The Amiga games libary vs The ZX Spectrum's

[PeteProdge]

It was pleasing to put the Atari 2600 up against the Speccy last week, and give a balanced and appreciative look at the Venn diagram intersection of their games libraries. Really chuffed that lots of you came up with examples where the Speccy just had to concede to it. I didn't want to turn it into a playground argument where we just side with the Speccy no matter what. And done so gracefully against a machine was objectively worse on nearly every specification.

This time the tables are turned. I'm putting the plucky 8-bit Speccy against the most popular 16-bit games computer of its time. The one you'd have seen in your late 80s Spectrum mags heavily advertised by Silica Shop as the path forward...

Amiga overview

Yeah, it's got Commodore in the name, the Speccy's mortal enemy, but the Amiga started out as an independent computer in its own right, ironically by an former Atari engineer and with a loan from Atari! It's not a souped-up Commodore 64 (and in another irony, many Commodore employees went over to Atari), but many C64 users saw it as the successor. Commodore purchased it in 1985, plonking it on the market and the high-end versions felt like competitors to the Apple Macintosh.

Putting aside those heavily expensive and serious-minded versions that came out early on (Amiga 1000/2000), the cheaper Amiga 500 was received as a games computer over in Europe. It went head-to-head with the Atari ST in what was the 16-bit wars during the time the 8-bits were slimmed down to three major platforms. Yeah, there was PC gaming, but those clunky IBM-compatible DOS PCs were pricey business machines, and your retinas would be punished under CGA mode and your wallet punished by an EGA upgrade (which still fell short of the visuals from the Amiga and ST).

The ST would fall by the wayside as the 1980s ended and I think it's safe to say even us Speccy owners went down the Amiga route (I certainly did), along with a lot of other 8-bit refugees. 3.5" floppy disks! Familiar brands like Ocean, US Gold and Gremlin! And X-Copy making 'backups' *cough* easier and quicker than yer tape-to-tape efforts. Plus you could, within limits, do some serious computing and be somewhat creative too, as it was like an Aldi knock off Apple Mac in many respects.

By 1992, the Amiga 1200 arrived and it felt like what the 128K introduction was for the Spectrum range. Much better, but at that point it was rather too late. Many gamers were satisfied by 16-bit consoles, with the mighty Sega Mega Drive facing off against the slightly-better-than-adequate Super Nintendo. Commodore responded with the CD32 console, which was effectively an Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM drive and no keyboard, but who wants Zool when there's Sonic? Commodore was hugely failing, Amiga taken up by Escom but like a King Canute, it could not beat the consoles, and plus, PC gaming had got its act together and you had Windows by this time.

To this day, people keep flinging money at the brand in many revival attempts, which never work out. I have fond memories of my Amiga 1200, I loved Deluxe Paint III, the Bullfrog games, the cheekiness of Amiga Power magazine (YS in all but name), the PD libraries, but it was hard to stick with in 1996!

A game where the Speccy beats the Amiga: Feud

I've always been bowled over by the magnificence of underrated budget game Feud (and when are you gonna finish that video on it, eh? - Ed), and here it is on a platform capable of stunning graphics, beautiful sound (the Speccy original never had any music, although MODs made in Eastern Europe certainly did), it should be absolutely hammering the Speccy original into the ground.

Yet it doesn't. At first glance, the Amiga graphics are outstanding, a lot more realism in there. When you start playing, the animation isn't as charming and what's a huge clanger, YOU CANNOT MOVE DIAGONALLY. Which makes the game a lot slower to carry out tasks/chasing. There's been no effort to have any music playing, which would be a doddle for the Amiga to do.

One thing in its favour though, I love the addition of those Satanic statues in the woods, that's properly creepy!



A vastly reduced colour palette, but used to great effect here. The Pickford brothers have put immense effort into every pixel, so you have something really detailed. It plays out on a black background and I'd argue that's actually its strength. It's a lot more straightforward than the overly grassy arena you see on the Amiga where things get lost and the repeated grass/mud tiles are visually annoying. The ZX Spectrum version has colourful sprites and scenery standing out a lot more. I suppose its like the look of Pac Man, the neons are more pleasing to the eye when laid on a black background. Oh, and you can fully read the spell book and most importantly, move diagonally!



A game where the Amiga beats the Speccy: Arkanoid

Pretty damned close to the arcade version in graphics and sound. And let's face it, with every Amiga having a mouse, it's the natural control method. For Speccy owners, you'll have to fork out fifty quid for such a device and it won't be supported here (until the MODs that hit the internet, but those don't count). I dare say it's actually BETTER THAN THE ARCADE VERSION because of mouse control. It feels so right, a lot better than the coin-ops twiddly dial.



