At a Glance: American Sammy Corp. (yes, this is an actual company) brings us the deviant adventures of a little mutant boy trapped on a really weird island. As this little red headed freak, you will find yourself crusading through six different parts of a mystery island, battling with everything from miniature UFOs to bouncing, pink, dead old mens' heads. As if that is not enough, you will also travel through some of the levels riding clouds and logs while trying to dodge sporadically spawning enemies. Yes, you will find this game to be a very enjoyable waste of time.

Platform: NES (Download Emulator here - 192k)

Download: Download ROM here - 79k


Finally, end guys that are more scared of me than I am of them!Game Plot: Learning my lesson from "Deadly Towers," I decided to wait two minutes before pressing start. The game doesn't give you a storyline, but rather decides to loop some of it's in game demos. Here is what I assume is the plot: you (the red headed aberrant) have decided to fly around the world in some lame attempt of being the next Charles Lindberg. Not having enough fuel in your plane, you crash. Now, since the game is called "Amagon," I am assuming that you crashed onto an island named Amagon (I think there was some kind of publishing error and that they really meant "Amazon"). Since there HAS to be some way off of the island, you must traverse from one end to the other, and because you are a red headed freak with a gun, everything on the island hates you and wants to kill you.

Weapons: You come equipped with a rifle. This is not a normal rifle though, oh no, that would be far too logical! Instead, this rifle shoots little red balls instead of bullets! You have a limited amount of ammunition, but can obtain more by killing enemies (like in real life). Be warned though, not all enemies will give you bullets. Some will give you little crown things that do absolutely nothing, while others will provide you with tiny blocks with a picture of a man flexing his muscles on it. Now I originally thought that you could only have a rifle in this game, but after getting that muscle block, I was proved wrong. Once I hit the "select" button, my character flexed his muscles and became really big and strong! So you do not only have a rifle, but you also have the ability to pound the countless amounts of enemies with your fists. Keep in mind that when in normal mode, if you get hit by anything, you die. But while you are in super muscle mode you actually have a life bar!

Enemies: The fact that the designers managed to combine zillions of different types of enemies into one single game was very reminiscent of "Booby Kids". In fact, there are so many enemies in this game that I was reminded of "Bad Street Brawler" as well. This game has a little bit of everything in it! You will find tree climbing porcupines, lobsters, sea horses, dinosaurs, and many other animals, not to mention some enemies that apparently came from a far away planet. It seems most enemies in this game have the ability to jump towards you at ludicrous speeds if you try to jump over them, and if you manage to actually get over them and run a distance past, they have the ability to teleport right behind you. 

To make things just a little more "interesting", they also combine the worst possible combinations of enemies, making some levels completely unbearable. In one map, I was jumping across trees to avoid the elephants that were shooting bubbles at me. While I was trying to jump across the tree branches, porcupines fell down from above, and when they landed, charged towards me at 600 miles an hour. I was then attacked by sea horses and lobsters that appeared to be coming from a freshwater stream. Such things wouldn't be a big deal, but they came at the most inconvenient of times, like when I was traveling across the stream on a log. The designers sure were smart and tricky with this game!

The incredibly smart final boss avoids my muscular body and shoots lightning bolts in the opposite direction of me.Number of Levels: There are six parts of the island, and for each part you must play through two rounds. It seems the further you progress through the island, the more bizarre things become. For example, when you begin the first level, you are on what seems like a beach shore with grass and rocks. But from the beginning you can tell things are wrong, because you are forced to fight oversized dragonflies, bouncing mushrooms, and dive-bombing birds. By the time you reach the last level you will have traveled through streams, dark forests, some kind of dinosaur desert, ultimately ending up once again on a beach type area. The only good thing about the levels in this game was the fact that they at least tried to make different textures for each new level, even though the textures still sucked.

Number of Bosses: There was a boss for each new part of the island, giving us a total of 6 bosses, most of which were pretty messed up. You will fight living trees, two-faced lions, giant hippos, and even skeletons. As if this isn't enough, when you reach the final part of the last level, you see a boat. If you enter the boat you are magically teleported into a large room where you are greeted by a giant cloaked wizard type thing. This thing shoots obnoxious fireball attacks all over the place. You are likely to find that the bosses are really easy to beat if you manage to save your muscle power-ups and use them all on the bosses. When you are in this mode, you are practically invincible and can basically kill most end guys with a few punches.

Defining Moment: This game was filled with many magnificent events, but I will present you with my favorite. Once, as I was trying to run through the last level without using my muscle power-ups, I ended up having a very frustrating time in the middle of the level. There were little things on wheels following me, and as I proceeded, swarms of killer mosquitoes would fly from the opposite side of the screen. So as I tried to jump over the wheeled enemies, I usually ended up hitting a death mosquito. To top things off, they have some kind of half breed crab / lobster things that climbs trees, so if I dodged the wheeled things and mosquito swarms, I still had to worry about high speed shellfish ramming me from behind. This was when I really enjoyed having no life meter. 

If you would like to emulate the experience of playing "Amagon," I suggest you strand yourself on a island with Wesley Willis and listen to him sing his wonderful music and perform bizarre sex acts with the wide variety of animals he sings about. If the animals are actually on the island with you and Willis, I suggest that you try to kill them before they try to kill you, because in "Amagon", not doing so would lead to your downfall. You'll probably want to get some necromancers to make some dead old man heads too, but I have no idea where you'd find those (both the necromancers and the dead old man heads).

Graphics-7
Gameplay-6
Story-9
Sound-9
Fun-8
Overall-39

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

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About This Column

The Rom Pit is dedicated to reviewing the most bizarre and screwed up classic console games from the 1980's, the ones that made you wonder what kind of illegal substances the programmers were smoking when they worked on them. Strangely enough, the same illegal substances are often necessary to enjoy or make sense of most of these titles. No horrible Nintendo game is safe from the justice of the ROM Pit.

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