Graftgold‘s conversion of Rainbow Islands on the Amstrad is a decent port of the brilliant Taito arcade game. It was published by Ocean Software in 1990.

The play area might be small, and the graphics chunky, but the gameplay of this jolly classic has been retained well enough. The game can be played single-player only (I couldn’t find a way of activating simultaneous two-player), and does have a few other small sacrifices made to fit the game into the limited memory of the Amstrad (like, for example, there being no treasure chest during the ‘goal in’ phase of a level).

Movement of Bubby, the main character, is a little slow and juddery as well, but overall this is a good, playable conversion. Given a choice, though, I would play either the PC Engine version or the arcade original over this. Rainbow Islands on the Amstrad is for CPC fans only, really.

One other thing to note is that the title screen says “copyright 1989” for this conversion, but the sale of Telecomsoft (who were to originally publish the game) to Microprose delayed the release of Graftgold‘s Rainbow Islands ports for almost a year, before Ocean Software finally managed to negotiate a deal to publish the game.

Rainbow Islands on The King of Grabs:
Arcade, Amstrad CPC, PC Engine, Amiga, Atari ST, Sega Saturn

More: Rainbow Islands on Wikipedia