Hired Guns

Hired Guns is a computer role-playing game produced by DMA Design (distributed by Psygnosis) for the Amiga in 1993. The game is set in the year 2712, in which the player controls four mercenaries selected from a pool of twelve. more...

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One of the advancements of the game was that the four characters were on screen simultaneously in their own window. The game was also ported to the PC.

The plot is that a hostage rescue mission on the planet Graveyard proves to be illusory and that they have actually been lured into a weapons proving ground, in order to pit genetically engineered creatures against them to see how they fare.

The game used a system of four simultaneous Dungeon Master style first-person perspective viewpoint in the world. Each character was individually controllable and occupied their own square, unlike Dungeon Master where the entire party occupied the same square. Each character could be made to follow another character, simplifying large group movements when only one player was controlling the party. The gameplay was advanced for its time, allowing up to four players to play simultaneously, using mouse, keyboard or (modified) Sega Mega Drive joypad, with a parallel port adaptor allowing 4 joypads/joysticks to be used at once.

The game area was in real 3D, and monster/enemy AI had free movement around each level environment, unlike in other games of that time, running from monster/enemy AI up some stairs meant they couldn't chase. An array of heavy weapons (including a robot sentry as seen in Aliens Special Edition),incendary devices, and mines could be used to take out the enemy (or friends!) either on the same level as you or below. Players had to manage their inventory too, as they could only hold so many items. Interestingly enough, there were strange devices called \"Psionic Amps\" that could be used to create strange effects on the player or on the world around them - i.e. a Psionic Amp could be used underwater to create an area of air so the player could breathe.

The game is known for its very nice music and sound in its Amiga version. It is one of the games that looked and sounded better on the Amiga than on the DOS version.

Amiga Power

The British Amiga games magazine Amiga Power (AP) had a long running gag about Hired Guns. Nearly all games magazines, AP included, have a Next Month page, which offers a brief insight into the contents of next month's issue. However, for AP's first 30 issues or so, they had a thin strip on the back cover upon which they wrote a few lines on next month's issue, and included a very small screenshot of an upcoming game.

This enabled them to have a running joke for several months regarding Hired Guns. For several months, the game failed to arrive for review, as the publishers kept moving the release date back. In response, Amiga Power put the same screenshot of the game on their Next Month Strip every month for about six months, with repeated humble reassurances to the reader that they might, possibly, have it by next month.

Read more at Wikipedia.org