The Killing Game Show is a mix of platform jumping, shooting and puzzle solving game developed by Raising Hell and published in 1990 by Psygnosis for the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. In 1991, a Sega Mega Drive version followed under the name "Fatal Rewind", this time published by Electronic Arts.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY In The Killing Game Show, the story takes place somewhere in the future where you control an armed robot and you must either evade or shoot enemies that swarm the platforms you have to climb. You actually are a criminal participating in a deadly TV show to survive and set free upon success. Your goal is to make your way upwards, to the level's exit within a specific time limit. When this limit ends, toxic liquid will begin to rise from below and will eventually destroy you. Also, the enemy hordes keep re-spawning which will make your survival much harder. In each level you have the ability to check the map by pressing the relevant key and in addition you can use special gadgets or items -like shaped keys to open certain gates- to unlock different sections in each level. Overall, the game is really tough and if you lose a life you will be forced to play the level from the very start. There is also a replay function where you can fast-forward gameplay. Note that this feature was unique back in the early 90s and pretty useful for such a tough game.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Atari ST version has nicely designed environments. The sprites' animation is fast but the scrolling suffers sometimes from slight frame-rate drops. The game also features nice sound effects, speech and an intense in-game music score composed with the ST Digi-Synth. The ST version is very decent in every aspect and plays greatly. Our only complaint is that the impressive intro sequence is soundless and that you can't have music and sound effects simultaneously.
GAMEPLAY VIDEO In our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga and Sega Mega Drive versions.
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).