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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: fishy_fiz on February 25, 2011, 01:20:23 AM
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Pointless thread, but I felt the urge to share some thoughts with someone, and it made more sense to share them with other amiga people than anyone else :)
As many of the regulars here will be aware, Ive recently gotten ahold of an a1200+'040 card again. Being that Ive only had it for a short while Ive been going through some of the old classic games again. While this has been a kind of fun, once the nostalgia receeds I find myself noticing that the majority of Amiga games havent aged well. This isnt just due to the age, I find myself still able to enjoy lots of games on machines just as old, or even older, but rather the Amiga simply got itself a lot of substandard software. There are plenty of exceptions, and I think no less of the Amiga for it (Im having a blast still), but I'd somehow not noticed just how average a lot of Amiga games are, even games that were big names back in the day. What I find disappointing though is the almost complete lack of good games that take advantage of expanded Amigas. There are some that take advantage of an expanded amiga, but so very few that are any good. The following are a few games that Ive been trying out of late.
Alien Breed 3d 1 and 2 I enjoyed, although not as good as I remembered.
Breathless is the most over rated piece of crap ever. Technically competant, but boring as mud. No imagination in levels, boring enemies, no sense of "being there", no atmosphere, boring weapons, bland textures. (I really dont like this one incase you couldnt tell :))
Flyin' High. Nice to have a 3d texture mapped racer for the amiga, and it looks ok and is technically ok, but plays badly.
Frontier. I wouldnt play it on anything less than '020 + fast mem, but a great game.
Payback. Very well done GTA clone. Not exactly my kettle of fish, but a good game nonetheless. Unfortunately not really a great experience on an aga machine unless using an '060, and even then only in lowest possible resolution/detail.
Gloom. Very simple game, but does what it sets out to do pretty well.
Virtual Karting. I really enjoyed this back in the day, but after trying to get back into it I find myself unsure what the attraction was all those years ago. Runs well, but is quite bland. I found myself mostly playing in overhead mode due to the weird perspectives for first person views.
StreetFighter2 (US Gold). Very quick using an '040 (even a stock a1200 its kinda nippy compared to a500), but plays like mud. I actually prefer it on a 68000 cpu, although it's far from great at the best of times.
SuperStreetFighter2 Turbo. Looks very nice, has all the parallax, etc. but has frames blatantly missing, which completely spoils the game.
Zool2AGA. Not quite as good as the ms dos version, but for my tastes a bloody good Amiga platformer.
Vroom. I'd never played it before, but I quite like it. Very (perhaps too?) fast.
Legends Of Valour. Smallish window, but runs great and I really like it. Not even sure why I like it, I just do :)
Z-Out. One of the most under rated shooters on the amiga. If you like Rtype you really should check it out. Very much a clone, but very well done. Slick, fast, and with nice graphics. My only "problem" with it is that it's not until a few level later that it really shows its technical prowess (nice multi level parallax, etc.).
Birds Of Prey. No idea why I used to think this is good (maybe the intro?). Horrible game.
Reading this back I must admit the crap to good ratio isnt as bad as it felt while having the big gaming sessions I had over the last few days. That said though, there's very few games that really drew me back to them after a few hours of play. I think part of my disappointment was with the fact that the vast majority of games were games that could be played on an a500 with a floppy drive. Sure, an '040 is far from cuting edge these days, but it wouldve been nice to have a few good games that are more of a match for an a1200 + faster cpu + extra ram. PC people had a better gaming experience for the most part with equivalent machines (486 era).
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I'm experiencing the same thing as of late as well. I think I'm going to hit the RPGs and click adventures pretty hard. And as for my absolute favorite AGA game? WormsDC. I play the crap out of that game every day. Always surprising and always fun. I also plan on trying Total Chaos, but haven't yet.
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Hi,
I really like Megaball, Soliton and Crazy8's. I also liked Adoom, and Dungeon Master, It came from the desert, Monkey Island, and Rolling Thunder.
smerf
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The amiga had many crap games but there's classics that stand out to this day :)
The ones I find myself playing over and over:
Gloom, Alien breed (all of them), chaos engine, super cars 2, worms DC, Battle isle, historyline, Dune, Turrican (2 and 3 mainly), Warlords (certainly not up to amiga spec, but a damn fine strategy game), UFO (xcom to you yanks), Lemmings 2, Settlers and a bunch others.
