Amiga features in Greatest Home Computers list

[BozzerBigD]

Hmmm. Should the IBM PC be on that list? Really? People only bought them for home use to run work applications in the 80s, the heyday of the home computer scene! They weren't 'home computers' until Windows 95 and even then they were rubbish! Seriously!

Doom I understand was a killer app but green screen monitors, single bleep sound chips, MS-Dos and Commander Keen were abominations! You had to use a game port on the early sound cards to even plug in a joystick early on! My PC owning friend who claimed the Amiga was "only for games" used a flight stick to play Mortal Kombat! Awful times when the PC was rammed down our throats as the only way forward! Then C&C came out and i nearly believed the hype

Hated our Windows 98 laptop in the 2000s and MSN basically bricked it when my sister installed it!!!

[BozzerBigD]

@Matt_H

... but don’t go knocking Commander Keen!
Those games are a masterpiece and the fact that we didn’t get an Amiga port is one of the greatest software tragedies of the early 90s.

It's only because it was the first time a PC was shown to be capable of scrolling smoothly. The art style was memorable and I remember the green aliens from episode 1 but the bright gaudy graphics didn't do it for me! Sonic and Mario were the games that developers were shooting for. The Great Giana Sisters is far superior to Commander Keen and that was 3 years earlier! Keen looks like an Amiga PD game. There is an Amiga port of Keen Dreams now but I seldom play it for more than 5 minutes. It's got a kind of fever dream atmosphere to it!

[BozzerBigD]

@Gryfon

In the home is where they ended up though.

Yes, but they were not suited to it and mid-90s PCs were often bundled with MS Works rather than Office which made them next to useless. I was far more productive with an Amiga with Pagestream and TurboPrint than my PeeCee owning friends! But they still thought I was messing around with a computer that could only handle games! Morons! In addition, I often think that the American public lived in a distortion bubble considering the PC superior and forgetting the Amiga prior to AGA! Yes, the vast hardware superiority was over but the PC wasn't at all pleasant to use until at least Windows XP. To see middle aged Americans reminisce on YouTube about early PC hardware is frankly baffling to me! Doom made the PC interesting for gamers but before then the platform was a mess for home users.