Most annoying Amiga game in the world.

[PMC]

I recently bought a copy of Namco's Arcade Classics for my PS2, expecting a right good retro gaming session.

However my hopes were dashed when I realised that most of the games held my attention for an extremely brief span...  And then I realised that coin-ops are deliberately made to be difficult to keep the 10pence pieces being fed in.

A successful coin-op conversion needed significant changes to the gameplay in order to make it more suitable to those playing it on their Amigas.  If you play something like "Operation Thunderbolt" on your Amiga, chances are it'll be much easier than the arcade version.

[foleyjo]

but in the case of Double Dragon why did they make the graphics so bad?? Take out 95% of the sound effects and make it the worst version of the game ever

[McVenco]

I pretty much liked most of the games I ever played. It just happened that I threw away games that didn't catch my attention after 2 tryouts  :lol:

But if I have to think of 1 game that sucked, it must be Brat. Frigging little feller yelling "You blew it, man!" everytime you screwed up a level again  :-)

Oh, and of course all soccer games, because I just hate that sport....


(Hey y'all, by the way. I'm new here :-) )

[Hyperspeed]

PMC: Interesting that Elite had a spaceship called a 'Panter Clipper' because they're working on a space shuttle type plane to send cargo to the space station called a 'Clipper'...

:-o

[Legerdemain]

Hm, I agree. I can't understand how Project X managed to stay away from this disucssion for so long.

Of all the shooters I've played I would say Project X is the the 2nd hardest of them all (R-Type Complete for the PC-Engine being the hardest so far). I think the developers of Project X forgot about one major thing... balancing the toughness of the game. I've played it rather much at times, and every now and then I get tempted to try it again... each time with more shoot'em up experience in my baggage... but each time I become utterly disappointed with the fact that the game is way too hard to be fun. Too bad there are relatively few good shooters for the Amiga. Apydia is one, and Z-Out another, but then what? Xenenon 2 must be one of the {bleep}tiest shooters for the Amiga, if taking how much praise it got in the press when released into consideration (of course there are worse shooters out there, but why was Xenenon 2 so praied? I don't get it). Jerky scrolling, sluggish controls, annoying and repetative music, extremely dull leveldesig... *ARGH*

[Morax]

From all the games I played in my early teenage days, when I still had an A600HD, the most annoying games where:
- Shadow of the Beast 1 - very hard, and the diskloading was quite annoying, as was the long intro which you were obliged to look.

-Awesome, also Psygnosis, this one was easier than the above, only the landing scenes were annoying.

-Alien Breed - Tower Assault, one of the most non-linear games I've ever played: You could get very far with lots of lives, but when you come across a corridor and couldnt find the exit, all was lost :s


Later, when I began a bit with emulation, I tried to play Shadow of the Beast 2, compared to this, the first part is quite easy. SotB 2 is an almost impossible game to finish, EVEN with the cheat on (Ten pints), because you were very likely to get stuck, and then since you won't die, you'll have to reboot and watch the whole intro again, and again, and again...

So in my opinion, it's gonna be SotB 2 :p

[PMC]

Hmmm, some controversy creeping in...

Xenon II was looked awesome in the static screenshots and for the first ten seconds I thought "Wow, this is the game I'm going to ble playing non-stop for the next six months!"

However, I have to agree that yes, the scrolling was a little jerky (as was Xenon and Chaos Engine, both Bitmap Bros games also) and that the repetitive music did grate after a while.  The thing that bugged me most was that the game could be played entirely from memory.  After sixteen years since I first played it, I still know where each baddie sprite is going to appear.

Shadow of the Beast was another case in point.  The demo must have sold thousands of A500s thanks to it's beautiful graphics and stunning soundtrack. Underneath however was very little of substance, get close and you notice that all the sprites are limited to four colours and that foreground scrolling was a tad jerky.  It was a classic case of being seduced by the graphics and sound.

Coincidentally, both games were the catalyst that inspired me to save my pennies and pester my parents for an A500.  The less glamorous games of the time stood the test of time much better IMHO, as I still occasionally play Batman the Movie, Turrican and Battle Squadron.