For long term enjoyment, RPG's, adventure games and strategy for the win.
god damn.. can't write one of these lists without hitting submit, and forgetting something. HIRED GUNS!
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Never been a big fan of Shoot'em'Ups but when it comes to Deluxe Galaga AGA I can play this brilliant wee game for hours on end... :)
(and best of all its PD... :))
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One thing I noticed.
It looks like 8 of your 15 games are 3D games of some type or another.
Those are specifically the type of games the Amiga has the most problems with....
I've been playing mostly shooters and side scrollers (which I'm really bad at) and find I think a lot of them hold up really well...
And to agree with smerf (OMG), MegaBall was one of the first I loaded when I got my Amiga again. Still my favorite of that type of game.. ;-)
desiv
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Went through a similar process a few years back.
I found there was no huge value having a beefed up Amiga (030+) for games and games were my main interest. I'd say the HD was the best upgrade, then RAM, AGA and faster CPU not so much, 68882 FPU was a waste of money for me.
Demos are another venue for tooling around with a beefed up Amiga but tend to look a bit quaint out of context.
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I think part of my disappointment was with the fact that the vast majority of games were games that could be played on an a500 with a floppy drive. Sure, an '040 is far from cuting edge these days, but it wouldve been nice to have a few good games that are more of a match for an a1200 + faster cpu + extra ram. PC people had a better gaming experience for the most part with equivalent machines (486 era).
Doubtless this is because so few people back in the day had significantly upgraded machines - the baseline pretty much stayed at "1MB A500" for most of the Amiga's life and "2MB A1200" after. PC users, on the other hand, kept the baseline constantly increasing, so it was reasonable for developers to target newer hardware specifically. Convenient for gamers who didn't want to upgrade their systems just to play new games, but it does kind of suck in retrospect. There's a fair bit of AGA 020+ homebrew stuff on Aminet, though.
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Theres a decent handful of titles that either benefit from more oomph (dune 2 and frontier:elite 2 spring to mind) or that had provisions for nicer stuff if your machine supported it.
In the latter case, that generally means 2 megs of RAM versus 1 though :) (Walker and Hired Guns f.x.)
I remember an article in amiga format bemoaning the fact that even an 030 would make far more impressive amiga games possible, but there just wasn't a market I suppose.
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I was always partial to Alien Bash 2.
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I'd love to play Doodlebug again for one last time :(
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One thing I noticed.
It looks like 8 of your 15 games are 3D games of some type or another.
Those are specifically the type of games the Amiga has the most problems with....
I've been playing mostly shooters and side scrollers (which I'm really bad at) and find I think a lot of them hold up really well...
And to agree with smerf (OMG), MegaBall was one of the first I loaded when I got my Amiga again. Still my favorite of that type of game.. ;-)
desiv
Sure, a lot of them are 3d games, but as I mentioned I was looking for stuff to take advantage of an expanded amiga, and despite typically being a bit of a mismatch (amiga and 3d) it still is something that will take advantage of faster hardware (hence the reason I was trying a bunch of 3d stuff). It's a shame there's so few 2d games on the amiga that are written with an expanded AGA system in mind, or even polygonal games with high polygon counts (an updated frontier, virtua racing style racer, virtua fighters style beat 'em up, etc.), or even smething like Team17's World Rally Fever (great powerdrift style game, shame it never made it to the amiga). Besides Feeble Files and Nightlong there's not even really any point 'n click adventures that utilise an upgraded amiga (heck, very few even require AGA).
All this said though Im happy to have the '040 and will upgrade it to an '060 sooner rather than later (lots of good apps that take advantage of them). It's just a shame that the few remaining games developers that were around still around by the time most people where running upgraded systems tended to focus on trying to make Doom style games. The fat lady is yet to sing on the amiga yet though, so maybe one day still, even if I have to make them myself :)
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Sure, an '040 is far from cuting edge these days, but it wouldve been nice to have a few good games that are more of a match for an a1200 + faster cpu + extra ram.
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Have you tried Wipeout 2097 on an PPC equipped classic Amiga?
Works like a charm on my A4000D in Micronik BigTower with CyberstormPPC; Mediator with Voodoo4, Terratec 512i digital, 10/100 mBit NIC; DENEB; ...
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Yeah, I used to have a bppc + grex + voodoo3 and it's not a bad version (although in my opinion it's inferior to both psx and pc versions). That said though Im more into 68k stuff these days. Pretty much anything that utilises ppc can be found elsewhere, and usually in better forms. Still nice to have for the Amiga, but Im more interested in Amiga specific games (at least when it comes to this thread).
