/vr/ - Retro Games

The best artists on Amiga has come from the demoscene.

>Our mechanics are kind of shaky but look how many fucking colors we can display
Platforms always play to their strengths and high-color graphics were the Amiga's

>>4937520
>use VGA card
>welp, sorry, Amiga

>>4937147
Amiga also had god tier sound.

>>4937147
how many of these games are actually good though?

Obviously Turrican is great...is that it?

>>4937714
Even then, Turrican still can't touch Mega Man.

>>4937714

Amiga games? There are plenty, Worms, Cannon Fodder, Moonstone, etc

>>4937717
>mega cuck
just no dude
megaman was always garbage. the quality of any NES game is exaggerated because we we're starved for good games

Even the guys who founded Rare were amazed at the difference in Q/C and sophistication of Nintendo's games compared to home computer stuff.

>>4937147
How could they learn pixel art back then?

>>4937147
What arcade ports were actually worth playing on the Amiga, besides the following?

>Pang
>Rainbow Islands
>New Zealand Story
>R-Type
>R-Type II
>Ninja Warriors
>Detana Twinbee (unlicensed)
>Silkworm
>Marble Madness
>Super Street Fighter II New Challengers
>Rodland

what are some good exclusive platformers (or space shooters) worth checking out?

>>4937736

NES is vastly overrated as a whole (most of the NES-library is really fucking bad and honestly worse than the libraries of many other contemporary platforms), yes, but Mega Man was good.

The best NES games (actually made for the NES, so not arcade-ports):
>Mega Man (in general, every game's pretty much the same so just one general entry)
>Super Mario 3
>Zelda 1

Comparable Amiga games (same criteria):
>Worms
>Cannon Fodder
>Monkey Island
>Moonstone

>>4937747

That was one of the strengths of the Amiga though, the sheer amount of homebrew-stuff.

>>4937775
Monkey Island was a PC game that only got a phoned in Amiga port.

>>4937775
>Mega Man (in general, every game's pretty much the same so just one general entry)
>Super Mario 3
>Zelda 1

And SMB2 and Castlevania 3 and FF1-3 and DQ1-4 and Ninja Gaiden and TMNT and so forth.

I'm not precisely sure why he's ranking the Amiga against the NES since one is an 8-bit system and the other is 16-bit. Amiga versus Mega Drive would be a better comparison.

>>4937795

Hate to go all /v/ on you, but a lot of those are meme-games that aren't as fun in hindsight when you aren't a kid. The point of my list wasn't to mention every game that was fun, that would take ages for both platforms, my point was to compare the, in my opinion, top games versus the top games. Otherwise I could rattle off shit like Silk Worm, Turrican, Speedball, James Pond and whatever the fuck else that was fun, but not top-tier.

Also, Castlevania was never good.

>>4937807

Someone else compared Mega Man to Turrican, that's why.

>>4937812
>Hate to go all /v/ on you, but a lot of those are meme-games that aren't as fun in hindsight when you aren't a kid
And what would make Superfrog not a meme game that's only fun when you're a kid.

>>4937817

Nobody mentioned Superfrog, so nothing?

The Amiga had top-tier visual/audio capabilities for its day, and the games reflected that. However, its clock speed was pretty low; the A1200, for instance, ran at 14Mhz. That made it comparable to the oldest, bottom-end i386 processor , and slower than any i486 processor.

Despite that slow clock speed, the dedicated, specialist architecture could match or outperform IBM pc's that cost twice or even three times as much when it came to putting colors on screen and playing pretty tunes.

...Until it couldn't.

3D, even fake, Doom-style 3D required processing power, and that was basically a no-go for Amiga architecture. Generalized computing won out over specialized computing. 3D is what killed the Amiga.


Funilly enough, we're now back in a situation where specialized computing is ahead; processors play second fiddle to graphics cards when it comes to pumping out pixels and polygons, and we've been here for a while.

If Amiga had managed to hold on until graphics cards became a thing, the market could have looked very different.

>>4937827

Yeah, as soon as Doom hit that was the beginning of the end for Amiga. It had a few more years of good (even great) output, but the writing was on the wall

>>4937827
that's like double sega genesis speed though

>>4937827
>The Amiga had top-tier visual/audio capabilities for its day, and the games reflected that

Not really, no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbbkDEeolYg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTYeaISxe_0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RDgt26Zcio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu9plquyhiQ

>>4937857

How old are you? Cherry picking examples won't work, I was a kid in the hayday of the Amiga, and I was always excited to play games at my friends Amiga back then because they nearly always looked and sounded better on the Amiga compared to what I had (a NES and a Sega Megadrive).

