SWIV is a classic vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up that was considered a spiritual successor (not officially) to Tecmo's arcade game Silkworm. The game was initially released for the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST in 1991 and later for the Acorn Archimedes (1992). The game looks good, sounds wonderful and contains a great deal of frantic shooting action.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY As in the original Silkworm, you can choose to control either an armored jeep or a flying gunship to battle your way through the game's enemy territories and swarms. This also gives you two different playing styles and, although you might go pretty far with one vehicle, you could end up getting blown up straight away! Using the helicopter you have the advantage flying above any dangerous obstacles scattered around the ground (such as trees, mines etc) but the heli can only fire in one direction, which sometimes makes killing enemies a bit hard due to their enormous amount of firepower. On the other hand, you have the jeep with a mounted cannon. Maneuvering this 4WD car can be a little difficult (due to the total chaos that occurs on the ground) but it can jump over some obstacles making life a little bit easier. Shield power-ups can be found, which can be either picked up to afford temporary invincibility or detonated to destroy all enemies on-screen. Every so often, a boss enemy will attack you and will grant you with gun upgrades when killed.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Graphics are of very good quality with some superbly drawn sprites and backgrounds that portray the action in a military-style. Note that the Amiga graphics are identical to the later Acorn version and pretty close to the ST. The sprites move fast and smooth while the scrolling performs well. The game's sound is cool, utilizing the Amiga's sound capabilities to produce true stereo. If you move to the left the sound comes from the left speaker! Move to the right and the sound shifts with you and this creates an amazing atmosphere! SWIV offers some great, sampled sound effects and the introductory tune is among the best someone may find on an Amiga game.
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