Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, Amiga

I don’t know why, but the Amiga version of Cinemaware‘s classic Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon looks absolutely terrible. The graphics are appalling and the presentation overall is very rough around the edges. Compare it to the Commodore 64 version and it’s easy to see the disparity.

What makes this even more confusing is that the Amiga version of this excellent game is the original. It was designed and programmed by Bill Williams and published by Cinemaware in 1987 – a full year before the Atari ST and C64 versions were released, and two years before the MS-DOS version.

The Amiga is far more capable, graphically, than what we’re presented with in this game. The only explanation I can speculate is that ‘graphical presentation’ wasn’t Bill Williams‘ forte, and he either insisted on doing the graphics himself (and Cinemaware indulged him), or that maybe he got someone else to do the graphics and they turned out to be not very good at it. I don’t know the circumstances of the production of the Amiga version’s visuals, but they are so bad that they’re unlike anything else that Cinemaware ever produced. And, for those who don’t know: Cinemaware made some of the best-looking video games of all time. Just look at Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger, or It Came From the Desert to see the difference in art quality.

So it’s all the more shocking that the speech bubbles in Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon are absolutely awful; that the fonts and pull-down menus are dreadful, and that the colours are unbelievably garish. The game plays well enough, but the graphics are just dire…

If anyone has any thoughts about this Cinemaware anomaly I would be interested to hear about them in the comments below.