If you want to do a comparison, then find the most graphically impressive game from the Amiga in year 19xx and compare it to the most graphically impressive game on platform X of the same year

>>4937869
>hayday

Amiga games mostly amount to selling the sizzle without the steak. They look nice but the design and gameplay of its games is usually laughably bad. I mean, it was hard to compete with the NES having some of the best and most well-funded game devs in the world when most Amiga games were coded by two guys in a Hungarian commieblock apartment.

>>4937523
>vga card
>1985

>>4937881

I'm a Swede, what's the term? Heyday?

>>4937775
PC games as usual have more variety.

>>4937890

PC-games of the time were pretty shit, though (graphically and audibly). They became better later on.

>>4937893
>Amiga
>were pretty shit
u wot

>>4937901

PC and Amiga are separate, unless you go into full autist mode with definitions.

>>4937889
VGA came out in 87 when the Amiga was only two years old.

>>4937907

Why does it matter? My favorite platform to play on as a kid was the Amiga, and that was in 1993-1996 or so. We had PC's, we had NES, we had Megadrive/Genesis, and still we chose the Amiga when it came to gaming because the games were just more fun, more varied and had better art/sound (generally).

>>4937935

Scratch that timeframe, 1992-1994 is probably more accurate.

>>4937935
>nostalgia goggles is an objective measure of something's quality
...

>>4937952

That argument doesn't work as I had access to all contemporary platforms at the time.

>>4937147
>>4937520
There were a lot of platformers that just had ugly gradients as background. Kinda vaporwave and definitely ugly. Like Robocod, available on every platform.
You'll probably like late C64 games like Mayhem in Monsterland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldo2ewLBt3Y

>>4937761
Ocean France made some good once, like Liquid Kids. Also Snow Bros and Dragon Breed.

>>4937538
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyHZbUNMMuw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKourb1mnc

The deja vu of another Amiga thread. Americans who with zero knowledge of the platform decry how shit it was, Europeans with minimal knowledge of the bigger (console) gaming scene of the time defend mediocre games they loved when they were 8 and clearly haven't played since. Rinse and repeat. Superfrog stamping on a human face forever.

>>4937857

Mongoloid posts the same fucking video of the awful Amiga version of the already fucking awful multiplatform Scooby Doo game by one of the most fucking awful publishers of the time they always post in Amiga threads to pretend it's representative of the majority of games on the platform. It's almost as tedious as the dickhead who always posts that webm of that shit 2D Playstation platform game in threads about how bad Playstation 3D games were.

Long live Amiga threads!

>>4937857
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oIHDudFegk

Forgot this gem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTK27II_Z2M

What the hell is this.

Most Amiga games look like some bad Flash/phone game.

>>4938307

Why would Europeans have little knowledge of the console scene at the time? We had the big names (NES, SNES, Sega-stuff) as well.

>>4938428

Also, Superfrog is pretty good

Anyone who grew up without Moonstone and 3-4 friends to play with didn't have a childhood

>>4938307
Did you only just realise that this site is shit?

>>4937714
>>4937717
Turrican is fucking shit. Terrible controls and level design. Mega Man has similar problems, specifically the NES ones.

>>4937907
i dislike amiga fanboys too but i don't think the average consumer could afford a VGA card in 87

>>4938428
Britain only had Sega consoles and Nintendo was irrelevant here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgDhnolRV28

Another lame C64 port with no attempt to properly utilize the Amiga's hardware.

>>4937147

The first Unreal. Cliffy B was big time inspired by the Amiga aesthetic and music scene

>be commodore
>make cutting egde home computers that were affordable
>eventually IBM/MS catch the business sector with their less efficient, more expensive machines
>"shit ibm has 20% marketshar mr tramiel what do we do?"
>*fires most of the staff and leaves with all the company's money*

Is this about right for Commodore's history? The transition from Amiga to MS-DOS was comparable to the dark ages, tech had to regress because businesses didn't want fancy graphics and people couldn't afford these monstrosities until years later.

The problem with computers based around custom ASICs is that it's very hard to upgrade or modify them much.

>>4937747
>games made by a team of professionals where multiple people work on one aspect are more polished than hobby or cheap contracted games made by 3 guys at most who each have to work on multiple aspects

>>4939528
Then it was rude for >>4937935 to claim the Amiga had better games.

The bar for commercial games in Europe was lower than the US. Most of it would be free or shareware by American standards.

I'm still laughing when I think about the praise for EGA trash like Commander Keen while I was playing smooth scrolling, 8 channel stereo sound, 64 colors on-screen plus blitter tricks games on the Amiga. Epic games are still listed as the first company that got """smooth scrolling""" out of a VGA card top kek. Shit doesn't compare to the glory that was Amiga.

