Archon For iPhone « Dave Metzener's Weblog

Archon For iPhone

Posted in Games, iPhone/iPod touch by Dave M. on June 28, 2009

So many years ago, I had an Amiga 500 and had found this awesome game called Archon: The Light and the Dark. It was created by Fire Fall Associates and distributed by EA. I played that game way to much even back then. This was back in 1985. Quite a few of my buddies back then also had it. It was a very popular game. Pretty far ahead of it’s time.

Well, it’s made it to the iPhone/iPod touch now. Archon Classic is the same exact game, updated graphics and controls that are just a tad difficult to get used to when one was used to playing with an Atari digital joystick.

I always find it interesting that older games are still popular enough to make an appearance on newer hardware. According to Wikipedia, there are other versions of the game on several platforms including the Playstation, Xbox, and Windows. Someone made a Quake 3 modification based on Archon too.

As soon as the iPhone version popped into the AppStore, I nabbed a copy. One thing that buying games on the iPhone/iPod touch has that is a problem is the lack of instruction manuals. Archon is not a simple casual game like Bejeweled. There are some pretty subtle rules with the squares of the chess board and you really have to know how each of your pieces fight in the combat arena.

The Help in the game goes over some of this, but not all of it. There is nothing over at the developers website on how to play. In fact, there seems to be more info in the Wikipedia webpage than any location that the iPhone/iPod touch version has available to it. I don’t have any of my Amiga games or disks anymore. I’m pretty sure I sold it all to someone. I wonder if there is a copy of the Archon game manual in PDF on the web somewhere… Apparently so. You have to love the internet!

Archon Game Manual

I look forward to playing this one. If it’s anything like the old ’85 version, it will be a blast to play again.

Here are a few more screen shots from both the old ’85 version and the iPhone/iPod touch version. You should be able to tell which is which.