Which Amiga games ARE better than on the ST?

[Megalomaniac]

Many of us love to moan about Lame ST Ports, those conversions that were clearly done either in a rush with no time to make use of Amiga hardware advantages, or by programmers who had no clue of what the Amiga could do, or how. Small playing-area windows, bad scrolling, only 16 colours (half-brightness graphics in extreme wretched cases) minimal sound, occasionally 12% slower, we can all name dozens.

However, LemonAmiga lists 1685 games that were released for both machines, and often the Amiga version was the lead, with the ST version cut down to fit that machine's capabilities. Sometimes that meant the ST version benefitted from gameplay refinements that offset any audiovisual limitations (Blood Money and Defender of the Crown come to mind) but later on the ST was often the rush job version. Examples:

Robocod is ghastly on the ST. A tiny screen window, no sound effects, choppy scrolling (the multidirectional scrolling sections, especially that succession of jumps on Toy World level 2, are ridiculously difficult) and bits where the small window means that the view-down-to-see-spikes feature DOESN'T SHOW ENOUGH OF THE SCREEN TO SHOW THE SPIKES. Note that The One for ST Games printed the exact same review as The One For Amiga Games did (same text (not mentioning 'Amiga' or 'ST' at any point), same screenshots, same percentage) which is tantamount to fraud.

Cannon Fodder is another, the bad scrolling makes an already difficult game almost impossible.

Menace was infamously a lazy conversion to the ST, with single-colour sprites, an ugly colour palette and an unhelpful score panel. Horizontally-scrolling shooters weren't the ST's strength, but it could do better than this. Still, it plays quite well.

Pac-Mania is the most surprising one - a 1988 coin-op conversion from the UK that wasn't an ST port????? Amiga owners got a full screen, smooth, colourful, highly playable conversion. ST owners got a small monochrome playing area making it impossible to plan ahead (that's if they hadn't been blinded by the horrid level-select screen) and still some noticeable slowdown.

Amiga Rainbow Islands is sometimes seen as an ST port, and it does indeed only have 16 colours and 25fps on the Amiga, but playing the ST version it's surprising how much slowdown there is, whereas the Amiga version runs at a solid speed throughout.

Any more, which would appear higher on a 'Best Amiga Games Ever' list than a 'Best ST Games Ever' list?

[AestheticDebris]

Weren't most of them? I mean even the quickest ports usually had improved sound at least. They might have been crappy compared to what the Amiga could do, but they generally weren't actually worse than on the ST (iffy dark colours aside)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Weren't most of them? I mean even the quickest ports usually had improved sound at least. They might have been crappy compared to what the Amiga could do, but they generally weren't actually worse than on the ST (iffy dark colours aside)

That's what I would say too. The opposite question would be more interesting: Are there ST versions that are better than the Amiga version?

[jotd]

there's also a thread about this. Addams Family is mentioned for instance.

[Megalomaniac]

I've added a final sentence to clarify what I was getting at.

As for better on ST than Amiga, some 3D games which were entirely processor dependent might count, as well as what Lemon calls the halfcolorbug (why US spelling?) games. I've suggested a couple more, but also, Prince of Persia is one I've seen suggested, and some ST fans say Monkey Island's directly-converted 16 colour ST visuals look better than the downgraded-from-256-to-32-colours on the Amiga version (though I think one of the German mags strongly disagreed).

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jotd

Addams Family is mentioned for instance.

Addams Family is different. Not necessarily better. It has the extra parallax tiles that are (for some reason) missing from Amiga version but it has flip screen scrolling which IMO makes it much worse.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Which Amiga games are better than on the ST?

Shadow of the Beast has to be the most obvious. The ST version was terrible. It wasn't the developers fault, it was down to pure economics. A 1mb version had been proposed with enhanced STe features but it was denied by executives on the basis that there were far more 520 ST than 1040 ST, the difficulty of fitting ST RAM upgrades and that almost no STe's had been sold at the time. An STe demo in 2022 shows what it could have looked like.

https://twitter.com/keithclarkcouk/s...18630578720768

[Predseda]

Nitro

[Minuous]

I recall it being mentioned in the mags at the time that Powerdrome and FOFT had better playability and less bugs, respectively, on the Amiga when compared to the ST versions.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by jotd

there's also a thread about this.

Doesn't matter. We definitely need another 100+ page one dumping on the ST (because that's how these troll well meaning threads inevitably end).

[kremiso]

the smaller screen area used on ST was common in a good amount of titles, starting from ie Turrican(s)

Lost Patrol could be interesting to explore in both machines; i surely prefer the miggy one, due the ugly 16 colors pics on ST, and the lack of two arcade sequences
the different 'soft' main tune imo worth a check too on ST btw

[Adropac2]

to answer a slightly different question as TCD has posed, the exceptionally great port of Oids onto the Amiga suffers from the keyboard hardware limitation meaning you can't play the game masterfully using keyboard

I'm not sure the amount on ST but the limit for Amiga is 4 or 5 I think and in Oids you need at least 6 simultaneously held keys at certain points when they cross over- which they do more than you would think. Joystick on Oids is very limiting once you understand just how much you can do with the keyboard functions set as they are

It's a very rare thing in a game to have so not a problem at all for most games on Amiga. The only game I can think of actually that is also a problem this way for Amiga is F18 Interceptor when you play using cursors and the combination of rudder creates a problem with the directions causing the plane to lock

[Megalomaniac]

Attacking the ST wasn't my intention, if the thread were to turn out that way I'd probably want to stop it. I'm hoping to highlight Amiga games which did make full use of the hardware, or were released on the ST first but benefited from design changes when converted to the Amiga.