Over on the Speccy, it's not a bad game, it's what can be expected of the machine's limitations. The programmer had to face that obstacle of replicating the analog gameplay with digital controls. Breakout clones aren't as good when played on a keyboard or digital-only joystick. To kind of make up for this, the programmer has put in a bit of acceleration on your ship, but while well intended, it's irritating and an inconsistency that makes you lose at crucial parts of the game. And it's already outclassed by Batty which did this thing a lot better. Of course, it's the mouse-enabled MOD you want, available here, which takes this from being an okay game, to being absolutely astounding and wishing the Speccy came with a mouse.



I could think of loads more games where the Speccy wins/loses, but, over to you...

[firelord]

After ZX I also got an Amiga 500.

Note: my next impressions were based on the games I owned so it might be different with any of you.

The first game I tried was Blood Money.
It was at the time one if the most impressive games ( at least according the mags I read).
Due to a wrong connection in the RGB cables the colors were incorrect and the first impression was not good for the amiga.

In general I think Amiga s successful games belonged to different genres ( or evoluted) than the zx spectrum.

I could compare zx green beret with amiga turrican. Both were very good in their machines and I could say they are equal ( considering capabilites of each machine).Also, I didn't actually liked shadow of the beast.

The game in the Amiga that make me think that it was worth the money I spend ( amiga was quite expensive with monitor ).Chaos strikes back. I would consider it the "evolution" of hewson Firelord.

Also spectrum was much more friendly for people that did not know how to program. In spectrum I wrote much more lines of code than in Amiga.

I can't remember at this time having the same game in both zx and amiga ( so, I hope I'm not very much out of topic)

[Mpk]

A game where the Speccy beats the Amiga: Zool

Zool is on the Amiga, but not on the Spectrum.

Clear win for spec-chums there. Up to jump? No thanks.

[blucey]

The Speccy is my true first love. The Amiga was great but for me it was more than a game machine. I used it to make music.

But comparing apples to apples.

Speccy had more variety and more character. The 7/15 colour palette meant the visuals were more iconic. Also keys were better than joystick for me. So Speccy wins out there.

Amiga had the better big games. Civilization, Syndicate, SWOS are way beyond the Speccy. But I'll take Rebelstar 2 over anything on the Amiga.

One of my fave ever games is King's Bounty but not the Amiga version.

[Nitrowing]

My (not computer savvy) mate and I were chatting last night about Amiga games as he had one back then.
He reckoned Civ1 and Walker were his favourites.
I loaded up Walker and could see that it was graphically much superior to what a ZX could produce and the use of a mouse was essential.
The mouse changed everything in gaming - the ZX may have been able to produce a passable version of Walker but, with no mouse... couldn't have worked.

[Journeyman]

Ah, the Amiga was SERIOUSLY impressive back in the day. I remember being at a friend's house once, and he'd just got Buggy Boy for his Amiga. I had the Spectrum version and had completed all the tracks, so I was happy to take him on - I thought I'd easily demonstrate my prowess and show him how it was done.

Blimey, the Amiga version was a completely different game! It felt about twenty times faster, had loads of extra features, way more responsive controls and vastly more detailed graphics. It really showed up the Spectrum for what it was. Good in its day, but seriously past it.

[Journeyman]

The mouse changed everything in gaming - the ZX may have been able to produce a passable version of Walker but, with no mouse... couldn't have worked.

True. A friend with VERY well-off parents got an Acorn Archimedes for Christmas not long after they came out, and Zarch was my first experience of mouse based gaming. It was seriously cool what you could do with it.

I was somewhat surprised when the game was converted for the Spectrum in the form of Virus. Obviously the graphics weren't as good, and you had to use a joystick and keys to control it, which was seriously fiddly and made the game much harder. It was surprisingly playable, though - I got it up and running on my Speccy again recently, and actually got passably good at it.

[Matt_B]

Carrier Command is another game you could compare across the platforms.

The Spectrum version is seriously impressive for existing at all, and also includes a few neat QoL improvements that speed the game up a little.

However, the Amiga and ST versions both benefit from mouse control, run faster and have full colour graphics with increased render range. It really shows off the generational difference between the CPUs the systems have.

[toot_toot]

I had both, while I didn’t appreciate it at the time, looking back both the Spectrum and Amiga had their places when it came to home computer gaming (I use that term instead of gaming, because unfortunately a lot of Amiga games tried to mimic console games and failed).

With the odd exception, the Spectrum really was good in that period up to about 1988 or so. Mostly arcade type games but with a bit more gameplay to give them more depth than having to just chew up 10ps like actual arcade games did. The Ultimate games, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg. The Amiga never really captured that simple, but fun, essence of gameplay that those Spectrum games had. Maybe it was down to the higher price point of Amiga games, but even the Amiga “remakes” of Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner were poor in comparison to the Spectrum originals, despite having better graphics.

