What stuff did/do you hate in Amiga games?
 

Ok, trick poll again :) Post below what stuff did/do you hate in Amiga games. What do I mean? Stuff like this:

- Black borders. Sometimes games did not fit teh whoel screen, and I'm not talking about games which were using 200 lines to fit on NTSC screens, but games that had borders, I suppose, for maintaining the game's speed up. I wanted my games to fit the whole screen!

- Non-transparent statusbars. WTF is this? Take a look at Lionheart. Teh score, lives, energy and all those stats lie neatly above the game screen. Some games used an ugly black/white/whatever border where they stuck all thsi info. I think this was also due to certain limitations, but I always thought it looked like pish. Turrican 3 has this border, while in teh Geensis version this border does not apepar and makes the game look much neater.

- Shovelware. God I hate this the most. Straight ports from steaming pile of turd systems like the PC, polluted some Amiga games. Examples are early shovelware from the ST, Sierra games (I think those were Apple 2 shovelware), and Sim City 2000. Games like Desert Strike were ported AND improved accordingly, showing what the Amiga can do if treated nicely.

- Not directly related to the games, but game producers. LAME EXCUSES. "The Amiga can't handle this, the Amiga can't handle that..." BAH! Lots of programmers showed the rest that the Amiga could do ANYTHING (just like any system)... This excuse got me sick in the times where the consoles started to climb in popularity. "The Amiga has too little buttons". PAH, Look at Mortal Kombat 2, all the controls crammed perfectly onto a one-button setup. "We have little number of colors". BLEH, look at Lionheart fer Jay's sake, it's so colorful it makes me see rainbows on the wall after playing it for many hours. "Sonic on teh Amiga is impossible" YEAH RIGHT, look at Kid Chaos and Mr. Nutz.

Those are all that come off the top of my head. What do you hate about some Amiga games? :)

Games where it takes 37 years to load a level. When you make it past that level, 52 years to load the next. When you die and you choose to continue that level, another 4 years

I hate amiga games which have some bad music !!
- give me some prod like Turrican II, Settlers, Dune or Hybris, and I can play to them all the night long :D
for me, great tune are the heart of games.

Okay, gameplay, story-line and realisation are important, but I won't play long at one game with have a bad tune.
(I prefer no tune than a bad one)

Not enough buttons........
 

........the lamest and stupidest excuse in the world. Beat'em-ups bein gconverted from coin-op or console with much reduced control systems, primarily due to the amiga joystick having only one button whilst consoles have severel. Hello?,,,,,,,,,what does this keyboard thing do then? Supply me with a green caps light tht I can turn on and off whilst waiting for it to load?

Which reminds me -

'Loading Please wait"
No shit! so that's what the noise is! A game carefully builds up an atmosphere, lulling you into its carefully grafted surroundings, its symphonic atmosphere of sound........only to present you with a blank sscreen with the that oh so familiar legend. The games thatuse there imagination (Super SKidmarks' Pong game for ex.) stand out a mile.

Leaps of faith -

exactly what it says - high up in the clouds with no way of knowing whats below. Although no where near as annoying as random deaths ie Rick Dangerous - nomore than a memory test.

I agree Peanut, that is one lame excuse. However I preffer them to make a decent convesion to one or two buttons than having to use the keyboard. MK2 had a good control method, and the fighters for the NoeGeo Pocket have managed to retain all the flair of the coin ops with just two buttons. To me, to work around limitations, you have to be very clever and find the best method. You have to know what to remove and what to retain. Where to drop the colors ammount and where to up it.

Those who find the combination release a corker of a game. :)

Loading times are a pain in the arse, yes, even more when the screen to look at is boring. Here's an example: Agony took AGES to load the levels, BUT the loading music AND graphic were amazing, so I had no reason to complain :)

I **REALLY** hate
 

Atari ST ports. 'Nuff Said.

As far as I remember from my "Real" Amiga days, every single ST conversion was not enhanced in the slightest (This may be wrong it's just the way I remember it)

And what P*ssed me off even more than that was when the ST got Amiga games ported to it, more often than not, they were pretty close to the Amiga version.

Again, this maybe wrong it's just the way I remember it:)

Lots of good points.

Those black borders were very common in games that were designed for NTSC-machines. Especially in Microprose's games, like F19, F117A (yeah, I like those games) and Silent Service 2.
At the time I didn't really think about it.

