What stuff did/do you hate in Amiga games?

[Minuous]

How about coin-op conversions which are much slower than the coin-op (eg. Bubble Bobble). Similarly, games which were designed for NTSC and thus run too slow on PAL machines.
And games where there are an endless stream of enemies (eg. Black Lamp) where it is hardly worth the effort of killing them because another one appears immediately.
And games like Scorpio where when you die you go all the way back to the start of the (very long) level.

[Thorham]

I used to hate the loading times, but that has been solved by WHDLoad. What I hate now is the fact that most games don't allow saving ones in-game position. It would be nice if such a feature could be added to individual WHDLoad modules (or a global state-save feature).

Edit:

Forgot the following: I also dislike the fact that most Amiga games use only one joystick button. This is of course caused by the ridiculous fact that Amiga joysticks generally have only one button, while they can have three. Yes, three, and you don't need special software, either (can be read directly from the hardware).

And finally, keyboard support would've been really nice. On the peecee, games are always playable with the keyboard. Can work on the Amiga, so why isn't it a standard?

[roberthazelby]

Originally Posted by BrooksterMax

Great thread, never seen it before.

Would add mine - the use of custom format save disks - SWOS and Cannon Fodder spring to mind, you could not just use a normal DOS formatted disk (very quick with X-copy I remember) you had to wait for their stupid custom things and their own formatting routine to execute. I am sure there were some other guilty games as well.

I often remember formatting disks for saves, only to find I had to do it again - ingame grrrr...

Gremlin's Harlequin did this, too. The disk format was REALLY unstable, meaning your saved games would get corrupted on a really regular basis.

I keep getting tempted to give my WHDLoad installed Harlequin a go, in an effort to complete it, but think I'd cry if I lost my saves.

The other bugs for me:

- Massive black borders, and the bottom third of the screen not being used
- Lack of parallax scrolling on many games. The Amiga could handle it, but most coders simply didn't bother. Addams Family looks very poor without it (and I'm sure I recall the coders stated in Amiga Power that they were having difficulty implementing it)

[skateblind]

Originally Posted by Paul_s

games which had more than 5 floppy discs. Seriously Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen would have been better just on CD-ROM

Yeah, I know they can be HDD installed but for those of us in the 1990's HDD's were expensive

How much were CD drives then? The CD32 version of BASS got released in 1994 apparently, the same year as the disc version I think. More formats means a wider audience so I don't blame them. I loved all those adventures, even if half of the time I was inserting discs rather than playing.

Umm, back on topic, I hate games that make the difficulty hard just to increase longevity, it works for some games, but not all.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by skateblind

How much were CD drives then? The CD32 version of BASS got released in 1994 apparently, the same year as the disc version I think. More formats means a wider audience so I don't blame them. I loved all those adventures, even if half of the time I was inserting discs rather than playing.

Umm, back on topic, I hate games that make the difficulty hard just to increase longevity, it works for some games, but not all.

I'd have to dig out some old adverts but I got my 1200 in the Summer of 1993. I also bought a HDD later around 1995 so I installed BASS/FOTAQ onto it then... made things a lot more bearable... I ran 2 external drives back in the day... Never bought a CD-ROM drive with my 1200... (wish I had)...with the Amiga dieing in 1994 I didn't want to buy any more hardware for my Amiga so remember keeping it as it was until 1999...

CD-ROM drives were pretty expensive back then IIRC, my HDD cost over £100 for 1GB but I had a job to afford it. My modem was £200+ (28kbps)... crazy times... for comparison when the first CD-RW burners came out I forked out £250 for one.

[vidarh]

Originally Posted by Thorham

And finally, keyboard support would've been really nice. On the peecee, games are always playable with the keyboard. Can work on the Amiga, so why isn't it a standard?

It is standard on the PC because so few people have/had joysticks on the PC, so without keyboard support your game wouldn't sell. Amiga games likely rarely got keyboard support because most Amiga users on the other hand had joysticks, and so they had much less reason to add it.

[vidarh]

Originally Posted by BrooksterMax

I only knew one friend in the 90s who had an Amiga with hard drive - but it was the 20mb A600 which for an extra £100 (?) on the disk drive only version was actually pretty useless! I think Beneath a Steel Sky would have filled that alone!

I got a used A590 with a 20MB drive for my A500+, and what was on there was very carefully chosen. No games. Unfortunately after 6 months or so something happened to the motor and it was unable to start. So I had to "assist" it by opening the drive and spin it up with my finger - once it started it ran fine... Drive lasted another year or so after than while I saved up money for a new, larger one to replace it.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by blackcornflake

A specific annoyance with a specific game:

Worms DC plays an action replay when two or more worms are killed in an attack. That bit is fine. The annoying thing is that, every so often, what happens in the replay is entirely different to what has just taken place. And so whereas your worm might have just blasted two enemy worms directly to hell, in the replay he instead does something entirely crap like fire his bazooka at his own little wormy butt. And what happens in the alternate reality action replay is taken as having actually happened.

Grr.

Never had that in Worms DC. Bad version, likely.

[Anakirob]

There's a few points I am surprised I have not seen mentioned in this thread already.

