Exactly correct, don't ruin the memories and experiences you had back then with those games that took ages to complete.

Like me... Mapping out every dungeon with graph paper for Dungeon Master.. Yep I did it, never left any stone unturned in that game. Loved it to bits and the game still to this day to me is the No #1 RPG Dungeon crawler ever :great

Both games are perfect examples of bad game design. Even though they are adventure games, both end in action scenes requiring perfect reflexes, to be executed with a 280 dpi mouse.

I barely revisit amiga games which is surprising because I was an amigan and amiga game player for 10 years - much longer than I spent with any other system.

But really what it was is that once I escaped the amiga amiga amiga view of the world in the late 90s and tried other systems supported by long-time professional game developers, I realized I had been mostly playing the equivalent of pretty-but-flawed amateur homebrew games the whole time on amiga and they lost their glitter. I would say the amiga has less than 10 great games.

Interesting how some games hold up better than others:

Double Dragon - first game I played the Amiga and I simply loved it. But yikes it's an awful looking conversion and not even fun to play.

Superfrog - loved this then and it's still brilliant now . I lament the lack of parallax (which I didn't even notice back then) but that doesn't affect the playability at all.

Rainbow Islands - great then and now.

Turbo Outrun - played this non-stop for ages, now it looks like the complete garbage slide-show conversion that it is.

Shadow of the Beast - still great. People criticize this game for being too hard, but with the cheat codes on it was fun then and now.

Pacmania - still as good as I remember it.

Turrican II - loved it then. It's still ok now, but it's not impressive in any technical sense, this is still a good game, but it has lost a little shine for me.

Platformers in general - up for jump never bothered me back then, but I find it unbearable now, I'll only play Amiga platformers with a modded gamepad with a spare fire button wired to up. In fact it has surprised me how the kids don't get up for jump either, I quickly swapped them to gamepads so they didn't write-off the Amiga entirely.

Lemmings - I remember this being fun rather than impressive, seems about the same today, I don't have the time or patience to play it through anymore though.

Mortal Kombat - this has not aged so well, I thought it looked amazing at the time...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (platform) - my friends and I played this to death when it came out. I tried it again recently and this is possibly the worst game I know. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Titus the Fox - back in the day I insisted, contrary to my friends, that this was a good game. They were right, I was wrong - small screen, unplayable difficulty. Yuk.

I found the same, even with the NES and SMS.

Did some of the Amiga games look far better than what these machines were capable of? Absolutely. But the gameplay and quality of games doesn't even come close to what's available on the consoles.

Yes, now that someone mentioned the scrolling at the edge of the screen in Turrican - almost every platformer on the Amiga had terrible scrolling that instantly distracted from the gameplay. And at the other end of the scale, many games scrolled too much, with the player staying very close to the middle of the screen at all times meaning even small movements caused scrolling. This is fine in some cases, where the scrolling is perfectly smooth, but when it's not, it put me off games instantly. Magic Pockets is the primary example here - never really got into it back in the day because of that, yet so many people loved it.

All you need to do is look at the various Mario games for some excellently thought out scrolling algorithms. Super Mario world in particular is spot on, so that you never actually notice the scrolling, and don't lose track of enemies just because the scrolling is too jerky, to close, or too eager.

When having this discussion you need to be very careful to stay grounded firmly in the era of games you are looking at. There is no point in comparing a games from the early 90s to games now that people are more used to as game play mechanics have completely changed.

In my mind games these days are easier but longer. They quickly reward the player releasing those all important endorphins that keep you playing and when they do hurt you there's often a micro transaction to ease the pain.

Back in the 90s games were shorter so had to be difficult to get any length to them. They had to ambush and punish you and you had to learn the curve and "get good" to get anywhere in them. To the OP I note you said you did beat Chaos Engine back in the day so why can't you do it now. Might I suggest you don't have the patience (and possibly even the time) to sit and play it as much as you did years ago and as such the game punishes you accordingly.

Don't get me wrong there are crap, really crap, utter foul smelling rotten poo filled dumpster fire crap games on the Amiga but there are also good games.

A good game in the 90s remains a good game.

