Blitz Basic was written by Mark Sibly of Acid Software to be the best simple Amiga creation tool around. Before this came along, the BASIC crown was held by Francois Lionet's AMOS which was good, but in my opinion doesn't come close to the power of this baby (don't hurt me Amos fans, I'm talking about the default setups here!). The proof is the sort of commercial success games written in Blitz have achieved these titles were all written using Blitz Basic.

• Skidmarks and Super Skidmarks: Great Iron Man style driving fun. One of the most popular Amiga games ever.
• Roadkill: Great Mad Max style driving killathon. One of my favourites.
• Guardian: Basically, Nintendo's Starfox/Starwing crossed with Defender. Provisionally titled SibWing (hmmmm!). Excellent.
• Gloom: I'm not sure but I wouldn't be surprised after seeing how fast Guardian is/was.
• Blitz Tennis: Er… tennis game.
• Blitz Bombers: Bomberman clone.
• Foundation: If I recall correctly, this great game was written in Blitz. Used graphics cards and other groovy stuff too!
• Worms: The original version shown to Team 17 / Ocean was written in Blitz. I believe it was tarted up in assembler before release though.
• Quake 3 - Arena: Alright, so this one is a lie!

The language Blitz uses is BASIC (No, really!), which has been around now for donkeys. However, instead of sticking with the tried and tested, the boys at Acid added many of the best bits from languages like C (while not including daft things like semicolons). They've even included a full assembler (with a few precautionary measures to take to preserve the BASIC coding) for those who require even more grunt!

Included with the language as default are players for MED modules, Protracker modules, Dpaint/PPaint format animations, Animbrushes, All the OS calls and functions and for the games programmer, the legendary BLITZ mode and commands. This is a mode that halts the OS and gives BLITZ total control and maximum speed. This is why I like it soooo much!

So far, this site has two things written by me in Blitz, Coagulus mini demo and Pairs. Both of these can be found in the Download section along with their respective source code. You can still get hold of the CD version of Blitz quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if magazines have/will put it on their coverdisks also.

Expect more from me using/about Blitz soon.

Coagulus / Rob