Why are platform games on the Amiga really mediocre?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Secondly the graphics in Mega Turrican were not 'tons better' either. Foreground graphics were the same, the Amiga version didn't have the background parallax graphics, but i'm actually at a loss as to how that would make it physically a 'better' game. Parallax has nothing to do with playability whatsoever.

I just checked them side by side, foreground graphics are very similar but not exactly the same.

I wonder why they didn't release an AGA version with the parallax retained. It would certainly have been doable.

[Retro-Nerd]

Actually it was a bit more complex related to the development platform. Factor 5 considered an Amiga version only for a few moments and moved then to the more profitable console. Behind their back Peter Thierolf (Kaiko/later Neon) made a deal with Rainbow Arts for an Amiga version. At some point he had some problems to complete it properly and ended up in the Factor 5 team. Together they completed it and Rainbow Arts/Renegade released the Amiga version first.

Factor 5 had later had some problems to find a console publisher for Mega Turrican. So the release was delayed for a few month.

Yes. Mega Turrican is a bit more polished than Turrican 3, especially the controls and the third button for the rope. It's a pretty linear console game, gameplay-wise adapted for the US market. It's matter of taste. I still prefer the complexer level design (inspired from Metroid) of Turrican 1+2.

I wonder why they didn't release an AGA version with the parallax retained. It would certainly have been doable.

Turrican II wasn't a big seller, less than 15000 copies iirc. Not sure about Turrican 3. Hardly surprising that they moved to the consoles at some point. An AGA version would have been financially too risky.

edit: Don't know if it's really true. But the German Amiga Games (not a trustful source at all) claimed/heard rumors back then that Turrican 3 had 25000 pre-orders.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by john1979

In addition all the much touted big platformer names on Amiga had huge glaring holes that made them almost unplayable:

Superfrog - No parallax, annoying as hell music, twitchy controls, cheap deaths
Kid Chaos - Terrible rave music, god awful main character
Zool - No ability to have sfx and music at the same time. Crap music on top
Lionheart - That tiny has hell sword and kick made killing enemies needlessly tedious and frustrating
Bubble And Squeak - AGA version ruined with bugged AI. Non AGA has no backgrounds (no excuse for this)
Turrican - When compared with Mega Turrican with it's lush Effects, lovely parallax, playability with three button pad, Amiga Turrican looks and feels like turd.

It's easy to do some comparison when you don't take a game like Mr Nutz : Hoppin'Mad...
If Kid Chaos have a "god awful main character" but what does it have to do with the game technical qualities ? It's a fast, impressive platformer, made specifically for the A500 and it proves that Sonic would have been possible on this machine, if it have been coded with the Amiga in mind.
Mr Nutz is the same thing.

Check Worms on the old Amiga and the console version... Where are the multiple layered animated parallaxes ? This game was coded on the Amiga, that's the reason he's kicking out of the way the MD/SNES versions.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

It's easy to do some comparison when you don't take a game like Mr Nutz : Hoppin'Mad...
If Kid Chaos have a "god awful main character" but what does it have to do with the game technical qualities ? It's a fast, impressive platformer, made specifically for the A500 and it proves that Sonic would have been possible on this machine, if it have been coded with the Amiga in mind.

But this thread isn't about what we could have had, it's about what we did have. Of course the Amiga is technically capable of great games, and a number of technically impressive games prove that.

It's game design that I feel lets a lot of Amiga titles down, especially the ones overhyped in the magazines in an attempt to compete with consoles. Amiga games often feel like they weren't really designed at all, just sort of thrown together. Even if you have good graphics and good music and sound and good programming, if there isn't a solid, coherent design behind it it isn't going to work.

I could be wrong but I get the impression Amiga software teams didn't even have designers, they had artists, musicians, coders and maybe a manager, but no design team as such. The obvious exception that springs to mind is Manfred Trenz, although he was a programmer as well but he certainly carried the vision for a project.

I think the main character is important, too. I think it was very much over-emphasised, even obsessed about, in the '90s when there was the whole Mario vs Sonic thing going on, and there was too much focus on cool, trendy characters "with attitude" but the character does matter because it's part of the overall theme and atmosphere of the game. The main character gives the whole game character, really.

I've actually had a fair bit of criticism over my own game's character, but, I'm not changing it. It does define the game for me, I did come up with something a bit eccentric and he definitely doesn't "have attitude", which is entirely the point but I don't think some people got it. And that's fine.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

But this thread isn't about what we could have had, it's about what we did have. Of course the Amiga is technically capable of great games, and a number of technically impressive games prove that.

