Was America nonchalant about Amiga arcade gaming?

[jj]

Americans played Nintendo and other consoles back when we played Amiga games. In the beginning, most of the quality Amiga games came from the US, but nearer to the 90s it was Europe in the lead and USA had confined the Amiga to be a host to the video toaster card.
 
Look at any "top 100 games since 1970" lists in US based blogs and that wretched Mario is on top of each one.
 
The world is full of fine platformers, Mario is not one of them. ;-)

 
Mario is not a fine platformer. Ummm ok

[Amiga_Nut]

Thing is consoles have always been cheaper than computers, fact of life. Even today you wont get a PC tower for $200 able to play Gears of War in DX10 like the 360 runs it. Also console games were always expensive. Sony were the only people to make an effort by cutting 20% off the list price for their own 1st party titles. But in 1988 or whenever Genesis games here were double the price and the machine was 200 bucks. So...after 10 game purchases your Sega Megadrive here works out more expensive in the long run. I think the NES was something like 40 bucks a game here, compared to 10 bucks for a C64 game, and the unit was only about 50 bucks less. No wonder Nintendo UK failed with the NES, the games were nothing special apart from a few 1st party franchises.

I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge. It's not like a PC where you need to mess about with himem or xms/ems and config.sys etc. Pop the disk in the drive, plug joystick in, play game. Not really sure how anyone who has experience with a Amigas can make such a crazy comment.

Sound wise there is a radical difference between the FM chips in a Genesis/TG to the 'do whatever you like' 4 channel DACs on Amiga. Sure you get more sound channels, but it is a trade off. You wont get anything as exquisite and unique sounding with the diversity of the MOD archives compared to stuff which always sounds like the FM sounds of a Genesis.

It just seemed that companies in the USA lost interest somewhere between the high priced A1000 launch and the revised A500 two years later. There seemed a lot of initial enthusiasm  which waned after time. I think that is down to Commodore in some ways, the A1000 probably wasn't the right machine to launch as a sole product, the A500 should have been first out the blocks for about the same price as an ST with mono monitor of $799. This would have been discounted down to about $700 or less and is not far off the 1987 price of an A500 anyway. Perhaps then interest would not have waned in the first 3 years in the USA.

I'm going to check out the games Cammy mentioned, never even heard of one of them!

edit :  I would be interested to see sales figures for the Sharp x68000 machine compared to NES/Megadrive sales. The x68000 is pretty much the Amiga for Japan, a computer with console quality games. So I wonder how well that high priced machine sold compared to cheap and cheerful console for 1/4 of the price.

[bloodline]

Mario is not a fine platformer. Ummm ok

Actually I never liked Mario either... I loved New Zeland Story though

[jj]

Well superfrog, brillaint game, runined by jump being up on the joystick

[jj]

Actually I never liked Mario either... I loved New Zeland Story though

 
I was not fussed on the earlier versions.   But super mario world and yoshi's island on the snes or two of my fav games of all time.
 
Much prefer them to sonic.
 
I always thought that platform games on the amiga were on the whole very dissapointing compared to the console platformers.

[Crom00]

The Sharp X68000 was a great machine. Check out the Emulators out there. This machine had pixel perfect conversions. I liked the dual tower case design with the handle.

[Amiga_Nut]

Very interesting, both games are from Ocean software. Can also see why 64 colour games were so rare, if you're designing sprites on an in house ST package in 16 colours. Kind of makes you angry when Dpaint III would have been a better choice and there was even an ST format so file formats are not an issue.

I wonder why they would start the game [Liquid Kids] without securing the licence, 1991 is still the peak of A500 popularity in the EU so there must have been a problem with the licence from Taito. Price? Maybe Ocean were hoping the price would go down if they showed a finished product at the negotiations? David Ward, the original co-founder of Ocean UK, would never have let this happen.

