What is it?
Now it's not as if I knew a lot about this game. It is here because of my never-ceasing interest for games that were developed for platforms already out of the mainstream at the time. And Nightlong is probably the last commercial game developed for, or rather ported to, the Amiga, and with three CDs it is the largest game ever to be released on the Amiga at all. And that it was developed for Windows in Europe, but ported to the Amiga in the US, is a curiosity in itself.
Nightlong was a co-production between Italian developer Trecision and the UK-based Team17, known best for Worms and the Alien Breed series. But the names listed in the credits are nearly all Italian, only under scripting do we find three English names. So it can be assumed that Team17 acted mainly as a publisher and the game was more or less developed by Trecision alone. In any case I have put an Italian flag into the about box.
Though Team17 had up to 1996 been mainly an Amiga developer, the Amiga port was now done by clickBOOM, who had debuted in that same year 1996 with Capital Punishment. Nightlong would be their last Amiga project. The exact years of release are a bit muddled: In Europe, the Windows version was probably released in October 1998, in the US in April 1999, while the Amiga version was released 1999 or 2000.
Nightlong is set in the year 2099, in a fictional capital called Union City. The main (i.e. player) character is Joshua Reeve, a former lieutenant in the International Control Military services who has taken his leave and is now a private detective in Union City. He shaves his head, wears goggles and looks more than a bit like the main character in Shadowrun for the SNES.
Five years earlier, Joshua's commanding officer Hugh Martens had saved his life in what should have been his last mission. So Joshua owes him. And now Hugh Martens, meanwhile governor of Union City, needs a favor. Some organisation has been sabotaging the factories of Genesis Cryogenetic Enterprises doing some serious damage. Genesis Cryogenetic Enterprises have sponsored his election. He needs those attacks to stop, and to stop quick, and to find out who made them.
Then, to spice things up a little, there is Eva Tompson. She wears the same shades as Lara Croft and is equally well endowed in the chest department. She is the owner of the Free Climax Nightclub and over time Joshua gets the feeling that she holds the vital key to solve his case.
If all this sounds somehow familiar, you are completely right. The game is a collection of clichés, whether deliberately or not, opinions may be divided. Even if you take the clichés as intentional and ironic, there remain other signs of shoddy craftsmanship. On occasion the game forces you to do some insane pixel hunting; in some cases, omitting to do something may prevent you from doing something else that is completely unrelated; and not few of the puzzles defy common sense and scientific fact. The last point is especially bad. If you're into science fiction of any form, you should always do your homework.
The best aspect of the game is simply that it is what it is: a traditional inventory-based point and click adventure with lots of puzzles, at a time when they had become very rare. This may well be enough to overlook its faults.
