Sky High Stuntman is a vertical shoot 'em up game an one of the toughest of its genre and time. The game was released for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY As a super-skilled stuntman you are hired to shoot another mega action movie by a top director. To get the scenes right you must complete four death defying stunts and your mission is to fly through each scene and land, but you have a limited number of takes (those are your lives actually) to get it right or you will be fired (or even worse, destroyed). In each level you pilot a different fighter. On the first level a Spitfire, a combat chopper on the second, a Phantom F4 on the thrid and a delta-wing jet fighter on the fourth. Along fighting, you can collect extra weaponry but you must use your smart bombs wisely as there are not too many and they prove useful especially against incoming heat-seeking projectiles. The enemy squadrons vary from jet fighters to combat choppers, missile launchers or even ships!
Sky High Stuntman looks, sounds and plays great but it is also extremely hard to survive. Even if you are able to memorize flight paths, the screen is overwhelmed by enemies and the smart bombs that wipe out everything on screen are limited. On the other hand, the resemblance to SWIV is either a boom or a drawback, depending on your personal liking.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga version sports smooth vertical scrolling, fast moving sprites, intense action but only up to 25 simultaneous colors per scene. The latter does not seem to effect things negatively though.
Before starting a mission (scene) you have the option to select either sound effects or music (unfortunately you can't have them both which is very odd for an Amiga game). The sound effects consist of the standard shoot 'em up type of explosive, sampled sounds while the in-game music and the intro music are both quite catchy.
GAMEPLAY VIDEO Our gameplay video includes both the Amiga (OCS) and the Atari ST 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