Amagon

Developer: Aicom
Released: 1989

Amagon is a great platformer, and not much more. You're a marine, named Amagon, which is not a misspelling, and your plane crashes on an island. From the site of the crash, you can see a boat at the other end of the island, so you grab your machine gun and head out.

Also, you can transform into Megagon, and he can punch the shit out of anything.

That's more or less it. The visual style is really fun, and the controls are pretty good. Amagon is a really unforgiving game, and you find yourself cursing at it alot, but then you play it again, which kind of means it's a good example of what it is. The Megagon aspect adds a little variety, and the enemies have a nice balance of predictability and difficulty. It's a pretty technical little game, and we played it for almost an hour, even though we weren't really getting anywhere.

I played Amagon once, when I was young, and I remember it being at my house, which is strange since I didn't have an NES. Whatever, I went into this wanting to like Amagon, and I did, so there you go. It's not an amazingly special game, but it looks good, it's addictive, and by those two measures, there are way, way worse games out there, several of which come before Amagon in the alphabet.

Rating: 8/10 A solid, fun platformer.
Advice: A megagon is a 1,000,000 sided figure. That's not advice. It's just interesting.
Best Moment: The millionth time you restart Amagon after falling in a hole.