I have always been fond of the thought of people from the demoscene turning to games just to really be able to squeeze out almost all there is from the hardware the game is running on.
Sometimes games impressive from a technical standpoint, Shadow of the Beast not mentioned, tend to be lackluster when it comes to gameplay. In the case of Euphoria, turning Boys Without Brains, and their over two year long session of producing Disposable Hero this is however not the... case.
Mario van Zeist and Harald Holt undeniably knew how to get the most out of the ageing Amiga and its ECS/OCS architecture, putting priority at the right places and doing away with some effects that while looking good, say... parralax scrolling, would have hindered others to shine.
Honestly, within seconds of booting up the floppy the intro starts to play reducing whatever loading times there are to something one almost forgets completely about.
It is almost ridicilous, the quality of the production, but I will get back to that at a later stage.
Although IREM's R-Type often is mentioned as a inspiration, Disposable Hero never feels like something other than its very own entity and there is no mobile satellite to be seen.
At least not in the same way as in R-Type.
It might be the rather unique upgrade system that helps solidify the uniqeness, working like the ship aquiring blueprints which after a set amount of time becomes availble as a finished product in the many factories spread out through the levels. Factories, also acting as health restoring facilities, which makes progressing through the everything but easy game a bit less daunting.
Quite configurable they are, the two ships eventually available to switch between. The bigger the engine the more upgrades one will be able to active at the same time and in an area where one ship might shine another might be lackluster.
Learning the levels, how to best deal with the enemies and the enviromental hazards are more or less a necessity to have at least a somewhat fair chance of ever seeing the game through to the end.
As of myself I can not seem to find a suitable way of taking on the final battle, but I digress. Point is in any case that there is, in all ways possible a good thing, a deeper level of strategy involved in successfully playing Disposable Hero than in many other western shoot 'em ups at the time.
Today there would probably have been selectable levels of difficulty available, maybe an option to play a reached level of choice, out of the five available, in some kind of training mode. But as it was designed the only way of getting around learning all the bits and pieces of the game is to play, play and play yet more.
Or, oh... well... use a cheat to enable infinite lives.
Something I do recommend everyone struggling to try out, if only to not having to play through the bits and pieces one knows by heart over and over again just to be able to spend some trial and error for a couple of seconds at the later parts of the game to learn how to tackle that specific part.
I can honestly say that one particular mini boss, one dealt within in a narrow tube with an ever speed changing fan at the bottom, took me some fifty tries to come to grips with. Doing this without the infinite lives cheat activated would have taken ages and probably made me turn off the game never to bother with it again.
I mean, there is always the option of going back to having no cheats activated and play the game as intended later on, considering the cheats nothing but a time saver in the learning process.
Although the good looks is not what makes Disposable Hero reach the higher of heights it certainly helps.
No matter how I look upon the library of shooters available on the Amiga I can not seem to find one that shrieks attention to details as loud as Disposable Hero.
The ships are really nicely animated with acceleration giving of a little burst of fire at the back of the ship. Turrets smoothly rotate to always point in the direction of the ship, bosses are sometimes huge and with pieces linked together in movement making their otherwise, sometimes, sparse animation a bit less noticable. At the bottom of the first level water in motion reflects what is happening above and the more I play the more I notice things all around me that would not have been needed to make a good impression but makes for an ever goodier one when noticed; Hein Holts, Arthur van Joles and Lars Verhoeffs work on the graphics can simply not be praised enough.
Concerning the aesthetics it might be that the theme in itself is somewhat generic, combining stone and metal with more organic material. However, the way it is presented to the player, with different themed levels extrelemy varied in their design, and as such never feels like they are repeating themselves, it all falls into place in the best of memorable ways.
Signs of Life Forces journey inside some giant entity can be seen, some alien elements from Gradius which in turn looks in the direction of H.R. Giger, pieces of Darius spacey underwater theme with fishes and whatnot but never in a plagiarizing way.
Almost as good as the graphics are the sounds and the music, courtesy of Hein Holt and Rick Hoekman.
Technotic and intense, in a way that makes it proper to talk about something Amiga esque, although with far more focus on ambience than on melody and Chris Hülsbeck's Turrican and Bjørn Lynne and Allister Brimble in the case of Project X springs to mind in a pleasant ambient way.
Not to say that the music is without hooks, but the beats and soundscapes are far more memorable than the melodies; The suggestive passively aggressive theme from the factory stands as a good example. Also, it works much better in the context of the game than for listening in general, even though it is a vast and ambitious soundtrack with dedicated tracks for all the levels and their bosses.
Disposable Hero to me feels somewhat forgotten in a broader sense.
While Project X, Apidya and Banshee often gets mentioned, aswell as the ports of R-Type, Disposable Hero seems like the one quite fantastic piece of shoot 'em up on the Amiga that few seem to talk about. Those who do talk about it, however, seem to be about as fascinated by the game as I as of a couple of weeks have been.
Better late than never, I guess.
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