Why are platform games on the Amiga really mediocre?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

There is and interesting interview of several amiga devs in this issue of the One on pages 22 to 27

http://amr.abime.net/issue_335_pages

indeed, there's even a moment where they say that the amiga has not been used to the maximum......

And to my joy, they also say that compared to the japanese and american developers, they still here are doing games like a hobby
(i was saying that the japanese devs had backk in the days excellent game editors and game designing tools we hadn't in europe...)

[john1979]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Well that's one thing for the main theme/credits music, rather another for the in-game music, where we don't have enough spare CPU for 7-voice and have to put up with 4 including sound effects. I do wonder how the 68020 copes with this though, and whether the A1200 could manage maybe 6 channel music during the game and 1 channel reserved for sound effects.

The title music sounds phenomenal and I can't really call whether I prefer the MD or the Amiga in that regard.

But the in game music pales gainst the MD.

Evidently consensus is against me which I shouldn't have been surprised about given that this is an Amiga forum. I suppose if I went onto Sega16 forums and claimed the opposite I would get shot down in flames also.

I guess I know which I prefer so I'll stick with that......

[Mrs Beanbag]

I also think the Megadrive music sounds great, certainly some of the best music on the console. The thing is we already had two previous Turrican games on the Amiga with a distinctive musical style so we had an expectation. It's bound to sound different on the Megadrive because of the different hardware but that doesn't make it bad.

In fact I was playing the Mega Turrican level 1 tune when Alex walked in and said "wow I like that," he didn't know what it was.

[lilalurl]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I do wonder how the 68020 copes with this though, and whether the A1200 could manage maybe 6 channel music during the game and 1 channel reserved for sound effects.

Super Stardust (AGA game) has 12 channel music!!!!!!!!!!!! (yes, that's 12 exclamation marks). At least that is claimed on the back of the box:
http://hol.abime.net/2212/boxscan

[Retro-Nerd]

Seems true for the title screen tune. The rest in 4-channel only.

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

I also think the Megadrive music sounds great, certainly some of the best music on the console. The thing is we already had two previous Turrican games on the Amiga with a distinctive musical style so we had an expectation. It's bound to sound different on the Megadrive because of the different hardware but that doesn't make it bad.

In fact I was playing the Mega Turrican level 1 tune when Alex walked in and said "wow I like that," he didn't know what it was.

I agree; it's good stuff. The Genesis/MD generally had developers making much, much better use of FM synthesis than most PC games ever did...

That said, it's easy to tell that the Amiga version was the original; it just sounds like a more natural fit of instrumentation-to-style.

[hansel75]

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but BC Kid on the amiga is a superb platformer, great graphics and sound, and it plays really good to!

Plus it even looks better then the original PC Engine version

Comparison-
http://retro-sanctuary.com/compaison...adventure.html

Edit- I have just been playing this on my A1200 and i had forgotten how good a game it is, it has 2 button support, music with sfx, and almost looks like an aga game despite being an ecs game..
I would go as far to say, that apart from the turricans in which aren't true traditional platformers, BC Kid would have to be the best amiga platformer out there!

[alkis]

There is only one game really
BLAZEMONGER

[dlfrsilver]

here are 2 links, with screenshot made from the 2 official Toaplan developpement computers for JAMMA boards :

toaplan TED editor for X68000 (yeh ! coin-op games creator !)

It has a lot of functions, and is way more advanced than the internal tool of Ocean Software to create tiles and to do animations !

https://app.box.com/s/5k1dmr9kpuidgyprlrhy

Toaplan GX010 (running on OS/9 for 68000, and disk saving of the tiles were done on 8"disks 48TPI 28 sectors per track !

https://app.box.com/s/hffjziv5ba646ul5nfb7

[lordofchaos]

To some of the earlier comments regarding Turrican 3, here's a video showing the differences side by side. Still think the Amiga has the overall edge in the sound department..The default difficulty level is harder on the MD.

[ Show youtube player ]

[john1979]

Originally Posted by lordofchaos

To some of the earlier comments regarding Turrican 3, here's a video showing the differences side by side. Still think the Amiga has the overall edge in the sound department..The default difficulty level is harder on the MD.

[ Show youtube player ]

Looking back on this thread I can see I got a bit too passionate about it all. Certainly makes for some cringeworthy reading a year later. Galahad was right to give me a hard time I think.

I prefer the MD soundtrack because it's more warm and bassy (without the hard separated stereo). The Amiga version is more clear and detailed because of the sample based output but subjectively it's not for me in this game's case.

