Why are platform games on the Amiga really mediocre?

[Retro-Nerd]

It would count 16 colors then. But don't try JPEGs but PNGs or BMPs.

edit: Actually it counts 22 from a random image i've just checked.

[lordofchaos]

Hmmm, that's what I was thinking, degradation in image quality could yield inconsistent results.

[s2325]

I'm using screenshots from HOL.

[TCD]

Screenshots on HOL are watermarked, so counting unique colours will never work. Grab the screenshots yourself and use the method that Mrs Beanbag proposed for a more or less accurate result.

[s2325]

I know that, I'm covering them with black boxes.

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Mr Beanbag has developed some personality of his own, but he's very much the antithesis of these impatient go-getter types. I have decided in fact that his one aim in life is to become a Rabbi. But he can't, because he's a beanbag and beanbags aren't allowed to study Torah.

This is great

He does blink if you let him alone already. Maybe I can give him different facial expressions depending on the level of danger, or something.

I always liked Jill of the Jungle's idle animations, where the otherwise apersonal message text would get snarky with Jill - "Are you just going to stand there?" (Jill nods,) "Look! An airplane!" (Jill gazes up into the sky.)

[Amiga1992]

In any case why colour count matter? The game in that list with the most colors is Kang Fu and it's a horrid-looking piece of garbage game.

I think the main thing here is not about technicalities, rather about game design. Games like Zool 2, Mr. Nutz or Mr. Beanbag have that right platformer feel, regardless of if the character is a bad ass squirrel or, well, a beanbag. It also doesn't matter if Mr. Nutz is more colourful, or if the Zool 2 parallax in the AGA versions is replaced with a copper background in the ECS versions, I still think it's the same brilliant, console-feeling, rewarding platform game.

People are too quick to judge things on how they look and sound. Perfect case is usually Street Fighter 2, the Super version on Amiga (not AGA Turbo) is the best Street Fighter game of them all because it just FEELS right although it looks rather lame. It was so gratifying to play it!

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by Akira

In any case why colour count matter? The game in that list with the most colors is Kang Fu and it's a horrid-looking piece of garbage game.

I don't think it matters that much to people, I find it quite intresting myself. But like you say it doesn't matter about the graphics if the game stinks.

[john1979]

Since debating with someone who will just continuously twist my words to suit is pretty pointless I'll make this my last reply. It's tedious to have to point out every strawman argument someone mounts, and makes for a shitty pointless debate.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Better background graphics as opposed to bars on the Amiga, can't argue with that, but really, the differences in foreground graphics are slight.

Err no, watch that video I posted. The differences in foreground quality are plainly obvious.

The Amiga version also had selectable 2 button support, so the whole Megaman grapple problem you had, I didn't... ever!

That's nice for you and maybe a few others, not so nice for the vast majority that had 1 button joysticks.

I have played Turrican 3 with 2 buttons on WHDload and it still doesn't feel as good as the control system in MT.

But certainly its lack of parallax or whether or not the main character is annoying or not wouldn't and don't feature as to whether or not i'll play a game or not!!!

Strawman. I did post a good list of reasons in another post as to why Superfrog is not a great game. You appear to have ignored those for your own convenience.

And you pretty much made the same point in the other four or so games you ''critiqued", laughably poor reasons to not play them.

"Pretty much" what does that mean? I just went over my list, I don't seem to have "pretty much" anything. Again you make up an argument so you can knock it down. I list lots of reasons why those games suck. I can list more.

I think the main Mario character is crap, but it has absolutely ZERO bearing on whether or not the game is playable or not.

Oh but it does. The central character can add a lot to a game. A lot of kids really liked Mario, are you telling me it didn't help sales?

I'm not overly fond of the Sonic the Hedgehog character, but its probably a little less random than an Italian plumber thats for sure.

Contradicting your own point above. And look at how Sonic sold. For a game that was really repetitive it sold buckets. The cool main character had plenty to do with that.

What matters to me is bits in a game that irritate me that ruin playability.

Sleepwalker is a good example.

Its got all the shit you hold so dear in it, but it fails because the designers though it would be hilarious to have the main character have an overly long animation when he nearly falls off the edge of a high building, whilst you're screaming at the fucking screen for it to stop so you can stop the sleepwalker being beyond help.

THAT is stuff that should affect how you view a game, NOT whether or not its got a bit of superfluous parallax that other than visually, offers nothing intrinsic to the game itself.

The graphics look okay, but the playability looks bad. I never said that graphics alone maketh a game. You seem to have put those words in my mouth. What a surprise...