Where the Amiga started to really beat the Spectrum was when the physical limitations of the Spectrum started showing. The first thing, which is easily forgotten about when using emulation, is tape loading. By the late 80s, Spectrum games either became multi load nightmares or where 128k only versions that took anywhere up to 15 minutes to load. Yes. 15 minutes (I’m sure Batman the Movie was 15 minutes). Think about that. 15 minutes to just load a game. Moving on to the Amiga the difference between the disk and tape was massive. I remember playing Silkworm on the Amiga and it took seconds to load. X-Out was another one, a multi loader on the Spectrum, again took seconds to load on the Amiga. Even if you compare graphics to some of the later Spectrum games, you have to take into account the loading times and the Amiga blew away the Spectrum. I think that’s why the Commodore 64 continued on well after the Spectrum was finished. I was really surprised that games like Supremacy, Speedball II, Defender of the Crown were on the C64 and they were actually pretty good! I think a big part of that came down to the availability of a floppy drive on the C64.

The next part was the genre of games that the Spectrum just couldn’t do. Games like the Lucasfilm adventures, which started on the Commodore 64 with Manic Mansion, just weren’t possible on the Spectrum. Then there’s games like Dungeon Master and other dungeon explorer type games. The Spectrum could maybe do it, but like it’s been pointed out, the lack of consistent hardware like the mouse just made it really difficult.

Going back to the Spectrum and Amiga now, I don’t really think of them as competing systems anymore. If I’m to play an arcade original, I’ll play the original game via MAME instead of the Spectrum or Amiga ports (apart from maybe Chase HQ which was crap on the Amiga). The Arkanoid comparison is an interesting one, because the best way to play it would be the arcade original with a spinner, not the Amiga or Spectrum versions. But the Amiga does well with the mouse controller, but the Spectrum version was (and still is) a great game. But I’d rather play the original arcade game if given the option. The late 80s early 90s platformers I don’t ever really bother with, because you can play Super Mario World on the SNES if you want that type of game. But the Spectrum is still really good at simple, fun arcade type games and the Amiga is fun for game genres that just didn’t do as well on home consoles - games like Populous, Syndicate etc .

[Pobulous]

I think there was a tendency to see the Amiga as an order of magnitude faster than the 8-bit machines, but with a similar IPC to the Z80 and only double the clock speed, it was probably closer to 4-5x the speed (taking into account the extra bits) in a lot of cases.

Once you factored the extra workload of the improved graphics, there wasn't a huge amount of extra grunt.
Had it been paired with the sprite/video offloading capabilities of the 4th generation consoles, it would have wiped the floor with the 8-bit micros.

Also, there was a tendency to try and make conversions from 8-bit to 16-bit look better, even at the cost of gameplay.
Does anyone prefer Chuckie Egg on Amiga to Spectrum?

[PeteProdge]

Also, there was a tendency to try and make conversions from 8-bit to 16-bit look better, even at the cost of gameplay.
Does anyone prefer Chuckie Egg on Amiga to Spectrum?

Yeah, with the move from 8-bit to 16-bit, game developers had loads more capabilities to play with and it was often the case of doing something just because they could, not because they should. Loads of unnecessary bells and whistles thrown onto games that didn't need them.

Exhibit A is the official Tetris:


Looking at that gives me a migraine, where as your more humble platforms - The Speccy, the Gameboy, Amstrad, etc - gave you just what you needed.

It's like those unnecessary 90s reboots of classic arcade games (Super Space Invaders, Pac Man 2, etc), throwing all kind of unnecessary baloney into it that distracts.

You brought up the Amiga Chuckie Egg, I've just taken a look and yeah, again another needless background, that's easily a contender for an Amiga game that's worse than the Speccy:

[StooB]

Where the Amiga started to really beat the Spectrum was when the physical limitations of the Spectrum started showing. The first thing, which is easily forgotten about when using emulation, is tape loading. By the late 80s, Spectrum games either became multi load nightmares or where 128k only versions that took anywhere up to 15 minutes to load. Yes. 15 minutes (I’m sure Batman the Movie was 15 minutes). Think about that. 15 minutes to just load a game. Moving on to the Amiga the difference between the disk and tape was massive. I remember playing Silkworm on the Amiga and it took seconds to load. X-Out was another one, a multi loader on the Spectrum, again took seconds to load on the Amiga. Even if you compare graphics to some of the later Spectrum games, you have to take into account the loading times and the Amiga blew away the Spectrum. I think that’s why the Commodore 64 continued on well after the Spectrum was finished. I was really surprised that games like Supremacy, Speedball II, Defender of the Crown were on the C64 and they were actually pretty good! I think a big part of that came down to the availability of a floppy drive on the C64.

Most Spectrum games didn't take 15 minutes to load and most Amiga games didn't load in seconds.Quite a lot of Amiga games needed you to swap multiple disks to load company logos and and pointless intro's before you even got to the actual game.

