Ars Technica’s Jeremy Reimer has published the 7th instalment in their series on the history of the Amiga platform. Part 7 deals solely with gaming on the Amiga, detailing various classic Amiga games that in one way or the other pushed the envelope. “The Amiga started out its life as a dedicated games machine, and even though it grew into a full computer very quickly, it never lost its gaming side. The machine’s 4096-color palette, stereo sampled sound, and graphics acceleration chips made it a perfect gaming platform, and it didn’t take long for game companies to start taking advantage of this power.”
Moonstone
Speedball II
Hybris
Superfrog
Oil Imperium
Chaos Engine
Sensible Soccer
Pinball Illusions/Fantasies
Another world & Flashback
Panza Kick Boxing
Turrican II
( Awesome Gameplay, Superb Grafics, Chris Huelsbeck music .. just perfect )
Runners up:
Battle Squardron
Apidya
Silkworm
Monkey Island
Jim Power
many more .. mostly on Amiga though.
They just dont makem like they used to.
Edited 2008-05-13 07:10 UTC
Yes, Turrican II, YES
and others:
Cannon Fodder
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
Silk Worm
Settlers
F-16 Falcon
Lemmings
I never had an Amiga (though I played Defender of the Crown on my uncle’s A500) but I wish I had played the original Lemmings and Pinball Fantasies first instead of the PC ports.
Alien Breed
Super Cars 2
Nitro
Utopia (isometric sim-city in space)
The Lotus games
Colditz
and of course
xcopy pro so that no one ever bought them
EbonStar
Little known game, but I packed hours and hours of fun into that game.
toki
awesome music, best arcade conversion ever.
Lander, Psygnosis
Great Gianna Syster
Hybris
and this game from Psygnosis featuring a Ninja, awesome.
Gravity Force 2 / Bratwurst / Rokketz
Dune II
Slamtilt
Chaos Engine, in case it hadn’t already been said.
The twin brothers
Police quest and Simon the sorcerer seemed popular.
UFO: Enemy unknown I guess.
Syndicate
Does anyone know what the vector “Battlefield 2” like multiplayer game was called? One could use various vehicles and play over null modem.
Dogs of war
Wendetta looked good
What was the name of the RTS? Napalm? I had to little RAM
, and that 3D fps from the same company? Way after Alien Breed 3D II.
Populus II? Couldn’t play it on my ECS.
Civilization and Colonization.
Zool
Edit: BLITZ BOMBERS AND XTREME RACING!!!!!
Edited 2008-05-14 00:55 UTC
Dune II
I have never even seen an Amiga in real life but Dune II I am familiar with; I used to play it on my PC years and years back. It was actually pretty darn good RTS, but the thing I liked the best was the music. It had such a fitting, somewhat ominous music to it. You could just feel the tension rise and rise as the music pushed it up while you were under attack by the Harkonnen…
Although in the west, its hardware was unparalleled, there were many shortcomings:
1) lack of multiple button joysticks. Most games supported a single button.
2) the Amiga’s hardware was far behind the hardware used in the top arcade machines of that era. I wanted to play Outrun, Afterburner and Powerdrift on my machine, but the Amiga lacked any sort of hardware bitmap scaling and rotation.
3) Japan had much more powerful machines: the Sharp X68000, the Fujitsu FM Towns, the Neo Geo (yeap, the Neo Geo is that old), all of them capable of scaling and rotation effects like the arcade machines.
X68000 was particularly famous for its top notch arcade conversions. Most coin ops were converted flawlessly to the X68000, to the point that that the game was indistinguishable from its arcade brother.
The above does not mean that the Amiga was not a good gaming machine, it just means that it was far from perfect.
You did not deal with Amiga too much, didn’t you?
1) If you had dealed with Amiga enough, then you had enough informed that Amiga Joystick port (Atari and C64 compatibile), that was a sort of serial port, it allows for 3 different fire signals (and you can mix the cables outputting these signals and switch two or more together to obtain further fire signals)…
The fact that the vaste majority of games supported only one fire signals is just a matter of developing the game with ease, and just a few money…
Also programmers knew that vaste majority of pepole bought just joysticks with only one fire button because these were far more cheaper than 2 buttons (or 2 + autofire) or 3 buttons (or 3 buttons + autofire).
