Year: 1995 | Publisher: Epic Interactive | Developer: Adventure Soft | Original format: PC | Version played: Amiga
Simon The Sorcerer II followed hot on the heels of the first game, just two years later, in 1995. Though I’d enjoyed the original, in all its Talkie glory on Amiga CD32, I was out of luck this time around. The Amiga version was cancelled during development and Simon II released exclusively on PC; a system I didn’t own and had little desire to.
I was a die-hard Amiga fan at the time but even I had to admit defeat eventually. As the releases dried up and the technical demands of the remaining games led to frustrating incompatibility issues, I eventually decided to move on to an N64 in December 1997 and sold my once beloved Amiga 1200 in January 1998. Two short years later, in the year 2000… Simon The Sorcerer II finally released on Amiga. Whoops!
I eventually played the PC version of Simon II in 2005. Though I still didn’t play it on a PC, I popped the CD in a Mac Mini and played it via the brilliant ScummVM. But I was always fascinated by that unlikely Amiga conversion. Why did it release so late? Why was it made at all? And was it any good? Well, a few weeks ago, early in 2023, a long held ebay search paid off and I was finally able to find the answers.
In the ReadMe file of the CD-only release, it’s explained that after Epic Interactive secured the rights to publish Simon II on Amiga and Mac, the Amiga version had proved particularly tricky to develop and one attempt had been abandoned before Peter Mulholland and Paul Burkey were brought in to restart from scratch. I recently spoke to Mulholland on Twitter, where he explained to me that the previous programmer had used the wrong version of the engine, necessitating the restart, and that most of the money would have been in the Mac version. In all likelihood, an Amiga port alone would not have been justifiable.
You only need look at the system requirements on the back of the box to see how unlikely this conversion was. Not only did you need an Amiga 1200/4000 and a CD drive, you also needed a seriously beefed up machine with a 68030 accelerator and at least 16MB of RAM. A rather whopping number for the Amiga 1200, which came with just 2MB as standard. Even if I had kept my Amiga around for a couple more years, there’s no way it could have run this game. Although I dare say the kind of person still using an Amiga in the same year that the PlayStation 2 released was almost certainly enough of an enthusiast to have upgraded their machine.
These days I do have a lovely expanded A1200. So, in theory, it should have been a doddle to run Simon The Sorcerer II. However, there were a number of technical issues I needed to overcome before I could replay the adventure on my favourite old computer…
The first problem was that I was getting no sound whatsoever. Had my ancient Philips CRT monitor finally given up the ghost? No. As it turns out, you can’t get any sound out of this game unless you install “AHI”, a program unknown to me, which was apparently created in 1997 to provide new drivers for all kinds of Amiga hardware configurations not anticipated in 1992 when the A1200 first rolled off production lines.
There’s no mention of the need for AHI in Simon’s manual or ReadMe file. I found out about it from an ancient forum post. But at least the installer was included on the CD. At last… I had sound! Sound effects and full voice acting, so novel in 1993 and somehow still impressive today, were coming through loud and clear. But something else still wasn’t coming through… Where was the music?
As it turns out, there isn’t meant to be any music in this version. As Mulholland explained to me, the original PC music is done in MIDI, which wasn’t easy to run on Amiga without reprogramming the tracks – something that was far out of the scope of the project. I’d just have to live with it. Or, at least, someone in 2000 would have had to live with it. I could at least load up the soundtrack on YouTube and play it alongside the game. A bit like the way the C64 version of Outrun came with Magical Sound Shower on a cassette tape. A bit of an extreme measure, perhaps, but I’d come this far already so why not.
Interestingly, the original music is still included on the Amiga CD and if you load up the game via ScummVM, I’m told it will actually play. But that wouldn’t be cool, would it? What would be cool would be loading up the Amiga version of ScummVM, which includes MIDI emulation, on a real Amiga. But you need an insane 32MB of RAM to do that and if you’re emulating an Amiga game… on an Amiga, you have to wonder what’s become of your life.
