Son Shu Si

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The hero, Son Shu Si, fights his way through six horizontally scrolling platform levels: the deep forest, the beach, the dark cavern, the town, in the surroundings of a castle and inside the castle. At the end of each platform there is a flying shoot 'em up sequence that ends with a large end-level boss. Each level also features some bonus rooms and shops. In addition, there is a Breakout clone to be found inside certain doors. Although the game was released in full for the Atari ST, the Amiga version was reviewed in gaming magazines but was never officially published for unknown reasons! Sometime in 2004, the original authors were tracked down but unfortunately the game's disks have been thrown in the garbage a month earlier. All hope seemed lost! Luckily, a friend of the developers team happened to read that specific issue. Patrick Tamine was helping to get Son Shu Si released at the time and still owned a two-disks runtime version. A backup was required but the disks were protected. The SPS (then CAPS) team were contacted and a checksum error was discovered on track 133 of disk 2 but, apart from that, the disks seemed to work fine. IFW/CAPS did a great job and managed to recover the data.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game on the ST is colorful, with nice visuals and a large variety of backgrounds and sprites. The sound effects are all sampled and quite funny and this version includes a nicely composed sampled intro music. In general, although the game was created by a group of unknown French developers, it's technically quite good.