When you first bought an Amiga, what games were you looking to play?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

It had a save feature though, CTRL+S when you see scrolling text, CTRL+L when you see the king. But yeah. Didn't know about that at the time because for some reason backup copies don't come with a manual...

This. Now I know that of course. I guess you could call that an effective 'you won't finish the game without the manual' protection

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Dastardly

I ended up looking forward most to the games of The Bitmap Brothers.

Yes, even though they were mostly ST ports, the Amiga versions of Bitmap games were often better, if only slightly. The star on the Speedball 2 playfield, the meatier sound and music, and so on.

I have fond memories of most Bitmap games. And I admitted to playing Xenon 2 to death back in the day even as I criticized its shortcomings only recently.

I would say that Gods was their best game; that game was magic.

[dirkies]

One interesting omission of this thread question for those early adopters is perhaps: when you got your Amiga in 86-88, how long did it take until you booted up the JUGGLER demo (and was blown away by it) ?

[Megalomaniac]

While they're not to my tastes at all, it's not hard to see why games like Shadow of the Beast and Wrath of the Demon would dazzle someone with an 8-bit (or indeed an ST) and attract people into buying an Amiga, regardless of their gameplay merits. Although most early Bitmaps games did get 8-bit versions, they have a layer of innovation to them. Speedball is pretty much a whole new genre, with inventions like the bribing, and Xenon II has digitised music, huge enemies and a very advanced shop/weaponry system. Gods was never feasible for smaller machines though - it sees them take the ambition level even higher with the adaptive AI and carefully-integrated puzzles. Plus the Bitmaps' image made them rock-star developers, and they had a house style in terms of artistic vision and colour scheme that helped with brand loyalty, even if the games varied in genres.

I'm one of these people for whom non-interactive demos never hold much appeal - show me the effects being used in a game and I'll be impressed. Still, The Juggler was a killer app in its own way - only Amiga made it possible, dare I say it.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

While they're not to my tastes at all, it's not hard to see why games like Shadow of the Beast and Wrath of the Demon would dazzle someone with an 8-bit (or indeed an ST) and attract people into buying an Amiga, regardless of their gameplay merits.

Gotta also bear in mind that some stellar examples aside, 8bit games were terrible in the main. Nobody had a clue as to how controls should work, movement, rudimentary physics etc - all of that was being worked out by the game devs of the day.

SOTB, having come from a Spectrum where most of the games ran at 17fps and below, was bloody great fun to play, as was Xenon II.

(Speedball was a different kettle of fish entirely though, and superb despite the sequel).

[Lilura]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Gotta also bear in mind that some stellar examples aside, 8bit games were terrible in the main. Nobody had a clue as to how controls should work, movement, rudimentary physics etc - all of that was being worked out by the game devs of the day.

Mmm... you say 8 bit games were terrible in the main... well, if that is true could that not be applied to 16-bit and 32-bit games as well -- and perhaps more plausibly?

But as computer gamers are we not and were we not looking for diamonds in the rough?

As for "nobody having a clue" (in reference to 8-bit coders and designers), I would like to think you are just exagerrating a little bit, but I would venture to state that 8-bit games of certain genre commonly employed features that later became rare, such as seamless transition, verticality and tile-rigged area design; the latter of which facilitates precise movement and positioning, which is very important to some gamers.

In those cases, "interpolation" isn't necessary. And often just gets in the road of raw gameplay, tactics and strategy.

The simplicity of 8-bit graphics also often facilitated precise movement and positioning, because there is very little in the way of color gradients that conceal edges (e.g., in the case of a "walk-mesh": where one can and cannot move to).

I think many gamers want to see edges and lines so that they can move and position their Avatar more accurately.

SOTB, having come from a Spectrum where most of the games ran at 17fps and below, was bloody great fun to play, as was Xenon II.

Yet I don't think the most ardent and nostalgic fan of Beast would argue that its controls and movement are all that good, even for the time. Unless by movement you were talking about 13 layers of 50 FPS parallax.

(Speedball was a different kettle of fish entirely though, and superb despite the sequel).

But the same is not true for Xenon of 1988, which was really no better than C64 shooters, but arguably better than Xenon 2.

[gimbal]

Terrible didn't exist for me back then, there were no standards and I had no reference. Rather than call games terrible, I'd rather just say that there were games that I did not find fun to play. But even those generally had some kind of cool idea in them because it was all experimental, which added to the fun. Take a game like Voodoo Nightmare as an example. Practically unplayable, even with a trainer. But it did have a day/night cycle and a hub world, two firsts for me when I started to play it. It boggled the mind what an actual fun game with a day/night cycle could look like.

[CCCP alert]

I think Sword of Sodan was the first real "wow!" Amiga game for me as a frequenter of arcades back then. Oddly though the Apple II GS demo of the unreleased game was almost as good, but the II GS is something I have never seen/used in real life even to this day, never even knew about that machine in 1988.

Unless Battle Squadron came first, in which case that would be the first "wow!" Amiga game for me.

[donnie]

Amiga really came to its own in 89/90

In 1989 you had pretty good software:

battle squadron
bloodwych
future wars
it came from the dessert
north and south
populous
rainbow islands
rick dangerous
shadow of the beast
silk worm
sim city
stunt car racer
twin world

I had an atari st in the 80s. In hind sight i would much rather have had an c64 with a disc drive during those years. Way better games, often way better versions .

Atari st was really a budget amiga with little to no good features of its own. So many games are worse on atari st than on c64 and amiga. So many games just ran like crap. I did not fully understand this back then, but now its easy to see why i never really played certain games. Horrible scrolling, push scroll, jerkyness, just awful.

I sold my atari st and much later bought an amiga in like 92-93. Then i think i wanted to play games like chaos engine, turrican 2.

[Megalomaniac]

Video games were still quite a new concept in the early 1980s, all the 8-bit systems (computer and console) had some big limitations (what worked on a Spectrum often didn't work on an Amstrad and didn't push the C64's limits, and vice versa), and most early 8-bit computer games were made by one teenager in his bedroom in a few months as a hobby. Even later on when you had industrial-scale multi-format developments from in-house teams, how many man-years went into the average computer game compared to albums or films? I expect most arcade games had more developers than all five or six home versions combined - Rainbow Islands does (9 for the arcade machine, 7 in total across Amiga/ST/C64/Spectrum/Amstrad) and that's a rare case where all the home versions of that are well-regarded.

The irony is, most of donnie's list are on the ST and (sound aside) almost indistinguishable from the Amiga versions - only Battle Squadron and It Came From the Desert weren't on the ST, and only Shadow of the Beast where the Amiga version is significantly better. Beast is also the only one where the C64 version could be argued to beat the ST one - partly because the Amiga version is designed to exploit the Amiga's limits with no thought for portability, and partly because the ST version is an underwhelming effort compared to something like ST Wrath of the Demon. Even in 1990, most great Amiga games are on the ST and generally pretty close in quality, 1991 was where the gap really widened in terms of the Amiga getting more games than the ST, usually released first, and almost always better. Disk-only C64 games had pretty much died out by 1989, and for adventure / RPG / strategy / sims the ST largely trounced the C64 by 1989. I guess perception is a big part of how you feel sometimes. I suspect if we asked this question on an ST forum we'd get similar answers, but with different levels of satisfaction depending on whether people wanted 'serious' games or 'action' ones.