What stuff did/do you hate in Amiga games?

[Puzzle]

Originally posted by kriz



yeah i got the WHDLoad version here. i can upload it to the ADF-zone ...

amiga4life.kriz

Thanks a lot. Now I'll go kick Dhalsim's ass once again.

[Overdoc]

Originally posted by bspus
I was eager to play double dragon 2, when I found out that the game was messed up. I got it back to the shop just to find out that the game was incompatible with 1.3v amigas! I almost cried.

This is not a kickstart problem, but a problem with the newer 1MB 8372A Agnus.
Double Dragon II only works on older Amigas with the 8371 Agnus ( maybe with the 2MB 8375 of the A-500+, too ? )


Ok, I think almost every annoying thing has been mentioned now ( especially CodeTapper's list ), but there is still one thing left that is responsible for the death of lots of joysticks I killed in rage:

The fu$%ing re-appearing of already killed enemies !!

One game that was a specialist in this was Risky Woods.
Or also Dungeon Master: You walked thru a level, killed all monsters everywhere. But then, if you walked around the level again after some minutes nearly all the fu$%ing monsters where there again !!
What a nonsens !
One reason why Dungeon Master wasn't that good imho. It's sequels like Abandoned Places where much better because killed enemies stayed killed and where not re-incarnated or something alike.

[MethodGit]

Originally posted by kriz
yeah i got the WHDLoad version here. i can upload it to the ADF-zone ...

amiga4life.kriz

Ummm, I just checked your SF2 game and, to tell you the truth, you actually possess not the WHDLoad version, but the old JST version. The WHDLoad game does not use disk-images, but ripped data files (or as Galahad, the author of the WHD patch, usually calls them, *REAL* files ).

[Steve]

Originally posted by Overdoc

Dungeon Master: You walked thru a level, killed all monsters everywhere. But then, if you walked around the level again after some minutes nearly all the fu$%ing monsters where there again !!
What a nonsens !
One reason why Dungeon Master wasn't that good imho. It's sequels like Abandoned Places where much better because killed enemies stayed killed and where not re-incarnated or something alike.

Not necessarily true. Only on a couple of levels were there monster generators in the game. One for the Purple Worms level where if you walk past certain wall types they get automatically generated restricting your movements. Also a screamer and giant rat regenetor rooms which are needed so you can stock pile on food and also so you can increase experience points before you face the tougher monsters in the game. So it's not on every level only a select few. It's also very much needed in the game!!

[Overdoc]

Ok, it would be ok for the eatable monsters like screamers, worms and the like, but it is not only them who regenerate !
Also skeletons and those big yellow ones which shhot at you are regenerating if you wait for some time.
I noticed that because I played thru one level and killed everything, and then wanted to go back to the entrance of this level to fetch some heavy chests with food and water. I thaught the level should be cleaned, but at least 70% of all the monsters in this level were back there again, and I had to fight against them again. - I hate that shit !

[JohnnyWalker]

Wow! Great post Codetapper, but I disagree on one thing:

Decrunchers which flash the screen

I actually like them. Reminds me of my Spectrum days, I guess.

[StarEye]

Originally Posted by Codetapper[B

Leisure Suit Larry 5[/B] - never played it but in the Amiga Power review, apparently you have to record some video footage, so you find a video camera and some tapes. But you can't use the tapes because they are not blank (where can I buy a video recorder which cannot record over an existing tape?!?) and to erase the tapes you need to find a free power socket - which just happens to be at the airport! Was someone on LSD when they made up the puzzles or something?!?

You were informed wrong. I can accept that certain games have certain puzzles that are incredibly stupid. A good example of that was Curse of Enchantia mentionened earlier in this thread.

But in LSL5, you don't have to go to an airport to erase the tapes. I don't even think the fact that the tapes have been recorded on is the problem. The problem lies in the magnetism. You have to degauss them.

You have to recharge the batteries for the videocamera and THAT'S what you do at the airport. The reason you have to do it at the airport and nowhere else, is because that's where you spend the most time between each recordingsession with the girls.

So, sorry, no cigar for you

However, I agree there's a lot of games with a lot of really stupid and bad puzzles. LSL5 isn't really one of them though. Either your memory is failing you, or the magazine is wrong.

I agree with pretty much all of Codetappers thoughts.

As I'm late to this thread rather than repeat I'm trying to find some less-annoying (yet still stupid) things that were done to games.

Keyboard based games without a redefine keys option.

Games that told you to swap disks but worryingly kept the disk light on (and remember the Amiga manuals always said: "Never remove disks whilst the light is on")

Games that crashed when I hit my Action Replay MKII's freeze button. B**tard coders ! I only wanted to see if I could steal your module/graphics, not actually steal them !

Games that still required multiple loads and never utilised even the basic 512k RAM expansion. Lemmings is a good example of the coders not making this mistake. Obviously the early Amiga games can be excluded from this.

