Why didn't more games use the keyboard?

[sammyfox]

Fighting games are horrible with a keyboard. They're one of very few cases where keyboards don't work well.

I beg to differ. the MK games always had simple motions for their special moves, like down and forward and such. On a keyboard these are much easier to pull off than say, anything in street fighter.

[sammyfox]

Are you for real? My PC owning 'friends' would attempt to play Mortal Kombat on the PC with an analogue joystick back in the day :laughing:

The only thing the Amiga was missing was CD32 support. 2-button joypad support was present on MK2 which was better than most. Why we had to tolerate pathetic single button fighting games back then I'll never know. The keyboard should not even be considered for fighting games. PC gamers were morons in the early 90s and even preferred Commander Keen to Amiga platformers :lol:

Commander keen was tons of fun though :c

[BozzerBigD]

@sammyfox

I don't understand the Commander Keen thing at all. I actually prefer Altered Beast on the Atari ST and that was considered a bad game! Fine I understand the PC hadn't demonstrated smooth scrolling until that game and iD pushed the envelope on the technical side. However, in the 286 days it must have been an exercise is polishing a turd in the sense the PC was so behind the Amiga which could do parallax scrolling and Commander Keen looks like it's using the 8-bit Paperboy palette. Dizzy, Ruff N' Tumble, Fire & Ice, etc etc were all better games than that joke.

Was it just a case of most American families already had a PC because daddy needed it for work and the whole continent went crazy for a mediocre game on a machine they already had?

Back on thread. Keyboard controls and mouse works for RTS and first person shooter games but that's it. Joysticks and gamepads are far superior for arcade games like Commander Keen tried to ape.

[BozzerBigD]

@sammyfox

Just  to clarify I've downloaded the port of Keen Dreams for the Amiga and  I'm giving it a go (using a CD32 Competition Pro/Honey Bee Gamepad ;-)).  It's fine for a quick bit of platforming but it reminds me of an Amiga  Public Domain release to be honest. Sorry if this is a favourite  childhood memory of yours but the Amiga had an almighty advantage over the PC for this stuff. It's like the U.S. just put their fingers in their ears and ignored the Amiga in preference to the NES and early under-specced PCs! Both had horrible colour palettes (CGA was poor) and very basic hardware.

[slaapliedje]

@sammyfox

Just  to clarify I've downloaded the port of Keen Dreams for the Amiga and  I'm giving it a go (using a CD32 Competition Pro/Honey Bee Gamepad ;-)).  It's fine for a quick bit of platforming but it reminds me of an Amiga  Public Domain release to be honest. Sorry if this is a favourite  childhood memory of yours but the Amiga had an almighty advantage over the PC for this stuff. It's like the U.S. just put their fingers in their ears and ignored the Amiga in preference to the NES and early under-specced PCs! Both had horrible colour palettes (CGA was poor) and very basic hardware.

Unfortunately it has always seemed to me that the US likes to go cheap rather than what is better technology.  By cheap I mean quality, not price.  Also by whatever is fed to us on TV.

Basically Atari and Commodore didn't really advertise here, and game machines sold for kids and adults bought the computers.  so unless you were a nerdy kid that went out of his way to find computer information and then talked your parents into buying an Amiga or ST, you wound up with an IBM compatible, or just a game console.

I never did own a NES, we went from Atari 800XL, to Sega Master System, to Genesis to Atari Mega STe, then my older brother bought his friend's A500 when he had switched to a Windows 95 system.  Then we also got a crappy windows 95 system that I was constantly fighting to get sound or modem working...

Joysticks are always what I preferred, and we only out of sheer luck discovered that Spy Hunter on the 800XL actually used the second Joystick's button to use the weapons besides the machine gun.  Imagine how awkward that is...

[BozzerBigD]

@sammyfox

This is right up your street;

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=62474

Check out DarkNESs an NES emulator that gives you the chance to play Super Mario Bros 3 but only with a keyboard! This is made for PC users who've stumbled across the Amiga and thing it's too much like a games console :-)

Note: Read your history and you'll know it acts more like a game console because initially that's what it was going to be!

[BozzerBigD]

@slaapliedje

Basically Atari and Commodore didn't really advertise here

Sad :-( All that was needed was a Mac killing Superbowl advert in 1985 and the US would have loved the Amiga forever!

[paul1981]

I never did own a NES, we went from Atari 800XL, to Sega Master System, to Genesis to Atari Mega STe, then my older brother bought his friend's A500 when he had switched to a Windows 95 system.  Then we also got a crappy windows 95 system that I was constantly fighting to get sound or modem working...

On the subject of Pieces of Crap, I've been combating an IRQ conflict on my Winblows XP machine today after purchasing a sound card.

[BozzerBigD]

... and I've been installing a new SCSI Hard Drive into my classic setup! The 'miggy is almost like a person; grumbling at change before coming round to the idea i.e after partitions generated in HDToolbox in this case!

They are such fun even when there are niggles!

[slaapliedje]

... and I've been installing a new SCSI Hard Drive into my classic setup! The 'miggy is almost like a person; grumbling at change before coming round to the idea i.e after partitions generated in HDToolbox in this case!

They are such fun even when there are niggles!

Ha, probably the reason I like Linux, I always like to tweak things to see if I can get thins set up the way I want it to be, instead of how some twit in Redmond wants it.

Also why I bought an Amiga, because Linux 'just works' these days.