It's the whole package that counts. Graphics, playability. The whole thing. Now imagine how bad this game could get with the current playability and really bad graphics. It would be getting less than the 6.52 score it's currently got on lemon.

As for your assertion that I should remotely care what a games magazine should think of a game, you're shit out of luck there as well. I think we can all name instances of absolute piles of dreck that were lauded on review only for the general Amiga games buying public vomiting into their laps as they wonder just what game it was the reviewer actually played.

Nice strawman. Yet again you twist my words to suit your argument.

The point was that reviewers of games take into account graphics and other factors other than just playability. Did I not mention that playability is the most important factor still? Yes I did. Did you choose to ignore that? Yes you did.

As for the sound effects sounding better on Mega Turrican, possibly they did to you, but the Amiga also had two previous Turricans and there is an expectation that certain things will remain the same. Most of the SFX in T3 are the same in T2 and T1.

So they decided not to improve the SFX on the Amiga because they were scared of upsetting the user base with better SFX? I dunno about that one, seems unlikely.

I think the thing is, MegaTurrican sounds so great to you because the Mega Drive was woefully short on music that didn't sound tinny, with the same sounding instruments time and time again.

A lot of Megadrive music is quite poor. I don't know where you get tinny from. Most complaints of MD sound is that it is muffled (Revenge of Shinobi for instance).

Owning both an Amiga and an MD back then made comparing the two games on the same system very easy. It was clear the MD had the better music in that particular game.

What is this "the same sounding instruments time and time again"?

The Amiga however was blessed with great music in even some of the shittiest games, it was the norm, but certainly I heard nothing in the Megadrive version to rival the title music of T3 on the Amiga.

I did, the title music of Mega Turrican on the Megadrive.

So, we've established it sucks for you that not all Amiga games had parallax or characters you liked and it utterly ruined games for you....

That's strange, considering I just played through Benefactor, that has neither parallax or a particularly memorable character, and really enjoyed it.

You've established nothing. In only one game I listed did I mention the main character as a factor. Superfrog has LOTS more wrong with it than the poor background GFX, which I did point out, and in three games in my list I mentioned poor background GFX as factors along side other playability issues.

Your post started with an Ad Hominen, then mounted strawman after strawman. How poor.

[Mrs Beanbag]

It's a bad sign when someone starts reeling off lists of logical fallacies, like the atheist trolls do on Youtube. The mods will have to close this thread soon if it's going to get nasty.

[laffer]

Some atheists on Youtube do make atheists look bad, sadly... but there are plenty of religious 'trolls' on there too so it goes both ways.
In any case, where did that come from? Pretty unrelated to anything in this thread, to put it mildly.

[lordofchaos]

It seems this thread has fulfilled its purpose.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by laffer

In any case, where did that come from? Pretty unrelated to anything in this thread, to put it mildly.

Accusations of "Ad Hominem" and "Strawman".

Strawman is always a favourite. It's so easy to misinterpret what someone says, and talk at crossed purposes, and so easy to assume it was deliberate. Human language doesn't really lend itself to completely unambiguous expression so it would be nice if people would give each other the benefit of the doubt and invite them to explain themselves instead of breaking out the philosophical assault weapons.

As if anyone could think this was a serious metaphysical debate. It's about whether the Amiga or Megadrive version of a game is the better, if we can't handle that without being overcome by rage I don't know what hope there is for peace in the world.

[switchblade]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Mario was originally called simply "jump man" but design and marketing departments soon realised that most people don't play video games as a purely intellectual exercise, that games are actually a medium for telling a story, and that emotional investment is important.

Mr Nutz was a bit too close to Sonic for my liking, that's the exact sort of image I wanted to move away from. That "attitude problem" that was so trendy, the way they'd give you accusing looks if you let them alone, as if to say "come on, I haven't got all day". I can see their appeal to their target audience, I suppose. Mr Beanbag has developed some personality of his own, but he's very much the antithesis of these impatient go-getter types. I have decided in fact that his one aim in life is to become a Rabbi. But he can't, because he's a beanbag and beanbags aren't allowed to study Torah.

It's kinda funny when you compare the motives of such big mascots like Mario, Sonic, Zool, Superfrog, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, etc. to each other:

Mario: A mascot designed to give a company and their games an identity that the audience can enjoy and recognize. Donkey Kong on the arcade didn't have much of a story to tell, but Super Mario Bros on the NES did. Especially when you clear one of the small castles in each world only to find out that, "The princess is being held in another castle!" A nice little plot twist to keep the game going, I assume?

