The Amiga conversion of Rod Land is an enhanced port of the Jaleco arcade game from 1990. It features extra levels, extra animation, hidden features and bonuses, and glitch fixes. The conversion was done by Random Access and was published by Storm (a sub-label of The Sales Curve) in 1991.

While the Amiga version isn’t quite as colourful as its arcade parent, it plays beautifully and contains everything (and more) that made the original so good – the cooperative two-player gameplay; the interesting wand-bashing/ladder-spawning action; the precisely-judged difficulty curve; the jolly music; the balloon-riding; the cute fairies and monsters, and the boss battles.

The badly-translated English has been tidied-up, but all the cut scenes seem to be present and correct, and the colourful, painterly backgrounds are well-recreated on the Amiga, without them being so busy that they interfere with the foreground graphics.

The only downside is that the Amiga version doesn’t give you any continues, which is a bit tight. The arcade version does, and so the Amiga version should have some too. I don’t know what the developers were thinking by omitting them, but it makes the game so much harder to make progress in with just three measly lives…

Overall, this is a great port and an excellent game on the Amiga. Rod Land is an under-rated platforming classic.

More: Rod Land on Wikipedia