Toki (also known as JuJu Densetsu in Japan) is a 1989 shoot 'em up platformer arcade game developed and published in Japan by TAD Corporation and published in North America by Fabtek. Due to its popularity, within the next two years the game was ported to a large number of home-video game consoles and home-computers of the time, such as the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Nintendo NES, Sega Megadrive and Atari Lynx.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The game's hero is a tribesman called Toki. Toki's girlfriend Miho was kidnapped by an evil witch doctor called Bashtar, who also put a spell on Toki turning him into a cartoonish little chimp. So Toki is about to start a dangerous mission in order to rescue his love interest gain back his human nature. Toki has to fight through five hostile environments until he reaches Bashtar's lair. Luckily, his transformation gave him the ability to spit energy fireballs from his mouth, which are actually his main weapon, as well as the ability to jump in higher grounds. The game is a classic platformer in which you must travel through a variety of levels and battle hordes of jungle monsters, cope with physical hazards (deadly pits, spikes etc) and fight a mini-boss at the end of each level. The ultimate goal of course is to find and kill the evil wizard. Toki is a really nice coin-op conversion and among the best in its genre. It follows typical action platformer moves in all eight directions. You can jump on several platforms in order to avoid enemies or grab a few bonuses, including energy portions. The level of difficulty increases as you progress and it's seemingly impossible sometimes to guide your little ape into safety, as nasties and some static hazards (spikes etc) dominate the screen in such a way that, there is no chance to avoid contact with them and thus, you lose your energy easily! Toughness aside, Toki is one of the most renowned arcade platform games and offers intense action and lots of fun!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Amiga conversion is technically close to the original arcade version. The visuals are quite smooth and move quite fast and flawless. You will notice that the backgrounds change in real time as you progress through each level. In comparison, there are some noticeable differences between the Amiga and the ST version, with the Amiga posing more colors and details especially on the backgrounds. Despite the Amiga's version sports a larger color palette, the ST version looks very good too. The in-game tunes are nicely composed and they are similar to the original, followed by a variety of nice, sampled SFX during gameplay.
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