Le Fetiche Maya is a challenging action adventure developed by Silmarils in 1989 and released for the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS (EGA,VGA) computers.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The body of the famous archaeologist Edward Halifax was recently discovered somewhere in the jungle of Yucatan, not far from Chichen Itza. The causes of his death remain unsolved. The old scientist, that's been missing for more than 3 years, carried a Maya parchment mentioning the existence of a mysterious fetish. Halifax's student, Professor Michael Fairbanks (that's you) travels to Mexico with the intention to continue the research and unveil the mystery. Michael finds himself in a small village called Merida, a god forsaken horrid place with two drunken sleeping Mexicans lying in front of a store. He needs to go in and buy supplies and he must also be aware not to spend his only $1000. Buying useful stuff can come in handy when Michael tries to bribe some locals for more info. Food supplies can restore his health (note: meats are more efficient than fruits) and his car can run for some time and distance without fuel (besides, Michael has one spare can on board). So, he has to choose and use his funds wisely. In addition, Michael can trade various items (found on the way) for other valuable goods and then return to Merida. Note that, for the first part of the game, you need to search and find certain objects and, as long as you proceed further, you'll also need to solve puzzles, encounter hostile locals, avoid death traps and wild animals, drive fast but carefully and enter many Mayan buildings and tombs; all the above offer a nicely presented action adventure game from the French software house, Silmarils.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics on the Amiga are good, with some artistic touches in each screen (yes the game is divided into screens, like a pure adventure game) and there are many beautifully designed environments with a perfectly matched selection of colors that impart a great adventurous atmosphere. The sprites' animation is a bit "jerky" though while each driving scene is based on an innovative pseudo-3D style and moves pretty fast (actually, the dashboard perspective reminds us of Lombard RAC Rally). Comparably, both the Amiga and the ST share similar visuals, with the Amiga being a bit more colorful. As far as the sound, the Amiga version includes a nicely composed intro theme and a few in-game sampled sound effects.
VIDEO On our video below, you may watch both the Atari ST and Amiga versions.
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