ECS should be enough. There are plenty of OCS games that look great (Shadow of the Beast, anyone?)

I took a look at the arcade version on my bartop arcade to see what all the fuss was about. It actually didn’t look all that different from the Lynx version. What am I missing here? I decided that that was it. I’ll leave this game for what it is and probably never play it again.

But then I received a replacement power adapter for my Lynx that I’d ordered. I was keeping my eye on one for a time now and there were finally back in stock. So I tried it out and this new one is much nicer. It’s way smaller than the original one, which is in a whole class of it’s own. It’s so big that I’m afraid that it will fall down and rip down the whole wall socket along with it. Also the plug on the console side feels like it’s not secure in the device and I’m afraid that it will fall out and my progress will be gone.

I still had the Rygar cart in the machine so I played it for a short while. And then it grew on me. I got a bit further than the last time and although the levels largely stayed the same, I started to like it. It’s uncomplicated, mindless bashing and simple platforming. I definitely have to give the arcade version another go also.