Good to see both games are released in full and never charged for

[save2600]

(thankx for the list Cammy, I didn't realize there were so many)

Yes, thank you! And yeah, it would be great to have a permanent list maintained. So... these 2-button games, when you choose that feature, is that stupid 'up' to jump function disabled or is it still there? I remember some games, even though they might have taken advantage of a second button, you could still accidentally jump by moving the joystick even up-diagonal  

[XDelusion]

I can not believe there are people out there that don't like Mario.

I mean seriously, have you played through New Super Mario Bros. Wii?!

That is hands down the most complex and most fun platformer I have ever played in my life, and I can't say any of the previous titles were a let down either. Not ever the Marioified Doku Doku Panic!

[tone007]

I don't see how lending someone a couple of disks to boot up in an A500 was harder than lending someone a cartridge.

Lending to a friend who'll take care of them is one thing, but renting out floppies is a bad idea, what with how easily they're destroyed, unless the rental place has license to make copies.

[Amiga_Nut]

The Sharp X68000 was a great machine. Check out the Emulators out there. This machine had pixel perfect conversions. I liked the dual tower case design with the handle.

Been using the emulator since around late 90s in my lunch break, back when the internet was full of game roms blatantly available for download Took a while to work out some games won't finish booting without 2mb on the Japanese emulator too!

I never understood why Chase HQ was looking iffy on it, but just about every other game on the machine was handled in house and arcade quality. Technically it has no blitter, just 128 16x16 pixel sprites, so a bit more powerful than the Genesis, but would have cost a lot more so was interested in how well it sold. The x68000 is Japan's A1000 vs Genesis battle.

It's a shame Amiga never got that level of support from the original arcade makers, recording arcade footage on blurry video and approximating it in Dpaint was the norm, but in Japan raw graphics data and music was donated frequently. Tragedy! Even Atari/Tengen were just as bad, Gauntlet II on ST/Amiga had the arcade music recorded to tape and then sampled using some budget sampler. What a joke!

[Amiga_Nut]

Lending to a friend who'll take care of them is one thing, but renting out floppies is a bad idea, what with how easily they're destroyed, unless the rental place has license to make copies.

Yep I meant swapping games between friends, cartridges are not required. Swapping tape games and VCS carts with school chums for a weekend was normal in my youth.

I think we used to rent VCS carts sometimes from the small time video store round the corner from us. Technically it's just as easy to ruin a video tape as a 3.5" floppy disk, and I guess the last person to rent it before it is reported as 'not loading' gets stung for the cost or banned in the same way as when someone reports a chewed up VHS tape on returning the movie rental. Same pitfalls really.

[tone007]

I'd argue VHS tapes are a bit more resilient, one bad bit on a floppy and you could be screwed.

...not to mention VHS tapes aren't likely to get virii!

[SamuraiCrow]

Yes, thank you! And yeah, it would be great to have a permanent list maintained. So... these 2-button games, when you choose that feature, is that stupid 'up' to jump function disabled or is it still there? I remember some games, even though they might have taken advantage of a second button, you could still accidentally jump by moving the joystick even up-diagonal  

I remember using up to jump in Turrican with my one-button joystick.  I had to get a special microswitch joystick so it would be precise enough that I could jump precisely.  Then I'd have to reach over to the keyboard to take advantage of the bombs and power-lines and other stuff that my joystick couldn't access with its one button.

In the arcade I didn't like playing Street Fighter 2 because it had 6 buttons but only 4 fingers and one thumb to press them with.  At home it was even worse: One button joystick.  I think I still have SF2 for the Amiga but there's really no point in playing it.

[bloodline]

I'd argue VHS tapes are a bit more resilient, one bad bit on a floppy and you could be screwed.

...not to mention VHS tapes aren't likely to get virii!

2bits actually, the MFM encoding on the floppy disk actually stores each data bit as two physical bits on the disk... Hmmm but I don't think MFM supported error correction... So maybe one bit error would kill the data... Piru, help...

[AmigaHeretic]

I remember when Street Fighter 2 (first one) came out on my Amiga.  We would play 2 player, but you had to switch floppies constantly!!  

My friend got it for his SNES and we stopped playing the Amiga one for obvious reasons.