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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 27, 2022 4:23 pm

I'd had a search for this one for a few years but it finally sailed home after being lost at sea for so long:

Ports of Call, by Aegis Development, Inc. (1986/87).

It's in extremely good condition, too, as you can see. (That's partly why it took me so long to acquire it; I simply won't invest in any damaged or incomplete boxed games anymore except under very special circumstances.)
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Love that: "Pictures created with an Amiga computer." Take that, DOS! There are two very minor creases on the back of the box which I can live with.

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I didn't show it here, but the box design is really unique. There is an outer cover, then a white box inside. When you slide it out and open it, it sort of opens like a weird door because the top half is connected to the bottom. You can kind of see how it is attached in the lower left corner of the photo. Very weird idea.

Other than the knee-buckling masterpiece Defender of the Crown, Jim Sachs is often remembered for his artistic excellence with Centurion and in this game, Ports of Call.

There isn't very much information online about Aegis Software at all, which is a little bit odd. When I interviewed Jim Sachs in 2020 he mentioned the company a bit more than I'd seen elsewhere.

Jim Sachs:
Graphicraft was a very simplistic paint program written by RJ Mical, mostly to allow the Amiga in-house artists to show off what the Amiga could do. It was ported almost verbatim by Aegis, and called Aegis Images. I used both extensively for the first couple of months on the Amiga. Then Dan Silva created Deluxe Paint, which was light-years ahead of anything else, and I immediately switched to that.
Sachs added:
JDS: When I was working with Aegis, Allan Hastings wrote Aegis Videoscape 3D, and I played with that a lot. I modeled the Nautilus, with an eye toward doing 20,000 Leagues as a 3D project, but the quality just wasn’t there until Hastings and Stuart Ferguson went to NewTek and created Lightwave.
In other words, some of the folks who wrote software at Aegis eventually would go on to create one of the most popular 3D packages of the 20th century. How kick ass is that?

I'll get into this game later in the spring. I'm still deep into re-playing Dungeon Master 2 (for the third time). I'm almost to the Axe Men area so I should know if it's worth continuing or quitting at that stage. Looking forward to this one!
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Close-up of J D Sachs' mastery of the medium.

:boing: <3

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Mon Feb 28, 2022 7:56 am

Nice! I don't remember actually playing this game though the title screen is familiar. I will have to check it out.

Glad you got a game checked off your list. I know how hard that is these days...

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EzdineG
Springfield, MO

Posted Mon Feb 28, 2022 11:49 am

My wife, a friend of mine and I used to play the hell out of this game on my Amiga 500.

Several hundred hours would be a conservative estimate, but it was always a bit crashy. We'd play until the point where it inevitably crashed and judge the winner at that point. It was pretty rare we actually finished a game because of this unless it was a really fast one.

I wonder if it was just my A500... or maybe the fact it was a pirated version of this game. Anyhoo, good times indeed!

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fxgogo
Twickenham , U.K.

Posted Mon Feb 28, 2022 2:28 pm

Another game I have been told to play by a number of people. As always, great photography.

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walldog

Posted Tue Mar 01, 2022 4:53 pm

I was just playing this the other night... I am not very good but its a cool game

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BatteMan
France

Posted Wed Mar 02, 2022 8:42 am

I can hear this intro screen ;) <3

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walldog

Posted Sat Mar 12, 2022 4:08 pm

I think I am visioning an Amiga love Ports of Call video on deck....





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