Zool

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Zool is a "Ninja Of The 9th Dimension", forced to land on Earth. To gain ninja rankings he has to pass through six hostile lands. The game is an original arcade platform game, relying on smooth, fast moving action, colorful graphics and a wonderful intro soundtrack by Patrick Phelan that has inspired several modern electro/techno remixes. You control a "weird" ninja by running and jumping onto a variety of platforms, traps and...candies! Oh yes! You collect lollipops, Smarties and you fight with jelly pops and other candy-style creatures! You have to trigger the scattered check-points of each level in order to be able to progress to the next one and also to have a progressive start point every time you get killed by a moving chocolate (!) Zool is a classic (and...tasty!) arcade platform game that can offer much fun. Note that the game was bundled with the Amiga 1200 upon its first release on the computer market, but not with the AGA version of the game since it followed later. Generally the original Amiga OCS edition (and later, the AGA) is still widely considered to be among the finest platform games for these computers.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amiga (OCS) version has nice detailed graphics and huge sprites, with more colors than the ST/STE and PC versions. The OCS version has fewer objects on the backgrounds compared to the superior Amiga AGA version (like clouds, more sweets and candies etc) and there are fewer colors on screen (around 40). The animation is pretty smooth, much like the AGA (the ST and STE versions have a few frame-rate problems, although the latter is using the Blitter chip for smoother scrolling). As far as the sound goes, there is a wonderful intro music, while the in-game sound is average, featuring only a few (nice to listen to) sound effects and strangely only the heart beating of your energy as a background sound!