A quick look back: my quick reviews for amiga shmups

[MJR]

During the christmas holiday, I got finally my old amiga working with extra memory and extra drives: so it was finally time to wipe all the dust off my old game collection. I went through 30-40 disks.

I'll give here a quick review of the shmups I encountered; this is not how I used to feel about them, it is how I felt about these games today, when played on real amiga, about 10-15 years later. These are just impressions, not objective reviews, as I only had one go at each. Therefore I will give no grades, only comments


Awesome
Took too long to reach the game itself. Gfx and music has nice feeling to it, but gameplay feels horribly unfair and uninvolved. I got frustrated quick.

Blood Money
I used to like this game, now I just cant understand why. Hitbox of the ship is ridiculously large, and I got killed off the walls as soon as I exited shop. Horrible!!

Cosmic Pirate
This was very nicely done 2D elite-styled shooter. Lots of missions to choose from. Nice 60fps scrolling. Playablility is nice, lots of bonuses to pick and many things to do. Graphics are terrible eyesore, but they didn't turn me off. Sadly in my saved game there was not anything to do anymore as everything was achieved, and the remaining gameplay felt too repetitive. Still, I recommend this to those who haven't tried it.

Datastorm
Graphics and music in the intro are horrible, but it is all redeemed when you start playing. Ingame graphics are detailed and clear. And playablilty is awesome, though framerate is only 30fps or even below. In this game you got so many enemies on screen for you to blast off at once that you wouldn't believe! Very generous with autofire items. Amazing enemy attacks and gigantic bosses. Difficulty is just right. I got to come back to this game, This is absolutely Brilliant Shmup!!!

Galactic
Weird game by the guy who did sanxion and delta. Luckily I grabbed the One issue which had the complete christmas edition. Smooth and solid 60fps gameplay, but very chaotic. It is very hard to figure out what is actually happening in the game or why you died. Might be worth hunting out though.

Project X
I said somewhere that I had 1cc'd this game. Now I find that very hard to believe. I mean the playability is absolutely fricking horrible!!!!!!! This has awful attack patterns, difficulty is shot to hell, first it is too hard, then boringly easy for to the end of level2, where you get crushed by insanely difficult boss. Did I forget to mention that if you die even once your weapons get so weak that you have no chance to survive. Disk labels read that this was the 'new version' but I find it hard to believe there is even harder version. But this is not challenging, this is taking a piss. Avoid like plague!!!

Sidewinder
My first amiga shmup, nice feeling of destroying and blowing. Most of the time you shoot ground-based objects though. No bosses, gets bit repetitive but not too much. Graphics are OK, remind me of old 60's scifi paintings. Sound effects are very nice, great booms and nice alien sound effects.

Starray
My old favourite game. I bought original from ebay. Playability feels still very solid, very smooth 60fps. 1st two levels have bit badly chosen colors, it is bit hard to figure out what happens, but this is redeemed in the later levels. This really gives your adrenaline system a boost. Great game.

Stardust
Difficult asteroid clone. Rendered graphics used to look amazing, now they look horribly dated. Still OK though. Playablilty matters most, though, and yes this has still nice attractive feeling to it. I remember seeing a nice thrust like subgame but I didn't get that far. Must give nod for the password system. I wonder if super stardust will feel as dated when I get it this week? Anyway, great blasteroids clone.

Swiw
I used to love this game, but this time I got totally turned off by extremely low framerate. It was incredibly difficult to get powerup. Sadly I just didn't like it any more

Virus
How I was able to play this to level 9 is beyond me. Terrible controls thrusted my ship right to the ground. I didn't want to try another ship. Reset. I should add for fairness sake that my mouse was not very good.

Xenon
First time an amiga shmup made me scream for excitement. Still looks kinda nice. First level was easy, 2nd wiped me off. Enough of this, thanks.