Loading was annoying. I remember that Mortal Kombat took ages to load (before the title-screen) on my A1200. Streetfighter II was also annoying, having to swap disks when you selected certain characters. And it didn't support more than two diskdrives, which still irritates me, since I have three of them. :)

(Does anyone have a JST or WHDLOAD-version of Streetfighter II?)


I think there was a lot of whining about the Amiga's so-called lack of this-and-that in the Amiga-mags around 1993. Sure, the hardware was getting old and all, but it wasn't that much behind the consoles in graphics and sound-capabilities.


Atari ST-ports.. well, the Thalion-games were quite good. I like Wings of Death and Lethal XCess. And that motorcycle-game was quite good as well. They are all very similar to their Atari-versions, even if the music does sound a bit strange on the Amiga-versions. I prefer the Atari's sound on those games.

My pick
 

One-discdrive support
Especially Gremlin had a habit for releasing games that only supported one discdrive (E.g. Zool 1 & 2, Lotus 3). I think it would be very easy to program multiple discdrive support. The worst game with a single discdrive support I have ever played is Psygnosis' Anarchy. To load the title screen you need to swap discs more than four times (I think).

Manual protection
I have never owned an original Amiga game but some friends of mine who had bought an original got very tired when they had to look up every time their manual when they wanted to load a game. Cruel protection inventions are the codewheel and Ocean's dongle.

PC-ports
Like Akira already stated, conversions from other platforms can be very bad especially if they are converted from PC. There are some exceptions, though. I quite liked Simon the Sorcerer, Dune 1 &2 and Lure of the Temptress.

Bad Cracks
Some cracking groups really f**ked up a game by providing trainers which let a game crash. In a trainer for First Samurai for example it is possible to get as many satelites as you want just by pressing on the keyboard. Once you have 20+ satelites the game slows down and eventually crashes. Other extremely unstable mega-trained games I own are Apidya and Robocod.

I really hated the way some games would turn my disk drives into a pile of rubble. Grinding and diskstepping from inside to outside of the disk in such a loud fashion that you knew the drive head was being worn to a frazzle.

The stop-loading of sections was unexcusable. Remember the 5-disk Odyssey demo? This was like watching an animated film and when it asked for the next disk, it resumed as soon as you put the disk in. Immediately. I assume they were pre-loading the next section while the current sequence was running. How come game prograamers couldn't do this? (BTW: does this demo run on WinUAE? I haven't tried, but then again the brilliant music score will only sound right on a real Amiga, so never mind...)

And how about when you are playing a level and die, then the game not only takes you back to the beginning of the level, but appears to wipe memory clean and reload it all from disk again (see Titus the Fox).

F19, F117A & Silent Service 2 were all PC ports, so that may be why they had the black border on them (PC's could not, and as far as I know still can't do overscan). The NTSC/PAL differences should only affect the top and bottom of the screen.

// Off Topic

Tim, which crack of Robocod and which trainer? The versions I have never gave me a moment's trouble and I tested the entire game with it.

Robocod crack
 

// Off Topic

I do not remember which group cracked Robocod, I will have to boot up my original Amiga this weekend. The cracktro has blue fonts and has a musical score which features many drums. With the 'F'-keys you can collect the different training options. The 'ingame-keys' option lets the game crash. When you play the game you can press 'W' to get wings, 'I' to be invincible, et cetera. You can also complete a level by pressing 'C'. Using this key too often results in a corrupt screen and eventually a crash (and a very naughty one this is: it immediately dooms up with a very high-tone noise: it really sends shivers down my spine).

// Off Topic

Hmmm...I'll have to check my copy, as well. I believe there was a way to activate those keys without a trainer, if I am not mistaken, but it's been years and my brain has been destroyed by rock and roll.

@ Akira

Yep I agree with everything you said.

The first unobtrusive panel I saw was on Project X by Team 17 *spit*. Excellent idea.

As regards to full screen, I take it you mean overscan. This wasn't done as you lost some programming abilities. I think you lost some sprites (or bobs) if you went into that mode.

The NTSC/PAL was due to compatibility, or if you are more cynical, it was because the coders couldn't be arsed to do the extra copper programming. I am sure that the copper only went up to 200 lines and required extra programming to get the extra 56. Perhaps CodeTapper could refresh my memory about that.

