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Book review: Commodore Amiga: A visual Commpendium

The “Commodore Amiga: A visual Commpendium” is the second book of the bitmap Books publishing house.

Meanwhile, there is a series of three books. Besides a book for C64 there is another book on the ZX Spectrum to be published shortly. The Amiga one is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign which commodore-amiga-a-visual-commpendium-main-no-slip73-440x440-440x440had more than 3000 supporters and founded nearly 130,000 pounds (about 176,000 euros). A cardboard slipcase protects the 424-pages of the book. Just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Amiga this book remembers on the software that characterized the “lady”.
More than 140 Amiga games with beautiful 16-bit graphics are displayed chronologically on each double page. Each game contains comments and anecdotes. These come from industry veterans like Brian Fargo, Julian Eggebrecht, Allister Brimble, Ron Gilbert, Chris Huelsbeck, RJ Mical, Dave Perry and many more. That is not all. There are additionally interviews with Amiga artists who reports from the good old days. Further, there are short articles about the history of the Amiga under mention of the different hardware versions.amiga-00473-440x440 Moreover, in multi-page company profiles some cult developers get a closer review. Among them are DMA
Design, Factor 5, Team 17, Sensible Software and some more. It is still nice to look at the box artworks of
some classic Amiga games which also found place in the book. The utilities like Deluxe Pain, X-Copy, etc. have their own chapter as well. Also the demo scene is represented with a brief digression. Last but not least got a selection of unreleased games a place in this extensive book.

The lovely crafted book leaves nothing to be desired for Amiga fans. The industry veterans comments on the games opens up a very interesting perspective. The Insiders provide an insight, which is much more interesting than just another amiga-00659-440x440simple summary of the game content. The company profiles are also well chosen and interesting to read.
The Artists of the Amiga era, which often find little mention in other publications, have their prominent place. In addition to that it would have been nice to read something more from the sound artists as well. The beautiful 2D games graphics are mostly well chosen. But some of the graphics could have represented the games a little bit better. The book does not try here to cover everything regarding the Amiga. That choice was a good one. The demo scene by itself could fill easily a whole book. It’s nice to get a book which set focus on the visual side of the Amiga without missing an cross section of the Amiga world. And that succeeds very well here.

We like to speak out a buy recommendation at this point. The book can be purchased through the distribution of funstock at a price of 29.99 pounds (40.67 euros). The book is only available in english language. Sadly we got no information about an german version so far.

Source(s): ejagfest.defunstock.co.uk

We want to thank funstock for the voucher copy.

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