Are amiga games bad?

[Wall_Axe]

My favourite games are for the PC from 1996-1999 in case you think I dont like any games
The spectrum had a few good games too which I play sometimes.
I have fond memories of Revenge of Shinobi for the megadrive. I did go back and play that again.

I had an Amiga back in the day and played loads of games for it. I cant think of any games I really enjoyed that I would play again to be honest,

Captive was a technical achievement and I played it then, dungeon master is pretty good.
The 3d game 'hunter' was ok.

Other than lemmings and worms I cant think of any classics.

Most of the other games were platformers or shooters with decent graphics but bad game design.
I follow a blog about someone who plays old RPG's. The ones that came out for the amiga usually have great flaws and are not well balanced.

[kingius]

No, Amiga games were not bad, haha!

Take a look at such gems as Hired Guns, Pool of Radiance, Black Crypt, Gods, XCOM, Space Hulk, Lords of Chaos, Moonstone... and that's just a few off the top of my head that were all awesome on the platform.

[Wall_Axe]

--- Hired Guns, Pool of Radiance, Black Crypt, Gods, XCOM, Space Hulk, Lords of Chaos, Moonstone.----

Yes moonstone was an absolute classic. I played Black Crypt..it was ok but seemed to be one huge puzzle. I got to a certain level and the game seemed broken.

I only played XCOM on the PC so dont know what the amiga version is like. I played Lords of Chaos and enjoyed it on the spectrum

[blucey]

The Amiga was very hit and miss but we only really knew that because everyone had 100s of copied games so you got a lot of good and a lot of chaff.

For me it was great, just for the likes of SWOS, Civilization, Syndicate, King's Bounty and quite a few others.

[R-Tape]

I've moved the thread to Other Retro Stuff.

The Miggy was arguably more my first own computer than the Speccy, and I thought the games were ace. I finally got the high colour resolution that the magazine adverts taunted me with for so long. I was happy with most of the games I had - Batman, Xenon 1 & 2, NZ Story, Future Wars, Pang, IK+, even the budget games like Robbeary.

But I didn't learn how to code a line on it.

[Lee Bee]

The Amiga had plenty of bad games, but plenty of good ones, too.

I have fond memories of the Amiga, and there's still plenty to like about the machine, however, I think it's lost its appeal for many of us because it doesn't really offer anything we can't get better elsewhere…

In the 90s it was the "best games machine" most of us had access to, but now we obviously have far better systems.

On the other hand, if you're looking for cute and simple "retro" graphics, the Amiga doesn't quite cut it there, either. It's a little too "advanced", yet still with all the horrible limitations of a 90s computer.

In short, the machine is neither one thing nor the other. Neither advanced, nor cute and charming. I never play Amiga games any more, but still listen to the music.

[Ralf]

Amiga games bad? Well, most people interested in retrogaming would certainly disagree with you to put in mildly

Amiga was a marvel. Anybody coming from 8 bit world couldn't believe that a home computer may have such great graphics and sound.

Okay, nothing lasts forever. Amiga had its best days around 1990 and was a bit specialised computer - performed better in some genres
of games and worse in others. It was the best in platformers and scrolling games. 8 bit machine weres no match and PC with CGA/EGA graphics
and Pc Speaker performed even worse.

In the 90s it began to change. Xcom is late game for Amiga where Pc already had better graphic and speed. Also playing later, big games like
Xcom or Dune2 on Amiga was a nightmare because you had to swap diskettes all the time and wait for loading.

But take a bit earlier games - Monkey Island, Pirates, Shadow of the Beast, Lemmings, Wings of Fury, Megalomania, Zak McKraken, Turrican, Wolfchild, Lionheart and tons of pretty, smooth platofrmers.

How did you came to conclusion that they had bad design?

[kingius]

The Amiga was very hit and miss but we only really knew that because everyone had 100s of copied games so you got a lot of good and a lot of chaff.

For me it was great, just for the likes of SWOS, Civilization, Syndicate, King's Bounty and quite a few others.

Syndicate! Another great game.

[kingius]

--- Hired Guns, Pool of Radiance, Black Crypt, Gods, XCOM, Space Hulk, Lords of Chaos, Moonstone.----

Yes moonstone was an absolute classic. I played Black Crypt..it was ok but seemed to be one huge puzzle. I got to a certain level and the game seemed broken.

I only played XCOM on the PC so dont know what the amiga version is like. I played Lords of Chaos and enjoyed it on the spectrum

Lords of Chaos is great on both platforms. The maps are very different on the Amiga; thematically exactly the same but much larger with such things as furniture and rooms on scenario one for example, and on scenario two... a dungeon in the cave system and even some secrets to find! Oh and there's a few extra creatures to summon, such as the Giant Scorpion which can mortal wound an opponent on any strike, but it loses the Super Potion and gains a Bomb Potion.

