/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5414703
becuase its shit

The Amiga's downfall was being a next-generation 16-bit machine that people still used like an 8-bit home computer.

The Amiga's downfall was being a next-generation 16-bit machine that people still used like an 8-bit home computer.

It's disappointing. The thing had the potential to be great, instead it sunk into an ocean of shitty platformers, shitty ports, and games like Shadow of the Beast that have fantastic audiovisuals but very little gameplay or content.

The Mega Drive/SNES certainly have their share of mediocre platform games and inferior ports, but the main thing that holds the Amiga back is the loading times for games. It's not that much of a problem with stuff from the mid to late 80s but once we get into Road Rash/Desert Strike territory it's just...no.

>>5414703
Never played one when it was light years ahead of DOS/IBM machines.

They get salty.

>>5414703
It’s just a way to start /int/ flame wars. Us Americans have almost no experience with those.

>>5414847
>Never played one when it was light years ahead of DOS/IBM machines.

Let's do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH3emf7NGg0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxef66P3Z3g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuJldAn0hR8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbbkDEeolYg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb6VvtAcmb8

>>5414926
>cherry picking the absolute worst shovelware you could think of
Every fucking Amiga thread I swear.

>>5414703
The only people who dislike the Commodore Screen Gems are underageb&

>>5414926
What a sad conversion of Strider compared with the MD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYfs6_CeQzA

>>5414952
As usual they didn't have access to the arcade source and probably had six weeks to finish.

>>5414703
It doesn't. It only triggers Yanks.
Amigas were the definition of gaming back before PCs running DOS caught up in gfx and sound around the late 90s.

>>5414979
>Amigas were the definition of gaming back before

If US Gold and Ocean were the definition of gaming, I'm glad I missed it.

The only good Amiga games ever were made by LucasArts, EA, and Microprose all American devs.

>>5414990
Even there you still had to deal with horrible load time and nightmare fuel copy protection.

I'd have to say Sierra's Amiga efforts were pretty lousy and phoned-in.

>>5415010
I seem to recall that Sierra did not do any development in-house other than PC compatibles and anything on the Amiga or whatever was outsourced. I still enjoy the early SCI engine games on the Amiga, like Leisure Suit Larry 2, and 3, Space Quest 3, and Quest for Glory 1 and 2. Those weren't too terrible compared to other platform ports. You think Larry 2 is bad on the Amiga? Check out the Atari ST version. It will make you nauseous.

>Amigas cost 400 quid when I was 11 and wanted one but couldn't afford it.
>Amigas now cost 400 quid and I still can't afford one.

>>5415017
It's not a very well-guarded secret that Sierra were a PC-centered company.

During the late 80s, almost every single game looked better on the Amiga than on the PC or any other machine for that matter. So I reckon that many software houses bothered to draw enhanced graphics for the Amiga, or at least add more colors. What made the expectation so unreasonable? Did LucasArts lose so much by investing on the Amiga at the time? I'm still glad I never had to look at pink and aqua graphics like PC owners.

>>5415040
Hmm, that's what pretty much all companies did (except for those dreaded ST ports). At least they custom-mapped the palette. Main problem is the poor performance of their interpreter on the Amiga, because they didn't bother to optimise it properly. Also by the early 90s the Amiga was becoming less and less relevant as a platform.

I found many of the Sierra games (especially the King's Quest series) absolutely impossible without a solution. Dying all the time and getting up to a certain stage and realising you'd forgotten to do something or pick something up was also very annoying.

The LucasArts games were much, much better designed and much less frustrating.

>>5415050
LA's "not dying" surely helped, but the early adventures (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, and Last Crusade) also had their WTF moments. The zeppelin action sequence in Last Crusade still puts me off everytime I play that one. The interface was much better though and also helped that you could find your way through the game more easily.

>>5415072
Sierra's games were certainly designed with an entirely different philosophy - definately different from today's approach to game design.

LucasArts had deaths in some games, even later ones. I'm fairly sure I remember even Full Throttle having death scenes, but I know that Fate of Atlantis had them. Zak McKracken had some horrible dead-ends and deaths. Finding yourself with no money left would leave you stranded and no way to continue.

