Amiga - No DRM, less breaky than PS4/XBone, no always online

[charlie chong]

i had the st with the power pack.
there were loads of great arcade conversions
bubble bobble,rainbow islands,gauntlet 2,r-type,new zealand story etc
then you had homegrown brilliance like stunt car racer,ik +,llamatron etc
good times
still i soon forgot the st when my dad came back from singapore with a import megadrive

[Aliquantic]

I'd nominate Ruff'n'Tumble and Kid Chaos for platformers on the Amiga, and second Brian the Lion. Platformers and Pinball Dreams was pretty much all we had on our Amiga in the mid 90s Kid Chaos gets ridiculously unforgiving on the last world, but is pretty good until then.

[stryc9]

What gets me is that the Japanese got the X68000, and games that took advantage of it.

In the west, high end computers were relegated to business use etc. Games were for kids over here back then so I guess it makes sense to target the market with a machine that could be afforded by parents to let little Timmy play Xenon, and use educational software and maybe learn something at the same time.

Unfortunately all little Timmy learned was that shmups were better if they gave you lifebars and had shops in them.

[louisg]

Uses the sound chip for synthesis rather than the massively more used four channel sample playback. Very under used in this manner, in fact off the top of my head only Uridium 2 did it commercially.

Lionheart and (especially!) Battle Squadron also did it to great effect.

Don't forget Hybris too! And I dunno if you want to count Turrican-- it's kind of in the middle. But I think it uses a lot of chiptune-style macros and phasing to get more out of a few voices.

gauntlet 2

I *just* discovered the Gauntlet 2 port on Amiga. It's not bad! My only complaint so far is the grainy sound effects and weird collision detection on the monster generators. I kinda can't believe people would rather play Alien Breed than this-- so much more variety and action (but less attitude). And apparently it does 4 players with a parallel port joystick adapter (and I guess Bomberman supports this too ).

I'll have to check out Rock n Roll.

UK wise -Amiga 500 hit around 87 whilst the Megadrive was around the end of 1990 (ignoring importing etc and concentrating what most of the gamers were doing). Thats quite a gap.

I'd also say that the MegaDrive party wasn't in full swing until Sonic the Hedgehog. Before that, you had a lot of games like E-Swat, Altered Beast, Rambo III, Thunder Blade, Space Harrier 2... they were good for the time (I would've killed to have a halfway decent Space Harrier), but the rest of the generation made it look clunky as hell. That's kind of what I was getting at with the Amiga being so early-- a pretty good proportion of the games are actually really old and so they won't be nearly as slick as later games just because the expectations weren't that high.

The games i tended to get more involved in were a little more involved than what id play on the MD

Yeah, for me, that was the home computer experience. I didn't have a lot of the fast action games on Amiga or C64 (and a lot didn't even come out in the US at all). Instead I have fond memories of Test Drive II, Sim City, Populous, Lemmings, It Came From the Desert, Wings, Falcon, Breach II... the kinds of games you wouldn't get to play in an arcade. Sometimes I'd play imports at the Amiga store in town (hanging out there and playing stuff like Turrican was considered a successful Saturday for me ), but I didn't have them at home. And then the creativity software like Deluxe Paint, Moviesetter, Instant Music and SEUCK were all a lot of fun too.

I really need to give Lazer Squad a good try. I *loved* Breach II back in the day. I wonder if it's as good as I remember.

What gets me is that the Japanese got the X68000, and games that took advantage of it.

I don't want to get into the Amiga vs. X68000 thing, but one thing to consider is that Ami is a 1985 machine that was down to $750 or so in 1987 (sans monitor, but it could be hooked to a TV in a pinch). X68000 is a 1987 computer that was something like $3000. But it did also benefit a lot from the fact that Japanese arcade makers gave a crap how their games came out on it. They didn't really care how they came out on western computers, and IIRC a lot of times the devs couldn't even use the original graphics or code.

Unfortunately all little Timmy learned was that shmups were better if they gave you lifebars and had shops in them.

Yeah, I think that's something we're still seeing ripples from. That and people treating videogaming like a somewhat passive narrative experience instead of a unique medium. To me, a lot of recent games both in the indie scene and commercial scene are like off-key music It's subjective.. but only to a point. However, though there aren't a lot of great shmups or platformers on the Amiga, there are still many great games that are up there with made-for-console releases on other platforms.

[stryc9]

The X68000 is simply testament to how seriously Japan took it's computer games. But yeah, comparisons are kinda moot since they were targeted at different markets.

