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Originally Posted by RichAplin
Heh it's fine, some of the Youtube comments are a hundred times nastier. I certainly don't take personal offense, I find it somewhat amusing that people get so worked up about something that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things; it's really juvenile, yet (I assume) that the people commenting were around when the Amiga was so are in their 30s/40s now.
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Perhaps your post here veils a kind of irony – but I think it highly likely that a lot of the worst comments on you tube are from people just hearing about the Amiga and when they come across older stuff just slandering it. I'm thinking mostly from gamers born into the 'playstation age' for whom even the Snes was already an old console.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RichAplin
I totally won't pretend I enjoy playing any of those games; actually I found that working in the industry tends to kill your enjoyment of playing videogames; There's a few games (other people's) I did enjoy (e.g. the Mario games are amazingly creative and fun) but nowadays I make a point of not working professionally on anything that has much of a user-interface; be it websites or videogames; if it's "customer facing" that means you get a ton of bug reports saying things like "Make the font bigger" (then a day later "Make it smaller again"!) or "Move it left 10 pixels" or "doesn't work on this one Android device" and after months on a project those things get really irritating.
I like the under-the-hood technical challenges myself :-)
So yeah, "Amiga Final Fight is a shitty conversion".. sure, whatever. I agree it's a shame it didn't have in-game music, but that was out of my control. I'm still fairly happy with FF from a purely technical perspective - much moreso than say Double Dragon 1, DD2, Line Of Fire, etc.
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Now I really don't want to open a can of worms here...
I think that your conversion of Final Fight was impressive technically, and as you say you never found it enjoyable as a game anyway. Without going into too much it plays a different game from the arcade machine – I can appreciate how unlikely that seems given that it's just a couple of bobs fending off a few more by beating them with whatever is at hand, but that brings me to the other group of critics – the 'mature' Amiga owning gamers.
Not all said Amiga gamers by any means, check out the reviews on Lemon and they are by and large positive – but it is a game that divides people.
Casual beat em up fans will love it, I bought the Atari ST version and it swapped several hands at my school (did I ever see it again?), never expecting the arcade, just fingers crossed that 'US Gold' had come up with the goods.
I enjoyed it, especially in 2 player, but as my rose tinted spectacles faded over time (which came in very useful for us STE owners still dreaming that we had just bought an Amiga!) I began to miss the intensity of the arcade somewhat. But even the Snes version (I ended up with the famicom version) was lacking when it comes down to it - and that was made by Capcom!
Years later I can see that what was missing is that frenetic 'controlled burst' button mashing combined with the technical depth of the gameplay – you'll miss it if you're just looking for a button masher, but there's a lot under the hood that makes the arcade the game it is. It has a core that is similar to Street Fighter 2 – timed combos that are totally simplified for Final Fight, frames of invulnerability built in to certain moves and a great move set. But 6 months just isn't enough time to get all of that in, especially if you were not used to the game in the first place.
But I can also appreciate the original Amiga release for what it is, and I don't think it's nearly as bad as all that. For a home computer the difficulty level is about perfect – you'll need to develop a strategy to get through and work out the best moves for a situation – which is generally when the goons gang up on you. I never had a problem with the gfx, and the variety of goons on screen and throughout every stage is impressive. Boss fights could have done with better scripting but meh – you had 6 months... For the the hardcore final fight fans it was never going to be quite the same. I think the same is true now. My attempting of it must surely be down to as you say – being a hobbyist and perhaps re-kindling a fire from my youth which all started with little one on the horizon. I'm not the coder you are and we'll see if I can even adequately finish a version that will run well without some hideous game breaking bugs!
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Originally Posted by RichAplin
It's nice to come to this thread and see someone having another go at converting it, on hardware that's only moderately more capable than I had to target. I'm personally a bit mystified why anyone would bother, in 2015, but... that's the joy of hobbies, you don't have to justify them.
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And why Final Fight? I think Gibs has the right idea with converting Double Dragon (again!), it's much better suited for a conversion to the Amiga than this is!
I too enjoy the technical challenge, and can relate in some part to your experience of 'customer facing' – mostly within this very thread!