Sierra had an excessive amount of death scenes though, but at least they made the deaths kind of funny, with every death having their own unique death message.

>>5415081
More accurately:

The only LucasArts games that had several death scenes and dead ends in the same way Sierra titles featured them were their first three ones: Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken & Last Crusade (just deaths, no dead ends). Even then, more often than not the dead ends were rather fair and easy to understand - for the era, whereas some Sierra titles were impossibly unforgiving; you could easily miss and item you couldn't even see in the beginning and never know you need it till the end (LSL 2 anyone?). Running out of money in Zak or getting a character killed in Maniac Mansion were obvious indications that you needed to reload; with Sierra you just kept your fingers crossed -and a load of save games.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis only had a couple of death scenes and you literally needed to beg to be killed to witness them. Full Throttle is not even applicable as we're talking about Amiga ports, but since you mentioned it you could only die in the very final scene (and the game automatically reloaded for you).

Don't get me wrong, I love several Sierra titles. My main beef with them were the lazy Amiga ports. The first titles of their main series (King's Quest, Space Quest, Larry etc.) looked like 8-bit computer games, and the later ones were either extremely ugly (Space Quest IV) or painfully slow (King's Quest V). They just never bothered to learn how to exploit the Amiga to its full potential.

But again, Sierra were a PC-centered company and didn't bother enhancing graphics for other platforms. Since they used the PC as a baseline, they just did direct ports to other platforms. It's pretty clear from reading around and listening to stories from people who worked for Sierra that the vision was the PC compatible was the future, and they based almost all of their designs off that. What's interesting is that they started as an Apple II developer, yet they didn't do a whole lot for the Mac either. Their 680x0 SCI engine wasn't very well optimized at all (it takes a 33Mhz 68040 Mac to get the same speed out of the VGA Space Quest remake that you got on a 16Mhz 386). The only exception was the Apple IIgs which usually got enhanced music.

>>5414952
Actually this was one of Tiertex's better arcade ports on the Amiga. You don't even want to ask why the really bad ones were like.

The AGI Amiga games did support the mouse but with no actual pathfinding it was next to useless.

Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga at least had a proper ending, the DOS version just displayed a message like "Congratulations you won!" and exited you out to the DOS prompt. What a letdown after all the effort spent on beating the game. From what I read, the ending cutscene would have required an additional floppy so they left it out to save money and because they figured few people would ever get to the end anyway.

>>5415172
Speaking of poorly-optimised games, Civilisation on the Amiga ran considerably slower than the PC. It ran as if you were using an 8086 PC or something.

I don't dislike Sierra, they have a bunch of nice games, but Lucas games just feel more polished and the graphics generally feel more...organic? I don't know how to explain, but Sierra graphics, animations and gameplay always felt subtly wrong to me. At least less right than LA.

>>5415172
I agree. 80s Sierra adventures on the Amiga only used 16 colour palettes even when they could have had 32 and the 90s ones ported from VGA games apparently used some ridiculous translation program to convert the graphics to the Amiga which went like colours 0-7 mapped to 0, 8-15 to 1....248-255 to 32, etc.

I grant you that LA did seem like they actually properly converted their games for the Amiga.

>>5414990
Your point being?

LucasArts games were just funnier and had a Looney Toons kind of feel to them. Sierra stuff was...bland and the humor just wasn't that good or sharp. I think I remember reading a pretty old Roberta Williams' interview and she came off to me like an extreme Christfag. Well that's probably a bit extreme of myself to say it that way and I'm really not trying to diss anybody's beliefs, but that was just too much about delivering "family values and a moral message" and that she was totally against Sierra going another way.

>>5415284
Quest for Glory could be quite funny at times, but King's Quest was pretty bland.

>>5415284
>same company that produced LSL

>>5415275
That most of the Amiga's games were shovelware, but the few non-shovelware games it had weren't even made by Europeans.

>>5415309
Other than perhaps Psygnosis, they were great. I don't think anyone would claim Ocean or Elite made anything good on the Amiga.

Any software house who specialised in licenced games like US Gold or Ocean were particularly bad because this was at a time when you could buy a licence for £20,000 and make absolute garbage games done in a month by one guy.

