Racketboy "Amiga shmup essentials" article

[Herr Schatten]

A friend of mine mentioned this one

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Another honorable mention : Mega Typhoon. 50fps, almost feels like pce

Oh, Mega Typhoon is amazing, technically. Seeing a proper bullet hell running on 1985 hardware certainly is impressive. The playability isn’t great, though, so it’s not much more than an interesting curio.

[the_knives]

From the article:

I dunno, in retrospective this seems very lenient towards Cope-com and still quite harsh on the Assembly Line. There are just three 1989 titles on the list by the way, and my playability award goes to the third one, Datastorm.

This makes for an interesting read.

https://retro-sanctuary.com/Comparisons ... adron.html

We used it as part of the background research when writing the guide. There are a lot of smaller and bigger differences between the Amiga and Megadrive versions of Battle Squadron once you dive into it.

BTW, I am the other dude that worked on the guide

[Turrican]

This makes for an interesting read.

https://retro-sanctuary.com/Comparisons ... adron.html

It does, and I enjoyed how deep It goes in comparing the graphics, counting colours and noticing tile blending.

I draw different conclusions from the same data though. Sacrifying tile variety and dropping the neat little tricks (extra colours on the menu bar) goes the extra mile in a console environment where ROM space is precious and expensive. The port makes those sacrifices and brings home the complete package, unlike in Xenon 2 and The Killing Game Show cases. This makes It in line with the treatment Shadow of the Beast received, and easily better than other situations back then, including Cope-com's Sword of Sodan.

I'm not really for playing shmups with analog controls, and mouse Battle Squadron sounds like just a little better than the fabled "Musha with XE-1 AP".

The main criticism left is therefore about difficulty, but when you read into the lines, you realize retro sanctuary is criticizing a default setting difficulty, which can be altered quite a lot and in interesting ways.

Congrats to both for the your piece though

[RuySan]

For me Banshee should be among the top tier. Yes, it commits every sin of euroshmups, but revels in them and is a huge load of fun. There's no other shmup like it and the sense of escalation is incredible.

Also, Agony is a great game because of the visuals. It's a different experience sure, but I love it.

[Nahar]

For me Banshee should be among the top tier. Yes, it commits every sin of euroshmups, but revels in them and is a huge load of fun. There's no other shmup like it and the sense of escalation is incredible.

Also, Agony is a great game because of the visuals. It's a different experience sure, but I love it.

Agony is a very decent game, in fact. It has some weird design decisions like putting a gynormous hitbox on the owl, but a good game overall.

[MJR]

Wow, this is a pretty great resource. Most of those games are from the early 90s, which was when the Amiga owners I knew were jumping ship to IBM/DOS computers (Wolfenstein 3D was spring 1992, that was big). I'd bet a lot of these games are pretty low profile among anyone who's not into Amiga emulation or who stuck it out with Commodore until the end. I'd have to imagine the shmup frame of reference for your average Amiga-knower is like, Blood Money, Xenon II and that killer port of R-Type.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Japanese developers had worked on that system

There were Amiga owners in Japan, but mainly hardcore hobbyists who hung around computer shops and would pay for the foreign curiosity. Tetsuya Mizuguchi said the two main influences for Rez were Xevious (the secret most important shmup ever) and the Amiga version of Xenon 2.

From my own interactions with people, the Amiga is known in Japan amongst the type of person who would know about 1980s computer platforms. But it's primarily known as the source for the yōge (Western games) that lurk indefinitely in 'Top 10 worst Mega Drive kusoge' videos. Sword of Sodan is like a standard-bearer for the clumsy inferiority of Western game development.

Had Commodore landed the right Japanese distribution partner and taken off there, my guess is you'd have a lot of X68000 downports since that was already the standard platform for late 80s Japanese arcade development, and the architecture would have made it easy & cost effective. But the probable broader result on the Amiga community would've been higher design standards across the board; things like having to choose between sound fx and music would have likely become less common among Western devs. This was certainly the result when Microsoft entered the console market, PC dev and Japanese consultant contracts in tow. Almost overnight Western games adopted (vastly superior) control, physics and interface standards which had been common in Japanese arcade & console games since the 1980s.

Thanks, This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen here. I would love to see more, links, anything

[OldSkoolShmuper]

Hybris review from Electronic Gaming Monthly (May 1989)



In the summer of 1989, my dad and I were at a B. Dalton Bookstore in Chicago, and downstairs there was a Software Ect. store where they had an Amiga setup. This was my first time seeing an Amiga computer. Went there several times, I remember 3 Amiga games Battle Chess, Hybris and Shadow of the Beast. I remember trying to play Hybris. It looked and sounded great. I never got to play it again until at least a decade later on an emulator.