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

[louisg]

Hey! There's this cool thing that doesn't have any DRM and has lots of great games. You can even get an *optional* hard drive for it (notice how they don't force that on you like SOME console companies), and the OS doesn't take up most of it. There's no "always-online" BS either. It's really cool.

OK ok, aside from making fun of some obnoxious recent Off Topic forums, I actually have been on a full-blown Amiga kick lately. Sure, a lot of the games don't hold up all that great, but I've found a lot that do if you give them a chance.

Among the games I've been playing have been Turrican 2, Wiz n Liz, and Pang. And I keep finding new stuff to check out, like Zeewolf (the JimPlaysGames YouTube channel introduced me to that one). If you stay away from some of the worse popular games like Xenon II or Magic Pockets, there seems to be a lot that have aged decently. I'm almost tempted to make both a list of games to try and an NTSC survival guide.

But I'm especially curious about the experience of being a gamer in the UK in the 80s. Were Amigas and Atari STs really more popular than consoles? The Ami was my favorite system growing up, but alas it was dead in the US by 1991. There were definitely a good share of games that I enjoyed on PC or console that had good (or even better) Amiga versions, and I had no idea some of them has also come out for Amiga until emulation was decent. So, I'm intrigued by this alternate gaming history, if I understand it right

[Ed Oscuro]

If you want to talk about UK gaming in the '80s you have to make some room for the Speccy, until around 1985 at least. Tens of thousands of games, a similar situation to the C64 here in the states, except there is lots more stuff I'd rather check out on the Spectrum.

[Udderdude]

Someone's forgetting to mention all the wacky copy protection methods that were around back then, including looking crap up in the manual that you'd better not lose, ever .. and those code wheels. ;3

[Wonderbanana]

Home computers (for gaming) were arguably more popular than consoles in the UK before the Amiga/ST era and right up to round the launch of the Playstation.

The Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 were probably the most popular early ones but there were many others.

This was partly because parents believed that the computers would be useful for school and teach kids, in reality they ended being games machines and most school playgrounds were a hotbed of software piracy as kids swapped games on C15 cassette tapes and then 3.5" disks in the Amiga/ST era.

I had virtually every Amiga game on disk, nearly all pirated and obtained from friends. Virtually everyone I knew had a copy of X Copy 2 for copying discs.

However the upshot of this computer culture was bedroom coding flourished in the UK and is why so many talented coders hailed from these shores.

[Ed Oscuro]

Someone's forgetting to mention all the wacky copy protection methods that were around back then, including looking crap up in the manual that you'd better not lose, ever .. and those code wheels. ;3

oh god, lenslok

[Wonderbanana]

Someone's forgetting to mention all the wacky copy protection methods that were around back then, including looking crap up in the manual that you'd better not lose, ever .. and those code wheels. ;3

oh god, lenslok

Do not mention Lenslock ever again please mate.

I still have nightmares about trying to load Brabens Elite and ACE using one.

[neorichieb1971]

Amiga was not more powerful than consoles. Except it had really good music and I liked the idea of having a monitor. The megadrive through RF looked shite. So games always had that washed out look. Once I saw a megadrive through scart my opinions changed alot. However, by then it had become mostly obsolete as it was already 1994. Also, it was about that year that console imports came on the scene with full screen 60hz graphics. In the PAL market, Amiga games were mostly full screen and fully optmized for 50hz, where as the console ports were not. This is really what made the difference.

[Ed Oscuro]

This was partly because parents believed that the computers would be useful for school and teach kids, in reality they ended being games machines

...but having to punch in the BASIC program listing yourself got a lot of people started with programming, so in many cases the games machines ended up being educational after all. I know some people attribute the UK's ability to punch over its weight in games development to these quaint little machines.

The Spectrum is a lovely simple design, aside from the ICs you'd almost think you were looking inside a Covox Speech Thing with all the resistors lined up.