It doesn't change the fact that we were blown away by Shadow of the Beast's unbelievable graphics and shit gameplay the day it dropped. I often wonder what things would have been like if the Amiga debuted as a console like I've heard was planned.

[louisg]

The X68000 is simply testament to how seriously Japan took it's computer games. But yeah, comparisons are kinda moot since they were targeted at different markets.

It doesn't change the fact that we were blown away by Shadow of the Beast's unbelievable graphics and shit gameplay the day it dropped. I often wonder what things would have been like if the Amiga debuted as a console like I've heard was planned.

I mean, kinda... Games by computer game companies like WolfTeam were about the quality of a lot of stuff on the Amiga, warts and all. It made me sad seeing Granada chug along at 20FPS or whatever on the 68K with almost all the same weird design quirks as the Genesis one.

I think the dividing line here is really between computer game companies and console/arcade companies, not between east and west. From my (admittedly somewhat limited experience), it seems like it's the arcade ports that really stand out on that machine more than anything, and those are often *great*. Which isn't to say there weren't some made-for-x68k games like Geograph Seal that blew me away, but, you know, stuff like Thunderforce II or Knight Arms isn't really up to the quality of a good console release much in the same way that a lot of stuff on Amiga isn't. But if someone wants to make an x68k thread with non-arcade-port recommendations that they think need to be played, I'm all for it.

Also I wouldn't say we didn't take *computer gaming* seriously. There are so many great strategy or puzzle games from that era, and groundbreaking action games even if they're not the same style. And I don't play RPGs, but apparently there are a few great RPGs as well. It's really easy to take it for granted, especially since a lot of good games either made it to other platforms a few years later, or they're not really showing off the hardware. Basically, there's just not a lot of good console/arcade style games on western machines, probably due to the lack of western companies doing console and arcade games. But other stuff? There's a lot to like!

Like I was trying to point out, Amiga and C64 games *seem* a lot worse just due to the sheer amount of people recommending not-very-good games that approximate the arcade or console experience. Nostalgia is a terrible thing But I'm trying to focus on the games that actually are still fun today (e.g., NOT Magic Pockets, NOT Xenon 2, NOT Shadow of the Beast, NOT Project X, etc).

[stryc9]

I will interject here to admit that I don't have any first hand experience with the X68k and I'm really just going off what I've read and heard about it, so you are probably right on the money with saying the non-arcade titles for the machine are mostly no better or worse than the average Amiga effort. The 'ports' of games like SFII and Final Fight give the impression that the machine was a power house, and the video for Castlevania shows some pretty mean parallax going on.

I think the potential inside the Amiga for awesome, smooth scrolling arcade-style games, or actual ports, was held back by some extremely inept and lazy programming by culprits like the aforementioned US Gold. On the flip side, I guess you had Team 17 pushing the machine in all departments so they did kinda demonstrate it was possible, although admittedly their games are not to my taste.

I mean you had the US Gold version of Final Fight that had no effort put into it at all, and just look (and listen) to SF if you can bear to do it.

Certainly not calling into question the Amiga's fine catalogue of original stuff, just lamenting the poor handling of the arcade side of things

Also, Walker by DMA, unless someone's already mentioned it (I might have already, I'm pretty tired).

[dcharlieJP]

ike I was trying to point out, Amiga and C64 games *seem* a lot worse just due to the sheer amount of people recommending not-very-good games that approximate the arcade or console experience. Nostalgia is a terrible thing But I'm trying to focus on the games that actually are still fun today (e.g., NOT Magic Pockets, NOT Xenon 2, NOT Shadow of the Beast, NOT Project X, etc).

This. This happens way too much - Xenon 2 is artistically pretty nice but the game itself is plodding and uninteresting. Back in the day it got away with it a bit, but time has not been kind to it. In truth the best thing about the Amiga version is the Bomb The Bass intro - so if anyone is curious just watch this and save yourself some time on the game :

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o3n6BRUVAl0

One of the greatest periods of gaming ive ever had was playing Millennium 2.2 and Warhead in tandem. Space drama resource management and politics on one side and weird fisheye lens space combat on the other - both with different yet dark atmospheres. Yet i rarely see either game recommended which is sad

[louisg]

This. This happens way too much - Xenon 2 is artistically pretty nice but the game itself is plodding and uninteresting. Back in the day it got away with it a bit, but time has not been kind to it. In truth the best thing about the Amiga version is the Bomb The Bass intro - so if anyone is curious just watch this and save yourself some time on the game :

Totally. I mean, I can't say I wasn't completely blown away when I walked into the game store and saw Xenon 2. The graphics had a ridiculous amount of depth to its parallax for the time, and the booming soundtrack was the kind of rich in-game music you didn't hear much of, complete with cool vocal samples. At the time, this was just about enough to make you forget about how crappy the gameplay was. And let's not forget that when you fire, the drums cut out. Let me repeat that: THE DRUMS IN A CLUB-STYLE DANCE MUSIC TRACK CUT OUT WHEN YOU FIRE. Gah! And *this* was the Amiga shmup ported to every single platform, including GameBoy and X68k?

