PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[Megalomaniac]

Interesting, thanks. Was it Nintendo's choice that the SNES got so few strategy based games then?

The other thing the Amiga lacked was a decent Street Fighter II style beat 'em up, at least until Shadow Fighter (Fightin' Spirit too, but the world had largely moved on to 3D beat 'em ups by then). I'd've loved a 'fun' racing game a la Mario Kart too.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Interesting, thanks. Was it Nintendo's choice that the SNES got so few strategy based games then?

That was one reason for sure.
Other important ones are the lack of mouse and keyboard and usually no way to save a game ...

And the more "conservative" approach by game developers: If you have to invest in an expensive development kit and pay fees, you are usually not so keen on experimenting with new concepts but stick to things that proved to be commercially successful in the past.

[Daedalus]

The controller style was probably a factor indeed - slow strategy-type games tend to suit a mouse and keyboard better than a D-pad. That being said, the SNES version of Sim City was pretty excellent (and had saving in the cartridge). It also got a version of Syndicate, though that wasn't nearly as good.

[Megalomaniac]

The Megadrive got a fair few strategic games though, plus a few consolified flight sims like F15 II, LHX Attack Chopper and Mig29, which the SNES didn't seem to, and the Megadrive had the same controllers and similar developers. Mostly they were converted from 68000 systems, but not all.

Actually LHX Attack Chopper is a good one for the original idea of this list too, 97% for the PC version from C&VG, it was in development for the Amiga but they couldn't get it fast enough, and they probably didn't think an AGA version was worth the effort as the game was a bit old by then.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by 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.

Yeah, the Amiga did manage to get the best of both worlds in that sense.

[Daedalus]

The lack of those flight sims certainly wasn't down to capability - after all the SNES had the rather excellent Pilot Wings and a few other flight sims. My guess was more to do with expected markets.

[sokolovic]

SNES was underpowered for pure 3D. That's why they needed a special chip for Starwing (which was far from impressive IMHO for the so called "first ever 3D game" according to some VG anthologies that overlook computers games) and why Frontier was cancelled on this machine.
PilotWings isn't in 3D but rather use the infamous mode7 which is cleverly used for scaled and rotated 2D.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

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$

You are right, I must be misremembering. In 1993 I must have bought a SCSI CDROM drive in an external case, then swapped the drive out for the CD writer sometime later (1995?). It was a Philips CDD2000 which looked exactly like the photo below.

Anyway it meant that by the mid 90's I could copy CDs for around NZ$10 each, much cheaper than buying a typical CDROM game. I didn't use it to pirate software, but I bet there were others who did. When gamers could justifying plonking down NZ$4000 or more for a decked out 486 or Pentium PC...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

SNES was underpowered for pure 3D. That's why they needed a special chip for Starwing (which was far from impressive IMHO for the so called "first ever 3D game"

And that wasn't the only game to get specialized hardware in the cart to make up for the console's inadequacies. SNES Doom included the Super FX 2 chip, yet...

SNES Doom features 22 levels from the PC version, but the player's heads-up display does not take up the whole screen. The floors and ceilings are also not texture mapped. The game lacks a back-up system, meaning that each episode must be finished from the beginning...

Due to memory limitations, the enemies are only animated from the front, which meant that they always appear to face the player. This renders monster infighting impossible... Perhaps as a concession to this limitation, circle-strafing was also removed, though standard strafing is still possible. Also, perhaps as a means to conserve processing power, sound propagation is unused, rendering all enemies deaf.

The game runs at the system's native 256 x 224 pixel resolution, though it doesn't fill the entire screen; instead, it runs in a window, with a black frame. Additionally, enemies, scenery, and items are increasingly pixelated the farther away they are, to the point where far-off enemies may be indistinguishable from the scenery... Due to system limitations, no particles such as blood impacts, smoke or bullet sparks are present in the game...

Fans of the game frequently criticized the port for its graphics, the difficulty of seeing far-off monsters, clunky controls, and low frame rate.

Imagine if that much effort was put into an Amiga version of Doom - software pirates would have hated the 3D dongle chip! (yet another reason to switch to the PC).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You are right, I must be misremembering. In 1993 I must have bought a SCSI CDROM drive in an external case, then swapped the drive out for the CD writer sometime later (1995?). It was a Philips CDD2000 which looked exactly like the photo below.

95 is the absolute earliest for that model - but they had a firmware bug that prevented them from burning audio CDs, which was fixed in 96.

Still the price would be around 800 US$ (not NZ$) by end of 96.

Anyway it meant that by the mid 90's I could copy CDs for around NZ$10 each, much cheaper than buying a typical CDROM game. I didn't use it to pirate software, but I bet there were others who did. When gamers could justifying plonking down NZ$4000 or more for a decked out 486 or Pentium PC...

I used mine for
- backups of my hard drive (finally a viable solution!)
- audio mix CDs for my car (best-of from my orig. CDs and some MODs and MP3s ..)

Amiga games on CD were too few and and rare by then to be pirated this way and I did not have a PC in the 90s.

But still: even towards the end of the 90s a CD-R drive was no standard in a new PC, but something you had to buy as an extra and you would need to copy a lot more games to get some return of investment, if that was ones plan ...

so there was a good couple of years from 1991 to maybe 97 where CD games were surely less often pirated than disk based games before.
(At least in the first world)

But this did not lead to significantly lower prices for CD based games in this period, although piracy was always the first argument brought forward by publishers to justify high prices ..

