How arcade to Amiga conversions should be.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Project X is rubbish but I think Agony is actually quite a good game.

You should play some good arcade shmups, and see the difference.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Thorham

You should play some good arcade shmups, and see the difference.

I've played many. Truxton, Donpachi, Dodonpachi, Strikers 1945, Gunbird to name a few of my favourites. Yes Agony is rubbish in comparison to those, but it's still one of the best shoot em ups on the Amiga.

[Retro-Nerd]

Agony is the most boring shooter with high ratings (besides Xenon II). You can turn on auto-fire and rush through the most levels. There are clearly better Amiga shmups, fortunately.

[s2325]

I think weapon is oversized, should be smaller but swords should be as default - one hit and you lose one sword.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by s2325

I like this fake "insert coin" in Venus - The Flytrap. Any other Amiga game have something like this?

Mega Typhoon has this too....up there with Battle Squadron IMO, though of course by the time of its release (1996), not alot of people even know about it!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

There are clearly better Amiga shmups, fortunately.

Apidya is a very good example.

[s2325]

But why second player is just tiny support instead of second bee?

[Mrs Beanbag]

at some point during the design process, someone had to ask "two bees, or not two bees?"

[dlfrsilver]

ahaha LOL Indeed, two bees or not two beers

[Greyfox]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Mega Typhoon has this too....up there with Battle Squadron IMO, though of course by the time of its release (1996), not alot of people even know about it!

Never heard of this game, delighted now you mentioned it, I am now off to experience this golden nugget

@Toni

I think the stuff and technique you've developed is a very clever trick and this would allow home dev to produce or reproduce quality games on the Amiga in the way they should of been, the arcade ports are pretty cool, but would it not need to be disassembled of the arcade ported games code taken apart to inject the new sprite set and colour scheme?


I'm no expert, so I probably look like I have egg all over my face lol.But there is massive potential for this, as of recently there has been a coder converting old Atari ST ports and reverse engineering them to an enchanted version for the Atari STe making the games more or less brand new with the new graphics and coding trickery he's done.

[dlfrsilver]

yes, this is more or less what could be done disassembling and then understanding how the original code work, and then adapt code parts where needed to make the game run on amiga.

[Mrs Beanbag]

there would have to be a fair amount of original code as well, scrolling routines for instance, which are hardware specific.

[dlfrsilver]

yes hardware specific, but since mame drivers are well described with memory maps, it should be more easier

[Mrs Beanbag]

for best performance, large chunks of the engine would be best re-written from scratch.

[Adrian Browne]

Hello tony and mrs Beanbag(I played the beanbag demo, its quite nice)

What about the original vertical scrolling shooter idea that was mooted as opposed to a port of an arcade game? Now that i want to see. Something that looks professional with nice sprite art, simple mechanics and good gameplay. Though obviously ports in the vein of final fight aga etc are welcome too.

[nobody]

I am sure if Tony post some original mockup of his idea and this is nice he would get some coder to help him. Most of these wannabe ports of arcades to Amiga will lose interest eventually and quit the project as many times has happened in the past. In the end why do it if you already have it on MAME with better quality?
If the game is original, Amiga only and very good quality they could ask some money for it. I would pay for it. Some games genres missing from Amiga are Metroidvania (mostly), horizontal shooters, vertical shooters, beat em ups in the style of Streets of rage.

Games to look after are Shatterhand - Metroid Fusion - Shovel Knight - Cave Story - Shantae Risky's revenge or shooters like SNES Raiden - MD Thunder force.

[britelite]

Originally Posted by nobody

I am sure if Tony post some original mockup of his idea and this is nice he would get some coder to help him.

The idea/mockup would also have to be realistic

If the game is original, Amiga only and very good quality they could ask some money for it

Just my opinion, but I think it's better not to involve money in these things. At least for me it would quickly kill my motivation, as I would feel like I owe people something, which makes it feel more like work than a hobby.

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by nobody

I am sure if Tony post some original mockup of his idea and this is nice he would get some coder to help him. Most of these wannabe ports of arcades to Amiga will lose interest eventually and quit the project as many times has happened in the past. In the end why do it if you already have it on MAME with better quality?
If the game is original, Amiga only and very good quality they could ask some money for it. I would pay for it. Some games genres missing from Amiga are Metroidvania (mostly), horizontal shooters, vertical shooters, beat em ups in the style of Streets of rage.

Games to look after are Shatterhand - Metroid Fusion - Shovel Knight - Cave Story - Shantae Risky's revenge or shooters like SNES Raiden - MD Thunder force.

Amiga does have some good horizontal shmups, even if some of them are arcade ports. Apidya, R-Type, R-Type 2, Z-Out, Dragon Breed, ST Dragon ,Silkworm... and then Uridium 2, Cybernetix and Overkill for defender clones (Uridium 2 is not exactly a defender clone, but I think you get what I am trying to say )

For vertical shmups, the thing gets a little uglier. There are some "decent" ones (Hybris, Battle Squadron... Swiv if you push it a little, Wings of Death if you push it a little more), but none that are really very good. (I still really love Battle Squadron, but I can see a lot of shortcomings on the game )

And for scrolling beat'em ups, that's really the most fucked up genre on AMIGA imo. The only 2 games in this genre that are not *bad* imo are Golden Axe and Shadow Warriors, both are reasonable ports of very averagey games. Everything else in this genre for Amiga goes from bad to really dreadful.

I've been wanting to learn to code for Amiga this year *just* to be able to do a decent Streets of Rage alike game, running on an ECS machine with just 1mb. It can be done even without using all the Amiga power if you can't code to push it to its limits, you just need to know what you're doing gameplay wise.

[s2325]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

And for scrolling beat'em ups, that's really the most fucked up genre on AMIGA imo. The only 2 games in this genre that are not *bad* imo are Golden Axe and Shadow Warriors, both are reasonable ports of very averagey games.

You forgot about Motorhead and Dynamite Dux

[Shatterhand]

None of them are that good.

Dynamite Dux is way too slow to be any enjoyable (It's shameful that the Master System version of this trumps all over the Amiga one). And the arcade game wasn't all that hot for starters either.

And Motorhead.... it had potential to be a lot better. I'll give in and say the game is indeed underrated and it deserved to be better known.

But the game does have a fair amount of serious flaws.

The enemies are incredibly repetitive in their attack designs. While it's cool to have a nice variety of graphic styles for them, the fact they basically all attack you the same way makes the game *very* repetitive very fast. (And it doesn't help at all that each level has a very limited set of enemies, even if they change every level). The lack of end-of-level bosses is a big letdown too. I like the bonus levels between rounds, *those* have some kind of variety to them, but I guess they added that exactly because the main gameplay is repetitive as hell.

I love the fact you have lots of different special attacks on the game, but as you use them over and over on enemies that are all basically the same makes this rather pointless.

And, of course, also lack of 2 players mode, which is the best way to play those kinds of games.

But they could have done a lot worse. They could have done Last Action Hero bad, for example (That game really get me on nerves, with just a few tweaks and polishing-up that could had been done in 2-4 weeks of extra work, that game could really had been *the* killer beat'em up on Amiga, or at least a kinda good one. In the end it became just an awful game that got ridiculous low reviews on magazines. It's not even as bad as the console renditions of the movie tie-in )