Are amiga games bad?

[clebin]

Carrier command is good. I do feel like it had potential to have well designed games like heroes of might and magic, but obviously cut down.

HOMM came out a year after Commodore's bankruptcy by which point the A1200 & A4000 were quite old (and AGA was underwhelming to begin with). There is a recent port of HOMM2 though.

Most PC games could've been done on the Amigas of the time, depending on what spec you were targeting. One of Commodore's very many mistakes was that they had never had a product that sat between cheapest, base-model Amigas and the ultra expensive big-box pro models.

An Amiga 2000 was something like 4 times the price of an A500 and offered nothing for a home user, not even a faster CPU. The Amiga 4000 did, but again it was mega expensive. To get better performance, they forced you to for a load of pro features that meant nothing to a gamer.

What if they'd two or three models of A1200 at the same time? For a couple of hundred quid extra they could sell you a higher-end A1200 with a 68030 or 040 CPU and plenty of FAST RAM. It could've run Doom quite nicely and that would be the model that every gamer would crave (and probably end-up saving up for). That might have bought Commodore enough time to turn the company around. This kind of What If-ery is a popular past-time in the Amiga community. There's never a shortage of braindead decisions to talk about.

[AndyC]

One of Commodore's very many mistakes was that they had never had a product that sat between cheapest, base-model Amigas and the ultra expensive big-box pro models.

The problem with the Amiga design in this regard was that it was heavily tied to the custom chipset and you wanted to reuse that as much as possible, making the distinction between models more difficult. And so much software was hitting the hardware directly (and pretty much had to once you start considering things like the copper) that you couldn't easily redesign bits behind the scenes without breaking compatibility nor replace APIs that got heavily used with hardware accelerated versions.

[Turtle_Quality]

Late to the discussion with not much new to add - but I just got my old Amiga out the loft and I'm meaning to test it out.

Moved to the Amiga from Spectrum + SAM in the late eighties, the OS, the graphics and sound were very impressive but in my opinion fancier graphics are no substitute for gameplay. On the other hand, though I love the Spectrum I have to admit the attribute constraint did make smooth moving colourful games difficult to implement.

Favourite games for me below, most don't need that much power, they're not technically impressive but they are fun

Dynablaster - 5 player with 4 joysticks - mayhem !
Kickoff 2 - 2 player footy fun
Pinball Dreams - along with Sagittarian on the Speccy, this is my favourite pinball game
Crystal Quest - I think it's better known as a Mac game, it was primitive and had silly sound effects but was addictive
Super Skidmarks - had a magazine cover disk with a demo of this, just played one figure of 8 track, 4 player, great fun
Sim City & Lemmings - played both first on the Amiga, these are games that needed the extra graphical detail of the 16 bit generation
Rainbow Island
Championship Manager - many hours playing this multi player, though I think it could have been implemented much the same on any computer with 512K or more memory

But when it came to programming the Amiga I tried but never got to grips with it, the concepts were much easier on the Spectrum when you have direct access to the screen.

[Ralf]

This kind of What If-ery is a popular past-time in the Amiga community.

Yes, these guys even today after 30 years still are often very upset that Commodore bankrupted. They
have a vision that if it didn't happen Amiga could be today something like Apple products. Not a retro toy but
a regular modern computer for everyday use, just like Mac. Maybe it wouldn't be dominating the market but
it would be a posh computer for the "better ones" while the masses would use PC

And actually they try all the time to have a modern computer that they would could call Amiga. If you don't know the story,
there are currently several parties for many years fighting about the right to use this name and call themselves a true
continuators of Amiga brand. From time to time they release some very expensive mutant PCs that they call Amigas.
It unfortunately had a bitter impact on community with people taking sides and fighting
each other too. Maybe today it's quieter than it was before, actually I don't follow this saga too close.

So they have several modern operating systems (AmigaOs, Morphos, Aros) and endless discussions
which of them is more "amigan" and even "What is Amiga?" at all.

For me they could all buy themselves some powerful Pc, make some Amiga style wallpaper in Windows,put some sticker on them with the word "Amiga" and this way they would have Amigas able to run all modern software

So yes, I'm really happy that I belong to Speccy community

[clebin]

The problem with the Amiga design in this regard was that it was heavily tied to the custom chipset and you wanted to reuse that as much as possible, making the distinction between models more difficult. And so much software was hitting the hardware directly (and pretty much had to once you start considering things like the copper) that you couldn't easily redesign bits behind the scenes without breaking compatibility nor replace APIs that got heavily used with hardware accelerated versions.