[Legerdemain]

@PMC

THANK YOU! You are one of the first I've heard agreeing with me on Xenon II, Shadow of the Beast and The Chaos Engine! *FEELS LIKE KISSING AND HUGGING YOU*

Anyways. Bitmap Brothers may have done some really good games, but I think that The Chaos Engine, for example, falls down from a perfect 5/5 to a 4/5 just because of the scrolling (and if the non-smooth scrolling wasn't enough the game also slows down rather hefty at times). SotB just seems to be the holy grail of Amiga games to many (along with Moonstone and some others), and often when I've pointed out that I find it prettier than good, I've been greeted with no kind of understanding of what I was talking about at all.

[KThunder]

ANY game that uses just one button and uses up to jump get my vote for most annoying game. unfortunatly there are many of them.

[mr_a500]

ANY game that uses just one button and uses up to jump get my vote for most annoying game. unfortunatly there are many of them.

You must be from the "Nintendo generation", because every joystick I ever used had just one button. How else could one jump but by pushing up?

Gamepads make me sick. ;-)

[KThunder]

there are several joysticks for the amiga that had two buttons (actual two button sticks not a one button stick with two buttons)
i had a friend who swore by joystick and i liked gamepads, so we had contests with several different game systems, and games him with the stick me with the pad and i beat him every time. he tried a gamepad for a while and got better.
joystick are made for flight sims and the like. they are ok for for driving sims.
one of the worst was superfrog, because it was such a great game. cool graphics, music and sound but up to jump was terrible. plus when you got the little ball thingie and wings the button would do different things at different times, with the same button. i dont remeber if it had a two button setting. ill go check

[Morax]

@KThunder: I have to agree with you, platform games and some shoot 'm ups are much easier to play with a gamepad (and somethimes even by keyboard), but some other games (like chaos engine, or alien breed) play as well with a joystick (imho).

@PMC: You're also right, Shadow of the Beast sucks really, but in my case, it was the first Amiga game ever I saw and played (also because I was used to ugly PC graphics, and 8-bit ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/NES-graphics). So it has kind of a special place for me :p. I sometimes just play it (in cheat mode ofcourse) just to watch the nice graphics and listen to the awesome music score .
In my opinion, part 3 was the best of the SotB-series, it didn't offer anything new, but it was the most playable of them all

By the way I never noticed that the OCS/ECS version of Chaos Engine was jerky? Only noticed it often with the AGA and CD32 versions (and since not all AGA games are such jerky I'm beginning to wonder that it's more a PC-VGA-port than a real improved OCS-version, aside from the sound-track)

[Legerdemain]

By the way I never noticed that the OCS/ECS version of Chaos Engine was jerky? Only noticed it often with the AGA and CD32 versions (and since not all AGA games are such jerky I'm beginning to wonder that it's more a PC-VGA-port than a real improved OCS-version, aside from the sound-track)

The OCS/ECS version is just as jerky. As far as I know there isn't one single Bitmap Brothers game with really smooth scrolling routines.

[Morax]

Hmm I'm going to try the OCS/ECS version on my Amiga 1200 because I think the AGA-version is a lot more jerky. But maybe you're right, since it's been a long time since I played the OCS-version.

[Legerdemain]

Oh, I have to add... the jerkyness, to me, is just that it doesn't have perfect 60Hz scroll, it feel like the game is running in 20 FPS or something (not slow, just not smooth), though, it might very well be that the OCS/ECS version doesn't suffer from the periodical slowdowns that the AGA version suffers from (when too much is happening at once).

[Hyperspeed]

I was dissapointed that Chaos Engine's scrolling was so bad for A1200. It was a good game though, a bit like Cannon Fodder viewed from overhead but with full joystick control over the character!

I noticed Speedball 2 had jerky scrolling also, but Zool 2 AGA had the same trouble so I wonder if it's a problem with AGA?

Kid Chaos AGA is really smooth as are other 2D games. The Jaguar version of Zool 2 was smooth on 68000 so why not on 68EC020!?

If you don't like Xenon 2's scrolling there's a newer style version called XP8. Stardust-style rendered sprites!

(Oh, by the way - Stardust's tunnel stages have smooth scrolling!)