Honestly, I think this kind of thing still occurs, where people are so enamored with graphics or atmosphere in a game that they don't really think critically about how the game *plays*.

I think the potential inside the Amiga for awesome, smooth scrolling arcade-style games, or actual ports, was held back by some extremely inept and lazy programming by culprits like the aforementioned US Gold. On the flip side, I guess you had Team 17 pushing the machine in all departments so they did kinda demonstrate it was possible, although admittedly their games are not to my taste.

Yeah I think the game designs coming out of Team 17 were a little lacking, but maybe not as much as a lot of Psygnosis games. And IIRC, the Final Fight port on Amiga was done by a teenager. I think that kind of thing must've occurred a lot Honestly, I don't know how developers like US Gold could let their terrible games out the door, and I don't know why Sega and other companies signed off on these ports.

It's too bad that a lot of times on Amiga, you got games with great programming or great gameplay, but often not both in the same game. Something like Unreal really shows off the hardware, but how fun is it really? Then on the other hand, you know, you get stuff like Pipe Mania or California Games which are excellent games, but they won't really make your jaw drop Every now and then, you get both in the same package, but not often enough.

BTW anyone here try Qwak? It's a neat single-screen platformer dealie. The gameplay is very simple, but it's addictive. There's a load of games like that on this system. And apparently, the Rainbow Islands is good too, but I haven't been able to get it to run. Speaking of which, Parasol Stars is neat, but it's no match for the PC Engine original (though it's damn close). I'd probably be playing the crap out of the Ami version if I didn't have a PC Engine. But one perk of that one is that the Amiga has two controller ports so you don't need to hook up the damn multitap to play with a friend

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Totally. I mean, I can't say I wasn't completely blown away when I walked into the game store and saw Xenon 2. The graphics had a ridiculous amount of depth to its parallax for the time, and the booming soundtrack was the kind of rich in-game music you didn't hear much of, complete with cool vocal samples. At the time, this was just about enough to make you forget about how crappy the gameplay was.

This was pretty much my experience with the game, too - until I turned the cheats and auto fire off.

[shmuppyLove]

You guys are tempting me ...

Is Amiga Forever a good package?

[yojo!]

Yes, the Amiga had some crappy arcade ports (i.e. US Gold/Tiertex) but it had some incredible ones too. The Sale Curves ports of Silkworm, the ninja warrior and Saint Dragon show that some talented programmers could offset hardware weaknesses. Even Atari ST ports of these games are quite impressive. Here is some interesting reading for a behind the scene look of those glory days...
http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/

[Drum]

Great to see Wizkid getting love in this thread. Wonderful game.

[louisg]

Oh, holy shit! Anyone seen Mega Typhoon? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iapekmpng .. I am very impressed.

I just got a chance to play it, and it's straight up a late-era approaching-manic Toaplan love-letter (the game itself is 1996). And I have no idea how they pulled off so many damn sprites at the same time on an Amiga. Now, I don't want to give the impression it's perfect-- it's got no music, and I got to a point since I died quite a bit where my weapons were too puny to take on the enemies. But, this is notable not only for being an Amiga shmup with a zillion on-screen sprites, but as a game by western developers who are obviously taking some serious cues from contemporary shmups in an era where everything else was like Major Stryker, Raptor, or Tyrian.

The gameplay has at least been given a decent amount of thought in Mega Typhoon, the enemy designs are varied and interesting, and powerups are pretty good too.

Actually, what's interesting to me here is that Battle Squadron was already an early Toaplan-like example (from 1989, a year before Raiden hit). For as much crap as 90s western shmup devs took, here we have a couple Amiga examples where-- while the games are far from flawless-- they are clearly paying attention.

Like many Ami games, I think you'll want an autofire controller for this one.

I'm going back to play it more Hopefully my hype isn't unfounded haha. Very excited.