[Wonderbanana]

This was partly because parents believed that the computers would be useful for school and teach kids, in reality they ended being games machines

...but having to punch in the BASIC program listing yourself got a lot of people started with programming, so in many cases the games machines ended up being educational after all. I know some people attribute the UK's ability to punch over its weight in games development to these quaint little machines.

The Spectrum is a lovely simple design, aside from the ICs you'd almost think you were looking inside a Covox Speech Thing with all the resistors lined up.

I did mention the coding scene

[Wonderbanana]

Anyone remember microdrives?

[NAVVARR]

I still have my amigas -a 1200 with a Blizzard 1240 accelerator and a 720GB hard drive and a CD rom- also an A500 with a Game Genie type cartridge to look at code etc etc.

Yeah, some amazing games - the Alien Breed series were great- also spent a lot of time playing Cannon fodder too.

Couldn't believe Project X the first time I saw it.

Lot of happy memories of the Amiga series.

[trap15]

BRIAN THE LION

[Krimzon Kitzune]

Among the games I've been playing have been Turrican 2, Wiz n Liz, and Pang.

Play the Genesis/MegaDrive version of Wiz 'n Liz instead. It's far superior in every aspect, although it may be hard to believe at first.

[louisg]

Hah I knew someone would bring up all the wacky copy protection schemes. If companies thought I wouldn't go to the trouble of photocopying the codewheel, they thought wrong!

Yeah, I've played Wiz n Liz on Genesis, but I think the game is more at home at 50hz. I also like the music and sound a lot more on the Amiga than on Genesis, but they did do a very good job with it. Were there other differences besides the parallax?

Amiga was not more powerful than consoles. Except it had really good music and I liked the idea of having a monitor. The megadrive through RF looked shite. So games always had that washed out look. Once I saw a megadrive through scart my opinions changed alot. However, by then it had become mostly obsolete as it was already 1994. Also, it was about that year that console imports came on the scene with full screen 60hz graphics. In the PAL market, Amiga games were mostly full screen and fully optmized for 50hz, where as the console ports were not. This is really what made the difference.

I wish the Genesis had cleaner video output for composite the way its competitors were-- we didn't get SCART here, and so everything was very blurry and mushy. I think it affected the colors chosen by the designers a lot. Either that or it just didn't have the overall palette the Amiga did (IIRC wasn't it something like 64 out of 512 colors?).

But yeah, overall the Amiga is a little weaker for traditional 2d gaming-- I can't see it running something like Sonic. But, it was mind-blowing at the time, especially opposite something like Sega Master System or NES. Not that they were competing since one was a much more expensive computer system, but that was what most people were playing at the time when the Amiga was doing relatively OK in the US in its little niche here. Still, I think there were some definite plusses of the Amiga over Genesis and even SNES for certain things, which isn't too bad for a budget-priced computer (as computer prices go) that launched a few years earlier.

...but having to punch in the BASIC program listing yourself got a lot of people started with programming, so in many cases the games machines ended up being educational after all. I know some people attribute the UK's ability to punch over its weight in games development to these quaint little machines.

Yep, I got started with coding on the '64 in-between sessions of Commando I loved those Usborne books on writing games that had a bunch of listings.

[Marc]

It was weird here in the UK. The Master System was more popular than the NES by a huge degree, but the home computers... Put it this way, the life span the C64 enjoyed would be like people still making PS3 games in tandem with PS4, five years from now. The ST took off initially because it was cheaper and there was an awesome pack with 25 games, but as soon as Commodore dropped the price of the Amiga it was pretty much over. ST was a Spectrum 128 with more colours, the Miggy was a different ball game. It had some decent arcade conversions, some amazing originals, and the best sound chip of any machine ever. I'm gonna dig mine out and set it up tomorrow now. Oh, and Wizkid. Bestest weird game ever.

[Wonderbanana]

Of course the ST and Amiga also had an effect on the music scene here too.

Ever heard of OctaMED? It was one of a few trackers.

Ever heard of drum & bass act Omni Trio? Renegade Snares and Mystic Stepper were produced on OctaMED as were quite a few other Rave tunes.