>>5415172
Bit surprised because while you could argue that the Amiga and Atari ST were minor platforms in North America and not worth investing tons of money into, the Mac definitely was anything but insignificant.

>>5415309
Is that really even true though? I always perceived the US developed stuff as poorly-optimised messes while European games were better designed for 50 fps animation and whatnot.

>>5415380
Cinemaware and Westwood were American.

>>5415386
I agree, they were American studios and so were LucasArts, but they didn't produce the kind of games I'm referring to, meaning the smooth, fast arcade action like you had in Turrican, Zout, Hybris, and whatnot.

>>5415395
You're right. American games were mostly tech demos or shovelware coming from other platforms. There are no smooth arcade-type games I can remember coming from there.

TempleOS

>>5415403
Wrath of the Demon is the only NTSC Amiga game I can name that actually does 50 fps arcade action. Were there any others?

>>5415395
>>5415380
Most arcade-style games from US developers were ports from other systems and they all appeared early in the Amiga's lifespan, ie. 1985-87, and were seldom properly optimised.

One issue with the US game market was that computer gaming tended to be perceived as being for an adult audience who favoured slow, deep-thinking strategy, RPG, and flight sim games and if you were a kid and wanted button-mashers, you were supposed to just play those on the NES or Mega Drive.

>>5415406
I did think of a couple of other arcade-style games that might fit the bill also. EA's coin-op conversion of Marble Madness was probably the first game that was truly optimised for the Amiga period, never mind that it came out of North America. Prince of Persia also got a pretty slick conversion to the Amiga.

It's virtually a complete bust when it comes to decent shmups coming out of NTSC developers, though. All the worthwhile ones published by companies in that part of the world were Euro imports. There was a very obscure shmup developed/published in the US in 1993 called Overdrive. While its good looks are reminiscent of SWIV, it all disintegrates when things start to move.

The Amiga and Atari ST were not major platforms in North America so it generally wasn't seen as worthwhile to invest any significant amounts of money into them. I believe they sold less than a million Amigas in North America.

>>5415284
>>5415304
Pretty sure Roberta meant it in reference to her own games.

Tiertex and friends had no seeming point to their existence other than ruining children's birthdays/Christmases.

I remember reading about Shigeru Miyamoto throwing chairs around the room in disgust and making them redo the water in the Super Mario Sunshine levels because he thought it wasn't good enough. The Dragon Quest 4 team spent an entire year just working on the AI.

Somehow I doubt any Amiga coders at Ocean or Elite had this kind of autism or dedication to their craft.

European games aren't well designed, generally speaking. They tend to have stupid things just for the sake of it.

>>5415475
Explain.

>>5415476
C64 and Amiga shovelware made by Euro demosceners as an exercise in showing off how many sprites they can move on screen at once or how many layers of parallax scrolling they can do with almost no thought to the actual game design or mechanics.

>>5415483
t. American who knows jack-all about Amiga games

>>5415501
Dude, the Amiga was shit aside from very specific games from Team17 and one or two additional developers. let it go already, European games were always shit, I'm sorry I'm hurting your precious childhood memories. why don't you go play James Pond and shut the fuck up.

>>5415514
Team 17 is like the ultimate meme studio though.

>>5415514
>European games were always shit
>british amiga and speccy games count for everything in Europe

>>5415551
To be honest Giana Sisters and Turrican are pretty overrated too and those were made by a German dev.

>>5414703
Why? It was great for the price. Gaming, productivity software. You could even do some limited rendering, image/video editing on that thing. IBM machines at the time looked primitive in comparison.

I never owned the A500. Instead I bought an A2000 the same year with financial support of my parents.

>>5415559
Rainbow Arts were another dev who were great on the 8-bit machines but kind of went off the rails when the 16-bitters came out.

>>5414990
Europeans did understand the hardware better when it came to performance and optimization. All top-tier demo sceners from the time are from Europe.

>>5415573

>>5415483
>>5415475
Good programming and good game design are not necessarily one and the same.

Supposedly Project Firestart was intended for the Amiga but EA forced them to put it on the C64 instead because the market for the game would be bigger.