Oh, by the way. If you thought this was the last of the technical hurdles, you’d be dead wrong. After testing the game in all its full voice-acted, music-less glory I decided to save my progress and the game promptly soft locked. It was impossible to save! A quick google search led me to Aminet – an online repository of Amiga files astonishingly founded in 1992 – where five patches, created between December 2000 and January 2001, can be downloaded for Simon II.
It’s unfortunate that these patches were needed at all. I hate to imagine the person who bought this game in 2000, had all the required hardware needed to play, but didn’t know about the patches. But it’s also kind of amazing that Amiga games got this kind of support and that the files can still be downloaded a lifetime later.
Of course, if I wanted to use the patches this would also mean I’d have to install Simon II to hard drive and wouldn’t be able to run it straight from the CD. A not insignificant task given that the install file is 170MB and the largest partition on my ancient Amiga hard disk is 200MB. It was going to be a tight squeeze!
By this point you might think that any remaining enthusiasm I had for actually playing Simon The Sorcerer II would have ebbed away. But I’d waited too long and jumped through too many hoops to not continue now. At last, I was able to play the sequel to one of my favourite games on the hardware that made me fall in love with adventure games to begin with.
Now it’s worth saying that, on the whole, Simon The Sorcerer II just isn’t as good as the original. Sure, it looks great. Beautiful in fact. Those highly detailed pixel art backgrounds and sumptuous sprite animations are some of the finest you’ll see on Amiga, and the puzzle solving is just as satisfying. But there are a couple of key areas that feel like a letdown.
Let’s get the worst out of the way first… Simon is a complete jerk. He wasn’t always the most likeable of characters but in the sequel his obnoxiousness is turned up so loud it’s deafening. His sleaziness is amped up too. If there’s a female character in the game, you can guarantee Simon has something misogynistic to say to them.
You might write this off as a sign of the times, but I don’t remember Guybrush Threepwood being quite this nasty, and the horrible streak isn’t just limited to Simon either. It pervades the game itself, most noticeably in the depiction of “Um Bongo”, a black character with a horribly stereotyped savage design, complete with bone jewellery, who speaks in exactly the sort of voice you’d hope they wouldn’t use. You get the feeling political correctness wasn’t exactly at the top of Adventure Soft’s priorities.
Racism and sexism aside, Simon is a little harder to like simply because of the absence of original voice actor Chris Barrie. New actor Brian Bowles isn’t bad exactly but he struggles to balance the exact aural tightrope walk that’s needed to keep Simon’s personality the right side of charming. Barrie had this way of making Simon’s sardonic humour work, but without his delicate touch the character more often comes across as snide and mean.
In other areas, though, the humour still has that same referential British charm that characterised the first game. I imagine that when the devs weren’t programming away, they were up all night watching sitcoms and cult TV shows, then coming in the next day and pumping the script full of references to all their favourite shows. Some of which seem a little obscure by the standards of 1995, and downright prehistoric by 2000. Little & Large, Penn & Teller, Jeremy Beadle and Mr. T are all referenced, all of which roots this game in a specific time and place, imbuing it with a sense of nostalgia that goes beyond videogames. Like the original, the writers also deploy a Red Dwarf quote, which always makes me smile.
The setting of Simon The Sorcerer II is the same blend of high fantasy and fairy tale parody that made the first game so fun to inhabit. A personal favourite has to be the three bears, who’ve been terrorised by professional thief Goldilocks so much that they’ve fortified their house with heavily armoured doors and enough CCTV cameras to make George Orwell weep. You have to jump through a few hoops to get any porridge from them.
As before, the stunning pixel art makes the world an absolute pleasure to explore, which makes it a shame that there isn’t quite as much to take in this time around. Right from the start, every location is instantly accessible from each chapter’s map screen. I assume this was done to cut down on the confusing backtracking through maze-like woods that slowed the pace of the first game. But it also erodes any sense of place as you hop from one disjointed location to another. It’s a minor criticism, but I kind of missed being able to stroll around this world and get a little lost, not knowing what I might stumble upon next.