[Ed Oscuro]

Interesting title, but I find it hard to get really excited about it - simple aimed bullets, strange forward-lurching enemy behavior, big enemies that can't get shots off, and the video doesn't suggest super fluid movement. It seems almost like a patch on Flying Shark except that it's just shaken things up.

The sound effect has me constantly in anticipation of BREAKING NEWS! We interrupt your regularly scheduled Miggy gaming with this special news: Major Stryker has sold more units than Mega Typhoon by fifty times!



Honestly, one could say the same thing about S.S. Mission, which is just a bit uglier than this game, but otherwise seems quite close.

But that's just my first impressions from watching a little gameplay, nothing solid.

[charlie chong]

just remembered it was graftgold(of paradroid fame) who did the ports of rainbow islands and they did a very good job.the port they did of ivan ironman's offroad racer was also excellent i remember!

i had a demo of another game they did called simulcra and i remember the gameplay being pretty cool from what i remember of the demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPYjzfwIQ6o

LOOK AT DAT 3D IT LOOKES LIEK DE FUTURE

just remembered another interesting puzzly game E-MOTION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57ficYjR5A
god those sound effects take me right back in time

[louisg]

Interesting title, but I find it hard to get really excited about it - simple aimed bullets, strange forward-lurching enemy behavior, big enemies that can't get shots off, and the video doesn't suggest super fluid movement. It seems almost like a patch on Flying Shark except that it's just shaken things up.

The sound effect has me constantly in anticipation of BREAKING NEWS! We interrupt your regularly scheduled Miggy gaming with this special news: Major Stryker has sold more units than Mega Typhoon by fifty times!



Honestly, one could say the same thing about S.S. Mission, which is just a bit uglier than this game, but otherwise seems quite close.

But that's just my first impressions from watching a little gameplay, nothing solid.

I wish the big enemies couldn't get shots off when *I* played. I got my ass handed to me :/ but I will say that the game gives you a LOT of bombs. 'course the same is true of Soukyugurentai. Not sure what you mean about not fluid movement-- the thing runs very well, though YouTube will put a dent in that. And I'm not sure what the Flying Shark comparison is. There's much, much more happening in this, and it's obviously taking inspiration from later games. If you aren't feeling generous, I guess you could say it appears more Raiden than Truxton 2 or Batsugun. But Flying Shark? Come on, man! Might as well say it's basically just Space Invaders

Yeah, the sound design is not great. But there really is a lot happening in the way of different shot patterns (they actually *aren't* simple aimed shots), enemies that chase you and have a variety of different movement patterns, actual good placement and pacing, etc. Give the game a try- I believe it's public domain now. Though I think the FS-UAE emulator runs at about half framerate, sadly. I started a topic on the main Shmups Chat since it is a shmup and all

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=46152

[louisg]

. Here is some interesting reading for a behind the scene look of those glory days...
http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/

I finally got around to checking out that site, and it is great! I loved reading about how they would port games and *then* try to secure the license, how they had to dig out graphics from rom dumps or-- even worse-- recreate them from scratch by watching and pausing a VHS tape.

And I had no idea that there was even an unreleased port of Liquid Kids for Amiga until I read that interview with the Ocean France guy. I tried it out, and it's not bad! The graphics are nice, but it is windowed and the frame rate is a little choppy (but not excessively choppy). Overall, it seems very faithful and there was obviously some real work put into it. That's quite a shame that it never got out. And Liquid Kids in general is a brilliant platformer and should be way more well-known than it is. I guess Snow Bros and WEC LeMans were among those unreleased as well.

Anyway, good read, especially for people like me who are interested in retro coding. It got me reading up again on the Amiga hardware. It's interesting stuff-- the Ami in general is extremely powerful, but the video has more in common with something like VGA than I thought in that there's no real tiled graphics mode, and a lot of stuff resorted to not using sprites for everything. Now it finally makes sense why some 2d stuff is windowed and why that'd get you a speedup with this hardware. It sounds like to get 90s-style 2d performance out of it you really need to be adept at using all the coprocessors like the copper, using BOBs well, etc.

BTW, if you use FS-UAE for emulation, it will zoom in on a windowed game (!). And I've read that if you set your desktop to 50hz, it will run at 50hz synched. That makes it possibly *better* than running on a real Amiga

[Marc]

I could've sworn WEC Le Man's came out officially?

[Ed Oscuro]

I finally got around to checking out that site, and it is great! I loved reading about how they would port games and *then* try to secure the license, how they had to dig out graphics from rom dumps or-- even worse-- recreate them from scratch by watching and pausing a VHS tape.

