DESCRIPTION:
"Nemac IV: The Director's Cut" is a First-Person-Perspective-Texture-Mapped-Action-Adventure-Game (a.k.a) a Doom-clone by Zentek.

It's minimum requirements:

• 2 megs of continuous memory
• AmigaMotorolla 68020 CPU
• 2 OS 2.04
• 5 megs of free hard drive space
• OCS chip sets

• Motorola 68040+
• 4 megs of continuous memory
• Amiga OS 3.1
• 5 megs of free hard drive space

THE TEST MACHINES:

A1200
• AGA only
• Cobra Accelerator (EC030-40mHz + 68882 40mHz)
• >8 megs FastRam, 2 megs ChipRam
• Ferret PseudoSCSI-II controller
• Pioneer Quad Spin CD
• 1.2 Gig Western Digital External IDE HD

A3000

• ECS & CyberVision 64/3D 4 meg running CyberGraphX v3
• 68030 25 mHz + 68882 25 mHz
• 4 megs FastRam, 2 megs ChipRam
• A3000's built-in SCSI-II
• Pioneer Quad Spin CD (same drive)
• 240 megs HD space total.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

Well, installation is a breeze with the standard Amiga installer. It checks your Amiga's configuration (CPU, Memory, OS version, etc) before giving you the green light. I must admit, it's a nice touch. I'd hate going through the whole installation just to find out I haven't enough ram, proper OS version or an inadequate CPU.

The first thing that greats you when you actually start the game is the game-configuration menu. It's an intuition window that has a built-in screen requester, and various other nick-nacks like Chunky2Planar routine selector, controls config, close Workbench switch... However, you can't set your pixel sizes (1x1, 1x2 or 2x2) or your play-area size (full-screen or fraction) from here though. You have to be in the game to do it.

AND NOW THE FUN BEGINS:

After the configuration window comes the title-sequence. The cut-scenes in thi game contains some nice computer generated animation. You can tell that a lot of work had gone into it but, as polished as it is, it's not very exciting to watch.

The actual playback is more or less silky smooth on a true SCSI-II controller (like the A3000's), but gets pixelated if attempts are made in increasing the screen size higher to quarter-screen. (The Ferret starts to choke and shows animations in little bursts, but I can't necessarily blame the programmer's on this though.) There is an option to choose a "higher" mode in the installation, but all attempts at using it on either one of my systems seems to yeel the same results.

Anyway, after starting an actual game, you get a nice view of your cockpit, with your guns at either side, and other information such as your various ammo levels and health. There are a few nice touches like textured floors and ceilings (which can be toggled on and off), the "up-down" motion of walking with your guns bobbing accordingly, the fireing of different weapons will cause different parts of your pistols to be animated.

Other then that, there doesn't seem to be any special graphical effects in this game at all (lighting or otherwise). Another thing you might notice is that everything is mechanical. You are fighting against robots. Now fighting robots isn't so bad, but its all done so clinically. These robots get shot, they might flash and then "tumble" on their backs. If the robots were to say, truly explode like the soldiers in Gloom Deluxe, or maybe crumble into tiny particles, it might be more exciting and rewarding to watch.

However, maybe this uneventful destruction might be due to the weapons. You start the game with 4 of them: Chain Guns, Plasma Guns, Grenades and Bombs. Strangely enough, none of them really give you a feeling of power. There doesn't seem to be any upgrades to these either, which limits the character's ability to evolve. Even grenades, the strongest projectile, isn't really spectacular. Instead of an typical small "explosion cloud", maybe it should be a bright explosion that blinds the player? (The player throws one, the screen goes white, and when vision comes back the player is surronded by destroyed ennemies. Now that's power!) Oh yes, there you may also use those exploding barrels for additional fire-power (ho-hum).

To make matters worse, your mission objectives aren't really varied as well. Get the pass code, open door, repeat until the exit is found. There doesn't seem to be any sub missions, or switches to toggle or traps to avoid. I did, however, find "secret" zones that countained -OoOooOoooO- ammo and health.

Movement is confined to a flat plane. (No jumping, or vertical movement at all). In fact, the whole game seems flat. The characters, although animated well, look like cardboard cut-outs from a Pop-Art gallery.

The actual game engine is quite slow on an 030 as well, any 1x1 pixel modes (include CyberGraphX) crawls on an 030 at more then half-screen. So for you lucky, 030 people playing with the Amiga Chip Sets, your game screen will look something like this:

(instead of)

This doesn't seem so bad, but CyberGraphX users with 030's will have to live with smaller and chopppier window sizes (since they don't have the luxury of using a 2x2 pixel mode).

As for sound, AsimCDFS doesn't detect any audio tracks on the disk, so there isn't an exciting CD-quality score playing to stir up your emoitions. The only "music" in the game are at the cut scenes. The cut-scenes soundtrack is mostly composed of long synthesizer chords. The rest of the game are simple sounds. This definatly doesn't help the game one bit. (The atmosphere, here again is clinical and unexciting.)

I must, however confess, that I haven't played this game past level 3. (It grew a little too difficult, and I just didn't care enough to play it again.) I'll wait until I get at least an 040 on one of my machines before I continue playing this. Then again, I'd probably try Alien Breed 3D-II, Gloom Deluxe and AmiQuake before I pop Nemac-IV in.

TO SUM IT UP:

I can't say that this is a landmark game. Although it manages to be competent at being a Doom-clone, it's just not exciting compared to it's breathen: Alien Breed 3D had atmosphere, which went into it's sequel (along with lighting effects, but a slow game engine), Gloom Deluxe had great explosions, CyberGraphX support, 2 player Split-Screen modes and a slightly faster game engine and AmiQuake (not an official and commercial product) has a horrendously slow game engine, but a very nice and fully 3 dimensional environement.

However, it would be a good idea to support and encourage Zentek into develloping more Amiga CD games. With a little more encouragement, and experience, they could go a long way if they focus a little more on gameplay.

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