[neorichieb1971]

I think the main problem with all the 16bit era was that the arcades were light years ahead of the home systems. I can't remember the amount of times I dreamed of an arcade perfect Amiga "outrun" or "Gauntlet" only to be let down. Not only let down but devastated. Even simple stuff like Street fighter on the Amiga was a monstrosity.

The kind of games that shined on the Amiga were Team 17 efforts, or Psygnosis. But in retrospect a lot of those games had glitzy graphics but ridiculously hard gameplay.

If you want to see the kind of graphics the Amiga did in intros, you would have been blown away if you had a console -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soNKY_wAA34

[louisg]

Of course the ST and Amiga also had an effect on the music scene here too.

The entire tracking and demoscene was incredible. I'm still inspired by it and still use a tracker as my main sequencer

I think the main problem with all the 16bit era was that the arcades were light years ahead of the home systems. I can't remember the amount of times I dreamed of an arcade perfect Amiga "outrun" or "Gauntlet" only to be let down. Not only let down but devastated. Even simple stuff like Street fighter on the Amiga was a monstrosity.

The kind of games that shined on the Amiga were Team 17 efforts, or Psygnosis. But in retrospect a lot of those games had glitzy graphics but ridiculously hard gameplay.

Yeah, an awful lot of games had great graphics and sound but terrible gameplay. I mean, I found an article in a 1996 PC game mag that was *still* ranking Shadow of the Beast as one of the best games of all time because it has parallax scrolling :/. Another PC gamer was trying to tell me Xenon 2 ruled because it had a shop.

But, despite all the high-profile games that aren't so hot that have people swearing up and down they're the best game ever, there are some truly good ones out there, you just have to dig around a little. There are great games like Uridium 2 that have nothing similar on a home console of the time. And there are nice odds and ends like good ports of RodLand and Speed Buggy, two games that didn't seem to catch on outside of home computers (!).

The biggest shame is that US Gold got all the porting work. Looking at something like Lotus and how fluidly it runs (better framerate than any Genesis racers AFAIR), I suspect there's no reason the Amiga couldn't have done a great version of OutRun too if it had been done by better developers.

Oh, and Wizkid. Bestest weird game ever.

I really want to play that, but I've been having trouble getting it going on my NTSC Amiga 2000. I will have to keep trying. I did find that some games respond to forcing it to PAL at boot (with the submenu) *and* forcing PAL in WHDLoad. Strange stuff.

[stryc9]

My mate went the A600 route back in the day, favouring the ease of piracy of the games rather than have to buy expensive 16 bit console software, like I was doing with MD.

There were certainly some good games on the Amiga, but usually it was best to let the MD handle the more demanding arcade ports, and let the Amiga do what it did best - stuff like Dune 2, Walker, Syndicate, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder etc.
The machine struggled with fast paced arcade stuff, and the less said about the majority of US Gold software the better (FF or Street Fighter 2 anyone)?

The machine has a good port of Parasol Stars as well dude. Not sure if Rainbow Islands is as good as MD since I haven't played it. R-Type 2 is a great port as well IIRC.

Some stuff was improved in comparison to MD versions as well, like Desert Strike, and the best versions of original software like Pinball Dreams and Fantasies.

Remember Pinball Wizard? The game used to say 'fuck you' when you closed it down!

As far as handling something like Sonic, there was Zool, and the far superior Superfrog by Team 17, which is has damn smooth scrolling for what is going on.

Fighting games faired as well as you would have imagined, although there is some evidence that the Amiga could have handled something decent with the likes of Elf Mania and Fightin' Spirit.

The sound chip is distinctive and supremely nostalgic, and although years ago I thought the PCM music on Amiga and Super Famicom was superior, nowadays the MDs FM is where it's at for me.