Games with horrid music that didn't have a disable music option.

Games that were either too hard or too easy and didn't have a hardness setting option.

Games that when completed just gave you a crappy "Well done" message and didn't even play a module or show a nice picture. Especially the ones that required you to reset your machine afterwards.

Games that when completed just looped back to level 1 without even making things harder the next time round.

Games that used scores but didn't have some sort of high-score table, and especially a saveable table (however with hindsight and thinking of CAPS this ain't so bad after all!).

Games where it was quite time-consuming dying that didn't have a quit key (to get back to title/options/etc...)

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Leisure Suit Larry 5 - ....Was someone on LSD when they made up the puzzles or something?!?

I think someone on LSD would be far more interested in working on the games visuals or music at that moment in time !

But another game springs to mind....(and this is gonna proove unpopular no doubt)...... Monkey Island 1/2

Now is it me or were some of the puzzles in that game a bit illogical/stupid. I know the game was humour based but it got a tad boring trying everything with everything after a while.

I was never a big fan of adventure games but I did like this game for the amusement factor, and did have to resort to using a walkthrough on the trickier bits.

[Galaxy]

Lots of good points - I agree with most of them.

One other annoying thing was the inability to save most games - particularly some of the games that take some time to complete (and don't provide level codes.)

[spiff]

Stupid control/interface mixing.
I've got myself a CD32 a while back and suddenly realized how **** stupid some of the start/option things of games are. Almost all games could have been fully joystick driven but instead need you to press F1 for one player or some similar crap and that makes them useless on my CD32.

Some examples.
Battle squadron, cant change control setup with out keyboard.. press F2.
Blood money, select 1 or 2 players F1, F2 instead of just pressing fire on stick 2
Flashback. Option to have a 2 button pad.. but no way to map button 2 to inventory
Stuntacar racer, no way to skip name on first screen.
Moonstone, select 1 or 2 when knight and monster lair are on the same place.
Logical, press 1 For joystick and 2 for mouse Wtf??


Computer cheating.
Any game where the rules are bent in a way that I notice it. Homeworld 2 was the last one..



As codetapper said.. intros with out the skip option. I've always wondered if shadow of the beast did anything useful besides a slow slide show for intro and humm with the diskdrive!?

[plasmatron]

Originally Posted by RCK

I hate amiga games which have some bad music !!
- give me some prod like Turrican II, Settlers, Dune or Hybris, and I can play to them all the night long
for me, great tune are the heart of games.

Okay, gameplay, story-line and realisation are important, but I won't play long at one game with have a bad tune.
(I prefer no tune than a bad one)

YEP! THATZ RIGHT !

[Galahad/FLT]

Decrunch colours :- This was done so that lamers knew that the game was working (I kid you not!). It wasn't done to be flashy, sometimes, crackers would crunch a huge part of code that would take quite a while on an A5oo to decrunch, the amount of times lamers said 'it just sits there with a blank screen doing nothing' wasn't funny, hence it was de riguer to leave them in. As games loading systems became more competant (i.e., not a 1 part loader) then there was no need.

Stupid ways of cracking games :- X-Out, Deliverance and Rolling Ronny are examples. The crackers ripped every single load to a file, and theres millions of little tiny files. A better way would have been to group the files together to reduce loading and speed it up.

SWOS - You CANNOT bypass the intro until it displays, in the meantime, it has to load a 200K module and graphics before you can skip it. Dumb.

Overdrive - Reloads a stupid amount of data, totally unplayable on Amiga A5oo.

Mortal Kombat - detects extra ram thus loading lots of data in the first instance, so it reduces loading in game, hence why it takes a long time on A12oo. Not really a problem

Anything by Tiertex - Shoddy, crappy, wanky conversions. The Megadrive/Genesis of Strider rocked, the Amiga version showed just how much Tiertex couldn't give a fuck.

Trainers - You don't actually have to use them do you! Blame your own weak wills for succumbing!

[7-Zark-7]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Anything by Tiertex - Shoddy, crappy, wanky conversions. The Megadrive/Genesis of Strider rocked, the Amiga version showed just how much Tiertex couldn't give a fuck.

Add the likes Creative Materials & Software Creations to the U.S. Gold crappy conversions Inc. Although Bubble Bobble was fine, Final Fight was a dissapointment apart from the Music, & ditto a couple of excellent Follin tunes in Ghouls for what otherwise ranked as a steaming pile of ST doo-doo. Compared to the 16 bit consoles, Amiga Ghouls was nowhere near as good.

Not that U.S. Gold were alone in that regard, but the blatant ST ports,(complete with ropey scroll & average FX), always stood out like a sore thumb.

[JohnnyWalker]

Games that crashed when I hit my Action Replay MKII's freeze button. B**tard coders ! I only wanted to see if I could steal your module/graphics, not actually steal them !

