Nemac IV

Don't be misled by the fact that the screenshot of this game looks so much better than those of the other 3D shooters for the Amiga. It's all a question of horsepower. The minimum requirements of Nemac IV were rather low. It would run on a 020 with 2MB RAM. It would even run on OCS/ECS. John Haas, who tested it on a 030/40, reports that he had the choice between 1×1 pixels and a rather small window, or 2×2 and fullscreen, or nearly fullscreen. He chose the former. To make the game look like on the screenshot, you would probably have needed a 060, and maybe some sort of graphics card. All that existed at the time were supported.

Nemac IV was not received with much enthusiasm. It was generally considered well done, polished, but somewhat sterile. This may have been due to the fact that it's all about mechs. You play a robot, you fight robots. There isn't a living (or undead) thing in the game.

This, in turn, may have been not so much a design decision as mere self-preservation. German authorities have never been friendly to shooter games, and they can impose devastating trade restrictions on games that are deemed detrimental to adolescents. To prevent this, publishers have often colored the blood in imported games green—or replaced living enemies with robots.

Reviews

• I got quite hooked on it and would strongly recommend it, John Haas says:

  Nemac IV arrived towards the end of the first wave of Doom clones for the Amiga. It had a distinctly different look and feel than the others (Breathless, Alien Breed 3D, Fears, Gloom, etc.) and obviously took a huge amount of effort to create. The levels (and there are 40 of them) are immense and very impressive graphically. There is a great deal of texture mapping and the detail is amazing.

• I was suitably impressed, Jason Compton admits:

  Nemac has by far the best presentation of all of the Doom-type games I've played on the Amiga. It doesn't have the brutal charm of Gloom or the well-established environment of Alien Breed, however, and the fact that you're supposed to be controlling your battle pod by remote control does make you feel very detached from the action.

• I can't say that this is a landmark game, Stéphane Desrosiers cautions:

  Although it manages to be competent at being a Doom-clone, it's just not exciting compared to it's breathen: Alien Breed 3D had atmosphere, which went into it's sequel (along with lighting effects, but a slow game engine), Gloom Deluxe had great explosions, CyberGraphX support, 2 player Split-Screen modes and a slightly faster game engine and AmiQuake (not an official and commercial product) has a horrendously slow game engine, but a very nice and fully 3 dimensional environement.