I own 5 joysticks with just one single fire button (3 were nowadays completely mangled by continue use). 1 with 2 different fire buttons + autofire, and 2 different CD 32 Amiga gamepad with multiple buttons. These Amiga CD 32 gamepads fits perfectly in normal Amigas.
http://www.syntaxerror.nu/joy035.jpg
http://www.syntaxerror.nu/joy037.jpg
See on this site, how many Amiga compatible multiple fire button joysticks were available:
http://www.syntaxerror.nu/joysticks.html
Also many people built by themselves some MAME cabinet-like joysitcks for Amiga, like this one:
http://www.eibmoz.dk/mamecabinet/joystick.jpg
(That in the image is made for PCs i think)
We had twice in our local Amiga Club house.
http://www.eibmoz.dk/mamecabinet/index.php
2) Also I played a version of Outrun that is almost similar to the coin-op version.
Just remember this:
Too often conversions from coin-op games were made with short budgets, or were SHRINKED to fit just one single floppy by loosing details and rescaling scenes, original features and/or indroducing animations, and/or entire game sequences.
Also Amiga versions were often made from Atari versions or PC versions.
Rmember that Atari ST was the standard reference platform for developing, beacuse it was rather easy and with no addicitional hardware features that had Amiga, and games were converted first to Atari ST then from Atari to Amiga and PC.
Too often features were not implemented back in the Amiga version beacuse it was a lost of time, effort and money. Again a matter of budget.
3)Yes, amiga it was far from being perfect, but too often its competitors were just only consoles, like Neo-Geo… and had peculiar hardware to improve game experience… And were created various years after Amiga was born, so had the benefit of better and improved chipsets.
These consoles too oftwn featured only NTSC American and Japanese TV systems, so these had not any chance to be sold in Europe (TV PAL System) and in the rest of the world…
Some had based on Game Cartridges and not floppies, so you can produce cartridges with the amount of flash memory to contain entire game, and also pre-calculated scenes with game effects…
Finally certain computers like Sharp X68000 were LUXURY computers for fanatic japanese hi-end gamers with lot of budget!!!
A X68000 had more but more features than a STANDARD Amiga, but at that price you bought X68000 + dedicated TV+VGA monitor, you could buy an entire Amiga acclerated with 68030, 12 or 16 bit Zorro Audiocards, like “Toccata”, and 24bit Graphic cards, like “Picasso II”, or “Retina”…
The difference was that people do not used accelerated Amigas for games, but for serious TV videotitling, or 3D raytracing while Sharpx68000 used all that bonus hardware just only for emulating coin-ops and realize stunning game conversions…
Different hardware for different style of using computers by the users, different productivity and/or different entertainment solutions…
I owned an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 1200.
I know this, it was even written in the joystick port information that came with the computer. But no game used it, and there were no commercial joystick controllers with more than 1 button when the Amiga was really popular.
It does not really matter, since games did not support more than one button.
Oh yeah? On the Amiga? could you please share a link with us? I bet you 1 billion dollars that you are lying. The Amiga 500’s hardware could not do sprite scaling and rotation.
That’s not an excuse for the graphics hardware of the Amiga being inferior to those of the coin ops.
The X68000 was out in 1987, i.e. the year the Amiga became mainstream…and it was vastly superior to the Amiga in the graphics capabilities.
So? my point is that the Amiga was far for perfect, not that it was not a good deal.
But we are talking about gaming here.
That is not culprit of Amiga if games were made easy with feaw features…
We played it and we were happy with just one button joysticks.
And perhaps some flight simulators supported multiple fire joysticks, but sure you never played such games?
It was dozzillions years ago, and I remeber it was quite good conversion for me… So what is the point???
And perhaps share a link with you? I do not have one.
If you are so nostalgic or you want to made a modern comparison then check for a pirate site, download outrun game and test it, and do not bother us anymore…
Sorry, but that is just THE POINT, my dear…
Maybe Amiga with its chipest could had done the trick to emulate coin-op hardware, but it was too expensive to emulate graphics 100% perfect, all effects and all game locations…
Again I do not see your point…
Amiga is hardware of 1984, sold in 1985 (Amiga 1000), and A500 and A2000 were of 1987 and mimicking almost all hardware of A1000 except that:
1) they have 512K or 1Megabyte ram addressable to graphic and sound chipset (chipram) depending on the model sold by Commodore and no more memory.
You had to bought apart expensive memory cards full loaded with 256K or 512K or 1 megabyte RAM.
2) These Amigas could support 64 colors halfbrite in low and medium resolution (320×256 and 384×512)
3 They had also 1.3 Kickstart that Allow the Amiga to autoboot from Hard Disks.
X68000 was born with more speed CPU, 1 stereo sound chip 1 extra mono sound chip, and more graphics than Amiga. It had 2 megabytes RAM and 512 KB for text ram and 512 KB just only for videoram… A very rich feature! I believe for a precise intent to be used as game machine. Very expensive in those times!!!
A500 and A2000 were inferior in Hardware to X68000 but X68000 was ridiculous because it had still 5,14” floppies when ever PCs are changing to 3,5” floppies…
How strange decision to adopt these models of floppies.