>>5415395
And even when you're talking Turrican or Z-Out, none of them can touch the best Konami or Capcom shmups.

>>5415594
Those games amounted to some demosceners playing Salamander in the arcade and going "Hey, I can do that."

>>5415594
Nigga please, Turrican is legendary in Eurolandia.

It's also like comparing Apples and Oranges, a specialty of /vr/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNAkBxNt0Dc

Turrican is typical of what I'm referring to. The programming and frame rate are excellent but the level design isn't and the enemies are very bland and unmemorable compared with Mega Man or whatever.

>>5415594
I thought we were comparing euro vs murican?

>>5415621
That was covered in >>5415410

Or as Chris Stamper said, "When the consoles came, the amount of time and effort put into a game trebled since when you were selling a cartridge for £40 instead of a £7 game on a cassette tape, you weren't going to skimp on things. Nintendo's edict that a game had to be bug-free left us shaking our heads. Bug free? Impossible! Yet we managed."

>>5415040
even the 90s.
I remember seeing screenshots and hearing sound clips from games like Dune 2, Worms and other early-mid 90's games and being appauled at how bad they looked and sounded.
the Amiga's only problems were really that it didnt sell in the US for some reason and that it was really really fucking expensive.
They were huge in Australia until about 95 or 97 or so. I remember my high school still had them in the art/graphic design room until about 99 when they sold them off. My dad bought 20 of them second hand, took all the best parts from them all and made one super Amiga out of them all. It was so full of shit we had to sit on the case to keep everything inside while a second person screwed it closed. No such thing as overheating or airflow back then, lol.

>>5415643
>the Amiga's only problems were really that it didnt sell in the US for some reason
It didn't have good productivity software. No Lotus 123, no WordPerfect, no Excel. The screen resolution was too low to be useful for productivity stuff anyway and hard disks were never properly supported. Those were the three biggest reasons.
>and that it was really really fucking expensive
Actually it was much cheaper than a PC or Mac.

>>5415501
but he's right.

t. old school member of demoscene.

>>5415639
I don't think that's really the reason, ever since polygons became the standard euro devs have made great stuff.

>>5415648
I've mentioned before how the Lemon64 top 100 games list had 63 NTSC C64 games and only 37 PAL ones while the Worst Games list was almost entirely (like 90%) PAL ones.

>>5415650
Since the 3D era gaming is a mass commercialized industry with huge budgets, not some guy writing ZX Spectrum games for beer money.

>>5415647
>no WordPerfect

There was a rather shitty Amiga port of WordPerfect and a really horrible port of MS Works.

A big problem with the Amiga from an American POV was that it had Commodore's name on the case. People didn't tend to take Commodore that seriously as a company compared with IBM or Apple and they certainly did nothing to dispel this image.

Arguably that also applied to the Atari ST which was popular in Europe especially Germany as an office machine, but no American company was going to have an office full of computers with an Atari logo on them.

The Atari ST had a bit of a niche for MIDI composition, but after 1988 Atari shifted most production to Europe where the market was bigger.

In case you're still doubting which was the superior machine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5h1smUA4lQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaejwInoRPw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f8Oc1ANHAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arLSgEmK6cw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cehaqXFCGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O6v5VNFCXc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B65t1VRGekw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apBUOVU2oZg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O3inzWEKyI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcyPvbqHjrM

>>5414703
Underage youropoors get butthurt when they learn that lots of Americans had better Amigas before they picked up theirs at the fire sale

The Amiga is only noted for video production, an application basically no one cares about and whose niche was quickly supplanted by PCs and Macs. Maybe the Amiga would be remembered more fondly here if it wasn't filled to the brim with terrible shovelware and European """games""".

This is the truth that Euros desperately try to deny.

>>5415790
>only noted for video production
>single-handedly brought affordable video editing, digital painting, 3D rendering and digital music composing to the masses

kids and their narrow, game-shaped world views...

>>5414703
Coz they try out 1 or 2 terrible games instead good ones, then they give up instantly.

