Worst Amiga Ports

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Ummm... No. But you could hardly expect them to pop in with a digital camera in those days.

Bit of a straw man deflective argument 'don't expect blah blah...'. What I DID expect is for the UK/US greedy scum software publishers to actually have some respect and put aside their greed and MAKE SURE ALL ARCADE ASSETS FOR LICENSES ACQUIRED FOR CONVERSION ARE SENT IN DIGITAL FORM FROM ARCADE SOURCE FILES.

Yes some of the artists working on home computer conversions should have been stacking shelves in grocery stores but the issue is the way these companies got hold of a license by any means, not taking a second to think about the realities of converting these games.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg, a proper computer development contract requires you to provide technical proof you are competent enough to complete the task. Here again we have an issue of lack of respect for consumer/greed of home computer game publishers AGAIN.

And finally you have to lay half the blame at the hands of the licensee, which idiots at SEGA and Taito thought those 2.5D piss poor productions from US Gold/Activision/Ocean were acceptable to have their name on it. I would expect a bit more professionalism from the Japanese but no, they were just as eager to accept bags of cash without having to lift a finger to even supply RAW bitmaps of tiles/sprites of their games or instrument samples/song melodies

Amiga's biggest problem is the majority of software being produced was solely for fuelling the millionaire lifestyle of SCUM like the founder of US Gold NOT for the production of quality ports. Almost ALL PAL Amiga games run in the dumbass 320x200 'cockeyed massive blank section on the bottom of the screen' NTSC mode. Less than 1% of Amiga commercial games are worth the money/console quality/done perfectly.

"worst port' is subjective, the reality is home computer ports should always have been the best they could technically be for arcade style games.

Most Amiga shoot 'em ups look pathetic next to the 1991 Commodore 64 shmup Enforcer, and that's a fact. Not my fault people who hardly went to the arcades to play these games were reviewing them in things like AF or ZZAP. I reviewed my own games.....WITH FREE CRACK DISKS I never wasted a penny on a shit ST or Amiga games after spending 3 days wages on Deep Space or Enduro Racer etc.

The Megadrive sales raped Amiga sales instantly, not because the Megadrive is a more sophisticated system but because that extra £10-20 per game was to ensure you usually got the best port technically possible for your machine in all aspects technically. I'd rather own 33% less games than own mostly piss poor frame skipping hand drawn colour starved colouring in book black outlines on everything utter rubbish

[gimbal]

Don't hold your breath waiting for a response though. I'm pretty sure that Pat the Cat, who apparently is banned, will not react to a post from 5+ years ago.

So I don't really know what you hoped to achieve with that lengthy pretty shouty post...

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Simon the Sorcerer II

It dosent look that much different too Simon 1 but it "runs" like a Turd

[rare_j]

Probably been mentioned already (in the ten years this topic has been running), but surely it would be a much shorter list of Amiga ports that were not totally worthless.

I was under the impression that the majority of them are beyond awful.

[kremiso]

sadly agree

LemonAmiga arcade-to-Amiga ports list & scores

according to the LA users votes, Victory Road was the worst
personally, i prefer to think that both Side Arms and Soldier of Light were never ported

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Probably been mentioned already (in the ten years this topic has been running), but surely it would be a much shorter list of Amiga ports that were not totally worthless.

So stick to naming your worst. Moaning about terrible games is infinitely more entertaining than creating yet another list of favorites.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The Megadrive sales raped Amiga sales instantly, not because the Megadrive is a more sophisticated system but because that extra £10-20 per game was to ensure you usually got the best port technically possible for your machine in all aspects technically. I'd rather own 33% less games than own mostly piss poor frame skipping hand drawn colour starved colouring in book black outlines on everything utter rubbish

The Megadrive also was a lot harder to pirate on. Copiers existed but they were expensive, and you couldn't just buy one at a regular store. You couldn't just ask your mom to go buy a copier for you easily.

You're correct, that Megadrive had way better ports generally, part of this is because most games were Japanese and the Japanese themselves did the ports. European companies tended to do bad ports, regardless of the platform.

But the hardware did have a role to play, too. The Amiga custom chipset could do some very impressive stuff, but a lot of it required technical wizardry. You had to choose what to use sprites for, what to use the blitter for, what effects to use the copper for, what had to be CPU driven. You had to carefully create mod music keeping the four channel limitation in mind, which made things even harder if you wanted music and sound effects at the same time. Doing proper Amiga coding was *hard*.

On the Megadrive you just built a couple of tilemapped layers, and threw sprites at everything. You had tons of sprites to work with and didn't have to think about messing with a blitter. Sound, you could just bang out stuff on the FM synth since it had a reasonable number of channels (and add PSG sound if you felt creative).

That's one reason why so many Amiga games were shitty ST ports. Not only did you get two platforms for almost the same amount of effort, but the ST was just plain easier to develop for. Not because it was capable, but because its lack of complex features meant you just wrote routines for the CPU and had it putter around pixels. It was simple and stupid.

MS-DOS games weren't popular in Europe, but they had that similar level of simplicity. Throw the CPU at the problem, and if the typical CPU can't handle it then just lower the performance expectations. MS-DOS ports were absolute garbage until the CPUs got so fast that it didn't matter. Then tons of good MS-DOS ports appeared because the simplicity of development became a strength. CPU pushes VGA pixels around. Boop on soundblaster, maybe make an MT-32 score since MIDI is easy, some shit pc speaker support with cpu mixing. Done.

There were not many genuine, impressive system-pushing games on the Megadrive. There just wasn't as much hidden functionality to unlock. But you didn't have to to get good results.

A more Amiga-like system from Sega was the Saturn. It could do incredibly impressive stuff for the time, but you had to be a dark sorcerer to make it happen.

Getting a good port to the Megadrive required far fewer man hours than trying to get anything even close on the Amiga.