I stopped using Amigas in 1995. What games did I miss?

[Shatterhand]

Tanks of Furry needs a 020 though.

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Yeah i love Mega Typhoon, the gfx aren't the best but it plays well and has satisfying sfx!

Mega-Typhoon is great, but it's well known game. From less known games interesting is Powder (made almost 10 years).

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[Gordon]

Mikro mortal tennis is a nice tennis game, graphically similar to sensible software titles

[amiga_Forever]

maybe software mostly, but what about hardware ? I can't imagine the same amount of hardware would be still created after 1995 after Commodore issue.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Solo Kazuki

Mega-Typhoon is great, but it's well known game. From less known games interesting is Powder (made almost 10 years).

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Yes, Powder is very nice.

[Shatterhand]

Didn't know Powder, I have to try it out. Looks really nice, though a bit on the slow side and too much euro-shmuppy for my taste... health bar + too many enemies that take too long to die. At least it doesn't seem to have inertia.

But unlike Mega Typhoon, the graphics are pretty good on this. But I don't think it will play better than Mega Typhoon

[idrougge]

Funny that you call it euro-shmuppy, I think it's as close as the Amiga gets to a PC Engine shmup.

[Gordon]

I always thought Apidya was the closest

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Gordon

I always thought Apidya was the closest

Yeah me too, from a company that was influenced by Japanese culture, that game would be suited to the PCE.

[appiah4]

Isn't Apidya basically Agony with a wasp?

[s2325]

I think Apidya have much improved gameplay than Agony. You have fun playing, not just watching pretty graphics.

[Shatterhand]

I still think Apidya is the best shoot'em up by far on Amiga, (Yes, better than Mega Typhoon too), it really has a spot-on level design with great gameplay (and the killer soundtrack just helps a lot)

I have to play Powder to have a better impression of it, but health bar on a shmup usually isn't a good thing, and it's something European developers usually loved to put on their shmups (and Inertia and enemies that require too many damn shots to die and uninspired enemy patterns)

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Funny that you call it euro-shmuppy, I think it's as close as the Amiga gets to a PC Engine shmup.

The graphics style, sure, it reminds me a bit of Aero Blasters, but the gameplay is typically European.

(we went off topic, look what you did, Shatterhand xD)

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

I have to play Powder to have a better impression of it, but health bar on a shmup usually isn't a good thing

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.

[Steve]

If it's ECS only games then the choice isn't great from 1995 onwards. It was mostly AGA only games from then on. The main one that springs to mind is Audiogenic's 'Odyssey'. Great little game. Released in 1995.

http://hol.abime.net/2278

[trixster]

Apidya was amazing. The first stage music was incredible as was the endtro music.

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[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.

Sorry Akira, but I can't avoid derailing the topic

Can you give me examples? Usually health bar on shmups is used as an attempt to hide bad level design... programmers make stupid bullet/enemy patterns and then throw a health bar to compensate.

All the greatest shmups of all time have one-hit deaths... from Xevious passing through the likes of Gradius and R-Type going to the more modern stuff like the Cave games in all of them you have 1-hit deaths. Sometimes you use a health bar to disguise a 1-hit death system (Deathsmiles, Guwange).

When I look at all the 13 annual voting for the 25 best shmups of all time at the shmups.com forum, I don't think any of the games on all the lists use a health bar at all, and it's pretty much a consensus between shmups players that health bar usually isn't a good idea on this kind of game.

I am pretty sure there are good shmups with health bars, but this is usually frowned upon by regular shmup players.

Then again... Amiga games after 1995 eh?

Total Football was released in 1996 and I remember being surprised by it when I got it. I wasn't expecting games that polished at that time for Amiga. Probably aged like shit anyway.

[Amiga1992]

Agreed on all shmuppy points by Shatterhand. Health bar is overcompensating for poor gameplay mechanics and level design.

[rsn8887]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

If you not including 1995, then 96 onwards;
Chaos Engine 2 (some like, others not so much lol)

I never met a person who liked Chaos Engine 2 it really is a POS

[Shatterhand]

Ok, just played 2 games of Powder.

