While randomly going over my Amazon account details, specifically looking at what comes with my Prime Benefits, I noticed a link for Amazon Games. I didn’t even know I had this. I currently pay $11.99 a month for Xbox on PC which gives me access to a TON of games, recent and retro. So when I saw the Amazon Games link, I immediately clicked on it to see what it had to offer.

Well the first thing I noticed when getting to the Amazon games home page was what looked like a bunch games made for your phone. Wasn’t too sure. I did a little bit of looking at what they had to offer and didn’t see anything great, so I randomly downloaded 2 titles. Blasphemous and Skydrift. The first looks like a side scroller possible platform game and the other looks to be a world war I era dogfighting simulator in biplanes and such. Looks like I actually downloaded 3 games? Hmmm. Well this third one is called Ironclad.

I started with Blasphemous. It’s a sideways scroller where you’re on a quest to discover items and complete, uh, quests. I played it for a good 20 minutes before I decided to save the game and move on the the next one. Luckily I have a game controller on my computer and this is one of those games where it’s much better to have the game controller than WASD’ing it. Combat was pretty basic. A to jump, X to attack, RT/RB ground sweep/block etc etc. B is your exit button and the other buttons on the controller all have their unique options. The menu buttons on the controller get you to the map and inventory respectively. It seemed to be a pretty basic game but since it was the first game I’ve played on the Amazon game account I’ll give it an hour or so before I decide to complete the game or give up on it. I’ll definitely come back to this because I’m still searching for a key to get through a certain door.

Coming up next is Skydrift. Oh man this is a fun game. I have an older GeForce GT710 in this particular computer at the moment and without changing any of the settings this game just worked perfectly. Another excellent game for the controller this game is fast paced and definitely challenging to play. The flight mechanics were so fun to play with for the first 20 minutes all I did was fly through the tutorial course at various speeds so I could get use to flight. Definitely going to need a ton of practice as there is some acrobatic flying to a small extent seems to be a part of the game. Flying between thin cliff edges, needing to hug the ground to get boosts, and all of the extreme canyon flying definitely coupled with immensely fun controls (I’m using a Logitech F310 game controller, basically mimics Xbox controller) makes this a game I’ll be coming back to and playing the next couple weeks/months.

Finally, and don’t know how this third game automatically injected it’s way into my queue, is Ironclad. Underneath that is some Japanese writing which probably vaguely translates to Ironclad. I couldn’t immediately figure this one out but I think I need to configure the controller special for this one or maybe it’s meant to be played with the keyboard as the tutorial refers to keyboard buttons, but the game controller does seem somewhat operational. I’ll revisit this in a follow-up article a month or so down the line.

If I didn’t know better I think these are mostly phone games but there’s a also a pretty decent selection of SNK games. The SNK games all seem to be coin-op games running on top of some windows based emulator, but don’t know too much about that so it’s just a guess. Anyways, gonna continue to check this Amazon games thing out as I like anyone else wants to get the full value for my well spent dollars and it was a surprise to me to even find out I had games available with Amazon account so it’s all win at the moment, except for in actual gameplay ;). So if you have an Amazon Prime account you also have a Amazon Games account, so check it out.

UPDATE 3/27/2021

Wanted to update this quickly and add a little more about the SNK Neo Geo (Max 330 Mega Pro-Gear Spec) games that come with Amazon Prime. I’m pretty sure I have seen some of these titles in an arcade. When you load them all up you need to add credits and then select player or player 2, identical to how many shoot’em up style games started in coin-op versions. Anyways, today I played Metal Slug 3 and was having a blast except for about the last 15 minutes (I had played for a good hour) when the game kept pausing for like up to 10 seconds before the screen unfroze and action restsarted only to find yourself dead. I was having great fun until those pauses started happening. On the plus side it was always prefaced with the blue circle then Windows 10 shows when loaded I’ll hope it was due to one of my applications because there’s a bunch of fast paced shooters available which are super fun, but also made for two players (like Metal Slug). I’ve always been a fan of co-op old school games like the old Nintendo Contra or the 1942 style air battle shoot’em ups. I’ve got a gamer buddy that lives downstairs and later today I’, gonna recruit him to play some of these games with me because these co-op games are a just a blast when you have a friend. 100 times better than playing alone. And if you don’t have any friends, get a hold of me and I’ll play with ya! 😉 K just wanted to update this after I spent a little more time playing with this and it’s nice to know it’s part of the Amazon Prime package which I just found out about. Just played another called Pulstar and it’s another addictive side scroller space ship shoot’em up with power ups. Just plain fun.

*Note: Ignore the August in the article picture. Didn’t initially notice that when pulling down the graphic.

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