In the latter category, Powerdrome and Vroom! added joystick control and I think a few bugs or design issues in FOFT were put right.

Nitro I think has different circuits on the ST, designed to remove horizontal scrolling. I forgot that TV Sports Football is amended in the same way.

Forgot about Shadow of the Beast, I'm one of those for whom it's style over substance, but the ST version indeed has no style either. The STe remake looks promising so far, obviously a lot more work needed before we can really compare, there's a good STe remake of Pacmania that's (unchanged music aside) pretty close to the Amiga one though.

[jotd]

Without criticizing the ST, we can't really compare the ST and the Amiga. Amiga hardware is better, there's not really a debate.

But we can compare the game coders efforts to take advantage of the amiga, which wasn't always done, and was sometimes even worse (Tiertex? dimmed colors?). There are also ST exclusive games that Amiga owner always wanted to play (I remember a friend wanting desperately to play Colonial Conquest). In that area recent ports bridged the gap, though, but didn't improve the ST games.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Doesn't matter. We definitely need another 100+ page one dumping on the ST (because that's how these troll well meaning threads inevitably end).

Usually the ST bashing ones end up being shorter. This is an Amiga board after all

More serious: I think it's easier to point out those games that had features on the ST that the Amiga version was missing (like Adropac2 mentioned). jotd's point about the hardware being the main reason.

[dlfrsilver]

Crack Down from Sega. 2 Disks on ST, with complete intro and also the outro that they did not put in the Amiga version, that get only 1 disk and a mastering error.

[ransom1122]

What do people think about Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: The Coin-Op!
Is it better on ST as it has music, or is the gfx & scrolling better on Amiga or exact?

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by jotd

Without criticizing the ST, we can't really compare the ST and the Amiga. Amiga hardware is better, there's not really a debate.

But we can compare the game coders efforts to take advantage of the amiga, which wasn't always done, and was sometimes even worse (Tiertex? dimmed colors?). There are also ST exclusive games that Amiga owner always wanted to play (I remember a friend wanting desperately to play Colonial Conquest). In that area recent ports bridged the gap, though, but didn't improve the ST games.

Amiga hardware is better for action games, unquestionably. For adventures and RPGs, the Amiga's better sound and more colourful graphics should usually make for a slightly better experience, though often needing 1Mb on Amiga but 512k on ST. For sims and strategy games, the ST's faster processor can make that version slightly better. In both cases though, the Amiga stayed supported by companies for longer. For 'serious' creative or productive tasks, its generally much closer. If you didn't need action games, an ST (or later STe) was just as good a buy as an A500, usually cheaper and/or with more bundled software.

None of Tiertex's games seem to have the halfcolorbug specifically, and I'm not sure any of their games were better on ST than Amiga, they were equally crap on both (though further from the Amiga's potential).

Havne't played Turtles 2. but I'd assume from that comparison that I'd prefer the Amiga version - ingame music doesn't bother me as much as a lot of people, and with the ST it may not sound great (and I assume you can't turn it off and just have sound effects?).

Crack Down's a weird one, presumably the whole thing would fit on 2 single-sided ST disks (800kb in total) but not one double-sided Amiga disk (880k) due to Amiga sound taking up more space (both versions look visually identical), hence the missing intro cinematic static screens? The mastering error making it crash before the last level (fixed for the Kixx reissue, I believe?) was just making it worse - does the Amiga version definitely lack the outro, or is it just inaccessible on the first Amiga release because of the mastering error rendering the game uncompletable?

[dlfrsilver]

Crack Down's a weird one, presumably the whole thing would fit on 2 single-sided ST disks (800kb in total) but not one double-sided Amiga disk (880k) due to Amiga sound taking up more space (both versions look visually identical), hence the missing intro cinematic static screens? The mastering error making it crash before the last level (fixed for the Kixx reissue, I believe?) was just making it worse - does the Amiga version definitely lack the outro, or is it just inaccessible on the first Amiga release because of the mastering error rendering the game uncompletable?

the game is double sided disk on Atari ST. The Outro is missing because 1 disk is not enough. they even removed some screens from the intro on the Amiga version.

The story behind is that they spend long months to make the ST version and 3 weeks to do the Amiga port.

[Megalomaniac]

You said Crack Down was two disks on the ST, turns out its one double-sided disk on both Amiga and ST (an early double-sided-only ST game, perhaps the first UK-developed one? Apparently it was 2 single-sided disks in the US, probably because the ST had declined quicker there so a smaller percentage of US ST users had double-sided drives). I shouldn't've copied your homework. But I guess they ran out of space on the one Amiga disk because the Amiga's version's improved sound took up more space.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

You said Crack Down was two disks on the ST, turns out its one double-sided disk on both Amiga and ST (an early double-sided-only ST game, perhaps the first UK-developed one? Apparently it was 2 single-sided disks in the US, probably because the ST had declined quicker there so a smaller percentage of US ST users had double-sided drives). I shouldn't've copied your homework. But I guess they ran out of space on the one Amiga disk because the Amiga's version's improved sound took up more space.

Crackdown retail release i own for ST is 2 double sided disks (sold in all European countries).

The 1 disk version you talk about is the budget release on ST.

There was not enough space on 1 disk for Amiga. They should have released the game on 2 disks instead of 1.

The sound is custom on Amiga (55kb), and it's not that big, and it doesn't bring any improvements. However, the Intro and outro + levels + sprite + main code was too much for 1 disk.

They had to use an MFM format to store more data in the Amiga version.