Xenon 2
And the obvious masterpiece. I thought first that I had played this too much, but still this left me marveling. Even low framerate didn't turn me off. This is better than many of the coin ops at its time. I love this game.

Z-out
I used to think this game was horribly frustrating. Strangely it didn't feel so this time at all. nice 60fps gameplay, even secrets were littered here and there. Graphical quality differs wildly. Though I wouldn't call it a masterpiece I would say that this is a quite decent game.

Postscript: I used have battle squadron and and hybris and X-out, but sadly I've lost my copies so I was not able to play and comment on them.. but I remember that I used to love them.

So, that was my return from the memory trip.. in summary I should say that for a serious shmups fan it is definitely worth getting a real amiga with joystick, these games are not expensive at ebay.. though my opinions were bit harsh, many of the games were holding surprising well against today's standards.. which games you should pick up I will leave for you to decide..

[Leeram]

Thanks for the reviews, I really enjoyed reading them.


Couple of comments:

Blood Money: I also used to love this game, and also thought the same as you when I re-played it. However I stuck at it and really got into it again. We are so used to 4 pixel hit boxes that we forget just how hard it is when the whole ship (and sometimes some of the space in-between!) is the hit box. However that is part of the game mechanic and when you get re-used to it it's not so bad. I still like blood money .

Katakis: I saw this game and immediately sold my Atari ST the next day! Then bought an Amiga 500 just for it. Superb game.

Xenon 2: I never could get into this and still can't. Slow graphics but more importantly really sluggish controls put me off. I didn't even like the theme tune which everyone was raving about (although I did like the original record that was in the shops).

Cheers

Leeram

[MJR]

Since these were not even trying to be objective reviews, you are welcome to add your own comments and disagree. Thanks!

[Turrican]

Blood Money
I used to like this game, now I just cant understand why. Hitbox of the ship is ridiculously large, and I got killed off the walls as soon as I exited shop. Horrible!!

I wonder if the word "Hitbox" was ever used in the Blood Money days...

[ccovell]

Ahhh... the Amiga. I miss her. Whenever I go back home I'll take her out of storage and play those games again.

Anyway, I never had an Amiga in the 80s (just from the mid-90s) so I never had the same nostalgia over most games that most people do. So, I can objectively note some of the shmup types I hated on the Amiga:

- Games that were all graphics and no gameplay.
- Games that were shameless clones of R-Type.
- Games whose programmers obviously owned a PC-Engine but still were too inept to make a game of the same quality.
- Games that were conversions from the C64 or ST and thus had poor colours and huge borders taking up the bottom half of the screen -- as if I needed to be constantly reminded of the name of the game that I'm playing.

Shmups I loved on the Amiga: Super Stardust (great graphics, sound, AND gameplay), Apidya (Or Abidjya II going by the katakana), Turrican II's shmup level, and some Tempest clone whose name I forget.

So, anyway, here's a nice site with pics of Amiga games for all your reference. http://hol.abime.net/search.php

[it290]

The only shmup-type games I find myself playing with any regularity on the Amiga are Stardust (not Super because I don't have an AGA machine), Apidya, and Deluxe Galaga. Play Deluxe Galaga! It blows many commercial Amiga titles out of the water.

There's also an Asteroids clone called 'asteriods' (yes, notice the transposed letters) that I enjoy quite a bit, although I can only find the demo version. It's the only Asteroids clone I know of that lets you take on a Super Star Destroyer.

If you enjoy Thrust-type games, you might want to check out 'Rocketz' as well. It's a two-player competitive Thrust game. Pretty nice.

[Guardians Knight]

just found an old coverdisk with insectoids 2 on, this is a nice little game and can be put easily onto your amiga harddrive...what do you mean you dont have one?!

erm to give a brief synopsys:
think galaga

[Shatterhand]

Funny how you complained Blood Money's hitbox is too big, and said Xenon is great..

Xenon's hitbox is BIGGER than the ship's sprite.... the game is awesome indeed, but the insane hitbox nearly kills it (And I am all for big hitboxes, being the old-school freak I am).

