Hi everyone,

Thanks for visiting Old School Game Blog. 🙂 It’s Saturday and time for some Amiga action!

Today I’m going to do a review of a music album called Amiga Power – The Album With Attitude. It was kindly sent to me by the Matthew Smith, author and the one who started the Kickstarter campaign for the project. Many thanks for the album, Matthew! 🙂

Amiga Power

Now, some of you might wonder what Amiga Power is. Back in the 1990’s we had plenty of  Amiga magazines too choose from at the news agents. Amiga Format, CU Amiga, The One, Amiga Action and many more! Some of the magazines had an overall serious tone, while others focused a bit more on humour. We can safely say that Amiga Power belonged in the latter category, while publications like Amiga Computing stood for the more serious computing bit.

As for game reviews, I must say (and this is my personal impression) that Amiga Power always appeared as the most honest. If a game was bad, they would tell you straight up, without any fuzz. In other magazines, some games might receive a bit too high rating due to hype etc. As an example, Rise of the Robots (more like Fall of the Robots) received a whopping 91% in Amiga Joker and a score of 81% in CU Amiga, while Amiga Power gave it 5% with the comment “Even if you don’t believe in Father Christmas, it might be worth writing to him to make sure he doesn’t bring you a copy of this.” (source)

Still to this day, if I want to discover some “new” Amiga titles to play on the Amiga 1200 or just relax with a bit of reading, Amiga Power is always an option. 🙂 Here is a picture of one of my favorite issues, which was bought at Narvesen (a Norwegian news agent who used to have a good selection of Amiga magazines) kiosk back in the days for 72 NOK.

The Album With Attitude

Another fan of Amiga Power is Matthew Smith. He loves Amiga Power and decided to do a campaign on Kickstarter in 2019 to make an Amiga Power tribute album. The campaign turned out to be a big success, which you can see by checking the page on Kickstarter.

The album comes on two CD-s and with a big (and I mean big!) booklet. It was not without reason they called it The Mighty Booklet. 😉 It was written by Matthew Smith, with Rich Pelley and “Additional Persons of whom you may have heard”. The album was produced by Matthew Smith and mastered by Allister Brimble.

As you can see from the photos, it looks very, very nice. 🙂 The booklet is more like a book in my opinion and an excellent read with a lot of interesting information. Here’s a few photos of some of the contents:

The Music

So, how is the music? I can tell you that the two CD-s are crammed with remastered songs from classic Amiga games. Here you will find tunes from legendary titles like Sensible World of Soccer, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Cannon Fodder, Speedball 2, The Chaos Engine, Banshee, Hired Guns and many, many more. Authors includes Olof Gustafsson (Pinball Fantasies), Chris Hülsbeck (Apidya), Allister Brimble, Jeroen Tel, Jogeir Liljedahl and others.

As mentioned above, the songs are remastered and they sound absolutely beautiful. The joy of putting on a physical CD with its amazing audio quality… it’s top notch! In these times, with people enjoying music streamed from the Internet, it is a great feeling popping in that CD and turn on the player and then listen to some quality music.

If you have a memories of gaming on the Amiga and/or reading Amiga Power, the book and the CD-s will definitely take you back in time.

My favorite tracks? Definitely Goal Scoring Superstar Hero from SWOS, Speedball 2 (Movie Mix), The Chaos Engine, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Hired Guns. The Lotus tune is really something special I think. Love the regular music from the game, but hearing it remastered is super. 🙂

All in all, it’s been a great experience listening to the music and reading in the book! Great stuff!

If you are interested in purchasing a copy, why not head over to the 010101 Music webpage?

https://www.010101-music.nl/shop.html

Thanks for reading and see you in another post here on Old School Game Blog. 🙂