I never thought I’d see the day that an Amsoft game, more especially Harrier Attack, would be getting an enhanced edition. It is one of the best games I have ever played on the Amstrad CPC 464, and to see it remade for the Amstrad CPC Plus by Chris Perver fills me with retro joy. Originally Harrier Attack was released in 1984 and the concept of the game was to fly a British Harrier Jet across the landscape on bombing runs destroying both enemy buildings and aircraft.
And here’s the latest. “Some are under the impression that Harrier Attack was written in the BASIC programming language. They may think this due to its slow speed, blocky movements and 8×8 character-sized sprites. But it is written in machine code. Its slow speed is due to the entire screen being scrolled one byte at a time. There are also program loops inserted by the programmer to deliberately slow the game down, presumably to make it easier for children to ‘win’ on the earlier levels. As Harrier Attack is a fairly simple game, I wanted to see if I could disassemble it, to try to speed it up. The result is Harrier Attack Reloaded!”
