What games should the Amiga have had in the nineties?

[grond]

"Alone in the Dark" would have been perfectly possible.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

EDIT: @d4rk3lf it has nothing to do with shame but realities of the market. Remember the OP mentions "The Nineties" specifically. Yes, there were some people with tricked out power Amigas back then, which were perhaps capable of running these titles. Were there enough of them to justify investing in a port? Clearly not, because it didn't happen even for the A1200.

Well, I agreed with you in everything.
It's just, my impressions are that if devs (at some point) started making games for hi end Amiga's, many people would upgrade, and therefore there will be much more available hi end Amiga market, for the future games.
It's chicken and the egg question.
Dev's don't want to make hi/end game so they have wider market, and market don't upgrade, because nobody forcing them.
And only one hi quality game can be "game changer" (how many people upgrades their PC, only because of doom)?

[utri007]

Originally Posted by grond

"Alone in the Dark" would have been perfectly possible.

True! And it would a be a 3D game wich don't require more than 5 frames per second for to be playable. It is not very fast themed game.

[Daedalus]

There were a few games released for accelerated Amigas in the '90s, some ports, some originals. It shows both were possible (when the publishers were geared for a small market), but as was noted, a lot of people didn't bother upgrading earlier because there was no real need - most of the games were aimed at the A500, even if it meant reducing the quality of ports. And, even when some were aimed at the A1200, they were still hobbled by trying to shoehorn them onto floppies or accessing the chipset directly so users with graphics cards couldn't take advantage. As a result, people complained that game XYZ wasn't coming to the Amiga, yet were expecting miracles because the game was too advanced to run on their A500. So they held out and ended up buying PCs instead.

Check out games like OnEscapee, Foundation, Napalm, Payback and so on, as well as ports like Quake, Earth 2140, Descent: Freespace and Wipeout 2097.

[spiff]

There's a bunch of good games where the engine, logic and sound was done. Why didn't they just pay one extra gfx artist and crunch out a solid sequel 6 months later?

SWIV II, Battle squadron II, Apidya II, Chaos engine 1.5, IK++, GODS II, Leander 2, Speed ball 3, Stunt car racer II, Super cars III, Moonstone II (Snow bros.. the work was done why??)

At least we got more Lemmings, pinball dreams and skidmarks

[mc68060]

Also shame on Digital Illusions for not giving us that 4th table in Pinball Illusions ("The Vikings"). If disk space was an issue, they could have added it to the CD32 version at least.

[utri007]

Amiga was surprisingly good for 1995 -2000. I had ( still have) with 68060 CPU and Spectrum GFX card. Surfing net was better than Windows machine.

Some how I hope that there will be some nice games and ports for accelerated Amigas, even when there is a growing number of Amiga 500 users.

[duga]

After five successful years for the A500 it was now time for five successful years for the A1200. Thanks to the trap door only the OS and the trap door card needed to be upgraded every six to twelve months during these five years. A1200 owners could follow the upgrade path by only changing the SIMM module or the trap door card.

Date____Fast MB___CPU__Comment
Oct 1992 _1_______stock A1200 released with 2 MB chip and 020/14 onboard, 1 MB SIMM on trap door card. HDD is optional.
Apr 1993 _2_______stock
Oct 1993 _4______020/28 CPU upgrade, ready for Doom
Apr 1994 _4______030/40 CPU moved to trap door card. C= out of business.
Oct 1994 _4______030/50 New owner, ready for Doom II
Apr 1995 _8______030/50 CD1200 peripheral released
Oct 1995 _8______040/25 New stronger PSU included
Apr 1996 _16_____040/40 With fan
Oct 1996 _16_____060/50 Without fan
Apr 1997 _32_____060/60 Last A1200 release
Oct 1997 _32_____PPC603 Release of A1600 with OS 4.0

As usual, hindsight is always 20/20.

[eXeler0]

In the mid 90s either your machine ran Doom or you were... well... doomed..

[AlphaAmiga]

I know that this has been mentioned before and discussed at length and in great detail but want to add my thoughts on this.

In my view the A1200 should have come with a much more capable CPU (much faster 020 or entry level 030 CPU) with minimum 2 MB fast ram as stock.

Commodore themselves should have been producing accelerator cards for their systems instead of leaving it to multiple 3rd party manufacturers.