Now I’ve complained about this game a fair bit, but by the time I was done with it I’d still had a great time. Despite its relative flaws, I found myself sucked in by that satisfying structure that all great adventure games have. Collecting items, talking to silly characters and experimenting with the world all while mulling over six or seven other puzzles in the back of my mind. The expansion and contraction of freedom and frustration in equal measure as you smugly tick off puzzle solutions and drive yourself mad in dead ends. It’s a timeless formula.
I also have to wonder… Was getting the game to work in the first place also a satisfying puzzle? I sold my A1200 and bought an N64 back in the day because I was so fed up of the way new Amiga games were becoming more like PC games; harder to get running without jumping through several technical hoops. But, on reflection, I do like problem solving, and it’s undeniably satisfying to overcome a technical challenge. A bit like solving puzzles in an adventure game. If I’d ultimately failed to get the game running then I’d be mad as hell, but overcoming each hurdle did make it all the more satisfying once I eventually got to play.
Of course, you don’t want to bang your head against a brick wall too long. Finding online advice on how to run an obscure, late era Amiga game is exponentially harder than finding a walkthrough for the same game. But it’s kind of cool to know it is out there and I’m not the only daft enough to put myself through all of this.
TWELVE LITTLE THINGS ABOUT SIMON THE SORCERER II THAT I RATHER LIKED
1. I’ve spent far too long trying to figure out where the name of this island café comes from. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it’s a misspelled reference to UK pop group Chumbawamba? They were certainly around in 1995, although they didn’t have their big breakout hit until 1997 with Tubthumping – a song that always reminds me of the Amiga just because it was everywhere the same summer I was playing the likes of Worms: The Director’s Cut and Gloom.
2. You have to love silly credits.
3. When you rescue the villain Sordid from Hell at the end of the game, the graphics take on a disturbingly graphic nightmare style that’s simultaneously funny and horrifying. It reminds me a lot of the Grandma Hell scene from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.
4. This other reference to Hell, part of a montage travel sequence featuring the game’s titular lion, is a lot more relatable.
5. There’s a pleasingly high number of funny idle animations for Simon. I was pretty surprised the first time I returned to my desk to find he’d crumpled into a heap of bones.
6. What is this genie’s name? Yep, it’s Keith! Simon The Sorcerer II can now join the illustrious ranks of games starring a Keith, alongside Ys I & II and Raw Danger. Unlike those games, the writers here knew the name was inherently amusing and Simon mercilessly mocks the genie for it.
7. A literal wardrobe malfunction sees Simon zapped into space for one scene toward the end of the game. As well as being a fun gag, it may well have been a reference to Adventure Soft’s next game, The Feeble Files; a sci-fi adventure starring a green skinned alien voiced by another Red Dwarf star, Robert Llewellyn. (Although the alien in this scene looks uncannily like Mike Wazowski from the Pixar film Monsters Inc, which would release six years later.)
By the way, Epic Interactive also produced an Amiga port of The Feeble Files in 2002, which just blows my mind. This one requires such an advanced Amiga – with a 68060 processor, 32MB of RAM and a graphics card – that I refuse to believe anyone has ever played it.
8. This one is a really small thing but the way that moon shines through the window is exactly the kind of beautiful pixel art I live for. Simple but oh so effective.
9. One of the better pop culture references in the game. I wonder if there are literally any other videogames that have referenced The A-Team.
10. When you’re sent to the castle to get the “royal seal” and it turns out to be a literal sea mammal, this cheesy joke somehow really worked on me.
11. The squeaky voiced woodworm from the first game return. I quite liked the visual gag of them having gnawed all the trees down into finely crafted furniture.
12. Simon The Sorcerer has always felt like a Monkey Island tribute to me, but never more so than in the middle section of this game, which sees you trapped on a pirate ship. It’s a great self-contained puzzle sequence straight out of the Monkey Island playbook.
Finally, how about some music from Simon The Sorcerer II…
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