>>4939641
Doesn't matter when you could just rent Genesis platformers from Blockbuster which still btfo anything on the Amiga.

>>4939645
Name one Genesis platformer that was more sophisticated than Last Samurai, Leander, Beast 2+3, and treasure island dizzy.

>>4939648
>and treasure island dizzy

>>4939460
Uh...

>>4939648
Im an Amiga fanboy, but even I admit that Shadow of the Beast series was pure garbage gameplay wise.

>>4939648
Vectorman? Derp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErm-YRYzjM

There's nothing special about this and it doesn't even have any sfx.

>>4939664
It's the same problem with TID. The devs were used to using all three C64 sound channels for music so they continued this same practice on the Amiga even though it had eight channels.

>>4939454

Okay, I am a Swede and we had it all.

>>4939662
>Vectorman

It came out in 1995 ffs

>>4939659
Beast 1 was crap, but 2+3 were really nice. Also technically great.

>>4939657
>treasure island dizzy
The world was huge, it had underwater areas and required different items to be used at specific locations. It was pretty sophisticated for its time.

>>4939681
TEN PINTS

>>4937761
arkanoid revenge of doh on amiga has better graphics and gameplay than the snes and maybe even the arcade version
pacmania is also good, the worst conversion i've seen is mercs

>>4939686
>did not read the post
Maybe it's ok on the C64, the Amiga port however blows chunks.

I do admit that xenon 1+2 were lacking when compared to 8bit PC-Engine's Gunhead.

>>4939691
They were focusing on graphics since the music was already perfect ;^)

>>4939698
If you consider that ear rape music "good".

where can i get full amiga rompack

What PC game made you think the era of the Amiga was over? For me, it was Wing Commander 1. When I saw some bloke play it on a huge ass VGA tube at CSS, I knew I had to play this.

>>4939704
Google TOSEC Amiga or TOSEC whdload

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8grmRqWQtU

Errghh...

the amiga games were beautiful because developers were still stuck with C64 mentality and limitations and had no idea how to utilize ginormous amount of memory other than making better graphics and music

>>4937891
Haydey*

>>4939705
when Doom came out Amiga was still struggling with simple raycaster games

>>4937857
> pc lamer
> cherry picking this hard
what a surprise. intel, gtfo.

>>4937523
> use vga
1987 - 320x200 (256 colors)
not bad. it was pretty cool.
> use OCS
1985 - 320x200 to 360×576 (4096 colors)
though HAM mode wasn't the easiest to work with, for photos, scans and video it was fucking awesome for that time. something intelfags didn't catch up with for years. It wasn't the IBM PC that dominated in tv/movie/video production industry. it was the amiga, along with stuff like the video toaster.

intel, get the fuck outside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYoGNto1_TU

Microprose really made some of the best Amiga games and they were American (until 1991 anyway when they outsourced Amiga development to Microprose UK). This looks like 1994 in 1987.

>>4937753
by doing it
BY DOING IT

>>4939720
> simple raycaster games
> doom
you really have no idea what you are talking about.

>>4939739
Only HAM game I know of was Pioneer Plague and it wasn't good. Graphics were great although it had those typical HAM artefacts.

>>4939739
>VGA can display 256 colors out of 262,144 total
>Amiga can display 32 colors out of 4096 total
...

>>4939705
Definitely Doom. It was the beginning of the end for Amiga from this point forward.

>>4937753
people had awesome art programs called deluxe paint. it's still used and well loved by a lot of people all these decades later.

>bodeans bordello beauties vol 8

VGA had a lot more colors than Amiga, still couldn't match it for fluidity of animation until local bus video, although most of the kinds of games you played on a computer were RPGs and sims that didn't depend on fast animation that much.

>>4939748
> Amiga can display 32 colors out of 4096 total
> being this retarded

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify#Original_Chip_Set_HAM_mode_(HAM6)

>>4937147
Can someone name these games? Especially top right? Top right seems really appealing to me and I Do not know why.

>>4939756
Pretty much useless for gaming purposes, it can only do static pictures.

>>4939757
Lionheart, Zool, Beneath a Steel Sky, Super Stardust, Turrican 2, Fightin' Spirit. You can download BaSS for free on GoG.

>>4939748
Nah, 32 colors was the bare minimum. Most games used way more colors using hardware tricks. Copper backgrounds for gradients, and games could use 64 colors without many limitations. Palette cycling was used extensively too. VGA was only better on paper when compared to professional Amiga 2D games.

