PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Piracy definitely hurt, but was it really the biggest cause? Many Amiga gamers at that time weren't old enough to have jobs, maybe paper rounds but nothing else. People who paid £1 a disk for a pirated game would not have magically been able to spend 10 times as much as that on the originals of all those games if pirated copies suddenly stopped existing.

This. Software companies always claim that each pirated copy means a lost sale. The reality is more likely something like 50 pirated copies = 1 lost sale. Surely a problem, but a minor one.

I also think that kremiso made a valid point. If you not easily buy games but you could just copy them...

[gimbal]

My parents were old enough... but they were young themselves having to feed two kids and put them through school for the next 20 years. So we got a second hand A500 and (mostly) pirated games. Otherwise I'd have had 10 games total, probably.

But hey, I did buy the later games of the software companies we robbed that survived the switch to PC...

[grond]

I think one factor also was that the average Amiga-owner was younger than the average PC-owner. Kids don't have the money to buy everything they want but the network to get copies, grown-ups with a salary have the money and at the same time are less likely to have access to copies.

EDIT: ok, this was already brought up during the time I loaded the page and typed my comment...

[sandruzzo]

I remember too many Amiga games were pure garbage. We should think about it as well...

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Exactly. I'm not convinced that piracy killed the Amiga, but competition of other platforms in terms of distribution, quality and games library.



The last portion of the sentence is the important one.
Pirating on PC was EXACTLY the same. No less, not a little. Still, you always had fresh and new quality releases on the PC. Why is that ?

The example above of Peter Molyneux:
Populous and Syndicate were also pirated on the PC. That didn't stop Bullfrog producing more games on the PC, though. It was feasible to keep on developing for the PC.

Why not for the Amiga ?

People started to shift to other platforms. Other platforms (especially PC in comparison to Amiga) opened them more possibilities and more customers. Most Amigas were bought for gaming. But PCs were bought for work AND gaming. Which spread it widely in households.

There the software companies focused their money+energy. Again, on the PC there was the SAME pirating going on. But still there were more potential buyers, and just increasing. Even if no one would've pirated games on the Amiga, you would still have earned more money on the PC including pirating.

I cannot remember why exactly, but when I switched over to PC, I bought most of my games as well.

But I was older at that time, had regular income, and games felt more professional and worth paying for, somehow. Hard to explain.

And on my SNES I paid for all games I played, off course. since there was no other alternative I was aware of anyway.

But every single one of the few games I owned was worth it, and played to death. I must have invested hundreds of hours into Street Fighter 2 Turbo alone. But I also played through Yoshi's Island, Zelda Link to the past, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, spent a lot of hours playing Mortal Kombat 2 and Killer Instinct.

There was just a certain amount of quality control with these games. You just knew they were good, and worth the price you paid for them.

And even these days, if I start playing Super Mario World or Donkey kong Country for instance, it's still fun.

With Amiga games, you often barely wanted to play them more than a few minutes, because most of them were so bad and had despicable frame rates.

It's really sad, when it all started so promising with Marble Madness and Defender of the Crown.

[Megalomaniac]

The Amiga should have been a perfect market for developers, there was no fee to pay to develop for the console, no exclusivity requirement, no interference in game content, and it was much cheaper to put a game out there and see how it did. It rewarded innovation and quality, other than a few bad conversions and licenses most of the biggest sellers stand up well now and spawned multiple sequels and imitations of various qualities (Lemmings and Populous created whole new genres, for a start. Would a console developer have taken those risks?). Pick any random monthly Amiga chart and there'll be 6-8 bona fide classics in the top 10.

Maybe it's lazy to blame the Atari ST for the poor technical quality of so many Amiga games (especially big arcade conversions) but there's a clear pattern on LemonAmiga that almost all the highest rated games (even from the time when most development was led with the ST) were released for the ST after the Amiga, if at all. On the technical side its even more blatant - compare even late 80s Amiga originals like Hybris, Shadow of the Beast, Sword of Sodan and Datastorm with anything on the ST (not that they necessarily had gameplay to live up to the technical marvels) and imagine if the classic arcade games had been converted into those engines. Not that things were perfect after the ST had died out - imagine if the people who coded (say) Elfmania and Brian the Lion had actually understood why the console games they were ripping off were actually so much fun...

[Jope]

It's interesting to hear about how you guys tended to pay some bloke copying disks at his flat (or some car boot sale) for your new warez. That's just something that never happened in my circles, warez was circulated for free from kid to kid. People closer to the warez/demoscene knew a mail swapper or a modem trader, but the normal gamer kids just copied from other kids.

I'm sure someone sold copied games for money in Finland too, but it didn't happen so often that it would be a thing people regularly reminisce about.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Jope

It's interesting to hear about how you guys tended to pay some bloke copying disks at his flat (or some car boot sale) for your new warez. That's just something that never happened in my circles, warez was circulated for free from kid to kid. People closer to the warez/demoscene knew a mail swapper or a modem trader, but the normal gamer kids just copied from other kids.