1-Leaps Of Faith
Especially annoying in Ruff'n'Tumble, because the game designers claimed repetedly in WIP articles that the game would contain none. And yet there they are. Oh, and these totally ruined any chance of playability in Quik The Thunder Rabbit

2-Baddies Spawning Right Up The Players Arse
Alien Breed 2 is the first title which springs to mind. But there are many others.

3-Psychedelic Vomit
Especially when the puke in the foreground looks exactly like the puke in the background. I.E. Trolls and Oscar.

4-Baddies take an impossible number of hits to kill
Alien Breed 2 and Project X

5-All powerups lost with life
Coupled with the previous point, makes the game unplayable after the first death. I can get to level three in Project X without losing a life. But if I die at any point after the asteroid field in level one, then I might as well quit and start again for all the hope I have of making it any further.

X-Memory Tests & Ridiculous Time Limits
The problems have been mentioned before, but I just had to take a shot at Alien Breed: Tower Assault. Because it was sooooo close to being awesome, but finally succeded in being worse than mediocre, just a couple of stink lines away from "steaming pile of...."

Whoever "The Wolves" were (T17 Playtest team), they sucked at doing their job. I guess they were involved in playtesting from fairly early on, and were probably so accustomed to the levels that they simply did not see how badly designed they were, I bet the ***ts even requested shorter time limits, dead ends, etc.

Team17 really did make some shitty overrated games, eh? A couple of good titles, a handful of mediocre ones, and a lot of excrement, albeit pretty excrement.

Originally Posted by Photon

Never had that in Worms DC. Bad version, likely.

This problem was already explained on the previous page. The original release was bugged, T17 sent out a patch disk to all who registered their copy.

[Eclipse]

My memory is hazy but it went something like this:
F1GP, I found an old "The One" magazine coverdisk with a nice menu. I copied it to F1GP disk 1.
Before the game loaded it would bring up a menu, basically the options were Copy Disk 3 to RAM and or Play Game.
What it did was copy Disk 3 to RAM, relabled ram the same name as the disk and then started F1GP.
Once loaded no disk swapping was required. You had to have a 1MB Amiga of course.

[JohnnyWalker]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Team17 really did make some shitty overrated games, eh? A couple of good titles, a handful of mediocre ones, and a lot of excrement, albeit pretty excrement.

And yet it was SACRILEDGE when Amiga Power gave things like Body Blows (a much deserved) 74%. Time has proven them right, it seems.

One Team17 game I liked was the "Special Edition" of Alien Breed (aka '92). I thought they really made a simple, enjoyable little game, that pulled everything right back to the basics.

Can't say I enjoyed many of their other games.

[StarEye]

For me, the majority of Team 17 games were ranging from pretty good to great. I don't see a lot of crap on this list: http://hol.abime.net/hol_search.php?N_ref_publisher=590

I'd say the vast majority is actually great games (wether you like htme nor not, they're great. Just because you have a different taste in games doesn't mean that you have to look at them as shitty).

For example, I don't really like Halo. Hell, I didn't even find Super Meat Boy (the latest universally loved indi game on Steam and XBLA) that fascinating. But I have no trouble in acknowledging the quality in these games and I can easily see them being enjoyed by others. There are plenty of games that I don't like, but that I don't really consider shitty - just not for me. For me Team 17 were pretty consistent in their quality.

The Body Blows games were fun and playable for its time. There wasn't a lot of competition on the Amiga if you wanted a Street Fighter-esque game. It was also very hyped (as the Street Fighter-beater) with in-depth previews in magazines and reviews scores generally did get a bit inflated.

Also, a 74% score is actually quite good, considering that Amiga Power were the only ones that used the full scale. A 74% score from AP would probably be something like an 85-90% in Amiga Format, so to say time has proven AP right is to say that Body Blows is a well above average game.

They were probably the EDGE of the Amiga magazines.

[laffer]

Lack of level passwords/saves was pretty annoying in several games... not only Amiga games of course, older games in general.

Also - dumb copy protection preventing you from installing games on your harddrive, really dumb.

[StarEye]

Copy-protection that prevented you from making backups of your originals, and when these protected games also forced you to save on your original disk.

[Predseda]

That ship that sucks all your money in Deluxe Galaga.

[MajicMushroom]

Originally Posted by Kada

It's probably been mentioned already, but: ridiculously long loading times and disk swapping. Something I used to get really frustrating over was when you had to swap a disk, and then swap back to the first one again. I mean, come on! This happened when I was playing Willy Beamish from floppy disks back in the days (oh man... was I happy when I finally got a harddrive). It'd prompt me to change from something like disk 3 to disk 9, and then back to disk 3 again. Gaaaah!

Yeah, think the worst culprit of Zool? It was a real disk-change-a-thon!

[SWIV]

Yeah disk swopping was a pain,i do not actually recall much in the way of hating anything much with the Amiga except perhaps when i damaged the disk drive ejecting a disk while it was being read,after owning mainly cartridge consoles until the Amiga i just felt the whole 3.5 disk drive system was just too mechanical and vunerable.
Apart from that sometimes i felt a few games could of been done better,i felt Operation Wolf was better (faster) on the C64 for example.

