Black Tiger, known in Japan as Black Dragon, is a 1987 action platform game released for the arcades by Capcom and ported by U.S. Gold for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and ZX Spectrum in 1989.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY In this "spiritual successor" to Capcom's classic game Ghosts 'n Goblins, your land is threatened by three evil -and strong- dragons. You play the role of Black Tiger, a barbarian hero and fight your way through a variety of enemy-swarmed levels, to spot and kill those menacing monsters. Your only weapons are your armor (that can be lost after taking too many hits), a triple dagger (projectile) and a ball-and-chain flail (melee) to kill your enemies from up close. The sprawling, eight-way scrolling levels are packed with hidden bonuses to encourage and reward your exploration. Most of these bonuses are in the form of "Zenny" coins, a currency that allows the player to buy items as an upgrade to their weapons, health and armor, keys for treasure chests and anti-poisoning potions. Special items that reveal coins, an upgraded armor or simply bonus points may be found by attacking certain walls. The gameplay is quite tough since you have to always climb on platforms with numerous enemies (monsters, armored knights and more) attacking or shooting you all the time. Apart from the enemies, you must also beware of any lethal gaps since you will end up in instant death.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga conversion features good graphics and colors, pretty close to the original arcade. Between the ST and the Amiga there are no major differences since the Amiga conversion is surely a direct Atari ST port! So if we put the arcade and the Amiga Black Tiger side-by-side, the action is slower. The sound features a nice intro theme and in-game sound effects taken directly from the arcade (with good sampling quality). In general, Black Tiger is a decent action platform game and surely a "not that bad" coin-op conversion for the Amiga home computer. My only complaint is that the Amiga could do better, at least in the animation sector.
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga OCS and coin-op arcade 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