It's game design that I feel lets a lot of Amiga titles down, especially the ones overhyped in the magazines in an attempt to compete with consoles. Amiga games often feel like they weren't really designed at all, just sort of thrown together. Even if you have good graphics and good music and sound and good programming, if there isn't a solid, coherent design behind it it isn't going to work.

I could be wrong but I get the impression Amiga software teams didn't even have designers, they had artists, musicians, coders and maybe a manager, but no design team as such. The obvious exception that springs to mind is Manfred Trenz, although he was a programmer as well but he certainly carried the vision for a project.

I think the main character is important, too. I think it was very much over-emphasised, even obsessed about, in the '90s when there was the whole Mario vs Sonic thing going on, and there was too much focus on cool, trendy characters "with attitude" but the character does matter because it's part of the overall theme and atmosphere of the game. The main character gives the whole game character, really.

I've actually had a fair bit of criticism over my own game's character, but, I'm not changing it. It does define the game for me, I did come up with something a bit eccentric and he definitely doesn't "have attitude", which is entirely the point but I don't think some people got it. And that's fine.

I totally agree with you. I was just answering to that assertion :

4) Inferior technical specs to 16-bit consoles developed 1988 and onwards (Mega drive, Snes)

With good coding, an 1mb Amiga was on part with these machines. This wasn't a technical problem.

[Lord Riton]

I know that was not really the question, but for me the best platform game i ever played was/is "Blue's journey"/"Raguy", on my Neo-Geo.
Loved that game, lot of colors, neat characters, not an original story (the bad guy that destroys the world story..), but really well made and the graphics were really nice and different on every stage. Also the music and sound helped a lot to immerse in the world:

[ Show youtube player ]

To bad, like most of the Neo-Geo games, it was the exact same game we could find in arcade halls, and so they had unlimited lifes (credits). But i still played that lovely game a lot !

[Dastardly]

My favourite platform game of all time is a great conversion on Amiga. Rainbow Islands.

[lordofchaos]

Ruff 'n Tumble and Lionheart for me. Although hands down my favorite platformer on any system is still Donkey Kong Country on SNES ;-) I borrowed a friends SNES over the summer with this game and ended up being glued to it!

[switchblade]

Kinda interesting that both Super Turrican games for the SNES are being brought up. Apparently, Manfred Trenz worked on a game resembling Turrican called Rendering Ranger: R2 for the SNES, and was only released in Japan in 1995. Possibly considered the most rarest and most expensive SNES game ever made; only 5000 cartridges of this game had ever been produced.

Rendering Ranger went through three years of development and originally had hand-drawn graphics, before they changed them to pre-rendered graphics due to the success of Donkey Kong Country. Unfortunately, by the time the game was completed, the only company that was interested in releasing this was Virgin Interactive.

Despite being a Japanese-only release, most of the game is in English. Weird.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/rendering-ranger

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Each tile is coded on a byte or a word. if it's coded on a byte, the you can have 65535 tiles (64Kb of video memory).

The memory on the amiga is something else. there is no tilesystem, and if you want one it must be programmed. An amiga would require megabytes of RAM to get the equivalent of a tilesystem like the SNES or a coin-op machine.

The tilemap systems never see or access the graphics. The system get the access and display via the Hex code of a said tile in VRAM.

Uh, no. No no no. Tilemaps are arrays of pointers to actual tile definitions that have to be stored in graphics memory. Tiles themselves take up just as much space as Amiga graphics of equivalent resolution and bitdepth, because they're just small bitmaps. If you're using 16-color 8x8 tiles, you can store a maximum of 2048 tiles in 64KB. (And as for word-length tilemap definitions, not all the bits are used for the pointer - there's also palette select and horizontal/vertical flip bits.) There's also the fact that the tilemap itself has to go in video memory, along with the sprite parameter list. (Can't remember whether the palette definitions do, though.) Tilemap hardware isn't magic.

And doing tiled graphics on the Amiga would take up the exact same amount of space for the graphics at equivalent size and bitdepth, plus a screen bitmap for the output (and the code itself would take up some memory and CPU time.) Not "megabytes."

[lilalurl]

Originally Posted by switchblade

Rendering Ranger: R2 for the SNES

There is a romhack changing the character sprite to the Turrican suit:
[ Show youtube player ]

[s2325]

Slowdown is recording fault, not game.

[Retro-Nerd]

Rendering Ranger was probably the closest thing to Turrican that Trenz dared to design, without the fear of being sued for it. And it's really mediocre, more interesting for game collectors.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I always wanted to make a game like Turrican, maybe I will one day. Surely it's a fairly well-trodden genre by now though? On what basis would someone sue you for making a platform shoot-em-up with a guy in cybernetic armour? It's like trope city.

[john1979]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

You're pretty much wrong on most counts as far as MegaTurrican/Turrican 3 are concerned.

