Nicky Boom is an appealing platform and power-up galore game with lavish landscapes and action that includes lots of jumps and shots towards strangely looking creatures of varying sizes. The game was released in 1991 by Microids only for the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS home systems.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY In this colorful action platform game Nicky's grandfather is captured by a cruel witch named Zoldraneand kept locked inside a dark dungeon. Nicky hopes to find the old man and learn all the secrets of the forest tribe he is the guardian of. To stop Nicky finding his grandfather, the witch has changed the peaceful inhabitants of the woods into monsters and ordered them to watch around her castle. But Nicky does not give up and sets off his adventure to the evil witch castle. You are called to help Nicky get around the traps and fight alla the enemies that swarm the land! Nicky Boom is a pleasantly executed and very playable bounce around game with a few neat puzzles chucked in. Nicky has to make his way through 8 levels of rib-tickling bugs, spiders, killer snails, birds and an assortment of other nasties. The young boy is armed with an array of weapons and power ups like bombs while he also discover the keys needed to proceed. As long as you hold down the fire button, Nicky will throw a more powerful bomb destroying everything around or even open certain doors as soon as he possesses the key. Collecting various items (most of them left from dead nasties) such as sweets, cakes and bonbons will grant Nicky with extra health and more powerful bombs. Thankfully, the difficulty level increases gradually so you'll have the time to learn the game's mechanics with ease.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Nicky Boom's visuals are good with smooth scrolling, sprite animation and colorful, detailed backdrops. Comparably, the Amiga (OCS and ECS) version plays smoother than the ST and a bit slower than the DOS. I really like the color gradients on the background skies! The Amiga version has more than 70 colors on-screen and also includes some of the best tunes ever played on a platform game along with some nicely done sampled sound effects.
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch the Atari ST, Amiga OCS/ECS and DOS versions of the 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