>>4939760
sadly so :/

>>4939754
>although most of the kinds of games you played on a computer were RPGs and sims that didn't depend on fast animation that much
This is an America-centric view of history.

You can see for example the Amiga X-COM looks like shit. The graphics really struggled with only having 32 colors to use.

https://issuu.com/amigajay/docs/theamiga101bookpdf

Link relevant. A good read.

>tfw Mac master race could use 640x480x256 in 1987

>>4939761
That's BaSS? Guess I gotta get to playing it now, it has been in my backlog for ages but something about that image really turns me on.

>>4939770
AGA version is better than PC. It had real music and not this adlib crap.

>>4939775
The Amiga has better music admittedly but every other category it fails hard especially the whole "swapping six floppy disks" bit.

>>4939773
> be in 1987
> mac ii with 8-bit video card
that'll be $15,000 thanks. (not kidding).

>>4939781
oh, i meant say in today's dollars.

>>4939776
This can be ignored by installing them to HDD. Every Amiga game can be installed using whdload. Not at the time of release of course.

>>4939773
Yeah if you wanted to pay $7000. That wasn't until the LC that the Mac had consumer level 640x480x256. It did provide an advantage for a while over PCs since most of the latter's games at that time were still in 320x200.

>>4939785
yea whdload came along far too late. during its life there was a point where it felt stupid that games were still coming on multiple disks that used custom trackloaders with some shitty protection (hi rob northern). there was no excuse not to have games be hd installable.. except this cynical anti-piracy attempt prevented it.

What the fuck was wrong with Amiga developers?

>actually damaging people's disk drives

>>4939792
At a chaos computer club event they made the Amiga drive "sing" a Mozart sonata. I'm so glad Amiga emulators also come with the various drive state noises.

>>4939792
yes, some protections were really fucking stupid. some c64 protections were well known too for knocking drives out of alignment.

The AGA machines were never adequately supported; right up to the end, most games were still designed for the A500 with no hard disk.

Not Apple IIs though. The Disk II could survive the toughest copy protections and it had a controller so low-level that no copy protection in existence was uncopyable if you had the right software.

>>4939792
I remember giving my older brother soldering instructions for the x-copy copy cable. When used in the dedicated nibbler mode, it would copy every game. But it took way longer.

>>4939798
>>4939773
>Apple fanboys
brainletwojack.jpg

I think it was partially the influence of comic books the demoscene on UK artists and partially the OCS having a fuckhuge master palette but a low onscreen color limit, which encouraged limited hues with subtle shading.

>>4939797
They were useful for porting PC games tho. A futile attempt as we know today.

>>4939797
>AGA
>still using planar graphics
Y u do dis.

It had a lot of mediocre shovelware rubbish that autists think was killer because they played it when they were 10 and don't remember how shite the game actually was.

>>4939832
idiocy is why. should have came with chunky mode support from the start.

VESA and SB16 was the end of Amiga. There was no hope at that point of beating PCs for gaming.

>>4939857
> be american
> produce the most amount of public domain and shareware trash for the amiga
> denials 25+ years later
> it's like the tampa bay amiga club and fred fish collections never existed
wew. never gets old.

>>4939867
Yes, those were PD meaning we didn't actually expect people to pay for them unlike in Europe.

>>4939774
It's an okay game. Great opening and premise but it kind of just plays out like any other jokey adventure game.

>>4939771

Neat!

>>4939878
Well, I like jokey adventure games. I just recently replayed some of my childhood favorites like Kyrandia and Discworld. I unironically don't like Monkey Island as much as I like many others.

>>4939742
Uh huh. Now compare their budget against the budget of the typical European developer. It's not even a fair comparison.

User groups were a big part of the computer scene in America in the 70s-80s, of course they died out in the 90s with PC homogenization.

I bought a couple of fish disks once. They had nice TOS Star Trek game. It was shit compared to Tobias Richter's game tho.

PD/shareware Amiga games were usually some crappy hi-res mode shit that ran in Workbench. Commercial games were mostly in low-res mode and booted directly from the floppy.

Anybody still use an Amiga today? I got this nice A1200 tower and I'm using a scandoubler since I don't have any multisync CRT monitors anymore, but the image quality is really bad. Faint black vertical lines in every low-res game, workbench looks great though. And the device gets scorching hot. What do?

Anybody here still use the BBC Micro? How can consolecucks and Amiganuses even compete?

No one outside of schools had that thing.

>>4940017
Ashens, is that you?

>>4940017
>LCD monitor

They do look nice but man are the games themselves trash. At this point as soon as I see an amiga platformer, shmup or any other action game I can be absolutely sure that they play like total shit compared to their jap counterparts. Should have spent more time learning basic game design instead of art maybe then the games wouldnt be completely disregarded by fans of the genres nowadays

>>4940028
Giana sisters block your path

>>4940028
^This. Turrican is the classic example of a game that looks cool but is designed horribly.