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This was always the issue with the Amiga and CPU upgrades due to the whole Amiga custom chips.
Crap scrolling and slow fighters on Street Fighter 2 on MS DOS playing on your 386? Get a 486DX and everything magically improves to arcade levels of quality. On Amiga you can load up US Gold's SF2 conversion on an 060 you spent £750 on and it will still be mildly better than a £299 ST.
I also started a thread about a year ago about why the hell was Amiga basically given such bad coin-op conversions. The Amiga is capable of something close to Sonic if you look at Kid Chaos, ditto Outrun and Lotus II, Shadow Fighters and SF2 etc etc.
It is quite sad looking back just how bad many conversions were and the best software was mostly original arcade games not arcade conversions. Luckily there were 1000s of games and there are plenty that will make your jaw drop.
Add to that there were plenty of more intellectual games like the Magnetic Scrolls adventures which were just pure class and superior to the PC versions :) If it was out on OCS/ECS then PC version would be EGA = PANTS! :roflmao:
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This was always the issue with the Amiga and CPU upgrades due to the whole Amiga custom chips.
Crap scrolling and slow fighters on Street Fighter 2 on MS DOS playing on your 386? Get a 486DX and everything magically improves to arcade levels of quality. On Amiga you can load up US Gold's SF2 conversion on an 060 you spent £750 on and it will still be mildly better than a £299 ST.
I also started a thread about a year ago about why the hell was Amiga basically given such bad coin-op conversions. The Amiga is capable of something close to Sonic if you look at Kid Chaos, ditto Outrun and Lotus II, Shadow Fighters and SF2 etc etc.
It is quite sad looking back just how bad many conversions were and the best software was mostly original arcade games not arcade conversions. Luckily there were 1000s of games and there are plenty that will make your jaw drop.
Add to that there were plenty of more intellectual games like the Magnetic Scrolls adventures which were just pure class and superior to the PC versions :) If it was out on OCS/ECS then PC version would be EGA = PANTS! :roflmao:
It's not really the upgraded processor nor the custom chips that were at fault it was more down to sloppy/ lazy conversions by the software houses in order to release the latest titles on the Amiga back in its heyday in my honest opinion... :(
Way back at the start of it all (the A1000 era) it was more down to the programmers not yet understanding just what the Amiga was capable of or having yet discovered the secrets of the machine. Take some of the very first games for the Amiga "The Feary Tale Adventure", one of the best games ever written for the Amiga IMO, for it's time brilliant gfx/ music & concept but let down by some badly written scrolling routines and a simple case of the programmer not yet having discovered quite how to programme the Amiga to it's best yet... :)
While I was never a big fan of the beat-em-up style games, to me it was a simple case of checking them out first before actually buying the things, if it was badly coded and played like a dog the answer was simple, I wouldn't buy it just because the gfx looked good... :)
I could never see the the point in paying around £25 for a game that had been badly converted/ported or rushed out by the software houses in order to grab their share of the market. Games like the Lotus Trilogy , Pinball Dreams/ Fantasies etc... are prime examples of just what could be achieved on the Amiga by good programmers and those were indeed worth every penny paid for them... :)
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I agree mostly with you there Franko. Although to elaborate even further the amiga was in the unfortunate position of having only 3rd party developers, plus not being an eastern based machine. The vast majority of arcade games where developed by asian developers who would more often than not help sega/nintendo/whoever with sourcecode, gfx and sound for conversions to thier machines. This seldom happened with amiga conversions. Three exceptions I know of (there's probably others) are Ghosts And Goblins, Shadow Warriors and Toki. All 3 of which were very good conversions (coincidence ?).
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Well I actually bought my first Amiga (A500) thinking I would play plenty of cheap and easy to get games compared to expensive SNES cartridges.
Hardly actually played any, once I bought my first Amiga mag (Amiga Format with Real 3D and that silver 3D head cover). And then amazing app after amazing app followed for free on yet more cover cd's. Games on the Amiga? What were they? Too busy rendering, getting the most from DPaint, Scala, PPaint, ImageFX, Photogenics, Wordworth, Imagine, Drawstudio, Cinema 4D, Shapeshifter (Photoshop, MS Office 6, Quark). This is what made me upgrade the A500 with a GVP '030, then A1200 with '030, A1200 with '040, then A4000 with '060 and CV64, and later upgraded the A1200 '040 to an '60. None of these upgrades made any sense to play games, but the apps sure were motivation enough for me.