Yeah, the custom chipset was a blessing and a curse. It became a curse because Commodore didn't invest in R&D. When they realised their mistake, they cobbled together AGA but it was too little too late. Their longer term plan was to make the Amiga more commodity based and maybe even replace AmigaOS with Windows NT. But of course if that had happened what would be left that was interesting about the platform?

[clebin]

Yes, these guys even today after 30 years still are often very upset that Commodore bankrupted. They
have a vision that if it didn't happen Amiga could be today something like Apple products. Not a retro toy but
a regular modern computer for everyday use, just like Mac. Maybe it wouldn't be dominating the market but
it would be a posh computer for the "better ones" while the masses would use PC

Who knows? The AmigaOS was a good OS for its day and technically better than Win32 or the MacOS, but it was still on borrowed time like those OSes. They'd have had to buy something in like Apple did with NeXT, or develop something better from the ground up like Windows NT. Maybe they'd have bought BeOS after it was rejected by Apple.

Commodore had failed in pretty much every regard but the Amiga still carved out a niche in 3D and TV production which might have sustained it for a bit, but realistically there's probably only room in the world for 2 mainstream commercial platforms. We see this in mobile phones with iPhone and Android. So unless they could've taken on Steve Jobs and won (unlikely) they'd have ended up as another Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics.

So they have several modern operating systems (AmigaOs, Morphos, Aros) and endless discussions
which of them is more "amigan" and even "What is Amiga?" at all.

Aargh, if I hear another conversation about "What is Amiga?" as long as I live, it'll be too soon!

For me they could all buy themselves some powerful Pc, make some Amiga style wallpaper in Windows,put some sticker on them with the word "Amiga" and this way they would have Amigas able to run all modern software

This I don't agree with. There's a lot of quite unique stuff about the AmigaOS that I genuinely really like, not just in the UI, but right down to technical things like the Shell, folder structures, the use of datatypes and libraries and so on. The Windows environment tends to hide the internals away from the user too much - and if you go looking in the filesystem or the registry, you quickly find out why!

The Unix/Linux filesystem is an arcane thing from the 1960s and relies on package management to clean it up, whereas I think the OS designers of the 1980s were trying to solve problems in a different way looking at object-oriented design and so on. Even the old MacOS was quite forward thinking, just sadly built like a house of cards. Copland would've been cool if they'd ever got it working.

There's a lot to love about AmigaOS and that's why people are passionate about it. Passion can be a good thing, but can so often turn toxic as well.

So yes, I'm really happy that I belong to Speccy community

Aye, it's lovely here.

[berarma]

The Unix/Linux filesystem is an arcane thing from the 1960s and relies on package management to clean it up, whereas I think the OS designers of the 1980s were trying to solve problems in a different way looking at object-oriented design and so on. Even the old MacOS was quite forward thinking, just sadly built like a house of cards. Copland would've been cool if they'd ever got it working.

What's the Unix/Linux filesystem? I guess you mean the OS.

OS designers of the 80s were trying to get around the limitations of the computers of that time while trying to make them more user-friendly. They look now like toys. Today, almost any phone/tablet/computer is powerful enough to run a proper OS and the Unix paradigm is the one most computers run on. It's more object-oriented than any other OS implemented in the 80s or later. Even the idea of a desktop gui came from Xerox in the 70s, in the 80s everyone was trying to copy the idea and adapt it to home computers.

[clebin]

What's the Unix/Linux filesystem? I guess you mean the OS.

No, I’m talking about the file and folder structure of Unix/Linux - /etc, /usr/local/bin, /var/log and so on rather than the OS as a whole.

OS designers of the 80s were trying to get around the limitations of the computers of that time while trying to make them more user-friendly. They look now like toys.

I agree, but mainly that's the lack of memory protection, which can't be retrofitted and cripples the OS. If they'd had memory protection, those OSes would be quite different. Apparently some of the Amiga designers, possibly Carl Sassenrath, wanted memory protection but Jay Miner, in a rare mistake, vetoed it.

But there's more to an OS than that and there are some nice concepts in those later OSes if you don't get too hung up on Unix being the be-all and end-all. The Unix designers themselves went onto make Plan 9 because they didn't think their design was perfect.

