Gods, Amiga

Developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Renegade Software for the Amiga in 1991, Gods is a stylised platform game in which you play as Hercules, on a quest to make his way through five large stages, themed with Greek mythological motifs.

Each of these stages is divided into a number of “worlds”. When you reach a certain point in each, you’ll get a summary of your progress and are awarded a bonus, dependent on what you killed and collected on the way.

Hercules can jump, duck, throw various weapons (he begins with throwing knives, but can upgrade these by collecting weapon power-ups), throw switches, climb ladders, collect gems and pick up keys (which are used for opening locked doors). Occasionally he’ll also get to summon a shopkeeper who’ll give access to a shop full of upgrades and other goodies.

You start with three lives and can collect more as you progress. Hercules’ health is shown as a beaker of brown liquid in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and if this completely empties, he’ll explode in dramatic fashion. Lose all your lives, and it’s game over, but you can use passwords to continue from specific levels.

The movement and animation of Hercules is quite strange – almost as if he has a pole up his backside – and his jumping mechanic is also weird (he can only jump left and right, not directly upward). The “huh!” he shouts every time he jumps is also somewhat annoying. Enemies, traps and even power-ups often appear out of nowhere, and at times Gods can be a very unforgiving experience. The game also does some weird stuff, like respawning you on top of enemies after losing a life, but overall it is reasonably compelling to play – once you get used to its strangeness.

Gods has decent graphics, and some cool intro music (“Into the Wonderful” by Nation XII), that uses voice samples and doesn’t sound like the usual ‘chiptunes’ audio from this period. It also saves high scores to the second of the game’s two disks.

Gods was also released for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis, the SNES, for PC MS-DOS, the Archimedes, the Atari ST, and for PC-98. The Amiga and Megadrive/Genesis versions are currently (at the time of writing) available on the retro gaming steaming service Antstream.