The disk loading was just absolute shite on lots of games, mostly trackloaders. I said before in a post that Titus the Fox is the worst I've seen. Horrendous. Its counts down from summat like 300 and it's just so fucking slow. Who the fuck thought that method up! Best example of loading time was on the Northstar-Fairlight Megademo 3.

Kheph, I actually don't mean overscan (like in PacMania), I just mean gaems that leaves ugly borders across teh screen. I'll find examples at home and take pics :)

I agree with Tim about bad cracks. Since I had an A600, all the stupid cracktros crashed at the sight of an ECS and KS2.0+... I could fix those that came with DOS disks, but not those on NDOS disks. This made me not play some games I would have killed to play, only now I can try them thanks to cleaner images.

Trackloaders are a mess. Titus was shit even if you loaded it from HD. Pathetic programming. And have you HEARD the trackloader of teh 'A Feeble Time' demo? OH MAN, I feel bad by listening to the drive suffer like that! Was there a need to do such horrible things to drives?

Reload-blues
 

I remember a game a friend had on his C64, which was called "Movie Monsters". It required you to reload the whole game when you died - from tape. The loading-process took about 20 minutes or so.

Ouch.

Being an adventure game fanatic, my "Hate List" is genre (but not Amiga) specific:

- Action sequences in adventure games
Remember "Operation Stealth" from Delphine? Great adventure game with nice puzzles. But... all of a sudden, you´re riding some kind of water vehicle and you must avoid enemy agents and other obstacles to get to the next part of the game. I HATE this! When I play an adventure game, I want to burn some braincells, nothing else!

- Totally STUPID puzzle solutions
One example that strikes me is a problem in "Curse of Enchantia" from Core Design. Your character is walking along a path when a bandit attacks you. The clumsy bastard stumbles on a rock and falls to the ground, breaking his neck. In the fall his sword falls to the ground."Oh well, I´ll just grab the sword and be on my way", you think. Oooooh no. The corpse is blocking the way!
Take a step over it? Nope.
Walk around it? No way.
Move it? Nay.
Swing your sword, cutting the corpse in two pieces? Yes Sir!
Awwwww.....

Prepare yourself, it's a long read!
 

Small screen size: Check out The Addams Family, the coders were so lazy that they couldn't get the game running even 320x200 at full speed, so the game area seems more like 280x180 or so. Yet Superfrog from Team 17 is full screen and a hell of a lot faster (and better graphics/sound).

Intros: Having to sit through massive intros was bad enough, even some which offered you the ability to skip them were a pain. ie. They load and decrunch a huge file and then offer the choice to skip them. Far nicer is "hold down fire to skip the intro" while it starts to load and bail out on the user presses it while it's loading. I don't want to wait 30 seconds while it loads to skip it instantly! (And of course intros which you can't skip suck too! Team 17 were nice with Superfrog, boot from disk 3 for the intro or disk 1 without it).

Long pauses: You've just lost a life and have to wait 10 seconds while a tune plays and it says "Get ready" etc etc. Hitting fire should take you straight back to the game and bypass all that garbage.

Stupid extra features: I personally find the JST version of Walker annoying as it detects all my extra memory and turns on speech. While you are itching to kill some little bastards you have to sit there for about 30 seconds while you are told your mission... Why couldn't they make it so you can be playing while the speech is going or fire to skip it?!? (NB: Walker WHDLoad out soon with ability to turn off speech and hopefully have all files decrunched to begin with!)

Invisible death: From the "this game is too easy, let's make the punters die unless they memorise the entire game so it lasts years instead of days" school of thinking. Rick Dangerous and Switchblade 2 fall into this category... Those stupid spikes appear from the floor with nothing to indicate they might be a trap. At least a few dots on the floor would give you a clue not to walk there. It just means you have to either walk really slow or jump everywhere which is pointless.

Slow loaders: Already covered here but the ultimate lameness is reloading the same level you just died on when you use a continue play. And yes, Titus the Fox is the worst loader I have ever seen. (Incidentally the counter is a sector counter, 11 sectors to a track, so each sector is about 500 bytes - so that loader is loading only 150k yet takes forever! And correct me if I'm wrong but after it loads from say 300, it starts up again a second time?!?)

Death sequences: Great to look at ONCE, after that just annoying - especially if it requires another load.

Fake progress bars: I think Microsoft invented these, the old "make it go up to about 90% real quick then just increment the remaining time by 10% of what's left" trick... So you get to 90% in about 10 seconds, and the remaining 10% takes about a minute to load...

