Most annoying Amiga game in the world.

[Morax]

From all the games I played in my early teenage days, when I still had an A600HD, the most annoying games where:
- Shadow of the Beast 1 - very hard, and the diskloading was quite annoying, as was the long intro which you were obliged to look.

-Awesome, also Psygnosis, this one was easier than the above, only the landing scenes were annoying.

-Alien Breed - Tower Assault, one of the most non-linear games I've ever played: You could get very far with lots of lives, but when you come across a corridor and couldnt find the exit, all was lost :s


Later, when I began a bit with emulation, I tried to play Shadow of the Beast 2, compared to this, the first part is quite easy. SotB 2 is an almost impossible game to finish, EVEN with the cheat on (Ten pints), because you were very likely to get stuck, and then since you won't die, you'll have to reboot and watch the whole intro again, and again, and again...

So in my opinion, it's gonna be SotB 2 :p

[Morax]

@KThunder: I have to agree with you, platform games and some shoot 'm ups are much easier to play with a gamepad (and somethimes even by keyboard), but some other games (like chaos engine, or alien breed) play as well with a joystick (imho).

@PMC: You're also right, Shadow of the Beast sucks really, but in my case, it was the first Amiga game ever I saw and played (also because I was used to ugly PC graphics, and 8-bit ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/NES-graphics). So it has kind of a special place for me :p. I sometimes just play it (in cheat mode ofcourse) just to watch the nice graphics and listen to the awesome music score .
In my opinion, part 3 was the best of the SotB-series, it didn't offer anything new, but it was the most playable of them all

By the way I never noticed that the OCS/ECS version of Chaos Engine was jerky? Only noticed it often with the AGA and CD32 versions (and since not all AGA games are such jerky I'm beginning to wonder that it's more a PC-VGA-port than a real improved OCS-version, aside from the sound-track)

[Morax]

Hmm I'm going to try the OCS/ECS version on my Amiga 1200 because I think the AGA-version is a lot more jerky. But maybe you're right, since it's been a long time since I played the OCS-version.

[Morax]

Legerdemain wrote:
Oh, I have to add... the jerkyness, to me, is just that it doesn't have perfect 60Hz scroll, it feel like the game is running in 20 FPS or something (not slow, just not smooth), though, it might very well be that the OCS/ECS version doesn't suffer from the periodical slowdowns that the AGA version suffers from (when too much is happening at once).

I just tested the OCS version, both in PAL and NTSC, when in PAL-mode everything seems to be the same speed, but when in NTSC-mode there are indeed some minor occasional slowdowns (but everything is faster overall). Or maybe I'm just seeing ghosts.

I might add that I live in Holland, and that's somewhere in Europe, and 8 years ago when I still played on my Amiga 600, I had my own small TV (Still have it, and I still can't afford a bigger one :p ), and the weird thing is that that thing can't display NTSC (like most can), so I never bothered using it. Only some years later when I only had an Amiga 2000, I somehow found out that the 1084S IS capable of displaying NTSC, and then found out that some games played faster (or in the case of SotB 2, at the speed it was probably ment). Never bothered to check on Chaos Engine though.

[Morax]

KThunder wrote:
yeah floppy swapping was an annoying feature all right. some games didnt even seem to sort stuff so it was in order, insert disk 1 then 3 then 4 then 2 then 4 bah

And the most annoying thing about such games was that a lot of them weren't even harddisk installable :s grrrr...

[Morax]

Legerdemain wrote:

Actually there's not much more than a handful of games on the Amiga originally designed for NTSC (I base this on actual NTSC releases, and those are not many). Thing is, for some reason many developers only used 320*200 of the 320*256 available pixels on the PAL screen. Many games will run in NTSC, but chances are they were never designed to do so. Brian the Lion, for example, runs way too fast when in NTSC, even though the entire game looks like it was designed for NTSC. Many games that looks like they are designed for NTSC even do have title and introduction screens in PAL.

Furthermore, in many cases, if running a game which looks like it was designed for NTSC but actually wasn't, in NTSC mode can make things behave really odd. Jerkyness in the scroll can appear, if the game uses long samples in their modules (if modules is used for the music) the music can sound really bad... and so on...

I have no clue as of why they did it this way, but when talking about games like Eye Of The Beholder and such, it was probably not more complicated than the fact they were ported from a system which used 320*200 as default resolution. Another theory can be that only using that part of the screen could speed things up...

That's very odd... More logical would be when American-made games were programmed with NTSC in mind, and European with PAL, but I've seen a lot of European-made games (or even games in the German language) which don't use the bottom lines... Another (weird?) thing is that a lot of CD32 games does seem to have been made with the region in mind, and most of those PAL-games also use the lower 56 lines.
By the way is the Amiga the only computer which has those differences in resolution between PAL (320/640x256) and NTSC (320/640x200)? Because other machines and consoles  seem to have the same height in both the display modes...

And to add I indeed noticed that some games switched to NTSC to speed up things (in emulation though, but my PC is fast enough, so it could easy have been on a real Amiga), Those games seem to be jerkier in points when a lot of action goes on at the same time, then when played in PAL. Also the music and/or sound skipped a bit sometimes.

[Morax]

@KThunder: You're right ofcourse, I know emulation isn't exactly the real thing (Happy I still have good two amiga's :-) )

[Morax]

I know Crazy Cars 3 as well, quite a bit frustrating indeed, especially the not-hd-installable-thingy...

I recently played the Crazy Cars in emu, the first two are real crap, but the 3rd is more like Lotus, which is a good thing