XCOM on the Amiga was just fun until someone threw a smoke grenade or a launcher bomb went off and caused a large section of the map to fill with smoke. For some reason when that happened the computer would take literally hours to play its turn!

[firelord]

Amiga had many great games. I consider it a gaming machine.
I will mention one game :
Chaos Strikes Back. After that there is a great list of good games (many of them already mentioned)

Also we had Protracker...

[kingius]

Also playing later, big games like
Xcom or Dune2 on Amiga was a nightmare because you had to swap diskettes all the time and wait for loading.

As for swapping disks... well it was Street Fighter 2 that I think was the worse conversion. Up to 3 disks might be needed for just playing one fight! Ouch. Compared to the SNES, well, the SNES hammered the Amiga down with its cartridge and was just one more nail in the Amiga's coffin. Good points on Xcom and RTS, and I think DOOM was a big factor in showing the PC was the superior platform too, if memory serves correctly.

Edited by PJ

[Ralf]

But I didn't learn how to code a line on it.

I read sometimes Amiga forums and while reading these guys I have a feeling
that Amiga is a bitch to write code. It seems to me that it's more complicated than Spectrum
and there are too many choices.

So when a new guy wants to create something on Amiga, he is immediately overwhelmed.
Should he do it for Amiga 500, 1200 or some Amiga mutant on steorids? Should he use C, Amos, pure assembler or something else?
Should he use blitter, copper, system routines and so on...

On Spectrum everybody was a programmer, even if most humble one, because Speccy
starts with Basic so people were trying to make something in it.
Amiga had more guys who only knew how to start some program.

And now we have a better retro scene with more activity, more games per year and more quality, pushing our machine to the limits.
(evil satisfaction mode on )

[AndyC]

The Amiga and ST were both like souped up 8-bits that many of us wanted. The games were often just graphically enhanced versions of the same thing we were already playing (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst). Where they fell down really was that they were a long way behind arcade hardware, it at least by the time they were affordable machines, so you couldn't really get that kind of arcade experience that the 16-bit consoles could mug more closely match.

But they still had some great games. Lemmings, Worms, It Came From The Desert, Monkey Island. And there were some that looked so much better than there 8-bit equivalents (whether they played better or not), like Batman, RoboCop, Shadow of the Beast etc.

[AndyC]

I read sometimes Amiga forums and while reading these guys I have a feeling
that Amiga is a bitch to write code. It seems to me that it's more complicated than Spectrum
and there are too many choices.

It's a complex beast and getting the most out of it all boils down to being able to juggle DMA cycles between the various chips. Multi-processor coding is difficult at the best of times, but when you're dealing with lots of hardware with different capabilities it's an additional challenge. The people who could do it well made the machine shine, but looking back I can't really blame the people who just wrote simple ST compatible code and then maybe tweaked it minimally to try and up the frame rate or add some fancy copper colour effects etc.

[stupidget]

Me and my mate used to spend hours playing Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe. Having only played Speccy games before seeing this violent masterpiece to say I was blown away would be an understatement.

[Van_Dammesque]

No, but it does share similarities with the speccy:
- there was rampant piracy, there were a lot of games for the machines so you were exposed to a lot of good and bad.
- You also had the PD scene, whereas the Speccy had a PD scene but were bought up as crap/basic games (cassette 50 anyone?).
- as mentioned earlier games were crap due to lazy ports, or the system's capabilities were not yet being pushed, but we 8 bitters drooled over the multicoloured; near arcade perfect screen shots!

I usually spend more time nowadays on retro forums (this and EAB mainly) than I actually do *playing* retro games. I have revisited the games I wanted to play anyway and got them out my system. Some games for the Amiga I loved and played well into the late 90's such as F1GP but wouldn't think of sitting down now and playing it (maybe 5 mins if I get the urge). I have many current games I haven't played or keep replaying games I like (COD WAW and BO, WRC for instance) I even watch the likes of Tech Tangents, RMC, Adrian's Digital Basement on youtube even though I never had then, nor now, any wish to play with Pentium I or II games, Tandy, Colco or even Apple.

[berarma]

When we got emulators and computers powerful enough I thought I would try some Amiga games that were famous back in the day. I never had an Amiga.

I tried a few and got a bit disappointed. I may have made a bad selection, though. The games I tried felt more like tech demos than real games.