This way they would have been buying much larger quantities of CPU's giving them a nice price break leading to relatively cheaper accelerator cards to tempt the market to upgrading with (twined with pushing games/productivity hardware to entice said users to purchase said hardware), especially those still rocking A500's.

This would have moved the minimum target hardware upwards so that developers had a much better base level of performance to work with.

If the market had consisted of a much greater majority of AGA machines, with better specs, then developers would have targeted them rather than essentially being 'forced' to create games that needed to run on said A500's given they were still largest target Amiga machine.

In the late 90's we did get some great games, some of which mentioned by Daedalus (I would like to add Wasted Dreams, The Shadow of the Third Moon and Genetic Species to the list).

[StevenJGore]

Interesting question. The obvious answer is "all of them", but of course that would have required Commodore to still be around releasing new hardware right up until the end of the 1990's to keep up with advances in game requirements. The original Playstation was released in 1995 which was a huge step forward for gamers. Could a new Amiga have realistically kept-up and remained a competitor? Then another landmark in the gaming world - Half-Life - was released on PC in 1998. In an alternate universe in which the Amiga was still going strong, would it have been released on the Amiga too? I find these kinds of hypothetical scenarios both interesting and depressing in equal measures!

[utri007]

Another way to think this, is what we don't have? There is lack of semi modern car games, but games like NHL 94/95 would have been possible with at least 68040/60 or PPC amigas. It is funny how few tells to favor them, but they are always best selling titles.

[ Show youtube player ]

[spiff]

Originally Posted by utri007

... NHL 94/95 ... It is funny how few tells to favor them, but they are always best selling titles.

You're absolutely right, being your typical computer/martial arts geek most team sports tend to bore me.. But that NBA/Fifa/NHL license really shows where the money is at.

You probably could do an interesting cultural argument around the lines of 95-1999:
European bedroom coders using whatever they want having a hard time adapting to international "corporate" licensing resulting in blander games.

[duga]

Originally Posted by utri007

Another way to think this, is what we don't have? There is lack of semi modern car games, but games like NHL 94/95 would have been possible with at least 68040/60 or PPC amigas. It is funny how few tells to favor them, but they are always best selling titles.

[ Show youtube player ]

No Amiga PPC in 94.

040 for NHL 96 (released end of '95), 060 for NHL 97 (released end of '96) and PPC for NHL 98 (released end of '97) could in theory have worked.

[Phantasm]

Command and conquer

[McTrinsic]

Master of Magic

[duga]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Command and conquer

As the minimum requirements according to Mobygames was 486DX2 I assume 040/25 MHz and AGA would've been plausible.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by duga

As the minimum requirements according to Mobygames was 486DX2 I assume 040/25 MHz and AGA would've been plausible.

I guess you could cut out the full motion videos, like the warcraft 2 floppy disk version.

I don't know what full 256 colour scrolling looksl like as I've never played a game which has done that (looking for recommendations, I don't think Lion King and Aladdin are). But both Warcraft 2, Syndicate, Command and Conquer have the vertical status bar.

Originally Posted by utri007

Amiga was surprisingly good for 1995 -2000. I had ( still have) with 68060 CPU and Spectrum GFX card. Surfing net was better than Windows machine.

Some how I hope that there will be some nice games and ports for accelerated Amigas, even when there is a growing number of Amiga 500 users.

Wow that sounds like a nice machine, I'm guessing you also used that machine to emulate a mac to run Netscape, Micro$oft Office?

[roondar]

Originally Posted by redblade

I guess you could cut out the full motion videos, like the warcraft 2 floppy disk version.

I don't know what full 256 colour scrolling looksl like as I've never played a game which has done that (looking for recommendations, I don't think Lion King and Aladdin are). But both Warcraft 2, Syndicate, Command and Conquer have the vertical status bar.

You are correct, Lion King & Aladdin both run in 64 colour mode.

On the topic of the status bar, it may be possible to "copper trick" that so that you can still use hardware scrolling (AGA can have quite big gaps between display fetches, so you have some leeway here). It'd definitely be possible to use sprites instead. Or think outside of the vertical box and rotate the bar to be horizontal instead

[Predseda]

The Dig, Rex Nebular, Broken Sword