3 days of hardcore amiga gaming lead me to think....

[fishy_fiz]

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).

[fishy_fiz]

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  

[fishy_fiz]

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).

[fishy_fiz]

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 ?).

[fishy_fiz]

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.

[fishy_fiz]

@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