A crap game from the 90s remains a crap game.

The Chaos Engine is a great game.

What was said about Turrican, where you can be harmed by enemies coming in off the edge of the screen, yes, that's what put me off Turrican from the start. Bad gameplay, excellent music!

Shadow of the Beast Trilogy SPRINGS to mind! But the scrolling was smooth as silk, mind.

That felt very off. A lot of Bitmap Bros games were like that.

I'm reminded of Boulder Dash on the Atari 8-Bit, where the scrolling was smooth, hardware, but one speed, BUT it only happened when Rockford approached the edges. HOWEVER, on the higher difficulties when Rockford zipped all over the screen, it was possible for him to disappear off of it altogether and the scrolling had to catch up to him when he stopped! Very silly when there's a strict time limit on each level! Also, the Turrican problem happens there, too, that Rockford would run into an enemy when the player can't see him!

It's a bit of shame, really, because I feel that the C64 has a lot more great and playable action games that are not crippled by shitty frame rates, lame euro gameplay and garish palette choices (the C64s palette is simply what it is) plus endless disk swapping.

The games I played and loved on the Amiga were usually simulation games (like Falcon, Gunship, Elite and Interceptor) or RPGs (like Bards Tale 1&2, Battletech, EotB and Dungeon Master).

Both genres I could have played as well or even better on an Atari ST.

The action games I enjoyed on the Amiga I can count on one hand. Rainbow Islands, Turrican 1, Ninja Warriors and R-Type 1.

When I saw what the PC-Engine was capable of just a year later after I bought my Amiga, I was a bit sad though.

I am going to filter out games with technical issues like bad framerates. This is about games with bad design choices.

Crack Down comes to mind. It was one of the favourites because 2 player coop fun, it was also part of the first batch of games I actually got for the Miggy so that makes the glasses all the more pink. I play it now and I can only be mortified by the horrible floating camera that other ports of the game do not have. Why. Why!?

Double Dragon 3. Same difference. Had tons of 2 player fun with this one, but... hell no that I'm ever booting it up again. Not on any platform to be honest.

Ghost Battle. Throwing weapons at an arc so you can't hit enemies low to the floor even when ducking down. Why. Loved the game though, very stylish and an awesome tune. I don't think I'll ever play it again.

Toki. single-hit-death game with harsh collision detection... played it hundreds of times, will not likely play the Amiga version again.

Jim Power. The music! The graphics! The speed! This game blew me away. But I just can't stomach most single-hit-death games.

Wrath of the Demon. This game gave me nightmares as a kid, so dark and moody. The intro especially. And today it bores me to tears, maybe they should have tried to do a little more than making a stunning SOTB clone with wonky repetitive boss battles...

etc. etc. Its painful to create huge lists of "which games suck!" :) Even the games that suck provided tons of fun back in the day.

Just don't mention arcade conversions as MAME versions beat them and there's no point playing the amiga version, unless you're creating an Amiga-powered arcade cabinet (my dream :))

For the "up for jump" note that most games are now patched properly within whdload to use joypad buttons, which greatly improves some games that are very difficult with "up for jump", because sometimes pressing up+fire allows to fire and not jump, and you accidentally jumped on enemies...

I have my A1200 sitting on my main desk next to my PC, with CF card full of whdload games, KTRL32 controller, joysticks, but not switching it on as much as I thought I would. Maybe it depends on the phase of the moon...

Any game that pisses away my time with an intro disk that's basically a slideshow, and then start loading the actual game on disk 2.

• Bonus points if that intro is unskippable.
• Extra bonus if the second disk can't be loaded from the external disk drive

(Not that todays 3 games studio 9 middle-ware, DLC commercial unskippable before game start is much better)


To anyone doing HD installs : <3

Amiga (for me) was always about the joy of home-computing, about the OS and the cool software, about gfx years ahead and only secondary about games - but we got some very innovative ones here too like Setters, Lemmings, Populous or Battle Isle / History Line ...

