Lost Vikings 2
Frigg did not see this coming... the wind is strong, the sun is warm and it’s soon time to board your longboat to fly along the waves... Will you be the axe or the decapitated head? Erik the Swift, Olaf the Stout, and Baleog the Fierce are captured by Tomator once again... will they make it back home?
Back in 1993 the original The Lost Vikings was published for the Amiga (OCS) and CD32 by Interplay and received favourable reviews. Then in 1997, the sequel was released but missing the Amiga platform.
Now moving to the AmiGameJam 2021 (annual game development competition), the theme this year is “ports”, one such port is Lost Vikings 2, which will be ported from the SNES by the berzerkers in Last Minute Creations.
LV2 is in the early stages of creation. Around 30% of the assets of the game have been extracted from the SNES ROM and whilst some details may change, here is the plan:
Last Minute Creations will attempt to do this for OCS hardware with EHB graphics to not butcher the visuals too much and there will be an AGA version with 1:1 graphics eventually too. They will try to not cut the content so it will probably require expanded CHIP MEM to 1MB or even 2MB (a bit of FAST mem so that the executable runs fast enough).
The idea is to have the game with an installer for which you provide the ROM (dumped by yourself, from digital distribution, etc. for legal reasons) and it auto extracts the required data and runs the game with it. Therefore Lost Vikings 2 will be completely free and open source.
Whilst the deadline for release is the end of February 2022, there are significant challenges in porting this title in the right way. So, cross your legs, cross your fingers, look up to the sky and smile at Odin... this may just happen!
Binary manipulation by KaiN, graphic retouch by Softiron and adjustments for Paula by Luc3k. Let’s hope this plan unfolds and that there is an ample supply of mead to celebrate next year’s release!
Keep your one eye open for updates:
https://bit.ly/3uE6U24 https://bit.ly/3uCcvFP