Onslaught

Well, shovel me sideways with a stick.

The last thing I expected to be reviewing this fine morn was a resurrection of an Amiga game I’d all but forgotten about.

I must confess, that when I first saw the name Onslaught I had to wrack my poor brainbonce.

Time to sift through the memory pipes to recall whether it fell amongst that insanely small amount of Amiga games that still hold up today as being really rather good or there was some other reason for it sticking in my memory (aside from it being one of the final games released by Hewson, those fine chaps responsible for publishing officially the greatest game ever made). And wrack my brainbonce I did whilst waiting for the game to pop up unto the off white box that resides under my television.

Was it the tune? Hmm, never the greatest Maniacs Of Noise fan, the game… nope, still drawing a blank and then ah yes, those pixels. That was it. I remember Onslaught precisely because at the time, I really was quite enamoured with the pixel work and yay for pixels! They’re retained with nay a smeary filter in sight in this new incarnation of the game. Woohoo.

If it weren’t for the pixellicious beauty of our afore loved Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp we’d be starting the campaign right here for more games that use the fine art of the pixel to their advantage. In fact, stuff it – we’ll start the campaign here anyway. Hey ho, lets go. We demand more games that use pretty pixel art and we want them now (or tomorrow, no rush).

But alas, here almost endeth my trumpeting. You see, Onslaught was, how can I put this, a divisive game. Yes, I realise that all games are essentially divisive – how else can we explain away the Rick Dangerous with tits that is Tomb Raider being loved by so many whilst being so hateful?* Yet some by their very nature are more so than others. Reading back through the old reviews of Onslaught before parking myself down to write this one, I’m left with the same levels of puzzlement that met me all those years and many sleeps ago. Onslaught is a game of depth, they’d say. You’ve just got to find it. Now, I’m one of those folks who is happy with a game that on the surface feels incredibly simple but disguises within itself many layers of subtlety, sadly I never actually found any in Onslaught. The supposed depth just never appeared. Although a big head with spinny arms did. So that’s something at least.

My experience with Onslaught both then and now consisted of moving right a lot, occasionally going up a bit and hitting things when the weapons allowed me to. So readers, am I missing something here? I know there’s shooty bits too where you take on the wizards, but it’s not long before you’re thrown back into moving right and hitting things again with the occasional bit of going up. I’m struggling here folks, throw me a bone…

But hey ho, there’s something more fundamentally important here than my inability to grok the game correctly. The fact that Onslaught is here is remarkable. The fact that I’m sitting down, on my sofa, sort of like I did in 1990 only then I didn’t have a wife, kid and the shackles of old age that bind me and in all likelihood, I was probably really quite drunk around that time… yes, the fact that Onslaught is here and on the Xbox360 is incredible. And more to the point, it’s not some shoddy shovelware of doom, it’s a pretty darn fine port however you choose to paint it. This is great. And in many ways, well, many, many, many ways I’d dearly love the Xbox Community Games to become a viable route for authors (or even small companies acting on the authors behalf) to re-release their old games without all the hassle that certification brings and the painful financial crippling that could potentially come from going down the big daddy XBLA route.

So regardless of my inability to completely grasp Onslaught, I’m happy it exists. I want more folks to follow in its footsteps and for that reason alone I want it to be a success. There’s too many games all but lost to the annals of history now, too many games left out to dry or re appropriated by folks who never quite understood what made the original so good or bunged out there with little love, care or attention for the sake of taking a few of your Earth pounds away to a big megacorp to be tunneled into funding tat.

Make it so, people. Make it so.

*Cat, meet pigeons.

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