Shanna
On its own merits, Shanna is a rather unassuming, cleanly presented platformer. You’re a knight off to find the eponymous lost little girl.
Although the game isn’t all that ambitious, Angelo Felix exhibits a better-than-average mastery of Game-Maker’s quirks, has his own voice, and manages to paint a game that is enjoyable on its own terms regardless of the whole Game-Maker thing. Rather like Mark Hadley, Felix does such a good job in avoiding the typical pitfalls and complications and tropes of so many of his peers’ games that Shanna hardly feels like a Game-Maker game itself. It’s just simple, charming, and itself.
The visuals are mostly original, and for their part are both striking and appealing. Yet there is a bit of trickiness at work; some of the monsters and weapons appear to have been borrowed from Firefall. It’s not hard to tell the original, if you’ve used Deluxe Paint and have a grasp of VGA palettes. I wonder why Felix felt compelled to borrow the sprites, as he has such a lovely visual style of his own, and frankly Shanna is a much better game than Firefall. You will notice, though, that Felix put some effort into hiding the theft. He only borrowed the animation frames he needed, and then altered them a bit to match the game’s style. If anything, I think I prefer his edited axe to the original.
I wondered briefly if Felix and Firefall Softwarez were the same entity, but it seems unlikely. Their visual styles are quite different, as is their external software. Shanna’s title screen is an EGA job probably assembled in Paintbrush or something similar, and Firefall’s is a complex Deluxe Paint project. Consider that Firefall came first, and the downgrade in tools would be peculiar.