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It's not really the upgraded processor nor the custom chips that were at fault it was more down to sloppy/ lazy conversions by the software houses in order to release the latest titles on the Amiga back in its heyday in my honest opinion... :(
Way back at the start of it all (the A1000 era) it was more down to the programmers not yet understanding just what the Amiga was capable of or having yet discovered the secrets of the machine. Take some of the very first games for the Amiga "The Feary Tale Adventure", one of the best games ever written for the Amiga IMO, for it's time brilliant gfx/ music & concept but let down by some badly written scrolling routines and a simple case of the programmer not yet having discovered quite how to programme the Amiga to it's best yet... :)
While I was never a big fan of the beat-em-up style games, to me it was a simple case of checking them out first before actually buying the things, if it was badly coded and played like a dog the answer was simple, I wouldn't buy it just because the gfx looked good... :)
And yes it is 100% down to the programmers, the Japanese did even better things with the even more complex/restricting Sharp X68000 so it's a western world greed based thing not a lack of coding talent at the time. Blame the software houses and blame the ST (where too much of the code design came from for 99% of conversions)
I could never see the the point in paying around £25 for a game that had been badly converted/ported or rushed out by the software houses in order to grab their share of the market. Games like the Lotus Trilogy , Pinball Dreams/ Fantasies etc... are prime examples of just what could be achieved on the Amiga by good programmers and those were indeed worth every penny paid for them... :)
The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games. PC users got a boost in quality with every machine/CPU upgrade regardless of if it was Zool/SF2 etc etc that's all.
And if SF2 is ported badly it doesn't matter whether I buy it or not for Amiga, the point is it was coded terribly and I can't play it without buying a SNES/Megadrive/3DO which all had excellent versions etc. And in the end that means I abandon Amiga theoretically and the Amiga brand is diminished to a minority platform where even worse games by rubbish programmers are released (witness the downturn in quality of Amiga games in the mid 90s as the best programmers 'moved on' to PC and consoles). Ditto Lotus II is a great game but also would be nice if Outrun which is very playable was done right.
The Amiga is great, the hardware is way ahead of it's time but the games were rarely up to the standard of what is technically achievable. TFF Shadow of the Beast in 512k.
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Well I actually bought my first Amiga (A500) thinking I would play plenty of cheap and easy to get games compared to expensive SNES cartridges.
Hardly actually played any, once I bought my first Amiga mag (Amiga Format with Real 3D and that silver 3D head cover). And then amazing app after amazing app followed for free on yet more cover cd's. Games on the Amiga? What were they? Too busy rendering, getting the most from DPaint, Scala, PPaint, ImageFX, Photogenics, Wordworth, Imagine, Drawstudio, Cinema 4D, Shapeshifter (Photoshop, MS Office 6, Quark). This is what made me upgrade the A500 with a GVP '030, then A1200 with '030, A1200 with '040, then A4000 with '060 and CV64, and later upgraded the A1200 '040 to an '60. None of these upgrades made any sense to play games, but the apps sure were motivation enough for me.
I hear you, I spent a lot of time doing creative things too on Dpaint and Digi-view and samplers for MOD instruments etc. It is fantastic I agree and Amiga did it best in the 80s. But I do like games too.
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The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games. PC users got a boost in quality with every machine/CPU upgrade regardless of if it was Zool/SF2 etc etc that's all.
I never saw the Amiga as a "games machine" I've always seen it as a computer that allowed you to do more creative things like music/ graphics/ videos/ D.T.P etc..., in an environment that was far more user friendly than PCs or Macs had to offer at the time (and still is for me to this very day)...:)
So to me the need and usefulness of expanding the Amiga to it's max was and still is always a priority (regardless of cost), games to me were really just a side benefit of owning such a great machine and never played a part in my choice to upgrade my Amigas... :)
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The point was Amiga users get zero benefit from paying more for £/performance on their CPU upgrades on all but the most basic 3D polygon games.
There are plenty of Amiga 2D games that benefit from a faster CPU.
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I was always partial to Alien Bash 2.
This was/is an excellent game! No doubt the best free game ever. I still have a copy that sees much use.
Others along this line, such as Chaos Engine are also damn good.
It's almost like the Amiga was a test bed for gaming ideas. Who would ever have thought It came from the Desert (or other Cinemaware titles) would have caught on. They are odd games to say the least - but excellent!
