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Originally Posted by roondar
I tend to agree, though it can sometimes work if paired with well designed levels and weapons (as in, very rarely it can make a game much more tense in a good way). Usually though it's not done well.
On that topic, I've also never really liked the "invulnerable, but reacting to hits as if vulnerable" type of enemies you sometimes see. Quite infuriating when you shoot an enemy for the entire time it's on the screen only for it to not blow up and just keep flying off.
The big problem is that the easy way of doing scrolling on the Amiga normally takes too much memory, so you have to use more complicated methods. Not really a big deal for horizontal scrolling, but Copper based vertical scrolling can be a bit of pain to get right. The bigger deal, I think, is that not everyone knew of these methods back in the day. What seems logical to me now may not have been to those early coders.
In the case of the Bitmap Brothers and Xenon, however, I'm not convinced it was lack of programming ability (mainly because their later Amiga games were scrolling/running a lot better than their earlier efforts). It rather seems to me that they initially deliberately chose to keep their games relatively similar across their various platforms.
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Well to be fair to the Bitmaps, they didn't program Xenon 2, The Assembly Line did.
And the way Xenon 2 was programmed is how a modern brute force PC would do it, i.e. redraw everything onscreen.