Yes, it was developed first for Megadrive, but it was ALWAYS envisioned that the Amiga would get a version as well, and ended up being released first.

My point was that the Megadrive version WAS NOT a port of the Amiga version. Which one was released first depends on many factors and so matters not one iota (is irrelevant).

Foreground graphics were the same

The Megadrive had much better effects (enemy deaths etc), and if I remember rightly, there were more colours and the detail was slightly higher. I remember someone describing the Amiga version as looking "washed out" colour wise compared with Mega Turrican and I think this hits the nail on the head.

the Amiga version didn't have the background parallax graphics, but i'm actually at a loss as to how that would make it physically a 'better' game. Parallax has nothing to do with playability whatsoever.

Do magazines measure the quality of a game only in terms of playability? No, even though playability is the most important they also factor in graphics, sound, presentation and lastability into the equation. Yes, graphics can make a game physically 'better'. As much as I love playing nethack I prefer something a little prettier most of the time.

And if you're mentioning playability it's arguable that the Mega Drive version still comes off best, not having the poor grappling hook control system that the Amiga was stuck with.

I personally found Mega Turrican too cluttered where some enemies blended too easily with the background. Thats not cool no matter how you cut it.

Fair enough, but I never had that problem after many hours of playing Mega Turrican. I wonder if you're just trying to find any lame reason to put it down in favour of the Amiga version?

And lastly, whilst the Mega Turrican music was pretty damned good for the Megadrive, the Amiga version had it beat, the 7 channel title music on the Amiga elevated it beyond the Megadrive music before we even get to the ingame music.

Beg to differ, I've played both games many times, and the Megadrive music definitely sounds the best on a Hi-Fi setup. The effects also have a lot more umph than the rather wimpy sounding ones on the Amiga. It's one of the few games that really pushes the sound chip.

I don't agree with everything this guy says, but he makes a good Amiga vs Mega Turrican comparison video:
[ Show youtube player ]

[john1979]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I totally agree with you. I was just answering to that assertion :

4) Inferior technical specs to 16-bit consoles developed 1988 and onwards (Mega drive, Snes)

With good coding, an 1mb Amiga was on part with these machines. This wasn't a technical problem.

Yes with good coding, and I'd still disagree it could actually compete with the best of MD and SNES. There was a reason the parallax was left out of Turrican 3 and Bubble & Squeak ECS, and especially for Turrican 3 I doubt it was developer laziness.

The SNES and Megadrive made coding the kind of graphical love you see in Lionheart much easier. With coding that kind of quality of graphics on the Amiga needing high levels of skill and experience it was no surprise most of the 2d games on the 16bit console were surpassing it.

[TCD]

Just for the sake of it: The MD had a more limited palette than the Amiga. If that affects the game though is quite questionable (as is if the amount of parallax scrolling does).

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just for the sake of it: The MD had a more limited palette than the Amiga. If that affects the game though is quite questionable (as is if the amount of parallax scrolling does).

MD had I think a palette of 512, I guess 3 bits per RGB component, but in a game you don't typically have too many shades close together because you want the most range of colours so I don't think that's so much of a drawback over the Amiga's 4 bits per RGB component.

MD however more than made up for it with more colours on the scrolling layers and also the hardware sprites which can use seperate palettes as well. On Amiga bobs have to share the background palette and sprites are severely limited. There are also 3 hardware layers of parallax. So the MD clearly has the edge graphics-wise when it comes to this kind of game.

[TCD]

I think the whole discussion about technical details is a bit moot when it comes to the quality of games and not of graphics. Sure they add to the overall feel of a game, but the SNES has loads of polished, very mediocre games (comic licenses spring to mind). I said 'for the sake of it' and the Amiga does have 8 times as many colour opportunities (even more in HAM of course), no matter how they are used.

It doesn't matter for me btw. I enjoy every 16 bit system and titles like Beyond Oasis show that a genre that was big on the SNES had an exception to the rule on the MD. Limiting yourself to blanking out a platform for a certain genre because of making generalisations doesn't make sense to me, so that's pretty much the point why I still post here

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by TCD

I think the whole discussion about technical details is a bit moot when it comes to the quality of games and not of graphics. Sure they add to the overall feel of a game, but the SNES has loads of polished, very mediocre games (comic licenses spring to mind). I said 'for the sake of it' and the Amiga does have 8 times as many colour opportunities (even more in HAM of course), no matter how they are used.

Indeed, and Super Mario World for instance had very simple graphics purely for the sake of style, that the Amiga could probably replicate easily. In fact it's pretty much NES level graphics with a background parallax layer added. But it's a fun game with lots of charm and original ideas.