Ishar 3: The Seven Gates Of Infinity is the best of the Ishar series and among one of the most impressive RPG games ever created on the PC (MS DOS), Amiga, Atari and Macintosh home computers.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY All Ishar games boast exceptional 3D graphics for their time, a huge game world, alternate solutions to puzzles and, the best of all features, different personalities and goals of each party members that make gameplay tenfold more colorful and fun; Ishar III is the best of the series. You start you journey controlling Zubaran or you can also import characters from any other game of the series and set off to hunt the dragon of Sith, the last survivor of the Great Black Dragons. In order to accomplish that, you need to go through a number of gates, each one warping you to a different time period. Each time period, like the islands of Ishar 2, has its own, unique landscapes and weather conditions. It's a quite large and pretty tough game that will occupy you for at least 20 hours of gameplay! Without any maps or walkthroughs, you can expect a good week (or more) of hardcore gaming, before finishing Ishar III. This Silmarils' trilogy, published from 1992 to 1994, is one of the few RPG series native to the Amiga and possibly the only RPG series of the 90s coming from France. Note that all three Ishar games are also available for the Atari ST and they are among those games few that supported the Atari Falcon.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Ishar III (as all Ishar games) features exceptional graphics, with detailed backgrounds and digitized characters! The Amiga OCS version offers awesome visuals, using 32 colors on-screen! The animation (especially during the game's intro) is really great and the sound is plain exceptional! The Amiga OCS version of Ishar III features an impressive digitized intro music and some nicely done, sampled, sound effects, much like the Amiga 1200 and the Atari Falcon versions (that unfortunately are missing from the ST machines).
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