First I have to say, my TV has a problem when running in PAL that certain combinations of colors make the screen goes black for like a second and then it comes back normally (it looks like the TV is adjusting to something, and it only happens when its in PAL video mode). This never annoyed me too much up until now, as when it happens it usually happens on title or loading screens, and the worst offender so far was Uridium 2 with this happening at the start of every life (I guess it's something with the effect of the Manta entering the screen).

But with Powder it happens frequently enough to make the game borderline unplayable. Everytime I switch weapons, get hit by a bullet or the bigger bosses explode, I get black screen for a second. (And I know this isn't the game fault) - which basically means I can't switch weapons while the screen is cluttered and the game is basically 1-hit deaths for me (since when I get off the blindness of the black screen and the screen comes back, I am usually at a situation where I'll get hit again with no time to react - though sometimes I get lucky )

Still with this ridiculous handicap I still managed to reach level 4 on my 2nd try (and getting top spot at the default hi-score table ), so I could get some of the game.

This is no PC-Engine shmup I'm afraid. This can't get even near to touch stuff like Soldier Blade or Gate of Thunder.

First the Framerate is kinda low and the game is at a kinda slow pace. The bullet patterns are 90% of the time just a regular spread of bullets and nothing else. The game *does* throw a couple of impossible patterns just because the spreads of different enemies end up overlapping and this is obviously a bad design.. but I must say I only saw it happening a couple of times, and then the health bar saves you.... (except it doesn't save me because I get a black screen, hehehe)

Then the problem is with enemies point-blanking at you and shooting when already being off-screen, which is something I find really annoying in shmups. Then add a hugeass hitbox and enemies that shoot lasers with no warning at all and you get the recipe for disaster. And then you have single color enemy bullets that aren't all that nice to look at and causes visibility problems at some points.

(I'd guess single color bullets are faster to blit, I considered this on the game I am coding, but it really looks like shit and makes them harder to distinguish from everything else, even if their color isn't used for anything else)


The weapon system is completely stupid. I do like the idea of having all weapons at your disposal anytime and then you switching weapons when you need them. Thunder Force games (to a extent) and Radiant Silvergun (all games released before Powder) do that very well. But now Powder...... First, only 2 weapons are useful for anything, the initial triple shot and the homing missile. The rear shot may be useful too, though as much as the homing missile, but the other 2 weapons are horrible. Then the way you switch weapons is really stupid, you tap left or right to change them on the panel and then press the space bar.

If you are not going to support the 2nd button (in 1998, God damn it!), then just let F1-F5 switch weapons, instead of making me tap the dpad/stick to choose weapons and then have to reach for the space bar. This system is completely stupid.

Now, with all the problems of the game out of the way, the game *does* feel kinda fun to play, mainly because the screen is always cluttered with bullets and you have to keep dodging stuff all the time. This remade with a small hitbox (which was already the norm for shmups in 1998, even Mega Typhoon which is 3 years older makes this right), 1-hit kills, no instant-spawning lasers and a decent weapon system would be a pretty good game, even with the low framerate and slow pace.

The graphics are really nice, though I wonder if the background had less animations the framerate could get better... I'd prefer to play a game with no animations on the background but running at 50 fps. (Though I'd bet the developers just knew they wouldn't get the 50 fps so just added some icing in the cake anyway)

Now considering the Amiga has a really low standard for shmups, this certainly is better than most of the crap we got. From the little taste I got here, I believe back at the day I would be playing more of this than Project-X for example But IMO Mega Typhoon and , of course, Apidya, still trumple all over this.

Thank you for the recommendation. I should get a CRT tv in the next weeks for proper old-school gaming, I may give a little more time to this game

Edit: Oh, and Powder does something I had never seen before today on Amiga games, but curiously it was the second game I saw doing today (Earlier I was playing Tubular Worlds on Amiga for the first time and it does it too): Using the System Requester to ask for a disk change. It's really awful to see the game being thrown back at the workbench screen with a INSERT VOLUME POWDER2 ON DF0: request. It looks extremely amateurish.