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Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Golden Axe - Atari ST [005] PlayThru 

Title Screen
NOTE: A trainer was used for making this capture.

Golden Axe, an excellent side scroller hack-and-slash from Sega that was released in the arcades  in 1989.  I have only played the Atari ST version, and Sega Master System version, maybe 2 or 3 times.  I had the Genesis cartridge early on, and that is the one I played the most.




Gameplay
The Atari ST port was a decent effort.  The cons: The play area on screen is squished and not full
Magic Potion Used
screen. Not all of the music is present from the original arcade version. Too much floppy disk access really breaks the flow of the game. The lack of the ability to have a 2nd button for use on the joystick requires a keyboard key press for using magic. Floppy access/loading when magic is used takes too much time and breaks the flow of the game, and the disk access is toooooooo much (twice for emphasis!)

Gameplay
The pros: The graphics are decent for the ST palette. The music that is included is nicely composed on the ST's soundchip. All three characters from the arcade are selectable. Two players simultaneous play is supported like in the arcade. The arcade ending is included.

Box Front
Overall, the game gets the job done.  Playing this title from a hard drive would definitely be very beneficial to speeding up the game because of the numerous floppy disk accesses.  For loading, you either get the black 'LOADING' screen, or you can see an icon on the lower bar showing a floppy disk when disk access is occurring.

Arcade Flyer
Capture info -


I had four points where the video went out of sync during the video capture, and I am not sure why. This was not a one time problem, as I duplicated the issue multiple times with the game, while trying to clean it up.

This gameplay was captured on March 17, 2018.

Game was played on an Atari 1040 STf, TOS 1.4, 1MB, equipped with a CosmosEX from Jookie.
A Best Electronics ST Monitor to VGA cable was used, connected to an OSSC 1.6 (processing the video in Line4x mode), with the output being captured by a Startech USB3HDCAP.

Video was edited with Shotcut.

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