This week we have another two Amiga classics released by Rainbow Arts.

First up is X-Out (or Cross-Out if you prefer) from 1991, which was originally made by Arc Developments and released for a multitude of systems including C64, Spectrum, CPC, Amiga & Atari ST.
You must control the underwater attack vessels of project ‘Deep Star’ to defend the earth from the invading alien force that has infested its oceans.

Secondly we have the legendary Turrican II from 1991! Developed by Factor 5 this sequel sees your ship the Avalon 1 fall victim to a surprise attack by ‘The Machine’. As the sole survivor, it is once again your duty to wear the Turrican suit and destroy this enemy force!

Both cover artworks for these games are equally iconic and were illustrated by the same artist; Celal Kandemiroglu!
Born in Turkey in 1953 he had been creating comics and illustrations since the age of five and graduated from the fine arts academy in Istanbul around 1978.
He became heavily involved in movie & game artworks in the mid-80s and created a prolific amount of art for the German games industry.

Sadly he is no longer with us, having passed away in 2022, but his legacy of works is absolutely phenomenal and also includes the other Turrican Games, Z-Out and Katakis.

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This week for it’s time for a double feature with the delights of Shadow of the Beast III and Risky Woods.

Beast III needs no introduction really, as the final part in the original SOTB trilogy.
Here you must solve puzzles and defeat enemies to gain the elements you need in order to create a weapon capable of defeating the beast lord Maletoth.

The Beast series was developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis in 1992. The first two games had their cover art illustrated by Roger Dean, however this third entry was illustrated by David Rowe and depicts the return of Maletoth, emerging from the ground like an erupting volcano!

Risky Woods on the other hand was developed by Dinamic and Zeus Software in 1992, set in the mythical world where the ancient monks who guard the wisdom of the ‘lost lands’ have been frozen in stone by the evil Draxos and his minions. It’s up to our hero Rohan to save them.

But it’s cover art was again illustrated by David Rowe! This artwork captures various elements of the game in the background, including the platform based landscape, the stone monks, and Rohan himself facing off against Draxos!

David became a popular artist in the 1980s and 90s for his wide range of artworks produced for games, magazines, books and TV. As well as these examples, David also illustrated cover art for numerous well-known Amiga games including Speedball, Bill’s Tomato Game and Robocod!

One other particularly fascinating side to his career was that he created the majority of the background paintings for the various rooms in the classic uk TV series Knightmare!

Virtually every background you see in the first three series of the show was hand sketched, painted, textured and airbrushed by David, who has recently scanned these original artworks and published a book about them called ‘The Art of Knightmare’.

I was always a big fan of the visual style of Knightmare with its realistic, yet fantastical rooms and sets. Plus it was one of my favourite tv shows whilst growing up.

You can see more of his work at www.DavidRowe.net

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Shadow Fighter was a relatively late entry into the Amiga’s games lineup. Developed by NAPS Team and Published by Gremlin in 1994 it quickly gained a reputation as one of the best one-on-one fighting games on the Amiga.

The game’s boss character ‘Shadow’ forms the centre of the story, once a noble samurai warrior, he was cursed to become the walking dead ‘shadow fighter’, who can only be released from his curse when defeated by a superior opponent.

Whilst the in-game character art was created by NAPS Team, the cover art was created by iconic English comic book artist Greg Staples, who trained in Sheffield and worked as both a draftsman and in comics & memorabilia before becoming a fully fledged artist. He is probably best known for his work on 2000AD comics and Judge Dredd but has also illustrated Batman, Spider-Man and numerous other characters for comics, games and art cards.

Shadow is rendered on the cover in Greg’s distinctive highly detailed muscular but grungy style, which suits the character well as an ancient undead warrior!

As a first entry from a relatively unknown studio at the time, they could have gone with a much more generic or lacklustre cover. But I think this was an inspired choice and has really stood the test of time. 30 years on and it still looks awesome.

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Here we have ‘Awesome’ published by Psygnosis and developed by Reflections in 1990, an action game which I’ve covered before, with multiple gameplay styles in an epic sci-fi setting. As you might expect from an early 90s Psynosis-published game, a suitably epic cover image was required and in this instance a painting by legendary British sci-fi artist @johnharrisartist was selected.

John made a name for himself through the 1970s illustrating amazingly epic scenes for numerous science fiction authors.
As you can see from the accompanying art-book ‘Beyond the horizon’ John’s distinctive style is able to give an impression of vast scale, whilst depicting scenes that are almost like misty memories.
You may also recognise his work from the covers of Sinclair computer manuals in the early 1980s.
Plus in 1984 he was commissioned to create a painting of the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch by NASA.

The cover image for ‘Awesome’ was originally known as ‘The Building of FTL1’ and was featured in his first art book entitled ‘Mass: The Art of John Harris’.
He’s somehow able to imply a vast amount of detail in this scene with just simple brush marks, then let the viewers mind fill in the gaps.
In some ways, the closer you look, the less you see, but stepping back seems to reveal a huge scene, with intricate detail.

Whether you’re a fan of box art, sci-fi art or just amazing painting skills, then John’s work and Art books are highly recommended

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There are some game covers that are quite well known such as Roger Dean’s Illustrations for Shadow of The Beast, but there are many which are more obscure and often uncredited!

One prime example of this is the works of Tim White, who created numerous artworks that were used for both C64 and Amiga games, most notably those by Psygnosis.

With many older games, the graphics were obviously limited, so illustrated covers were an inspired move to get gamers attention and give those games an intriguing mystique to make you want to know more!

In many cases game covers were often re-used from sci-fi & fantasy books. But as games became more popular and budgets got bigger, artists would get commissioned to create artwork for a game, which is exactly what happened with Tim’s work.

