The Huz Experience

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Just another adventure game in the extensive and (almost) uniformly excellent LucasArts portfolio. However, it is special to me in a couple of ways:

1) It was the last LucasArts adventure game to be released for the Amiga, and consequently the last LucasArts adventure I played until Curse of Monkey Island.

And…

2) I have just replayed it for the first time in over ten years, this time in its full IBM-PC compatible, VGA, CD-ROM’ed, talkie glory. It is excellent.

I mean, really excellent. Due to the many significant shortcomings of the Amiga conversion, I had never been able to fully appreciate its charms. Playing Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga was more an ordeal than a game: it was inexplicably slow, running at approximately one frame per second on the Team path (not a word of a lie), the music was restricted to just a few of the PC version’s main themes reused over and over, and the graphics were a pale shadow of their full 256-colour glory.

Playing it on the PC was a revelation. The voices really work. The interplay between Indy and Sophia is well-written and funny. The dialogue system is sophisticated, with Indy able to comment to Sophia about most aspects of the current environment. And the story is real Indiana Jones. All of this was hidden under layers of frustration on the Amiga.

Fate of Atlantis has leapt from being “just another LucasArts game” to being one of my favourites. As a testament to how much I must have enjoyed it really – and much to my disappointment – I hadn’t forgotten how to solve a single puzzle, even at the distance of ten years. But that didn’t detract much from an excellent gameplaying experience.