Now Xenon 2 sucks so badly... I will never understand how people can enjoy this game so much.

And don't kill off virus.. it's not easy to get the grips with it, but when you do, you are set for a great time.

And Galactic was awesome.. I had The One Coverdisk version too (The first version, and then the one with the Xmas theme), awesome stuff, it's insanely chaotic

[MJR]

Funny how you complained Blood Money's hitbox is too big, and said Xenon is great..

It was simply because I did not felt angered when I died in Xenon. As I said, these were not reviews but just recordings of what I exactly thought at the moment after I had one game in each of these.

It's strange that I have never played apidya since so many people here praise it.. I got to track down a copy, then..

I would have included turrican II, but then decided to stick to pure shmups.. I also deliberately left out coin-op conversions, as I was simply not interested about playing an inferior version of a same game I already got on PCB/PSX/Mame

I should get super stardust today, and I'm really looking forward to it. I know one trivia from a friend, who was developing it, that the best ranking you can get is 'Omnipotent' - has any of you managed to get that ? If you have let me know.

[neorichieb1971]

I thought Hybris was one of my faves. From Discovery.

[D]

I thought Hybris was one of my faves. From Discovery.

I second that.

horzi = apidya

[Guardians Knight]

I know one trivia from a friend, who was developing it, that the best ranking you can get is 'Omnipotent' - has any of you managed to get that ? If you have let me know.

my brother completed the game he got that title.

altho sexier in graphic i preferred the original stardust over super, incidently i think it was the original he completed, the graphics are still great imo, those ray-traced effects still look good if you ask me.

[ST Dragon]

Stardust's ray traced graphics look great even for today's standards but the AGA Super version blows it away in the graphics department.
Especially those cool special tunnel stages look incredible on Super. Makes you wonder how they achieved that on the A1200.
A True technical marvel.

Personally the frame rate in Swiv is just fine on my A1200, but I find the darker/sinister themed graphics of the AMIGA version, superior to the Genesis/SNES version.
SWIV Amiga was the "Ikaruga" of it's time imo.

[MJR]

Stardust's ray traced graphics look great even for today's standards but the AGA Super version blows it away in the graphics department.
Especially those cool special tunnel stages look incredible on Super. Makes you wonder how they achieved that on the A1200.
A True technical marvel.

Personally the frame rate in Swiv is just fine on my A1200, but I find the darker/sinister themed graphics of the AMIGA version, superior to the Genesis/SNES version.
SWIV Amiga was the "Ikaruga" of it's time imo.

I will let my mate know how much you preciate their stuff
Is Swiv faster on A1200? If so I must have another go..

[ccovell]

Especially those cool special tunnel stages look incredible on Super. Makes you wonder how they achieved that on the A1200.

Same way Shin'en achieved the tunnel animation on GBA Iridion: they pre-rendered tunnel animations in short loops. The Amiga was great at animating backgrounds. It's all an animation scrolled about.

[ST Dragon]

Stardust's ray traced graphics look great even for today's standards but the AGA Super version blows it away in the graphics department.
Especially those cool special tunnel stages look incredible on Super. Makes you wonder how they achieved that on the A1200.
A True technical marvel.

Personally the frame rate in Swiv is just fine on my A1200, but I find the darker/sinister themed graphics of the AMIGA version, superior to the Genesis/SNES version.
SWIV Amiga was the "Ikaruga" of it's time imo.

I will let my mate know how much you preciate their stuff
Is Swiv faster on A1200? If so I must have another go..

I remember clearing SWIV on my old A500+ (1993) with no noticeable slowdowns / low frame rates, but I was young & wouldn’t really care to notice any such nuisances back then. (Unless they were frustratingly noticeable)

When I then tried a special, trained AGA version of Swiv, on my A1200 three years later, it played just fine @ a nice frame rate.
It should be faster however as a lot OCS\ECS games that were compatible with the A1200, would actually take advantage of the extra 14MHZ boost of the A1200's CPU and play faster / smoother.

