Book Review: Commodore AMIGA A visual compendium

Title: Commodore AMIGA A visual compendium

Author: Bitmap Books

If I had to pick a single entertainment system to define my childhood, it would be the AMIGA 500. After having an AMSTRAD PC/W with green and black screen, the AMIGA with all those colors, the incredible sound and music, and those devices called mouse and joystick were trully amazing. It defined my eighties and first half of the nineties, so it is hard to not be biased when reading this book.

Through more than 400 pages we'll see full-page, colourful images of many many classic titles, with the company, publisher, year of release, and then either a brief description or one or two paragraphs with info about the game (from its creators usually), some review or other related info. But not everything is a listing of titles, we also have some interviews in between, some of them really interesting to learn how was developing videogames and art for the machine, and a few "company specials" where we're summarized how some of the most known back then companies grew, what where some of their most important titles, and what happened with them.

The book itself is nice, but I'd prefered more consistency: All games displayed with a brief description and then leaving "insider details" for another section, or the company history, or developers/artists interviews. Sometimes you see an unknown game and just an opinion of "well, was a really tight schedule to develop this title!" doens't precisely help know what's about. Something similar happens with images, some games have wonderful screenshots or the main title image, while others have a random screenshot from the intro, a heavily zoomed fragment or artwork that doesn't represents much the game. This is what I really disliked, I'd loved to see an in-game screenshot of every game and not this "artistic approach" that sometimes fails to achieve its apparent purpose of finding representative takes.

Even with my complaints, the book is full of nostalgia and I'd recommend it (unless you have at hand a real AMIGA computer). It could just have been better.