If you read over this whole thread though there are plenty of good arguments each side - Amiga Platformers good - Vs - Amiga Platformers pretty poor show

The jury will always be out on this one. Personally I think Benefactor and Solid Gold are contenders that keep Amiga in the ring.

[nobody]

Platform games, yes they were much better on consoles, they had a mass market compared to the small and pirated Amiga one. Even though the Amiga had some serious power could not take off 50% due to piracy and 50% being owned by Commodore, all big developers left for ..NES which was a relic compared to A500 because they were making more money there.
(Off topic) Commodore was just milking Amiga 1000 hardware, they couldn't make software or upgrades for their machines, they could fail even if they had Playstation, Atari survived more than them even though they had inferior hardware! They were selling c64 until 1993.

[Michael Sykes]

Thats a thread worth reading...
I would say there are at least a few good platformer.
Marvin's Marvellous Adventure, ChuckRock² and Turrican of course just to mention a few.
But there are also a lot of bad ports from other systems that don't use all of the amigas resources.I would say those are only midrange on the quality meter.I guess thats true for all genres.

@nobody
Selling a good product as long as possible isn't a bad idea. The production of the VW Beatle was stoped in july 2003. Volkswagen is still selling cars.

The dumbest thing they ever did at big C= was to stop the production of the A500.
Or better to stop it because of the A600, which wasn't selling as expected.
Why would anyone want to buy it commo?
It was just a cheaper(in prod. costs) clone of the A500.At least that was what commo wanted.
But none of the old expansions would work.
And the worst thing was that the A600 was even more expensive than the A500 when it was released.
So commo canceld a product that was selling fine for a more expensive and worse system. WTF?

...they could fail even if they had Playstation...

so true...

[Mrs Beanbag]

off topic i suppose but i was thinking about the mistake that was the A600 earlier today. it was really a strange decision to release a new machine that was so similar in spec to the A500 with AGA just around the corner, if they had waited and released the A1200 and A600 at the same time it would have made more sense because then you could choose, but people were going to resent upgrading so soon, the result was that people still focused on OCS/ECS compatibility for games, making AGA all a bit pointless after all that.

A600 isn't a bad machine in itself, but the timing was business lunacy. Although if it had been AGA too, that would have really been quite good. Since so many AGA games were just OCS games with some parallax added, clearly an '020 wasn't even needed for them anyway.

[nobody]

Originally Posted by Michael Sykes

@nobody
Selling a good product as long as possible isn't a bad idea. The production of the VW Beatle was stoped in july 2003. Volkswagen is still selling cars.

Sure I agree, I still have a BMW E36 but cars are a different story you can use them for work, moving etc.
I don't have some bad feelings for good old 64 I love it but it was old by 1993 the SNES was already out there.

[Michael Sykes]

Originally Posted by nobody

Sure I agree, I still have a BMW E36 but cars are a different story you can use them for work, moving etc.
I don't have some bad feelings for good old 64 I love it but it was old by 1993 the SNES was already out there.

I think it was, like the beatle, only for the mexican and south american market.
If there were still some c64 in the shelfs here in europe in 93 I'm sure they were old stock.

But hey, they are still in use and there is an active scene still hacking them. There was even a late come back in 2005, if you remember the c64dtv!
I think what you experience as "differnt with cars" will happen with old computers,too.
It has imho allready started.
It's just that cars are a lot older than computers.And are much more common for a longer period of time.
But they dont evolve with the speed of silicon so the computer gets "old" a lot faster.
Wich means it's catching up exponentially. I think in 50 years it will be the same with retro computing as it is today with collecting old cars. Today it's still more about childhood memories, at least in my case.

[Mrs Beanbag]

i'm pretty sure they were still selling Atari 2600s in Toys'R'Us in '93.

cars are not a good analogy. you don't have to choose your car for compatibility with the roads you want to drive on/towns you want to go to.

[Michael Sykes]

But you could choose the car depending on the phonemodel it supports. ^^

BTW: do you remember that one? I was just looking for the gates quote and found a little more than expected.^^

At a recent computer exposition, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated:
"If General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, GM issued a press release stating:
"If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

-For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

-Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

-Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.

-Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

-Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads.

-The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.

-The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

-Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

-Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

-You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

[jimmy2x2x]

That is fantastic!

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Michael Sykes

But you could choose the car depending on the phonemodel it supports. ^^

wat

*has never owned a car*

[ Show youtube player ]