A 500 was priced at 595,95 US dollars… For me here in Italy it was 1,200,000 italian lire circa…
To bought it, I had to wait in 1989 when A500 falled down to 900.000 lire.
I do not know how was priced X68000 in 1987, but the model of 1990 with still 5,14” floppies but with SCSI HD was priced 20,000 japanese yen, that is for me in lire 20,000 JP yen x 200 Italian lire (Any yen was 200 italian lire circa in those times) = 4 millions lire…
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=306
With 4 millions lire in 1990 I had bought a 68030 A3000 + Picasso graphical card (2,800,000 lire + 1,200,000 lire) and being far better productive than any Sharp weirdo computer…
And also remeber that I could not had used Sharp X68000 in Italy due to it is just NTSC Screen (NO european PAL TV system) and supplied with 110 volts power supply (in Europe power it is 220 volts)…
Again to obtain the best graphics from Sharp X68000 (16 colors in 1024 x 1024 or btter colors in lowest resolutions i.e. 65k colors in 512×512) I could had not even used a normal TV set, but the Sharp-compatible expensive monitor that was built just only to be connected with Sharp X68000.
Excuse me, but compared to Amiga the Sharp X68000 was not only than an expensive game machine for crazy japanese hi-end gamers loaded with lots of money…
And it still could not be used to be productive.
Amiga was not only games but also full productivity.
Again as I said, different market targets, even if we are just talking of games here…
Edited 2008-05-14 16:26 UTC
So much time and effort devoted to bickering about 1980’s gaming!
It’s 2008, guys, and I’m all out of quarters!
Of course, it was the Golden Age of gaming after all. Nothing like getting nostalgic over being 12 years old wasting away summer days in the basement playing Black Hawk, Pharaoh’s Curse and Pitstop 2. Granted, that was the C64 but still, lovely memories.
Yes it is 2008 and eighties and nineties games are far better playable and enjoyable than nowadays games…
Perhaps you were happy. I wasn’t when I had to tap the space bar in some games, or I had to use ‘up’ to jump instead of a button. It was really frustrating.
I thought so.
Look, the Amiga could not do sprite scaling, and that’s a fact.
I have all Amiga games, including Out Run, but let this not bother you with your outrageous claims.
Nope, it’s not. The Amiga could not do the graphics of the top coin-ops of the time, that’s the point.
Somebody above said that the Amiga was the perfect game machine. I say that it was not.
Designing a computer does not take a few months, you know. While the Amiga was being designed, the X68000 was also being designed. The 2-year difference does not account for the difference in capabilities.
Expensive because of economic reasons. The Amiga was extremely expensive initially, remember? if the X68000 was marketed for the west and entered mass-market production, it would be cheaper.
Who cares about the floppies? the floppies are not a factor of gaming experience.
First of all, we are talking about gaming. Secondly, the price is irrelevant: we judge the Amiga vs other platforms on the gaming experience they offered.
If you want value for money, then the ZX Spectrum was a far better proposition than the Amiga: millions of games, some of them extremely good, hours of fun.
Again, irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
But the games were superior.
We are taking about games here.
Irrelevant.
There are plenty of games that uses dozens of keys, such as Flight Simulators…
So what?
I thought so.
[/q]
Then continue well-thinking and double-thinking…
Perhaps IMHO I suspect strong in this precise moment that you are just a flamer provoking me, and believing I should refourbish you with game links…
Do you think I am a pirate? If answer is “YES”, then Get lost!
Are you sure? Well I am not sure… Check for the Amiga features. I do not care just a secondary feature like Sprite Scaling.
Amiga performed unbelivable things with a few graphic chips, and NO GAME DEDICATED HARDWARE…
And that was enough and that is still enough for the vaste majority olf its users.
THre only thing that Amiga really lacked was a 3D circuitry to exploit also modern games, but unfortunately Commodore was sort of SCROOGE that want only to save money, save money, save money and not developing concrete hardware for new Amigas.
Amiga 500 lacked of MIDI port to save just only 50 cents per machine at Manufacturing.
This fact leave its competitor Atari ST free to conquer the music market, even if the Amiga had superior music and capabilities.
Otrageous? You were first to be outrageous and asking me for a game site to find Outrun…
Amiga had not DEDICATED hardware…
It was enough good for the capabilities it had, that made it capable to emulate many coin-ops without hardware bonanza.
Outrun coin-op motherboard had two Motorola 68000 clocked at 10 MHz…
Amiga had just one Motorola 68000 clocked at 7,14 MHz in NTSC mode, and 7,25 in PAL mode, and it emulated Outrun almost quite good to let it being played
[quote]
Somebody above said that the Amiga was the perfect game machine. I say that it was not.