>>4940036
lol can't believe I took this meme seriously and checked this game and the sequels out years ago, what a waste of time

GGS doesn't have any music, levels, or enemies you'll remember longer than 5 minutes.

>>4940046
^This.

Amiga never really had the support of American devs and without that, they couldn't compete in terms of budget.

>>4940046
Music is by Chris Huelsbeck who later became one of the founders of Factor5. It's a great time I still remember very well.

I defy you to find a Chris Hulsbeck tune as good as anything Koji Kondo came up with.

>>4937249
Albion was on Amiga?

>>4940028
SMB3 looks like Lego Blocks yet it kills any and all Amiga platformers ever made for gameplay and level design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIjDBmz9ndU

See what I mean when I say they look like bad Flash games?

>>4937850
Which couldn't really do 3D even in machine code and without textures

>>4940153
Only thing the bloody Atari ST did better. Frontier first encounters was almost unplayable on a bare one Amiga.

>>4938345
A macintosh game made by two people, probably as their first game
>>4939761
>Beneath a Steel Sky
Not even an amiga original game, I bet the VGA PC version is better

>>4939771
>Ruff n Tumble
Godly platformer. Got sort of spiritual successor recently, Rad Rodgers, which wasn't recieved well.
>Benefactor
Didn't play.
>I forgot the name of this one with jumping blob
Funny and original platformer that reminds me of Gish.
>Don't know the game
>Don't know the game
>Cannon Fodder
Great gameplay, timeless style.
>Something pinball
Something pinball.
>Chaos engine
Overrated.
>Superfrog
Didn't play.
>Don't know the game
>something Alien breed
Good top-down shooters, they were.
>Banshee
Unresponsive clunky controls, shitty sound design, generally overrated game from the time when any somewhat competent game for Amiga was getting 10s just because it is there.

>>4938331
>literally programmed by Eastern Europeans

>>4940080
Come on. . . !!

Gem'X - Main Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD-WE227W98

Bad Cat - Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcwuEVnMUvM

Jim Power in Mutant Planet - Pumpkin Fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z8wpNyU2eA

Katakis - Main Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxqzezn6lc0

The Amiga suffered from the unfortunate situation of American devs not caring enough to invest money it in and incompetent Euro devs with a $100 budget.

>>4940208
Uggh, how come Euro game music composers were incapable of doing anything but bathtub gargles?

>>4940209
Microprose and pretty much nobody else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMZP5zB6fCw

Why are Amiga threads so consistently terrible?

>>4940294
Jealous people trying to discredit the machine.

>>4940294
Americans are defending their chink consoles while yuropoors see Amiga as more than a computer.

>>4940294
Because the fans are all furries.

>>4939775
>shitty 4 channels remixes
>better than the great synthesized sound
why even bitch about xcom's adlib music when it has one of the best implementations? at least bitch about doom's fm support

Didn't they also put Civilization and Colonization on the Amiga?

>>4937147
too bad the gameplay was mostly shit

>>4940505
Doom was great on Gravis Ultrasound.

>>4940303
>Amiga as more than a computer.
What the fuck does that mean? What is it if not a computer, did it make coffee, too?

>>4940564
oh yeah if you have a real MIDI synth it sounds good, but i don't know what they were thinking with those FM patches.

>>4940586
Amiga means girlfriend. I always treated mine gently.

>>4940597
They don't sound good to you? I'm not an expert. My Yamaha card sounded a little better but Gravis wasn't bad at all. The standard model with 8mb tables.

>>4940548
Yes.

http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?list_title=civilization&submit.x=0&submit.y=0
http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=300

>>4940548
Both OCS and AGA versions.

>>4940608
the FM patches in doom are so bad that some people went out of their way to make new ones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_f4hMGmxYI

>>4937812
>Hate to go all /v/ on you,
Then don't.

>>4937147
Just a heads up, Eric Schwartz's complete animation collection and an enhanced Flashback version has been re-released for the CD32 today.

>>4941548
Isn’t that the furry faggot who later made anonymous porn?

>>4941597
Probably. Those animations were made before the term furry even existed.

>>4941597
I know nothing of the man, but >>4941548 says as much in a single image

>>4939748
ignoring HAM, the Amiga can display 32 colors each line and had a chipset specifically designed to do shit like changing the palette each line without hassle, so you typically had a lot more colors on screen at once (even if it was mostly for gradient backgrounds or water effects)

>>4939745
you literally can't read