Some people are to this very day very fond of Amiga (but also C64, CPC) arcade conversions and movie licenses, the good ones but also the average ones. IMHO, it's of no use (or close) to try to bring them to be playing these games on MAME (e.q. RoadBlasters got a 5.52 score on Lemon, while being a rather shoddy port) as usually accuracy is not at all what they aim for.

I don't agree with the premise, so... there will be salt. ;)

Equals "Hype!" (c). I think that you enjoy games more when you're a kid, and that then you might play them (and new ones similar to what you like) to death for 1.5 more decades until you finally stop liking games or open yourself up to the 100 new genres that arrived while you didn't even look. ;) Some time along 20 years, you may get rose-tinted glasses by the promise of something new, or drop them to play whatever you like that comes along.

The ratio of crap to good is the same every year on every platform, by reviews or any other measure. I dare make such a quote because I've seen no million dollar effort succeed in changing this in 35 years.

The ones that are still good are the ones being played today. In other words, this has nothing to do with reviews, and there might be some that you never played for a nice discovery. This has been the case for me on C64 and Amiga.

A few exceptions to "being played". They must be played for your own entertainment, not for others or as part of a completionist quest like the eminent Amiga Longplays - although I would say by forcing themselves to play through a game, they find out much more about each game and can tell which ones they enjoyed forcing themselves through. ;) There may even be something to learn from that, I think.

I think there's way too much slagging off games here that actually are the best versions of a genre on Amiga, and have tons more depth than the best console game ever. Do we like good games like gamers do now, or do we cater to our pet peeves (like gamers also do now) and try WHDLoad this and that and go "bah!" at the first imperfection?

Let's say that a gamer set out to find the 100 best computer games in many genres for each year. Unless he's so mossy and deluded as to lie to himself, from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, the Amiga would absolutely dominate that number.

It was a blessing and a curse that Amiga was seen as primarily a games computer when it was a PC before Windows and a better Mac than a Mac.

But this topic just doesn't rhyme with the fact that it sold millions for the primary purpose of gaming. Millions of kids put their money (or their parents') where their mouth was and paid three times console money to game on it.

No way. Almost every game on the Amiga sucked. Most games on the PS4 are pretty damn good.

FPS: Doom on PC would take #1. In fact, anything 3D would.

Simulation: Some PC simulation game on a 486 (released '89) would take #1

Turn-based strategy: Some PC game like Civilization on a 486 would take #1

Shoot'em'up: Any number of shooters on the x68000 would take #1, #2, #3, ... then the rest would be taken up with PC-9801 games...

Arcade port: Any number of arcade-perfect ports on the x68000 would take #1, #2, #3, ...

Platformer: again, x68000 or PC-9801, etc. would take #1, #2, #3... (x68000 has Castlevania Chronicles so that's my vote for #1)

1vs1 Fighting: x68000 Street Fighter 2

Scrolling Beat'em'up: x68000 Final Fight

RPG: x68000 or PC-9801 would win for JRPG. Obviously, PC for western RPG

Pinball: Amiga would take #1, #2, #3...

The only way your bet would work would be to limit it to US computers (even then PC would dominate FPS, 3D, CPU-intensive genres), and you've already limited it arbitrarily by not allowing arcade machines or home consoles.

Talking about mid 80ies to 1990:

From my middle european point of view I'd say the Amiga had a huge standing here. Like, everybody I knew had one.

PCs were usually equipped with CGA or EGA cards, both of which looked horrible (CGA) to sub par (EGA). VGA wasn't really a thing until 1990/91, but then it was over for the Amiga, imo.
Everybody I knew wanted a VGA PC, since the "AAA" game production of that time went over to the PC immediately with its shiny 256 colours, and the Amiga was relegated to get a lame ugly port a year later.

The X68000 wasn't a thing here, I haven't even heard about it until mid 2000s, I think.

Like I wrote above, I had the most fun with games that would have almost been the same on the ST.

The Amiga's custom chipset almost made no difference for action games until 1990 when Turrican came out, with the sole exception of Shadow of the Beast.

Isn't that the worst version of Civilization?

You quoted the wrong line :)

Don't know about Civilization, the Dos version of Colonization is definitely my preferred one though. "Some simulation game", definitely Transport Tycoon Deluxe would be my #1.