That's how it was here too. Sometimes a kid would want a 1:1 trade for their new hot stuff, but never money.

[sokolovic]

@TigerSkunk, that's because you seems to like only arcade games.
The Amiga game library is much better than the SNES one IMHO. Maybe the Megadrive match it but I prefer the Amiga one just for having Frontier and the Settlers.

[sandruzzo]

It's incredible that after all this years, we feel the need of more Amigas' game!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I bought a CD writer in 1993, for ~NZ$800 (NZ$300 of which was freight from the US). Not bad considering it was costing us NZ$1000 to have a gold disk master burned from a hard drive. It was a Philips external SCSI drive which I could use on both the A3000 and A1200.

Are you sure this was 1993?
I can not imagine it was...

Back in 93 NZ$800 would have been US$400 ... that was the price for a SCSI CD-ROM drive (read only!!) according to ads in Byte magazine from that year.

First CD-R media were introduced into the market only in 92 - drives that could write them usually >2000 US$

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Gorf

First CD-R media were introduced into the market only in 92 - drives that could write them usually >2000 US$

I had a quick look yesterday and found this CNN article from 1997 stating that drives "can now be had for somewhere in the $500-to-$600 range.": http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9708/19/cdrom.lat/
That article also states that those recorders "could set you back $10,000 or more" "six or seven years ago". So >2000 $ in 1993 sounds about right.

[oscar_ates]

SNES had quite good arcade conversions like SF2 and Final Fight. On Amiga, arcade conversions were usually shit except Mortal Kombat 1/2

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TCD

I had a quick look yesterday and found this CNN article from 1997 stating that drives "can now be had for somewhere in the $500-to-$600 range.": http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9708/19/cdrom.lat/
That article also states that those recorders "could set you back $10,000 or more" "six or seven years ago". So >2000 $ in 1993 sounds about right.

Exactly: it was 97, when I got my first CD-R writer (or "burner" as we would call it)
And CD-Rs itself were not that cheap either in the first year or so.
And software and the media itself were not that reliable: I remember a lot of "burns" that went wrong driving up the costs even more.

Also:
there was really no software for the Amiga in 93 that would allow you to burn a CR-R (MakeCD is from 96, BurnIt also 96 ???)

[Daedalus]

Indeed, I bought my first CD-R drive in 2000 and it cost me the equivalent of NZ$650...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

And on my SNES I paid for all games I played, off course. since there was no other alternative I was aware of anyway.

But every single one of the few games I owned was worth it, and played to death. I must have invested hundreds of hours into Street Fighter 2 Turbo alone. But I also played through Yoshi's Island, Zelda Link to the past, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, spent a lot of hours playing Mortal Kombat 2 and Killer Instinct.

There was just a certain amount of quality control with these games. You just knew they were good, and worth the price you paid for them.

And even these days, if I start playing Super Mario World or Donkey kong Country for instance, it's still fun.

This just popped up in my YT recommendations: The Story of Super Mario World [ Show youtube player ]
Just the first three minutes explain pretty well why Nintendo is still around today

[zipper]

ADescent Virge version on my A500T, Blizz 2060, CV64/3D was quite far from the original A500 gaming experience...

[Megalomaniac]

If you wanted to play adventures, strategy games, sims, western-style RPGs in the SNES era you needed a computer, although the Megadrive did get some conversions from the Amiga and the odd original. The SNES' processor was just too slow to do justice to those styles (half the speed of the Megadrive / Amiga / ST, and the same as the Spectrum). The Amiga was the best allrounder, and had more weird original games than any system. One quick reset took you from a complex RPG to a cutesy platformer, I loved that feel.

[sokolovic]

Yeah. That's why, for me, the Amiga game library is the best. You could jump from action/arcade games to strategy/western RPG/Point'n'clicks easily. It was the best of the two worlds between PCs and consoles. Not Always the best versions but for the price you paid a very good one at least. The only thing really lacking was japanese style RPG but it was the same on the PC. And Consoles didn't had the fantastic library of mouse driven "serious" games we had on the Amiga.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The SNES' processor was just too slow to do justice to those styles (half the speed of the Megadrive / Amiga / ST, and the same as the Spectrum).

Not really - you are confusing MHz with actual speed.
the 68K and the Z80 can roughly only do 1 instruction every 4 ticks, while the Ricoh 5A22 can do an instruction every 2 ticks.

And while the 68k has 32bit instructions and registers ... these instructions also take twice as long as the 16bit ones...

for most operations frequently needed in games, like copying data around, the 68k@7MHz is the exact same speed as the 5A22@3.5MHz

Due to the lack of complex instructions that would occupy the 68k for dozens of cycles, the 5A22 is even faster on interrupt handling..