Most annoying Amiga game in the world.

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Nebulus... I absolutely love that game.  If you think that the Amiga version is irritating (you've got to be 100% pixel perfect with your co-ordination) then the PC remake will drive you nuts.  I still can't complete the first tower on the PC!

[PMC]

Whirligig and Virus deserve honorable mention as being incredibly annoying, both by virtue of a fiddle mouse control system.  It's a shame really because both were quite groundbreaking in their graphics, just that the control method has yet to be perfected.

It's rather like playing a flight sim with an offset exterior view permanantly enabled, getting a clear shot at anything is next to impossible.

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Thankfully, Super Hang On had a joystick option.  Bloody difficult though!

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Frontier was a great game - despite it's numerous bugs!  I didn't care for the combat AI much and the fact that enemy Geckos will attack your Panter Clipper one at a time instead of en masse.  I got bored with firing at them and just rammed them instead.

On the contrary, Elite had a much better combat AI and much more entertaining physics, but was much harder to get into IMHO.  

Another annoying game which sprang to mind just now was Turrican 3, not because it was difficult but because it wasn't as good as it's predecessors.  

[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.

[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.