I loved the game, lost many an hour playing it.
But yeah, comparing the PC version to the Amiga was a hell of a shock to the system.
I wonder if the software houses had started to write Amiga games with a minimum spec of a 68030 and 8mb Fast RAM sooner if it would have made any difference in the sales numbers of the A3000 (not to mention 68030 accelerator boards for the A500 & A2000)?
I really think that much of what drove the increased PC sales during the time when PC gaming was huge and gaming consoles were not on top of the gaming heap (if there was ever a time when consoles were not at the top of the gaming heap, other than when the Amiga was KING of gaming), was that many PC owners needed a faster PC, or a better PC graphics card, just so they could play some new game. There seemed to be a time when you had to upgrade your PC every 4 months with a faster CPU, or a better video card, if you wanted to continue to be able to play the latest and greatest PC games that were being released at a furious pace.
Just look at how few games were written for the Amiga that need more than a 68000 and 1mb or 2mb of RAM to run. I would not be surprised if a survey was taken and it was found out that more than 50% of all 20,000+ Amiga software titles ever written would run on an ECS 68000 Amiga w/512kb RAM. Sure, many Amiga games will run better on faster Amiga hardware, but what percentage of Amiga games, or even less of productivity software requires an Amiga with a 68030/25MHz or better and more than 2mb RAM? 1%, 2%, surely not more than 5%. Now compare that to the percentage of PC games and software that will run under MS-DOS with only 640kb of RAM that was written during the same years that the Intel 386 was the most commonly used CPU selling in new PC computers.
I guess you could blame it all on the development practices (or lack of) of Commodore. I can clearly remember reading the disappointment in the Amiga magazine articles when the A3000 was first introduced "too little, too late" and "is this what we all have been waiting so patiently for?" seem to stick in my memory. I think that there was a similar feeling when OS2.0 was released (did the A3000 and 2.0 come out at the same time?) and absolutely remember the same disappointment, or much worse when the A4000 came out. But I think that more developers should have written 68030 or better software to make more Amiga users want to upgrade to newer models earlier and perhaps force Commodore into at least thinking of putting the 68030 into the A1200, or making two different A1200's available, one with the 68020 and one with the 68030, either on the mobo, or as a Commodore manf. trapdoor card at the time of it first being released. It is a real shame that Commodore held back the hardware engineers and settled for "good enough" and waited for PCs and Macs to catch up and surpass the huge lead the Amiga had when it was introduced.