I remember reading the guys who made a Ghosts n' Goblins port (for one of those systems, maybe one of the 8-bitters) just watched the arcade game and recreated the graphics from that...and I think that was even after they had the license. Can't really blame the original devs for not handing out copies of artwork but sheesh. Ultimately it ended up giving some of these developers a crash course in games development to make their own stuff, though

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

BTW, if you use FS-UAE for emulation, it will zoom in on a windowed game (!). And I've read that if you set your desktop to 50hz, it will run at 50hz synched. That makes it possibly *better* than running on a real Amiga

No doubt about this, the software removes black borders too. I'll have to test some things because I remember some games (notably Apidya) were too big to fit on some regular crts. (Apidya power-up gauge was off the bottom of the screens)

WEC Le Mans was definitely released for C64.

[Jonathan Ingram]

BTW, if you use FS-UAE for emulation, it will zoom in on a windowed game (!). And I've read that if you set your desktop to 50hz, it will run at 50hz synched. That makes it possibly *better* than running on a real Amiga

The emulation`s better for many reasons. How many actually have Amigas capable of running Quake in high resolution and at a fast enough speed? Or at all for that matter? With WinUAE, the sky(i.e your PC`s internals) is the limit.

WinUAE <3

[louisg]

Well, most computers can run Quake so that's not as big of a deal. But it's hard to get Amiga games running well in 2013, especially if you're in the US where the only thing you'll find are Amiga 500s and even those are uncommon (and you better hope they have the 1MB upgrade). This means you're stuck with unreliable, slow floppies and, since the kickstart is so old, there's no real way of forcing PAL mode.

Fortunately, the vast majority of games run on an Amiga 500 or similar model. Papa November was nice enough to give me an Amiga 2000 with a hard drive (basically, it's an expandable Amiga 500 in a huge box with a fan), and so I've been running with that using a 19" Sony PVM with an RGB-to-S-Video converter that a friend made. There actually is no masking on it, so games that use every inch of the screen like Apidya work great. Unfortunately, games that are windowed are more windowed than they were on the stock monitor But I think that can be adjusted with overscan.

But getting back to emulators, FS-UAE is pretty great. My experience with vanilla UAE and even some variations like E-UAE on multiple platforms was that it was jittery even compared to other emulators, and the sound buffer broke up easily. This would be after spending a lot of time tweaking settings. I do remember WinUAE being a little better in this department, but not by enough. But I'm seeing none of this weirdness with FS-UAE, plus it's easy to config, so that's why I am so impressed. It's very slick. It's the Boxer to UAE's DOSBox and I'd highly recommend it over the other UAE variations and ports.

There really is nothing like real hardware-- it looks, moves, and sounds fantastic (the Amiga sound hardware must be heard in person). But, for most people, I realize this isn't an option.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Not trying to start an emu-fight, WinUAE was a pain in the tits to configure about ten years ago but the more recent revisions are much friendlier.

[dcharlieJP]

yeah, i fought with WinUAE for a while then just let it be - extremely surprised how much better UAE is now. Even the Caanoo version is friendly !

[Shatterhand]

This is an old topic, but I am quite sad I missed it, I am one of the biggest Amiga fans ever.

How many people here knows Xenon 2 is uttelly shit and Bitmap Brothers proobably bought all their good reviews?

[Jonathan Ingram]

Bitmap Brothers are shit!

*hides behind cover*

[louisg]

This is an old topic, but I am quite sad I missed it, I am one of the biggest Amiga fans ever.

How many people here knows Xenon 2 is uttelly shit and Bitmap Brothers proobably bought all their good reviews?

Hahaha, this is timely! I revisited Gods and ended up posting this on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/LouisGorenfeld/stat ... 8898493440

I do love Chaos Engine and Speedball 2 though. I played through Chaos Engine recently and loved it, then made this video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXEMMX-CyLo .. it's like all the good ideas from their other games and none of the suck.

... and Xenon 1 was a better game than Xenon 2. Somehow Xenon 2 got ported to 900000 different consoles and computers though.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Xenon 2 did not deserve the 100% bought reviews it received upon release. Neither did it deserve the 36% "I can't believe we sold out last time" reviews it received when it was rereleased. The game was fine. You try-hards need to let it go now. Have you forgotten about Project-X? Now, there's something to get mad about.

[Marc]

The Bitmaps can never be called shit for one reason only, Chaos Engine. One of the best top down shooters of all time, and I'm replaying it at the minute so it's not just nostalgia.