Archipelagos (Amiga)

Archipelagos
Developer: Astral Software Publishers: Logotron (EU), Britannica Software (US) Platform: Amiga Released in US: 1990 Released in EU: June 1989 This game has unused text. This game has a hidden level select. This game has regional differences.

The Amiga Archipelagos is based on the Atari ST version, but also starts towards changes that would be present in the DOS version.

Level Select

The player first needs to complete at least two islands. At Archipelago 3, try to change archipelago to 8421. After this, the game allows warping to any archipelago up to 9999.

Regional Differences

Identical gameplay, but the text between the two distributions indicate a different plot, along with improved flavor text.

Europe	US
Enter the word from The Archipelagos Instruction manual Disc verification has failed	Please enter the hoversphere security code [...] Please provide the counter-code The hoversphere has self-destructed as a result of unauthorized entry

This part of the copy protection is a simple media/goodie check, but the US version themes it as a security code being entered into the hoversphere.

The following are death messages. The European version's death messages will have "You were killed by" on the first line, followed by the killer on the second line. The US version gives custom death messages for each - and while it does have the same "killed by" message, it doesn't get drawn to the screen (or is overwritten).

Europe	US
You were killed by running out of time	The obelisk has detonated destroying you and this archipelago

The latter is direct - taking too long after destroying the boulders causes the obelisk to kill you. The former is only mentioned in the manual.

Europe	US
You were killed by an arboreal tree	You have collided with a viral tree

"Arboreal", which is technically redundant, was changed to "viral".

Europe	US
You were killed by a twisted necromancer	A necromancer has seized the hoversphere

Europe	US
You were killed by a poisoned egg	The hoversphere has been contaminated by a toxic egg

Europe	US
You were killed by one of the lost souls	You have been destroyed by a howling 900-B aircleaner

This is a straight-up rename. It's also the second instance of this death type, the other one being unused text.

Europe	US
You were killed by a palm tree	You have collided with a palm tree

Europe	US
The Sea You were killed by	The hoversphere has sunk in the sea

To get this one, the player needs to move into a tile that was initially land, and was degraded twice before arriving. This is not possible in normal play.

This text is exposed to the user, because the user can to transport to an archipelago of a multiple of 5 (up to 100), eject the disk after the game verifies the disk, and insert a non-game disk. The game will fail to load the hand-crafted map, and will instead generate a level with garbage data that often starts the player in the sea, resulting in an insta-kill. Players using the common cracked version of the game will also experience this, as the crackers didn't properly remove the copy protection (forgetting that the same routines to verify the disk were also used to load the data).

The text is glitched because the kill-source appears near the top of the screen rather than in the correct position. The US version is unaffected.

For comparison, the Atari ST version instead says you were killed by "your own stupidity".

Europe	US
You were killed by the quicksand	The hoversphere has sunk in the sand

To get this, move into a tile that's initially land, and is degraded once. This is basically moving into a necromancer as it changes tiles.

Europe	US
You were killed by the blood of the ancients	Your hoversphere has been contaminated by toxic radiation

Arboreal trees and blood eggs generate the red tiles, thus it's not to hard to get.

Unused Text

Europe	US
You were killed by a lost soul	You have been destroyed by a howling 900-B aircleaner

In memory, this is the first death in the list, ahead of running out of time.

In the latter region, the memory region looks a little "odd", being either split in half or stray text.

Europe	US
You were killed by a pod	[N/A]

Located between "a twisted necromancer" and "a poisoned egg", and has no equivalent text in the US version. The term does appear in the Atari ST version's source code.