[/quote]
Yes, you are right… Amiga was not only games, but it was quite good enough for games. More than various competitors such as 16 colors CGA 8088 PC compatible, Black and white Macintosh, and Atari ST with no bit blitter and few colors.
Then get back to 1984 and form a computer company, hire enough engineers, and raise enough money to design a brand new computer just only to play coin-ops…
Amiga was built with a certain budget and X68000 with another budget…
The two platforms had different game nichers…
Sure, but it wasn’t…
If X68000 had been good marketed then it could had outperformed any other computer including Amiga, and had had conquered he market…
But as I said was only a luxury object for game-addicted people with lots of money in their pockets.
You can’t change the history by selling luxury computers…
And also we can’t change the fact that Commodore managements made enough miostakes to sunk the entire firm…
Then also Amiga went just but history…
If it still survive it is beacuse it is a good Multitasking, efficient OS, easy to use…
Bye bye games!
No, but it is ridiculous to built such a performing super computer and then adding old technology 5,14” flexible floppies, when all were migrating to more robust 3,14”…
I hope you will see the incongruence of design and lack of performances, even in loading games…
BWAHAHAH… Excuse me, but now you touch the bottom side and biting the dust with your statements…
ZX Spectrum was 8 bit, few colors, and got only a sound beeper…
Amiga had 16/32 bit design, 4096 colors and 4 channels 8bit stereo sound…
Its competitors were Black and White Macintoshes, 16 colors CGA PCs, and Atari ST.
No other competitors like Neo Geo or Sharp X68000 leaved the borders of Japan islands… Just only some Neo-Geos sold in USA…
Direct competitor for the Amiga then became Nintendo game console… But that console was outperformed many times by Amigas.
Irrlievant enough to let these machines no success at all…
I want to point you the fact that we are talking of only ONE SINGLE aspect of the entire Amiga History… This is just episode seven of its history, and only covering games…
[/q]
Irrilevant just for gamers…
We enjoyed more than games from our Amigas.
That’s sad to hear. You could have had a great time like most of us.
I don’t remember any frustration over joysticks or graphics.
In fact i loved every minute i played.
To bad you didn’t. Life must be hard if you only see the bad side of things.
Wow, really? Seriously? Please name any home machines in 1985 that could match dedicated arcade hardware that cost many, many times more.
No it isn’t. The Neo-Geo was released in 1990, the Amiga in 1985. That’s a 5 year difference.
The FM Towns was released in 1989.
The X68000 in 1987. That was an impressive machine though.
Perhaps you should check your facts next time, eh?
No home machine in 1985 could match Space Harrier (for example), including the Amiga. And the X68000 version of Space Harrier was almost identical to the coin op.
The Amiga hardware, as a coin-op hardware, was in the middle range at that time.
[/q]
The Amiga 1000 was introduced in July 24, 1985 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000). But the first really affordable Amiga version, the Amiga 500, was introduced in January of 1987, same year as the X68000!!!
My rant here is that the Amiga was far from perfect as a gaming machine. It may have been a good deal, offering solid gaming and value for money, but it was not the multimedia showpiece that people make it to be.
You know what would have made the Amiga a top notch gaming machine?
-a 65536 color display.
-256 hardware sprites (at least).
-hardware sprite scaling and rotation.
-quad playfields (instead of dual playfields)
-8 hardware channels of sound with 44KHz playback rate.
You posts are really pathetic. X68what? Never heard of it? How’s that? And don’t try that on me, I knew other rather popular Sharp machine.
So, you tought us hard lesson, didn’t you? Now we know that Amiga was useless crap, right? This is probably reason why it was heavily used by many, games being just one area of usage.
Wait a bit. It had OS? With multitasking? Draggable screens? A superior OS for that time? OS which along with HW allowed this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_software
Yes, take it – Amiga WAS superior, to whatever Sharp … it was combination of HW, SW, ppl creating it, community surrounding it, and it changed lives to many of us. It made us many friends. Do you have any friends? Not sure, looking to the attitude of your posts …
You should better accept historical facts, as no matter what you claim, you can’t change it RIP old glory Amiga days!
Electronic Arts went out of their way on the machine, as I recall. Battle Chess was quite a bit better than the later version that showed up on x86 hardware.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned Star Glider or Star Glider 2. I remember seeing Jez San (on BIX) trying to get the thing working on the earliest developer’s machine and having the machine crash far too often. 1985 seems so long ago.
Too bad today’s games have to be so complicated that they require a staff of 100 and a movie-like budget. Then again, those games from the 1980s must have been good business with all that profit.
my vote for Agony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re2T-uiXtqM