Sonic: A mascot designed to make a company stand out by trying to be the exact opposite of Mario, whilst still being a good guy. An anthropomorphic hedgehog who happens to look cute whilst still being tough at the same time. Speed is his game, and he does not enjoy standing around and waiting for you to do something. His idle animations easily prove that to you. Instead of princesses, he's saving cute little animals from being turned into robotic monsters, and stopping an overweight, mad scientist shaped like an egg from trying to rule the world.

Zool: A mascot designed to make an entire platform stand out (Amiga) in order to show console gamers that even computer gamers can have side-scrolling platformers with big recognizable names. The only problem was that Commodore didn't own the rights to Zool, so he ended up being ported to the Amiga's biggest competitors at the time (SNES, Mega Drive, and MS-DOS), thereby destroying any kind of exclusivity or supposed success that the Amiga would have.

And what about Zool? An anthropomorphic ant from another dimension who wants to obtain the rank of a ninja, so he travels to what is supposed to be Earth, and must go through six worlds of random crap to accomplish his goal. And all of this is coming from the game's manual and box covers.

Superfrog: The same motive as Zool by making a big-name platformer to stand out for a certain gaming system (Amiga), but much more colorful and cheery despite the same "damsel-in-distress" theme from Mario. The only difference being that you're playing an anthro-frog who was originally human, until an evil witch casted a spell on him.

Commander Keen: Similar motive to Mario, but designed to stand out for PC's equipped with EGA graphics and no sound-card support. A smart little boy tries to foil the plans of an alien race from trying to take over Earth. So he makes a spaceship and travels to the alien worlds to prevent the bad guys from succeeding, whilst using nothing more than a pogo stick and a ray gun to get the job done. No annoying princesses this time around.

Jazz Jackrabbit: Same motive as Mario and Superfrog, but focuses on speed just like Sonic. An anthro-jackrabbit travels to a planet to save his fair maiden, whilst stopping an evil turtle from taking over the universe, or some crap like that.

....I can't believe I wrote all of that.

[lordofchaos]

Originally Posted by switchblade

....I can't believe I wrote all of that.

In short, video game plots/storylines are generally quite silly

[Lord Riton]

If you want a great plateform game on the Amiga, try out Shadow Dancer. A really well done Arcade conversion !

Here a comparaison between the 2: [ Show youtube player ]

[john1979]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

. It's so easy to misinterpret what someone says, and talk at crossed purposes, and so easy to assume it was deliberate. Human language doesn't really lend itself to completely unambiguous expression so it would be nice if people would give each other the benefit of the doubt and invite them to explain themselves instead of breaking out the philosophical assault weapons.

Lets be honest. You are saying it would be nice if I gave Galahad the benefit of the doubt.

Strawman is just a way to win an argument by subtly changing what was originally said. I find it extremely unlikely it was purely accidental. If I see a strawman I'll call it as such, it's hardly breaking out the metaphysical assualt weapons.

It was clearly being done on purpose. See further back in the thread when he was debating with Dan. He was pulling the same crap then as he is now.

I'm outa here.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by john1979

It was clearly being done on purpose. See further back in the thread when he was debating with Dan. He was pulling the same crap then as he is now.

All I see is two people missing each other's points and getting mightily wound up about it.

It really is easy to do. The weirdest thing to see is when one person objects to the other one agreeing with them! Oh well.

As for Turrican 3, I actually got the sprite sheets and part of a tile sheet from Mega Turrican, and I can tell you that the background graphics are 16 colours so should work on Amiga without any changes. However it's not as simple as that because on the Megadrive the sprites can all use different palettes. The sprite sheet for the first level had 25 colours, not all shared with the backgrounds. So yes, definitely, some colour reduction has been done to get the graphics to work on the Amiga. They are still essentially the same graphics save for a few bits of detail, but squeezing the colour map results in exactly the "drab" look described in the video.

[laffer]

I do agree there are probably more good platformers on some consoles, but I do enjoy several Amiga ones quite a bit... they have a different 'feel' to me, somehow.

One I really like that I haven't seen mentioned is Shadow of the Beast 3... that's an Amiga exclusive, too.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by john1979

A lot of Megadrive music is quite poor. I don't know where you get tinny from.

Owning both an Amiga and an MD back then made comparing the two games on the same system very easy. It was clear the MD had the better music in that particular game.

Based on this video of [ Show youtube player ], I would say that:

1. The Amiga music is infinitely better than the Megadrive. How you can think otherwise is beyond me. It also sounds quite tinny to me.
2. The foreground graphics look almost identical on both Amiga and Megadrive to me (as Galahad said).