I remember talking to a coder who explained the reason some games crashed was because some code was being executed somewhere after it was "unfrozen". Anyways, I recall him telling me that he put in a piece of nasty code that changed the user's resolution on their monitors (if they had one) to crazy ones that it could never handle... in those days it meant a ruined monitor! Ouch!

He was adamant that anyone should be punished for looking at his stuff... a bit harsh in my opinion! It was someone fairly well known as well (although I can't recall who). Nasty!

[JohnnyWalker]

Ooh! I just remembered something I really hated: The round of Amiga games that came out to take advantage of the diehards in 1996/7. I'm talking Virtual Karting 1/2, 6th Sense Investigations, Flying High, Shadow of the Third Moon --- AWFUL!!

They were mostly designed with specifications in mind with gameplay an afterthought (in a weird attempt to compete with PC's superior 3D graphics), but they were quite possibly the worst Amiga games ever created. I'm talking Ed Wood of Amiga games... horrendous.

[Mr Creosote]

Originally Posted by Jim

Games with horrid music that didn't have a disable music option.

That's one point I often hear, but never understood. Why not just turn off the speakers?

[StarEye]

Originally Posted by JohnnyWalker

Ooh! I just remembered something I really hated: The round of Amiga games that came out to take advantage of the diehards in 1996/7. I'm talking Virtual Karting 1/2, 6th Sense Investigations, Flying High, Shadow of the Third Moon --- AWFUL!!

They were mostly designed with specifications in mind with gameplay an afterthought (in a weird attempt to compete with PC's superior 3D graphics), but they were quite possibly the worst Amiga games ever created. I'm talking Ed Wood of Amiga games... horrendous.

I can relate, but I Virtual Karting had a fantastic physics engine. I only hated the dreadful dithering effect put on top and wish it was possible to turn it off. It's strange how a lot of these games tried desperately to take advance of good systems, but totally forgot that the systems of tomorrow could be even faster and therefor an option to turn off the dithering would perhaps not be very fast on the current machines, but today it would work wonders.

And Virtual Karting also was way too limited. It should have been a much much bigger game, it should have been developed into as big as Formula One Grand Prix in terms of options and features and championships and tracks.

Sixth Sense Investigations I liked very much. The bad thing about the CD-version, was the dreadful voiceovers. The good thing about the CD-version was the sound-effects, which added slightly to the game. Like the start of the game when you open a locker, this long metal bar falls to the floor and makes a lound sound. The disk version was as quiet as the LucasArts game was in this area. The game had a fair amount of bugs too, but the game was funny-ish and had a nice atmosphere and okay puzzles.

Xtreme Racing was a great game however. Very slow on the basic amiga 1200s, but when played at full speed, it's fabulous fun, particularly two player. And death match too!

[Titler]

Pure SHMUPs or reflex/skill orientated games... with no saveable highscore support . Grrrrrrrr! Is saving your highscores, as a way of measuring your performance in games which have no other purpose than that challenge, so hard to understand?! Many PD games at the time could understand this, but it seems that most mainstream software houses could not. I suppose it comes from the earliest days of computing, where companies were wary of writing to the media of that time... but by the time we'd got to the age of mass availability of reasonably reliable floppies with the Amiga, would writing to a seperate blank disc have been so awful? Yes, people could have hacked the saves, but really, the only person you cheat is yourself....

Not really the fault of the Amiga this one, but... badly labelled PD libraries. Towards the end, I took to experimenting with various PD games to try and keep my intake of new Amiga thrills up, but I lost count of the amount of times where I thought I was taking home a new adrenaline-laced game, whose very title seemed to offer hours of baddie-mashing fun... games with titles like "Muscle-Bombah-8"... but which when loaded all seemed to involve a small red tomatoe pushing blocks around. Hnnnnghhh.

Games that didn't work on my particular chip set. And no one anywhere would give you a consistant reason as to why. "Ahh yes, it's because your power LED is green, you see, which means that..."

I also add my vote to "Games that did baaaaaaaaad things to your disc drive", sitting there worrying that you'll never survive loading this one...! But I must give credit to Commodore: My second hand Amiga still works, after 6 years of solid hammering, and now 4 years of storage by me alone... where as can I get Windows to restore my icon associations correctly, or my motherboard to correctly back up data to my CD-RW drive after just a year and a half of similar usage? Nope.

Oh, and finally... multi-disc swapathons. They were the worst. But those Amiga years, they really were the best all the same, weren't they?

[Syko]

I hates manual protection so much I started hacking legit games to get rid of it, Settlers being a good example (Got settlers II for the PC last year, and it's got some good improvements, but it's not the totally absorbing game I STILL play on the amiga!), still do it with PC games that need the CD

Any game that wont run on the A4000 coz it's got an 040...

And as for multi-disk swapathons, Heart of China, Wax Works and Dark Seed are prime examples (though still worth it, coz they're great games...)