It's frustrating how hard it is to find some old Amiga games.
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I never saw the Amiga as a "games machine" I've always seen it as a computer that allowed you to do more creative things like music/ graphics/ videos/ D.T.P etc..., in an environment that was far more user friendly than PCs or Macs had to offer at the time (and still is for me to this very day)...:)
So to me the need and usefulness of expanding the Amiga to it's max was and still is always a priority (regardless of cost), games to me were really just a side benefit of owning such a great machine and never played a part in my choice to upgrade my Amigas... :)
I agree wholeheartedly...
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Commodore would have gone bust a lot quicker if there were no decent games for the Amiga and A500 was never dropped to £399. It's that simple. Dpaint sold a lot of machines, Cinemaware sold a lot more though.
Amiga was the best of both sides, which was the reason the A1000 was the best machine in the world you could buy. Best creative, corporate and leisure software running on the best desktop OS. :)
I think we are getting off topic though, why were games like Lotus II technically so good and yet all the driving game coin-op conversions barely acceptable at best and downright crap at worst. Greed is the answer greed and incompetence with people like US Gold and Ocean.
PS I would like to see which arcade style games improved with a CPU upgrade.
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Actually in some ways I think that's actually quite relevant. Part of the "problem" in my opinion is that the Amiga was so impressive for it's day with the default/cheap configurations that I think people expected it to just keep shining without the need to upgrade this "magical beast". To a degree the exception to this idea I guess is applications, where people who had heavy type software requirements become well aware of the need for more grunt. Again though for it's day the Amiga also had some real standout applications that ran on "default" type machines, so apart from small niches there was never an upgrade type mentality. This of course changed with time, but unfortunately a little too late, as other options had caught up and in some ways surpassed the "glitz" the a500 and so on could provide so the big commercial developers mostly went sniffing where the buzz/money had gone. The lowest common denominator spec wise eventually grew, but there was simply no real money to spend the time/money/effort required to make games to take advantage of the superior hardware.
In some ways the Amiga being so far ahead when it was introduced was a bit of a curse, people simply expected it to do it all because theyd never seen a machine do things it could do.
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@fishy_fiz (Original post)
Maybe you're comparing old Amiga games to modern games. It's hard for me to play some of the old games (on any platform) because they seem so simple and boring now compared to what games are like today. The games were great when I played them at the time, but time aged them.
I liked ProjectX. It was a good classic scroller arcade with good, smooth graphics. Then I discovered BlitzBasic, and I got addicted to coding.
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Commodore would have gone bust a lot quicker if there were no decent games for the Amiga and A500 was never dropped to £399. It's that simple. Dpaint sold a lot of machines, Cinemaware sold a lot more though.
Amiga was the best of both sides, which was the reason the A1000 was the best machine in the world you could buy. Best creative, corporate and leisure software running on the best desktop OS. :)
I think we are getting off topic though, why were games like Lotus II technically so good and yet all the driving game coin-op conversions barely acceptable at best and downright crap at worst. Greed is the answer greed and incompetence with people like US Gold and Ocean.
PS I would like to see which arcade style games improved with a CPU upgrade.
One racing game that benefits from a faster cpu is Nigel Mansell World Championship. I only noticed that when I tried to play it on a 1meg A500. The frame rate dropped a lot compared to the 68040 A1200 I was running it on. I have this game on the SNES as well, and the Amiga version on a faster CPU is smoother, has better parallax scrolling, and more background details, and better sound. It really is an under-rated racing game on the Amiga. Its my favourite Amiga racer.
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@DavidF215
Im sure part of it is that, but some games stand the test of time, and I was surprised to see so many amiga games dated badly. By comparison I think a lot of games on the c64 (for example) stood the test of time a little better. Perhaps Im judging a little more harshly against the amiga being that I know what it's capable of in the right hands (which is also true of the c64, but the gap between best and worst doesnt stand out as much these days on the c64.)
I still think the amiga has plenty of good games, but on the whole I was a little underwhelmed. I think as much as anything I was hoping to find some games that are more of a match for an upgraded AGA machine (even though I sort of knew there wasnt a lot) and that played a big part in my being a bit underwhelmed.
At the end of the day I dont think it matters too much. By sheer weight of numbers there's still more than enough good stuff to keep a person entertained for a long, long time, and the classic amigas are still, and probably always will be my favorite computers :)