Update (Mon 3rd Jul, 2023 12:00 BST): As spotted by IndieRetroNews, basementApe has now released a demo of their new fanmade port of Rastan for the Amiga. It covers the first level of the game and features "remastered sprites" and "brand, new reimagined backgrounds".
basementApe handled the coding, audio, and remastered art, with a musician named JMD being responsible for much of the music. There's no estimated time of arrival for the finished release, but you can download the demo now from itch.io.
Original article (Tue 16th May, 2023 14:05 BST): Back in the late 1980s, Taito released Rastan (or Rastan Saga as it is known in Europe) into the arcades. The sidescrolling hack and slash featured a clone/homage of the popular character Conan the Barbarian and tasked players with fighting through swarms of mythical creatures to save a kingdom, in order to ascend to its throne.
Although it originally landed in Japanese arcades back in 1987, it later received a number of ports to other platforms. This included the Amstrad CPC, Apple IIGS, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Sega Master System, as well as a couple of other machines. For whatever reason, though, a version for the Commodore Amiga never made the cut.
Now, thirty-six years after its original arcade release, it appears that may all be about to change.
As spotted by the retro-aficionados at IndieRetroNews, a YouTube user named basementApe uploaded a video last month showing off a new fanmade Amiga port of the game, and it looks pretty promising from what we can see so far (Discord notification sounds aside!). The video is only 2 minutes 45 seconds long but it demonstrates the first level of the arcade game: a mountainous area filled with chimeras, bats, skeletons, and lizardmen.
The video description reads:
"Here's Rastan for the Amiga, with lots of new pixel art and stuff. It's running on an Amiga 500 with 512kb chip/512kb slow ram. Well, emulated but still. So far I've got the first level pretty much finished. Made using the Scorpion engine."
Sadly, there's no demo or anything yet to speak of, but you can watch the video of the other versions below to see how they compare. We'll try and keep you updated on its progress in the future.