Edit: Sorry this is getting further and further off-topic. I guess I’ll stop now!

[Cosmium]

Late to the discussion with not much new to add - but I just got my old Amiga out the loft and I'm meaning to test it out.

Moved to the Amiga from Spectrum + SAM in the late eighties, the OS, the graphics and sound were very impressive but in my opinion fancier graphics are no substitute for gameplay. On the other hand, though I love the Spectrum I have to admit the attribute constraint did make smooth moving colourful games difficult to implement.

...

But when it came to programming the Amiga I tried but never got to grips with it, the concepts were much easier on the Spectrum when you have direct access to the screen.

I'll just add that I took a similar same route: Spectrum to Amiga, and I must say I also found it pretty liberating going from the colour attribute squares to pixel-level colour!

The graphics and sound on the Amiga really allowed/fostered creativity - not just in programming games, but I also got into Sonix and then trackers for making loads of my own music for fun, sprinkling it with sounds captured by a handmade sampler. I programmed quite a few demos to get to grips with the hardware, and a Robotron type game. While none of these were released, it was so much fun making stuff on the Amiga, and I was constantly awed by its capabilities as I increased the complexity of each project, putting more and more demands on the hardware and it would keep up! Amazing.

Games I remember enjoying on the Amiga:
R-Type
F/A 18 Interceptor
F29 Retaliator
Lotus 2
Defender 2
I bought Xenon2 after all the buzz, but was a bit let down with the low framerate

I actually had a look online at a sample listing of 68k code the other day, just to remind myself what it looked like. While it did seem more open and cleaner than the Z80 with all its idiosyncrasies, the 68k seems somehow sterile in comparison.

And I think for all the Amiga's power and creative freedom offered, there's something to be said about the Spectrum's much simpler 'rigid' system and its funny little 8bit processor that forces you to think creatively to get things done. I also think the Spectrum's limitations make for a more accessible system to develop for - especially if you're a one man band!

[highrise]

I had an Amiga for about five years and I really enjoyed it at the time. However, if you put nostalgia aside, I'd take the SNES or Megadrive library any day of the week.

[Wall_Axe]

I'd say starflight is an example of what I'm talking about.

It had 'fifteen man years' spent on it and it's very good.
It doesn't need the power of a Pentium computer.

Games like this were very rare. I believe because of piracy. Games for PC in the late nineties were not pirated much in comparison and are a similar quality.

Starflight was originally developed for the PC because PC games were not pirated much in comparison to Amiga games. It just wasn't worth anyone's time to invest in the Amiga so you had endless platformers and shooters with no design team involved.

[AndyC]

PC games at the time were pirated less because the PC was a crap platform for playing games. It wasn't till the early 90's that the PC started to be seen as a viable games platform, rather than just a piece of office equipment.

[Mpk]

Games for PC in the late nineties were not pirated much

As a PC owner since the mid 90s ( WANG 386sx 4 life ), I heartily disagree.

[berarma]

As a 90's PC gamer I can disagree too.

The reason I think these games were a rarity in the Amiga is because its gameplay wasn't based on a display of colourful graphics. Magazines were sold mainly by screenshots and Amiga users were avid consumers of visuals and sounds. I'm not saying they were all but a majority.

These kind of titles found more interest on platforms that lacked technically, and thus had to rely on gameplay and the user's imagination.

[XTM]

My perspective is that I grew up with an Amiga as my brother and many of my classmates had one from 1990 onwards, while I myself went the console path (GB/NES, MD/SNES, PC Engine, Saturn) in the 90s.

While the Amiga has some very impressive capabilities and the standout titles looked great, I think it had a fair share of games that lacked polish. There were a lot of ST ports that had this kind of reduced colour palette, like with blue/orange tint and they often ran not the greatest frame rate. When the Amiga first came out I always thought it would have the grunt do pretty much anything 2D-like at a steady 50 fps, but alas that wasn't the case. As an avid fan of some of Capcom's games I was shocked at how bad Final Fight and Street Fighter 2 were on the Miggy, which is of course also due to the software house that created them, but I don't know how well you could have done them on the bog-standard Amiga 500. They just looked terrible compared to the SNES/MD versions.

I think it's also a bit down to a certain trash factor that some European games had. You'll sometimes come across the term "Euro trash", and I think it's due to how games still were created by fairly small teams over here and it shows in some poor design choices here and there. The Japanese seemed to be more professional, but that's my opinion and nothing to get worked up about if you disagree.