Swipe the images above for a selection taken from this art book. Below are the names of the works and the games they were used for.

Image 1 – Back cover ‘Dark side of the sun’ used for ‘Infestation’ (Amiga)
Image 2 – Bottom ‘Glory road’ used for ‘Forbidden Forest’ (C64)
Image 3 – Top right ‘Hearts of fire’ used for ‘Custodian’ (Amiga)
Image 4 – ‘Lord of the spiders’ used for ‘Unreal’ (Amiga)
Image 5 ‘Dragon drone’ used for ‘Amnios’ (Amiga)
Image 6 – ‘Under a calculating star’ used for ‘Obitus’ (Amiga)

Tim went on to create art for other Psygnosis titles including Terrorpods, Leander and The Killing Gameshow, though they were made after this book was published.

Sadly the man himself is no longer with us, having passed away back in 2020, but his memorable and inspirational art has left an amazing legacy in both science fiction, fantasy and retro gaming.

This particular book is highly recommended for this type of art or retro game fans.

TGW Rating 9/10

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Some of you may have seen a little mention of this guy on my Instagram stories a while ago, after I found him in a joblot of junker Transformers. Well he’s had a fair bit of TLC and after some significant research and hunting for parts he’s had a full restoration! (Swipe to the last photo for a ‘before’ shot.)

Redfoot Optimus Prime started as a bit of a myth, some people remembered having one or seeing them at a friends etc, but over time they started showing up at collectors fairs (in fact I almost bought one from a fair over 10 years ago for £20).

In reality, Red foot was a quirky variant of G1 prime made by ‘Ceji’ in France, who had the rights to make and distribute the toys in certain areas including some European countries and the UK.
His most notable qualities are his red feet, but he also has more vivid red paint on his cab than a ‘standard’ prime, his inner leg is stamped with a ‘3’ and his trailer is stamped as ‘T2 Made in France’. You may also notice that the shape on his forehead is just a silver outline rather than solid silver on most primes. The trailer itself also has a slightly different sized back door to a ‘standard’ prime.

Refurb-wise he’s had a thorough clean, bumper repair, replacement tyres, re-chrome and been completely re-stickered!
Through sheer chance I already had the correct T2 trailer and accessories which I’d picked up previously without even realising! I’ve also stumbled upon the correct ’Ceji’ instructions for him.

Really pleased with the end result, another increasingly rare variant added to the collection and another junker saved from the scrap heap.

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So some of you will remember my Diaclone Starscream from previous posts, I was fortunate enough to find one a while ago and have been trying to complete him since.

More recently I was able to find a box for him, which whilst damaged, was still a great addition. This however started a new quest; how could I repair this box?

Well, I managed it! After searching for photos of a complete box, I managed to piece together the missing areas in photoshop and overlay them onto a scan of my box. Next I cropped out the area I needed, printed it on adhesive vinyl, cut a replacement piece of card to reinforce the box and finally applied the vinyl.
Swipe the photos for before/after shots.

Sure, It’s not perfect, but that wasn’t the objective. I actually like the fact that it shows some age. My goal was more so to just repair the obvious missing areas and make it much more presentable for display. Needless to say I’m more than happy with the end result

Now here’s an amazing Transformers figure that’s also not a Transformers figure and has a somewhat quirky history.

It’s an awesome toy with surprisingly good articulation for its age, but fans of the series will know that Jetfire’s appearance in the Transformers cartoon was not entirely consistent with his toy.
This is because the toy design itself was licensed from ‘Takatoku Toys’ who had previously designed it as the VF-1 Valkyrie for the Japanese Anime series Macross (or Robotech as it was seen in other parts of the world).

This licensing process happened with various other transformers toys too, but the issue with Jetfire’s toy comes from the fact that the company Harmony Gold purchased the rights to Macross, and fiercely guarded what they considered their ‘intellectual property’.

Sadly, this effectively means that Jetfire will most likely never be re-issued in this form. Because of this, Jetfire’s appearance in the transformers cartoon and in later toys was redesigned. Also he’s sometimes referred to as Skyfire too.

These issues, combined with the fact that the toy is very prone to yellowing, some joints are prone to breaking and his accessories are easily lost, makes him tricky to find in good condition.

This is the third Jetfire I’ve picked up (the other two being junkers I intended to repair), plus it’s the nicest one I’ve seen in a while.  

First appearing in Timothy Zahn’s ‘Heir to the Empire’ storyline, Mara Jade is a character from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (Now the ‘Legends’ line). Originally being ‘Hand of the Emperor’ she was a villain of sorts, but Mara was drawn away from the dark side by Luke Skywalker and became his Wife.

This is a fantastic figure, and it’s a bit of an oddity that it actually exists. It was released back in April 2014, just over a year before ‘The Force Awakens’ effectively rendered the old expanded universe redundant. It also falls more so under the Koto/Starwars ‘ArtFx’ branding than the Bishoujo one, despite still being designed by Shunya Yamashita and keeping the bishoujo art styling.

There’s also one other figure in this set; Jaina Solo, another character now relegated to the legends line. There was also talk of a female stormtrooper design which was sadly never released.

Still, thankfully Mara was released, and what a great figure it is. Also seems to be a very sought after item these days as there’s probably very little chance of a re-release.

Here we have the iconic Street Fighter character Chun-li in her new ‘Battle Dress’ costume from her most recent appearance in Street Fighter V.

SFV featured some nicely redesigned costumes for many of the series classic characters. This costume has quite a different appearance than her original blue & gold qipao dress from Street Fighter 2, but in much the same way as her Alpha costume did, it feels like a fitting evolution of her character and style.

This is a great figure by Kotobukiya, although it has a less action-packed pose than the original Bishoujo Chun-li figure’s high kick, it still has a definite sense of motion to it…