The Amiga was the computer that we all wanted to have after the Spectrum but like OP, I'm more interested in trying Spectrum games than Amiga games. The few games I tried didn't leave a good impression on me.

I will try again with some of the suggestions here.

[Bubu]

Nobody says Prince of Persia??? I play it nearly every week

[spider]

In a brief period between a (dead) plus 3 and a purchase of a 48K+ , I ended up with a cheap A500 with some original games and various ahem 'backups'

From memory I liked Lemmings, Alien Breed (although it was very difficult) MegaloMania (I still occasionally play this) and Pang, possibly a few others that have faded from my memory although having said that i recall Prince Persia, North+South, Dragon Ninja and PacLand too. There was another left/right scrolly platform game with large characters but I forget its name. New Zealand Story was also not too bad but its not really my kind of game, neither was Bubble Bobble.

I think this was about 92 or 93, around that time.

[Jbizzel]

Elite 2
Micropros F1
Lemmings

It had good games.

[PeterJ]

It seems to me that it's more complicated than Spectrum

The 16bit machines were a whole new world compared to the 8bit machines. Especially the Amiga. Commodore did include a pretty awful implementation of BASIC with the early Amiga machines. AMOS, GFA BASIC and Blitz BASIC were the main options for would be developers who wanted to stick with BASIC.

Amiga Shopper magazine did some very good C Tutorials and even released a book with the DICE opensource compiler included. C seems to be the recommended development language for Amiga. The way the command line works probably got me into Linux.

I remember when I first got my Amiga I really missed the magazine BASIC type ins. I was never a big game player, but I did play Syndicate, Eye of the Beholder and Gunship 2000..

The public domain scene was brilliant, especially Fred Fish and TBAG. We used to have a healthy 'swapping' programme at work too! I used Protext for all my part time HNC/HND coursework.

The Amiga always has a warm place iny heart (I still use WinUAE regularly), but nothing beats the 8bit machines for easy (ish) machine code development. IMHO the games are better too!

[Lethargeek]

For me, the Amiga hardware seemed overengineered and underperforming (though still more impressive than most contemporary home computers) when i got to know it better. Many games look like the hw features were used just for the sake of it. That said, there are some games i liked and still playing sometimes. My personal fave is Ruff'n'Tumble. Sadly, i don't have much time for less casual games now.

The one thing i definitely dislike about many otherwise decent Amiga games is either 'washed-out' or inappropriately 'glossy' graphics (giving the impression everything was made of coloured glass with lots of white glinting) because of its relatively limited palette, esp if several hw layers were used.

[PeteProdge]

I do bang on about ZX Spectrum's Chaos being the greatest game of all time. That's because it is.

My second favourite game is... Populous 2 on the Amiga. I still haven't completed it yet. That was absolutely mint. Might give it a go again this weekend.

Also, Syndicate - that's proper global dystopian menacing long before the PlayStation era made that fashionable!

[Oloturia]

Powermonger wasn't bad, and I really liked Monkey Island, Indianapolis 500, Dune (Cryo), Chaos Engine, Centurion, etc.

BUT I agree that I didn't use the "computer" part of the Amiga, it was mainly a gaming console for me. I tried a bit of Amiga BASIC, and a bit of AMOS, but I lacked documentation, tutorials, books etc. so I did very little programming with it. On the Spectrum I wrote a lot of code. I had a few books, translated in Italian, with type-ins that I enjoyed to copy and modify (like Duel - Cabbageway).

[Lee Bee]

Here are some of my favourite Amiga games… (might jog some memories?)

Puzzle games:
• Lemmings series
• Gobliiins series
• Locomotion
• Krusty's Super Fun House
• Klax
• Gem'X
• Battlechess

Shoot-em-up:
• Apidya
• Banshee
• Alien Breed

Driving:
• ATR
• Skidmarks
• Jaguar XJ220

Fighting:
• Elfmania  
• Shadow Fighter

Point and click:
• Monkey Island 1 & 2
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Lure of the Temptress

God games:
• Little Computer People
• Settlers
• Defender of the Crown
• Theme Park

Platform:
• Parasol Stars
• Chuck Rock 2
• Fire & Ice
• Addams Family
• Soccer Kid
• Superfrog
• Titus The Fox
• Arabian nights
• Rodland
• Robocod
• Rainbow Islands
• Bubble and Squeak
• Turrican II & III
• Rick Dangerous
• Leander
• Ruff 'N' Tumble
• Doodlebug
• The Lost Vikings
• First Samurai

Misc:
• Pinball Dreams
• Wizkid
• Hunter
• Dynablaster
• Shufflepuck Café
• Bar Games