[Lee Bee]

You'll sometimes come across the term "Euro trash", and I think it's due to how games still were created by fairly small teams over here and it shows in some poor design choices here and there. The Japanese seemed to be more professional, but that's my opinion and nothing to get worked up about if you disagree.

Totally agree. Amiga conversions like OutRun were incredibly amateurish. What were they thinking with that horrific intro audio!? 40 seconds of memory-wasting self-indulgence that had nothing to do with the arcade game. The Japanese just have way more taste and class.

[deanysoft]

There were some poor Amiga games and conversions (if you want to see possibly the worst Outrun conversion, check out the CPC one!) but also some excellent ones such as Wizball, Starglider, Carrier Command and Bubble Bobble. Also the utilities were excellent - such as Dpaint. At that time it seemed better than the ST as that only had the AY chip and streets ahead of the early PCs. But in some case, as with all micros, there were games that really disappointed.

[toot_toot]

Yeah, I’d say the Amiga suffered from at the beginning poor conversions compared to the 8-bit originals, Chase Hq, Robocop, Chuckie Egg spring to mind. Later on in the Amiga’s lifespan, it suffered from poor rip offs of console games, particularly platformers, like ZOOL and even dare I say it Robocod.

BUT… the Amiga had some incredible games, Syndicate, Carrier Command, Populous 1 and 2, Mega-Lo-Mania, Sensible Soccer, Battlehawks 1942, Leisure Suit Larry, the Cinemaware games which really benefited from the big improvement in using floppy disks as a medium.

[patters]

My perspective is that I grew up with an Amiga as my brother

made me chuckle anyway

[RWAC]

I still regularly play Amiga games. Yes, it had a lot of bad games but it also had a lot of very good games that still hold up today.

Some of my favourites include (deep breath):

Colonization - my favourite game of all time
Wizkid
Hunter
D/Generation
Slam Tilt - a fantastic pinball game but only on A1200
Pinball Dreams / Fantasies - 2 great pinball games for the A500
Syndicate
Cannon Fodder
The Settlers
Vroom
Super Cars 2
Nitro
Swos - Still the best football game ever made
Yo! Joe!
Beneath a Steel Sky
Dune - Most people overlook the first game but it's great
Apidya - Like R-Type but with insects
Fury of the Furries
Lost Vikings
Theme Park
Desert Strike
Benefactor
Populous 1 & 2

And there were loads of great PD games like Super Twintris and Llamatron

[Morkin]

Reading some of the games listed in this thread, I think the Amiga had quite a lot of awesome games. I also enjoyed playing some 16-bit versions of games that were also on the Speccy like Wizball and Buggy Boy.

I recall a few games where I was initially wowed by the graphics but the gameplay was a bit rubbish. Like Sword of Sodan and Street Fighter II.

Also I wasn't a big fan of Amiga shmups or platformers - they didn't really 'wow' me. As far as I was concerned, Speccy ones were fine..!

Where the machine stood out for me were the bigger adventure/role-playing games like Bard's Tale and Eye of the Beholder, Monkey Island etc. The Speccy could do them to a certain extent, but I think the additional Amiga memory gave it a massive advantage.

[Edit: additional advantage = being mouse-driven]

[Bedazzle]

Wrong on both counts, XCOM was a great conversion

What about night missions?

[XTM]

I recall a few games where I was initially wowed by the graphics but the gameplay was a bit rubbish. Like Sword of Sodan and Street Fighter II.

Edited: I assume you are talking of the Amiga version of SF2. Yes, I've played it, it was trash compared to the arcade and console versions.

[Matt_B]

The particularly annoying thing about the Amiga versions of the SF2 games is that they look the part, but the gameplay is quite badly off.

At least with the Spectrum version you only have to take one glance at it, grimace a bit, and go and play something decent like IK+ instead.

[Pegaz]

From the "ingenious" topic, "Are Amiga games bad?", we quickly got to "Does the Amiga have bad games?"
Yes, there are, and you don't have to be Christopher Columbus to discover it.
Here are some ideas for future quality topics:
- Are Spectrum games bad? (obviously not)
- Are the C64 games bad (Yes, every single one)
- Are the Spectrum Next games bad (No, they are all products of genius)
Now that we have established the facts, we can deal with other serious topics..