And oh, MD: 64 colours from a palette of 512 compared with 16 from 4096 on Amiga, I believe. Although after spending some time lurking Sega 16 blast processing forum it's probably not as cut and dried as it sounds. After all, the Neo had a bigger palette (both on screen and total) than SNES, yet the Super Fami always seems to have the better examples of colour gradation. Seems to be the case with Amiga Vs MD as well in that regard.

[louisg]

Hired Guns! A few years back I got really into that, but unfortunately it was a copy that had latent copy protection and would crash when loading a save a few hours into the game. I should try again. I remember it being very good. And the pinball games are indeed very nice too.

I dunno if there's anything in the traditional platforming department that can match Sonic in terms of playability. I did try Superfrog and Zool but was underwhelmed. I do tend to agree that consoles are better at fast action games while computers are best at strategy and creativity software. But of course the hardware was probably aimed at playing a much older style of game, given that it was initially released in 1985 and planned years earlier-- think of where arcade hardware was at that point and what expectations were for games at home. All the popular genres were different from where they were at the end of that decade. When it was new(ish), I was very young. I just remember being blown away by its version of Marble Madness!

The sound chip? I *am* a total FM nut, but I don't think there's much on the Genesis that can match how ProTracker sounded. Of course, there were only 4 channels which did put a nice dent into what you could do with it in game soundtracks. A few like Ruff n Tumble, Lethal Xcess, or the Factor 5 games do well with the limitations, but a lot of games fall pretty flat there (or omit music all-together.. bleh). I actually think I prefer the Amiga version of the Turrican III (Mega Turrican) music for example. It's just so rich sounding. But at that point it's pretty subjective; the MegaDrive music is fantastic as well and did great with that sound chip. MegaDrive is definitely much cleaner.

[stryc9]

Yeah that's right, the Amiga Marble Madness is flippin' awesome! Another one I forgot to mention.

And the problem with a lot of the audio wasn't the quality - which was usually really good - but the fact that like you say, there was often compromises fitting it alongside actual gameplay. This often resulted in that infernal binary choice between music or effects

While I think of it, Stardust is another great Amiga title. And a question for you - did Ninja Spirit ever get a port to the machine or am I dreaming?

[louisg]

Yeah that's right, the Amiga Marble Madness is flippin' awesome! Another one I forgot to mention.

And the problem with a lot of the audio wasn't the quality - which was usually really good - but the fact that like you say, there was often compromises fitting it alongside actual gameplay. This often resulted in that infernal binary choice between music or effects

While I think of it, Stardust is another great Amiga title. And a question for you - did Ninja Spirit ever get a port to the machine or am I dreaming?

Stardust is good too, yeah The weapons are a little too pew-pew, but it's a nice take on Asteroids. Honestly, it's probably a better game than Blasteroids.

I think the choice between music or SFX was kind of a Euro game thing. It seemed like the musician would sometimes whip up one track that you could turn on, and that track would use all channels and be repeated every single lesson haha. I mean, 3 channels left for music does suck, but look at it like this: on a C64 or Master System, 3 channels was all you had and some games *still* got music and sound effects to coexist! And on something like the NES, you had more channels, but only say two squarewave channels, or only one triangle channel, etc. So, it kind of seems to me like lack of planning or lack of working closely with the musician. The chiptune approach worked well-- something like Battle Squadron is nice and seamless and still sounds full.

Ninja Spirit did indeed get a very bad port to Amiga. I think it was one of those ST ports that used no hardware acceleration or something, like Firepower :/

BTW has anyone here tried Paradroid '90? I am decent at the original, but cannot get anywhere in this one. Any opinions on this thing?

[Marc]

I gave up on Paradroid '90 pretty quickly, the scrolling just felt so restrictive in comparison the the superb C64 game. A few gems off the top of my head:

No Second Prize: Searingly fast poly motorbike racer with a terrifying one bike cam. Smooth as butter, hard as hell.
Supremacy: one of the only strategy games I ever got in to.
Mega-lo-Mania: Along with this. How this hasn't been updated for DS or tablets is beyond me.
Lemmings 2: Better than the original in every way. Space levels were awesome, with a great soundtrack
Hunter: Proto-GTA. An unbelievable achievement for the time.
Nitro: The best of the top down racers. Dev has an Android/iOS game out now.
Chaos Engine: Best top down shooter of all time.

