SAW Wars was a tongue in cheek game written by Ben Hayes before his days at Enigma Variations.
Ben described things in an interview as follows:
"Sort of a right to left shoot-em-down thing. There was a point to the game, in that you had to get through the various attack waves in order to drop a bomb on the offices of Stock Aitken and Waterman (this was 1989 remember … Rick Astley, Jason Donovan etc).
The sprites were all robbed, the other graphics were crap, the music was robbed and there were only about 6 attack patters. Thrilling stuff…. and it took about 20 minutes of tedium to reach the end. You could freeze it with an AR and alter the wave number with the screen editor, so at least you could see the end part easily!"
Ben later added when contacted in 2011:
"S.A.W. Wars was really nothing more than a load of nicked sprites, a character starfield and some ludicrous premise about blowing up "The Hit Factory" in a sideways shooter style. No terrain, no intelligent characters, no SFX… Nothing remotely worth mentioning, frankly. I think it was just me trying to work out how collision detection worked. People on Compunet would put up with anything back then, ‘cos there was nothing good around anyway."
An interesting sounding hacked game which unfortunately may never be found. You see, Ben lost all his disks in a flood many years back and this meant the likes of all his Kick Off 2 work was never to be found. The only chance of ever finding this one is if Ben had passed a copy to someone else.
Is this a game you can recall?…. is it hidden in your disk collection?
Could be a very quick and simple open and shut case for this one!
Contributions: Ben Hayes