I'll have to play it again on my A1200 in order to verify that though.
By the way, how can you tell if a game on the AMIGA is @ 30FPS, 50FPS, or 60FPS for that matter?

I don't recall any FPS counter on the Amiga?

Thanks in advance.

[MJR]

I'll have to play it again on my A1200 in order to verify that though.
By the way, how can you tell if a game on the AMIGA is @ 30FPS, 50FPS, or 60FPS for that matter?

I don't recall any FPS counter on the Amiga?

Thanks in advance.

There are no FPS counters of course, but you can easily see a difference between 25fps / 50 fps; which was probably always the case for PAL games; or 30 fps / 60 fps. Slow moving objects/scrolling look smooth in 25fps also, so look for any faster flying enemies; do they travel smoothly or not.

Also when framerate drops below 25fps that is very easy to see; some time Swiv goes clearly under that when the screen gets infested with enemies.

I don't think I could spot a 50-60 fps difference, so it is quite likely that the smoothest games like starray were in fact 50 fps, as it was the standard for european games in eighties anyway.

[D]

60 were games in 60 Hz then
50 were games in 50 Hz then

I remember having a special bootdisc that would maken any amiga game run 60 Hz.

I used it all the time

[ST Dragon]

I've never heard of such boot-disc before!
I would love to try it out!

Most 90's AMIGA games were at a constant 50FPS. Some characteristic examples are Turrican 3 (Which actually states it on the box-cover)

Agony
Turrican
Turrican II
Apidya
Project X
Chaos Engine
Disposable Hero
Banshee
Mr. Nutz
Jaguar XJ220

All had very smooth & fast scrolling
Where as Parasol Stars, R-Type II, Saint Dragon were probably at 25FPS & maybe even below that.

[Shatterhand]

There was an article in "The One" Magazine once, where they asked Andrew Braybrook (A great Amiga progammer, who made Fire & Ice, Parasol Stars, Uridium 2 and other great games) to take a look at the most technical amazing games on Amiga, and one of them was Stardust.

He said that the Tunnel animation actuall was an "Optic Illusion". The whole animation has only 3 frames, but the way it's done "tricks" your eyes to make it look incredibly smooth. What was most amazing at that was not only the animation, but how the screen also scrolled in all directions to keep with the movement of your ship in that section

But I remember he was actually amazed of how little memory the whole stuff ate, and I remember he claimed he had no idea of how they fitted the whole thing (Background animation, spriteset and music) without using a lot of memory.

And they didn't achieve that in an A1200, but in an A500/600 . Stardust ran in a bog-standard A500.

Stardust was also the only Amiga game I know that used 6-channel sound for IN-GAME music... some games with music made by Chris Huelsback did that in the title screen, but I don't know any other game that does that IN game.

And IMO Super Stardust is better than Stardust.... Super Stardust feels more balanced and it has some cool level designs.

[MJR]

Most 90's AMIGA games were at a constant 50FPS. Some characteristic examples are Turrican 3 (Which actually states it on the box-cover)

Agony
Turrican
Turrican II
Apidya
Project X
Chaos Engine
Disposable Hero
Banshee
Mr. Nutz
Jaguar XJ220

All had very smooth & fast scrolling
Where as Parasol Stars, R-Type II, Saint Dragon were probably at 25FPS & maybe even below that.

Well I'm currently playing chaos engine every day and I can assure it is clearly 25fps.. Otherwise I can agree with the list, except that project X has slower framerate for shots and missiles.. Some other games, like stardust, also draw bullets only in every second frame to save processing power.

[ST Dragon]

Concerning the 6-channel music in Stardust, I have a 1993 AMIGA format Mag with an Advert/flyer stating that it’s actually using 6-channel audio.
I remember reading that and thinking, WTF?! The AMIGA can only support 4-Channels. So I always wondered how they managed to do it, when I finally got to play it later that year.
Some really talented developers were at work I guess.

