After all these years I still keep coming back to the old adventure games and flight of the amazon queen ranks among the good ones. Anyone who’s played a lucasarts adventure like monkey island should feel right at home with the interface as it’s a standard point and click one with icons for use, pick up, take etc. The entire game is also in a cartoon style but some of the closeups of the characters are very detailed.

You play the part of Joe King, a pilot, who has to fly an actress called Faye Farrel to the Amazon for a movie shoot. Ofcourse things don’t go too well for Joe as he’s being chased by thugs and also has competition from another pilot trying to steal his gig. The game starts when you are locked up in a room by that pilot called Anderson, you’ll have to make your way out of the hotel and past the goons by using some tricks and the help of a lady. Things don’t turn out well as you crashland and you have to get Faye, your mechanic Sparky and yourself out of the jungle while trying to stop a mad scientist from taking over the world by turning Amazon women into dinosaur people!

As I said before the interface shouldn’t pose a problem and it has the usual keyboard shortcuts like P for pickup and U for use after which you can click on whatever it is you want. Things are quite linear though and most of the time you have to find a solution to a particular problem by getting an item or combining items in your inventory before you can go on. This does help in you getting totally stuck since the movement is often reduced to a number of screens at a time. The graphics are excellent and I especially like the closeups of characters which is nicely done. There is a CD version around with full speech but this is the disk version with only speech in the intro, personally I don’t miss it much to be honest.

Flight of the Amazon queen is a classic adventure with a lot of humour and it’s long enough to get plenty of fun out of it though the difficulty level isn’t that high. As far as I know the game isn’t that wellknown which is a shame because I can definately recommend this one.

Overal rating: 8.5/10

Erde Kaiser

This game was released for two different systems here are some notes:

Amiga Released in 1995.
The amiga wasn’t really suited for big adventure games as the game comes on 11 disks! You’ll see the “insert disk x” message often and the loading times are horrible. Try the DOS version instead.
DOS Released in 1995.
The graphics are excellent and it runs without problems in dosbox. I know the game can be fussy about soundcards if you’re not using a genuine soundblaster 16 or similar card.
Date added Nov-30-2007 13:50
Name Flight of the amazon queen
Developer Interactive Binary Illusions
Publisher Renegade software
First released 1995
Genre Adventure