Decrunchers which flash the screen: Not sure if any real programmers would leave these in a game but apparently some crackers deliberately put them in so the player knew how smart they were to crunch the files... Lame!

Inconsistent/Unfair Gameplay: Especially in sports games you tend to notice these things. Some examples:

Peter Beardsley's International Football - the ball must be made of concrete when you throw it in as it does not bounce. And the goalie can't move in the box, only up or down on the goal line.

RBI 2 Baseball, hit the ball to 1 mm away from the 1st baseman yet he can't pick it up - he has to wait for an outfielder to run in and throw the ball to him 1mm away.

Graham Gooches Cricket - edge the ball to a slip fielder and he often runs the ball back to the bowlers end rather than whipping the bails off at the keepers end!

Leisure Suit Larry 5 - never played it but in the Amiga Power review, apparently you have to record some video footage, so you find a video camera and some tapes. But you can't use the tapes because they are not blank (where can I buy a video recorder which cannot record over an existing tape?!?) and to erase the tapes you need to find a free power socket - which just happens to be at the airport! Was someone on LSD when they made up the puzzles or something?!?

Megatrainers: If you ever want to completely ruin a game, add infinite lives, time, ammo, bombs, sausages, peaches, level skip, invincibility, view end sequence etc. Then so nobody can beat you with an overtrained game, make it a +50 trainer with superb extras like add a life, subtract a life, add 2 lives, subtract 2 lives, walk through walls, turn enemies off etc. Make every key on the keyboard do something (hope the game doesn't actually use the keyboard) and you are left with a graphical slideshow (minus some gfx if you turn enemies off!)... Do any of these lamers stop and consider "where is the line where I have removed all gameplay"?

Shadow of the Beast 2 is impossible without cheating (well actually a friend tells me that his mate can complete it without cheating as it was the only game he owned when he got his Amiga and played it solidly for months!) so that doesn't completely kill the game - it's still difficult! Maybe starting with double the number of lives would be better than infinite lives or something. And this leads me to...

Impossible Games: I find games like Arkanoid, Shadow of the Beast 2, Project X, Frenetic impossible to complete. Lots of shootemups simply add a huge number of enemies and bullets to the screen so avoiding them is impossible.

Level codes: Another great idea in Superfrog is having a level code which you get depending on how well you play. eg. You have to gamble to collect the code, and usually you have to get most/all the coins on a level to have enough attempts at the slot machine to win the level code. A great idea! Games which have small levels and tell you the code every time are usually just perserverence to complete, but for puzzlers like pushover they're OK I suppose (I have completed all 100 levels of this great game!)

Massive maps: Some games like Turrican 2 I find superb with big levels but others I just think they are completely dull - nothing much to distinguish one section from another, you're never really sure which way you are supposed to be going etc... A lot of platform games are let down because you don't know where you are supposed to be going... I quite like Zool 2 as it has an arrow showing the approximate direction to the exit.

Racing games: Crazy Cars on the Amiga and lots of C64 games (Pitstop 2 etc) have the road always filling the same fixed road position and your car moves left or right (so sometimes it's at the far edges of the screen) which is annoying.

Another pet hate in racing games is where you don't have to steer around small bends, you can just carry on through it in a straight line to change lanes. How many times in real life can you take a small left hand bend by drifting across into the right lane without steering left at all?!? - Note: Almost all games ever made do this, even the great Lotus series (still superb games though!)

Holy cow Codetapper, I think you had a lot of anger to vent on teh subject eh? Great rant there :) Your first topic, Small screen size, is exactly what I meant with 'ugly borders' Why the hell could they not use the whole screen like in a Team17 game?

The disk swapping did it for me.

I used to own a teenage mutand ninja turtles version that required to swap disks about 2 dozen times every level. Later on, a new version was released to fix this.

But it was a problem in many other games. And I dont think that having more drives always helped. I only had my DF0 back then, but from what I see in emulators, the other drives are not recognised in older games.

One more thing was the imperfect compatibility between bioses. When I bought my amiga 500, it was with the 1.3 kickstart. I was eager to play double dragon 2, when I found out that the game was messed up. I got it back to the shop just to find out that the game was incompatible with 1.3v amigas! I almost cried.

yeah i got the WHDLoad version here. i can upload it to the ADF-zone ...

amiga4life.kriz