>>5414791
Shitty platformers came out for pretty much every single home computer and console, since these were all the rage at this time, so this wasn't a problem exclusive to the Amiga. Even worse were companies that were trying to push their shitty mascots through these. Luckily these times are over now ... well maybe beside a current console company who still pushes this antiquated stuff and just won't kill their mascots like all the other did in time.

Also, despite what some people usually write in these threads, that statement that Amiga devs from the US usually were making adventures, strategy games, etc. versus "european" devs who only did platformers, arcade ports and shmups isn't true either. I still remember especially the many, many business/management sims that came out for the Amiga, especially from german devs, the many french adventures like the ones from Coktel Vision and the really great ones from Delphine, heck "The Settlers" or "Battle Isle" originally were Amiga games from europe ffs. So I don't know what some are talking about. Even a lot of productivity software was available for the Amiga computers, a lot of still relevant rending/ray tracing software packages started on the Amiga, like Cinema 4D.

>>5415801
>quickly
The Amiga was the only serious solution that didn't cost as much as a house in that and other niches for nearly a decade. How can you call that quick when you've only been alive for what, 12 years?

>>5416829
>12
Not quite, try again.

>>5415529
I generally wonder where all the Team 17 praise is coming from. People treat it like they are on ID level, but they were hardly top devs even on the platform. When we are speaking about games that are truly, without compromises, can be considered great - what have they done? It's Worms (aka Scorched Earth Gold edition) and... Nope, that's it. OK, on Amiga it's Alien Breed 3D (the rest of the series were derivative in every way), Superfrog (there are better platformers on Amiga), Body Blows series (meh), and some euroshmups that all are the epithome of the worde "euroshmup".

>>5416908
They made fun games. All what counts.

>>5416917
Fun is subjective, it is not something that game has, it is something you are having when playing it.

>>5416932
The dumb faceless masses disagree. They made entertaining games. Not technical marvels like id soft did, but good entertainment.

>>5414703
Didn't have the fun games or the smooth performance of a Genesis or SNES.
Didn't have the functionality or the processing power of a DOS PC.
It really was the worst of both worlds.

>>5415647
I mean that's fair enough, but it was the go-to machine for graphic design and audio software. CG in 90s shows like Alex Mack was done with Amigas iirc

>>5416848
>Not quite
Surely you're at least eleven and a half?

>>5416936
>Didn't have the fun games or the smooth performance of a Genesis or SNES.
OCS Amigas were older hardware than the MD, they're closer to a Master System capability-wise. Not until AGA did the Amiga about match the 4th gen consoles for capability.

>>5416908
>>5415529
It seemed to me that the very worst Amiga games were actually the arcade conversions and licenced titles since they were usually done to huge time pressure unlike the original titles you got from Team 17 or Rainbow Arts where the programmers had a lot more time to work on the thing.

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

This isn't a fault of the hardware itself but Euro game designers seemed to have zero concept of the word "taste". Tacky as fuck. This looks like some bad browser/Flash game.

>>5416936
Did I also mention 95% of Amiga games were designed for a one button joystick when the thing could support three buttons in hardware? Why.

>>5417276
A lot of Amiga games were Sega arcade ports

>>5417269
>Music: We Music - The Return
Case in point. They couldn't get past the tacky demoscener title screen

>>5417276
>Did I also mention 95% of Amiga games were designed for a one button joystick when the thing could support three buttons in hardware? Why.
Most notoriously Street Fighter 2.

>>5415419
About 4 million Amigas were sold worldwide from 1985 to 94. The two largest markets were Germany and the UK and North American sales were about 700,000 total units.

>>5417397
It's not as if the Amiga was some mythical white elephant heard about but never seen in the US. They were always niche, but they certainly existed and had an annoying Usenet community. In fact when I look at archived Usenet posts from the 80s-90s, interestingly most of the Amigafags you see were Americans and not Europeans (did Euros not have any online access back then?)

>>5417425
They existed alright. They were annoying, always trying to pick fights with PC users, and most of them were furries.

>>5417269
Why does everyone like to cherrypick this fucking much?

>>5414703
It only triggers americans coz they're too ignorant about what to play on it, so they end up only playing the garbage games.

>>5415419
Shut up when adults talk.

>>5417161
Try 40s