Way back in 1985 Nichibutsu published the awesome vertically scrolling shooter game called ‘Terra Cresta’. A game that was released in the Arcades, with later ports to other systems such as the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 via Ocean Software. What makes this a rather hot news story for today, isn’t the fact that it is a very good game worthy of high praise, but the Terra Cresta Amiga port has been discovered and released by Spreadpoint and Swiss Cracking Association.
While I’m unsure if it’s the full version, and how it differs from the one that Amiga Bill tried last year. Here’s what Amiga Bill said about Terra Cresta the Amiga version sourced from EAB. ” In 1992, Japanese developer Dempa ported both Terra Cresta and its predecessor Moon Cresta to the X68000 as the debut title in their Video Game Anthology line of arcade game re-releases, titled Video Game Anthology Vol. 1 – Moon Cresta / Terra Cresta. That must have been around the year in which an unknown game studio was working on an Amiga 1200 (PAL) port. However, this was never completed and published.”
“But much later something very interesting happened. STI of SCA recently talked about it in diskmag Versus #10: “About two years ago I was contacted by a guy who said a friend of his had purchased an Amiga 1200 and some disks from an office clearance sale in Japan. Most of the disks didn’t boot and the guy found out that they were infected with the SCA virus. He’s not a coder, so he asked me if l could maybe fix the disks and find out what they contain. He sent me the disks, one of them was particularly interesting because it used a custom track format, and of course the first 1024 bytes of the loader were overwritten by the SCA virus. This activated my cracker instincts (and I felt a little guilty ;-), so I tried to figure out what was on that disk and how to boot it. Together with my friend Depeche of Spread point we managed to write a loader (the format was quite straightforward) and to run the code.”
“Then some people of SCA and Spread point restored it, fixed some major glitches and got it running. Because it had no music, they added a matching mod just for fun. This version at the time was available exclusively to AmigaBill for presentation. .”
NOTES : This version doesn’t have any music, just sound effects however according to one EAB member there is hope music will be added later “I must admit, that I am a huge fan of Terra Cresta soundtrack. So, playing without it is a crime for me. I agree to JOTD to patch the game and add some MOD files to make the soundtrack work on the Amiga version (from FM model, because there is an AY version of Terra Cresta in arcades). Music is very important in this one.”
And there you have it, so if you want to play this long awaited Amiga port even without music, come and check it out (HERE) or mirrored with WHDLOAD/ROMS (HERE)
