Amiga Tribute: Agony

Alestes from Agony

Part 9/24 of my Amiga tribute project >3

This time it's a title that's interesting in quite a few ways, behold Agony

For one, the main character is no mere owl, well, granted, it's actually a warlock who was transformed as part of a trial to gain unimaginable cosmic power, but that's not what I'm getting at
If anyone remembers a great company called Psygnosis, do you recall it's logo? Yes, that is the very same owl which was a sort of mascot of the company.

Second, this game had truly astounding graphics for it's time, and do remember we're talking about a game from 1991, and hell, this game still looks great. Like my good friend ThunderwolfBrony said when I showed him the game - "It's far better than those indie games which use the word "retro" as an excuse for bad graphics", and pretty much each aspect of the game was mostly for art's sake. The bitmap artworks, the background, the animation, hehe, ThunderwolfBrony called it a "swag game", and it's a pretty fitting description
Though truth be told, them graphics was what spawned some flaws, for one, the graphics took most of the space, so the game was pretty short, and also, no intro could be added to explain the backstory, heh, good thing the manual explained it clearly (oh, the good ol' manuals ^w^), also, this game was very hard, and the fact that many enemies and their projectiles blended too well with the background at times only unnecessarily magnified the difficulty...

Third, which is kinda tied with number two, this game was the first shoot-'em-up to ever use hitboxes. No, it wasn't Touhou. This is actually part of the "swag game" theme, as the creator purposely chose a bird as the main character, and the gaudy way it flaps it's wings is meant to show you how enemy bullets pass right through them and the main body is the only part that can be hurt, how's that for "swag"

And fourth, the music. The game featured a theme song by Tim Wright, which atypically for an action game was a classically-themed, piano-led instrumental. The title song was adapted without giving him proper credit by the keyboardist of Dimmu Borgir, Stian Aarstad, in the song "Sorgens Kammer" for their Stormblåst album. The band did not know about this. Following several months of communication between Wright and Dimmu Borgir, and in a nod to the composer, the band did not include the track on a later re-recording of Stormblåst.
Feel free to check this yourselves:
Original - www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9UTnU…
Sorgens Krammer - www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDeQI9…
Or a complete comparison - www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE6WFQ…
However do note that this plagiarism is a pretty well known fact, even Wikipedia states so both under Agony's entry and the Stormblåst album entry |3 and as good as the song sounds, there is no excuse to steal anyone's work.

Well anyways, it has been a while since I've drawn anything with wings, hehe, kinda missed that, and as you probably noticed, tried to draw them a tad differently. Also, this was the first time I ever drew an owl, so it's probably not the best owl pic on the net, but I really did my best here ^^


Other parts of the project - Shadow Of The Beast, Shadow Fighter, Zool, The Chaos Engine, Superfrog, Skeleton Krew, The Speris Legacy, Flashback, Agony, Brutal: Paws of Fury, Fightin' Spirit, Ruff 'N' Tumble, SwitchBlade, Lionheart, The Lost Vikings, Brian The Lion, Wolfchild, Gods, Entity, Franko: The Crazy Revenge, Hired Guns, Turrican, The Killing Game Show, Yo! Joe!


Alestes (c) Psygnosis