One thing I never understood about the AMIGA was why so many games were only @25FPS, where as others were @ super smooth @50FPS and most of all, why some only allowed the choice of in-game music or sound-effects but not both at the same time. (Especially some CORE Design games like, Chuck Rock, Jaguar XJ220, etc…)

Where as some other only had incredible intro / title screen music themes, but lacked any in-game music what so ever and only had sound-effects. (Some examples are Team17 games like Assassin, Project X, Alien Breed, etc... & Psygnosis’ Walker)

That bugged me so much!

Where as other games like the Turrican Series, Body Blows, Super Frog, Rod Land, Lemmings, Disposable Hero, Star Dust, (Some of which by the same developers) featured some kick-ass music & sound-effects, all through out the game.

Same thing plagued some AGA only games Like Trolls, Oscar. (If memory serves right…)

So it can’t be an AMIGA technical/hardware restrain/handicap/disadvantage… Or was it?

@MJR
Chaos Engine was one of the games along side Doom, Heretic & Hexen that I actually spent months & many hours playing through in order to discover every single inch of the game’s secrets.
The game was very smooth on my 29” Multi System SONY TV & did not notice one single slowdown / tearing effect, via my A1200 TV-OUT modulator.
So I dispute the fact of it being @25FPS.
Considering the fact that the game was nearly for 4 years in development by Bitmap brothers, I doubt very strongly that they would have left out such an important detail as “smooth” frame rate.

[ccovell]

One thing I never understood about the AMIGA was... why some only allowed the choice of in-game music or sound-effects but not both at the same time.

Blame programmer ineptitude/laziness. That's one thing that always bothered me about European-made games on many systems.

[MJR]

European programmers were not lazy, it was simply a pure business decision.
Games with slower framerates were due for games being conversions from ST, where they did not use any of the custom chips that Amiga had. The ones with higher framerates and other candies were using amiga to the full extent.

I have played CE on A500 since I havent got my A1200 yet, and it definitely runs on 25fps.
If you played chaos engine on A1200 then that might explain the higher framerate. I hope this is the case, because that will mean I'm going to enjoy the game with faster framerate soon..

but bitmap brothers, despite being competent on every area, never utilized amiga's custom chips much, their games were mostly designed to be similar on Amiga and ST.
It is not that I dont believe they couldn't have done so, but because it was financially more practical to recycle all the programming code from platform to another.

[ccovell]

I didn't mean to imply that all European coders were lazy... just that the lack of music in-game or a dumb choice of either music or FX, in many games on very capable systems, could only be put down to laziness. Games which tended to be non-Japanese.

It is not that I dont believe they couldn't have done so, but because it was financially more practical to recycle all the programming code from platform to another.

Ok, this might not be accurately termed laziness (but I would say so.) Looking over many pics of arcade/multiformat conversions on the Amiga, I was struck by how terrible so many of the Amiga versions were, simply because the coders used graphics from ST, Amstrad CPC, or even C-64 versions of the game. Music too. Sloppily port a game over to the Amiga like this, and it shows -- the full capabilities of a great system not being used.

[ST Dragon]

Well a lot of people argue that Saint Dragon (AMIGA) was in fact better than both the Arcade & PCE version, especially in the music department.

But I could expect nothing less from the creators of Swiv (Storm) as they also made ST Dragon.
I heard that Swiv does not have any in-game music simply because it only utilizes 0.5Meg of Memory.

[it290]

About the framerate of SWIV, it seems to run pretty choppily on my A3000 (030@30mhz), which is faster than an A1200, but that could be due to the fact that it's running under WHDload.

Regarding 6-channel sound in Stardust, it is impressive, but not all that unique. There are several audio programs for the Amiga (OctaMED being one) that allow you to use 8 or more channels -- its just software mixing.