1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Modern versions of Amiga games
Hollow Knight : complex 2D maps with beautiful gfx.
Are there any true metroidvania games for the Amiga?
Comment by DGolden at 04/03/2025 at 14:16 UTC*
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Turrican series while on the surface looking a bit like Metroid, is a linear series of levels, if massive ones. And some of them are shooter stages of course hah. It's really pretty different if controlling similarly. So not those.
However Amiga Odyssey[1] gets very close? Absolutely great game, perhaps main let-down in modern terms is just its lack of background music or automap (but hey original Metroid didn't have an automap). It is also split into its several islands (for disk loading reasons perhaps) rather than one contiguous world map, but you can still go back and forth between the islands anyway, it's not linear levels. It has the sprawling platforming, backtracking, collecting new abilities and ability gating etc. And the abilities are of course a bunch of fun animal shapeshifts that control significantly differently - like a certain later subgenre-defining Metroidvania a few years later...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd9RNZn8vWY
Kind of depends how loose and handwavy one is being. Too loose and any platformer with puzzle elements and backtracking seems to creep in. Some people apparently now squinting at European Dizzy series etc. and retroactively considering them borderline, though seems off to me. /r/metroidvania/comments/80lam4/can_the_dizzy_games_be_considered_to_be/
I for one probably stick to "arcade adventure platformer" terminology for Dizzy and the like, if perhaps "metrodvania-adjacent". Sort of thing where if you like metroidvanias you probably at least also appreciate the european-style arcade adventure platformers too, rather than them actually *being* metroidvanias?
Amiga Exile[2], if an enhanced port of the BBC Micro original[3], also gets close. Though very physics-based item-puzzley, so again it's perhaps more of a (really cool) arcade adventure platformer if we distinguish Dizzy/Exile/Strangeloop/etc. from the Metroidvania style based on emphasis on item-use gating rather than ability-gain gating.