[AndyC]

Part of the problem with the Amiga/ST era was precisely that the 8-bits were still going strong, so a lot of game design probably still focused primarily on the kinds of designs that would work across all formats with just "tarted up" graphics on the 16-bit machines. And that probably led to a lot of programmers just slapping unnecessary effects on games just to try and make them feel "not 8-bit"

It took quite a while for the 16-bit versions of stuff to really embrace the hardware advantages they had. Even things like Batman The Movie, which was a bigger seller of Amigas, stuck mostly to the same design but with fancier driving sections. By contrast the titles that simply couldn't be done on 8-bits, like Monkey Island or It Came From The Desert, looked like a massive leap.

[catmeows]

I think there was a tendency to see the Amiga as an order of magnitude faster than the 8-bit machines, but with a similar IPC to the Z80 and only double the clock speed, it was probably closer to 4-5x the speed (taking into account the extra bits) in a lot of cases.

Don't forget about 16-bit data bus. Everyone looks on CPU clock but memory speed was a serious bottleneck at the time and 16-bit (or 32-bit with 16-bit data bus, as is the case of 68000) simply could access words when 8-bit could access bytes.
Another thing are addressing modes - 68000 can do a lot things in single instruction that would need several instructions on z80. And finaly, you have hardware multipliers and dividers inside most 16-bit cpus. Especially multipliers are big help when accessing structured data like arrays.

[Vampyre]

Most Spectrum games didn't take 15 minutes to load and most Amiga games didn't load in seconds.Quite a lot of Amiga games needed you to swap multiple disks to load company logos and and pointless intro's before you even got to the actual game.

Agreed. I don't remember floppy games being particularly quick to load on the ST. Most games took anything between two and five minutes, which isn't that much different to 8-bit tapes. And the multi-disk games by the end of the 16-bit era were a proper PITA. Not as bad as the 8-bit multiloaders from tape, obviously, but still annoying.

[blucey]

Rod-Land. Amiga wins that one outright.

[RWAC]

I love the Amiga. So many great games: Syndicate, Hunter, D/Generation, Civilization, Colonization, Settlers, F1GP, Secret of Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky, Pinball Fantasies etc etc.

[Journeyman]

Most Spectrum games didn't take 15 minutes to load and most Amiga games didn't load in seconds.Quite a lot of Amiga games needed you to swap multiple disks to load company logos and and pointless intro's before you even got to the actual game.

I seem to remember Where Time Stood Still taking about ten minutes, and that squeezes in a hell of a lot. I converted it (manually) to Microdrive for my vDriveZX recently, and it only just fits.

I played the ST version in emulation recently, and it certainly isn't any particular improvement on the Speccy version. The MS-DOS version was definitely worse.

[Pobulous]

... Where Time Stood ... The MS-DOS version was definitely worse.

Were developers unaware that CGA 4-colour mode had another palette? Surely Black, Green, Red, Yellow would look a lot better for this game!

[Journeyman]

Were developers unaware that CGA 4-colour mode had another palette? Surely Black, Green, Red, Yellow would look a lot better for this game!

I know! What was with that horrible shade of magenta?

[AndyC]

I know! What was with that horrible shade of magenta?

Isn't it something to do with NTSC colour artifacting? If you put a CGA into NTSC, thin vertical stripes of colour generate a wider range of colours because of how it gets encoded. Something like that anyway.

[ZXDunny]

Cybernoid and Cybernoid 2.

They had the same maps, same layout (more maps on the Amiga) and the same gameplay. Graphics were amazing on the Amiga, loads of particles as you'd expect.

But the Amiga version absolutely stunk.

[Ralf]

Some games that look for me worse on Amiga than Zx Spectrum:

Renegade:

vs


Rolling Thunder:

vs


Yes, Amiga will always have more colours. But sometimes these colour choices are grarish and painful to eyes and
Spectrum more minimalistic version is also more elegant and classy

[Joefish]

I know! What was with that horrible shade of magenta?

I suspect they'd just taken the ST / Amiga version graphics (which were simply the monochrome Speccy graphics upgraded a bit with shades of grey) and done a quick substitute to four colours based on brightness levels (black, magenta, cyan, white). It probably wouldn't have looked much better with the alternative palette (black, red, green, yellow) unless someone actually took the time to re-paint every sprite and bit of background. Now there's a job for someone who fancies a remake, though a 16-colour version for ST and Amiga and VGA would be a better project.

As for Rolling Thunder, that's what the arcade original looked like (well, part from the cheap border). The sprites were pretty garish.

[AndyC]

Yes, Amiga will always have more colours. But sometimes these colour choices are grarish and painful to eyes and
Spectrum more minimalistic version is also more elegant and classy

I'm not going to disagree about them being garish, but that's mostly the fault of the arcade originals which they're pretty faithful reproductions of.