There's probably more, but they spring to mind immediately.

[Herr Schatten]

I gave up on Paradroid '90 pretty quickly, the scrolling just felt so restrictive in comparison the the superb C64 game.

I think the decision to only scroll vertically had been made, because they wanted to do an ST version and that machine couldn't scroll horizontally well. Shame, really. However, what I do like about Paradroid '90 is that the little logic game when you take over a robot is significantly harder than on the C64. On the C64, I could literally take over the 999 with the 001, not so much on the Amiga. It also feels like the robots' weapons pack a little more punch in Paradroid '90. Cleaning a couple of decks with the earthquake weapon feels really satisfying.

Two other recommendations off the top of my head:

Rock'n'Roll - Superb game that does seem to get overlooked, somewhat similar to Quedex, if someone remembers that. It doesn't look like much, but it's very good. Excellent music, too
Lionheart - Platformer that feels a bit clunky by today's standards, but by no means worse than some console games in a similar vein. (I'm playing Indy's Greatest Adventures on the SNES at the moment, so I can tell.) Great use of the Amiga's graphics and sound abilities. By the guys who later made Flink on the Mega Drive and Lomax on the PS1.

[Aguraki]

had an ST and an amiga and games Ive most played were:

wizkid
north and south
spiderman
dungeon master
rainbow island
populous
turrican 1 and 2
maniac mansion and voyageurs du temps
all lucasfilm games and some sierra.
new zealand story
great giana sister
flood

and many others,it was an awesome machine but I played on the ST more since I had it first.

[cools]

The best breakout style game ever: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poing_(video_game)

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.

And never mind a few old rave tracks - hundreds if not thousands were produced entirely on an Amiga before they were pressed!

[Skykid]

But I'm especially curious about the experience of being a gamer in the UK in the 80s.

I'm a little young to have enjoyed the full brunt of 80's gaming, I really didn't get the chance to dig in until around '88. But the hangover was there for years after. Spent a lot of time playing SWIV, Barbarian and Dizzy on friend's Amigas, and less time playing Zool, Street Fighter II (lol) and other stuff. Played lots of Atari too.

It was an awesome time though. Cassette Tapes in all the newsagents, Zzap64 and Crash magazines on the shelves and in the school libraries, and all the advertising in kids movies. Ahh nostalgia.

Of the tape based hardware I had the most fun with the C64: Ikari, Ghouls n' Ghosts, Labyrinth, Batman, Flimbo's Quest and Fiendish Freddy - and lots of stripy loading screens that made your eyes go weird.

[Herr Schatten]

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.

[Wonderbanana]

@her

Rock n Roll was simply wonderful, ive spent hours playing that and still would.

I adore Turrican II that much I'm still considering dedicating a cab to it

The other game I spent hours on was Utopia.

Midwinter was cracking too.

It's a personal thing but I prefer the Amiga to the MD by some margin, the graphics looked better and the sound was amazing. Shame it's a floppy based system, if it wasn't id probably collect for it.

Oh and for shmups, Silkworm on the amiga is ace!

Edit: Supercars II - amazing top down racing game by Magnetic Fields.

[dcharlieJP]

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.

No real argument that the Megadrive pushed out much better arcade conversions but the Amiga (and ST) had a huge array of great games.

The games i tended to get more involved in were a little more involved than what id play on the MD :
Millenium 2.2 , Warhead, Lazer Squad, Starglider 2, Sentinel - and of course the King of Amiga games : Sensible World Of Soccer.

All this said - C64 was my favourite period of gaming. Was fun when i hooked up with my wife as my sat and showed each other games we played as kids - her with Famicom and me with c64 and spectrum. (Firmly in the C64 camp - again, that sound chip...)