[source]

my bigest thing the lazy way that gaming companies brought out the game. The graphics or sound was programmed or the computer with the least amount of resources usually pc. The conversion for the amiga never used the amiga to its Potential. The other is directed to origin. Ultima III made you save to the floppy, but it would sometimes corrupt the disk and when you played it again it would not allow you to enter the towns because it thought the game was copied. On ultima IV the brick roads in town were cyan. With all the colours that the computer could do, they could have chosen a better colour.

[gimbal]

Walker was terrible. But I can't remember if it was any worse than Castlevania (in itself already quite bad a game).

[capehorn]

The worst thing about Zool was that scrolling blue screen while loading. It gave me a headache so I never actually wanted to play the game after it had loaded.

That and the keyboard puzzle. How you were supposed to know to jump on those keys in order without reading it in a cheat mag I will never know.

[Experiment T]

The Street Fighter 2 port i hate with a vengeance, having to constantly swap out Floppy Disk's for each stage (WHDLoad FTW!) and also getting that new cracked game copy straight from the BBS you waited patiently for only for it to Guru Meditate at Bootup.

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by capehorn

That and the keyboard puzzle. How you were supposed to know to jump on those keys in order without reading it in a cheat mag I will never know.

There's a little keyboard that you have to pick up, which then tells you the correct sequence.

[s2325]

swarming enemies in Oberon 69 and I can not shoot when jumping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8h5xX-D-rk

[laffer]

I've read the most of this thread but I admit I might very well have missed some of the stuff mentioned so I can't be positive that this hasn't already been mentioned but -

I really hated it when games required you to continually fire away nearly constantly but did not feature an auto-fire option. You could obviously use an autofire joystick but still... I think it's a pretty bad design choice.

Also any game having sections where you don't need any skill other than being able to press a button repeatedly very quickly, or wiggle your joystick back and forth as quickly as possible. The wiggle crap; which seemed to be more common in C64 games; was obviously no fun at all and on top of that it could easily ruin your joysticks (especially if you were poor like me and had to go for cheap joysticks).

Amazingly enough crap like that persists, even to this day - I played a Mario Party game on the GameCube recently and that had more than one mini-game requiring you to do nothing but press a button over and over as quickly as possible over a set period of time.
I have a really hard time understanding how anyone could find this kind of 'gameplay' fun in the least.

[Hewitson]

I actually really enjoy some of the games where you have to wiggle the joystick as fast as possible. Decathlon on the C64 is a good example of a game which implements it well.

[Matador]

I really hated all old amiga games (1985 to 1989)
I think that there are not good amiga games until 1990
I really hate all of those amiga games with music but no sfx
I never understand the coders why not choose sfx instead

[laffer]

Oh that reminds me - I hate it when in many games that had both music and sound effects at the same time would cut out one of the music channels while playing sound effects.
Especially if I really like the tunes, this is really annoying!

[Hewitson]

- The fact that it was impossible to play most games/demos on a decent machine. I still remember to this day how disappointed I was when I got my A1200 and next to nothing worked on it.

- Ridiculous loading times between levels (eg Cannon Fodder).

- Games that don't play music and SFX simultaneously.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

- Ridiculous loading times between levels (eg Cannon Fodder).

Loading times yes, but Cannon Fodder? I never experienced it as ridiculous. At most 20 seconds I'd say to switch to a new world; probably because a new set of graphics have to be swapped in.

[deicidal]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Loading times yes, but Cannon Fodder? I never experienced it as ridiculous. At most 20 seconds I'd say to switch to a new world; probably because a new set of graphics have to be swapped in.

Creating a save disk for it was also bad, I don't know what custom format they used but it was well OTT . One of the many things i still mean to investigate

[TCD]

Sherlock deicidal and the riddle of the lost time
Dunno what's worse : Spending ages to save a game (Morrowind on the XBox anyone?) or to find out *why* it takes frecking forever to do it

[deicidal]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

Sherlock deicidal and the riddle of the lost time

When I finaly figure it out, I will report back to you some time last week

[TCD]

Cool. Good luck and may the 1.21 Jiggawatts be with you!

[DJCruicky]

Disc labels printed upside down was my pet hate.

[T_hairy_bootson]

Software toggle buttons that would show you the opposite of the setting currently enabled. Vroom is a perfect example.

[Hewitson]

I always found that Vroom menu confusing.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

Software toggle buttons that would show you the opposite of the setting currently enabled. Vroom is a perfect example.

It's there to increase the difficulty you see.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by deicidal

When I finaly figure it out, I will report back to you some time last week

Or you could just ask me


Its just Sensibles custom disk format, and its badly coded and slow, hence it was removed from the WHDLoad version.

[Hewitson]

You'd think they'd have been more than capable of designing a decent disk format, the Cannon Fodder games were brilliant.

[_ThEcRoW]

I always hated the joystick only option in the majority of games. Why they didn't put the damn keyboard option in it?. On 8 bit platforms, redefining keyboard options were on every game. Also, the joy up for jump, instead of a second button, it annoys me in platformers a lot.