Back To the Golden Age is a side scrolling action adventure, developed by Ubi Soft for the Atari ST and Amstrad CPC in 1990. The ST version is available in one disc.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY You are a mighty knight on a mission to find the princess that's kiddnapped by the evil lord of the mainland. The evil lord opposed towards you a whole army of warriors, knights, archers or even bats and other foes, so you must fight your way through using your trusty sword and your powerful shield. You must also pass through several doors that lead to either a room (with various bonuses to collect), a shop (where you can buy spells, energy boosts and weapons) or even castles where you discover and open various objects that grant you with money.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The game looks like a mix of the great Silmarils' Targhan and the Ubi Soft's Night Hunter. The graphics are gorgeous with many colors and a plethora of cool details. The sprites look impressive and the animation is good (though I found some minor slowdown issues here and there). The sound effects are all sampled (from the ambient sounds to the clangs of the swords) and the intro music is a well composed sampled tune. Ubi Soft definitely managed to make another great game for the ST (as they usually did back then) and Back To The Golden Age is surely one of the best ST games ever!
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch both the Amstrad CPC and Atari ST versions of the game.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
Atari ST
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).