(same goes for music on CD vs. tape)

In the end it was Napster and other piracy (and Steve Jobs) that convinced music labels to sell a song for $1 online instead of charging $9 for a single on CD... and they did not go bankrupt.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Other important ones are the lack of mouse and keyboard and usually no way to save a game ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_Mouse
Used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Paint

As for strategy games I recommend Ogre Battle.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TCD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_Mouse
Used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Paint

As for strategy games I recommend Ogre Battle.

I know ... there where a bunch of other things a well, like a light-gun and even a keyboard (XBAND).

But this was not the usual setup ... and especially since the SNES was sitting next to the TV-set and players were on the couch or on the floor, a mouse was probably cumbersome to use in such a scenario...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

As I said: I didn't pay for Doom II in 1994 but it sold like hotcakes. Somehow I think that there is more to that than 'Piracy killed the Amiga'. I'll put it differently: Piracy was rampant throughout the C64 lifespan, but that didn't put CBM in financial problems.

Commodore was a hardware manufacturer. Piracy helped them make more sales! (until it didn't). The hardware was expensive, but after clearing that hurdle you had access to unlimited 'free' games. The trick was to get enough machines out that software publishers could still make a profit despite piracy. Commodore did their bit by making the C64 as cheap as possible, with low enough specs that gamers didn't expect too much so the games were relatively cheap to develop. The lack of sophistication and built in BASIC also encouraged users to write their own games, with some moving into commercial game development (eg. Outrun, the top selling home computer game of 1987, was programmed by a teenager who developed the game engine in his bedroom before being employed by US Gold).

The Amiga had more hurdles to overcome. To survive piracy It too would have to ramp up sales rapidly. But the Amiga was birthed into a marketplace already saturated with home computers with established user bases and loyal fans. Its superior hardware was attractive, but the higher price wasn't. Being a completely new platform meant C64 users would have to 'jump ship' and abandon their old machines. Many would choose not to until the Amiga reached 'critical mass'.

Software developers would take time to get the best out of it, while initially having a much smaller market - raising the per unit cost. Users expected more sophisticated software that made good use of the hardware, which raised development costs dramatically. The higher selling price limited demand and increased piracy.

Pirates claimed that they would buy good Amiga games if they were cheaper (ie. below cost) but not the cheap dross - even though it was generally as good as or better than most 8 bit ganes. Would the pirates hold off long enough for good games to reach their sales targets before eating into them? Of course not, that would be too ethical - instead they cracked them as soon as they could, even the 'dross'.

The C64 had the advantage of reaching critical mass early, when the competition was less sophisticated and developing at the same time. The PC was no threat because it was vastly more expensive and oriented towards business, so there was little overlap. In that environment it shone.

The Amiga - coming in later at a higher price - did suffer overlap, which got worse as time went on. It could not survive an ever increasing PC userbase and greater sophistication to the point where PC games could be just as good, combined to with more sophisticated piracy that killed sales before games could reach their breakeven point.

Another factor that isn't usually taken into account is the debasement of perceived value when you can get all the games you want - and those you don't - for 'free'. Theodore Sturgeon famously said that "90% of everything is crap". But if you don't have hundreds of games you might think the games you own are not crap, whereas if you do then having to divide your time between them means you probably won't get the best out of each one. Furthermore, having paid peanuts for good games you are less inclined to see them as worth more than peanuts.

The PSX had a lot of piracy yet it was the most successful console saleswise. By that logic CBM should have made tons of cash from selling Amiga hardware. Yet they clearly didn't.

Sony got lucky with the PlayStation, releasing it at a time when 3D CDROM gaming was just coming into vogue. Other contemporary consoles didn't fair so well. Sony also sensibly put copy protection into the Playstation, giving them enough time to reach critical mass before piracy killed it.

Commodore did eventually make tons of cash from the Amiga, until they didn't.

People stopped buying Amigas because they already had hundreds of pirated games and so had become sick of the Amiga. They wanted something new and exciting, which meant a PC because developers were producing new exciting games for the PC, but not for the Amiga because they couldn't sell enough to beat the pirates. That's not just my opinion - read the statements from top Amiga developers in my previous post.

Commodore certainly could have made more money from the Amiga for longer if they had done things differently. But to say that Commodore 'killed' the Amiga by their incompetence is reaching. If that was true then how come all the other home computer manufacturers suffered a similar fate? Were they all incompetent too? Commodore made some mistakes for sure, which are easy to see in hindsight. But many of those mistakes involved doing things that Amiga fans still think they should have done - like producing more high-end stuff, and (attempting to) leapfrog to 'next generation' hardware that made the PC look like shit.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore was a hardware manufacturer. Piracy helped them make more sales! (until it didn't).

So far so true ... and this goes even further:
without piracy - or lets better say the easy availability of games, many would not have bought an Amiga in the first place.
Imagine an Amiga with some working copy-protection mechanism: in all likelihood this forum here would be called "Englisch Atari Board".
And without hardware sales there would not have been so many software developers ...
I know, this is a slippery slope, but something to think about.

Pirates claimed that they would buy good Amiga games if they were cheaper (ie. below cost) but not the cheap dross - even though it was generally as good as or better than most 8 bit ganes. Would the pirates hold off long enough for good games to reach their sales targets before eating into them? Of course not, that would be too ethical - instead they cracked them as soon as they could, even the 'dross'.

Well ... we would buy new games as a group of around 10 people. And yes it was illegal, but in the days of cassette decks, mixed tapes, VRCs and so on we did not feel the guilt.
As a group we could afford ten times more games and software than any of us would have individually ... and even so it often enough felt like a total waste if some game was a "dross".

And yes: we would have bought more games if they were cheaper - we just had a certain budged. You can't spend your money twice.

I guess an other problem was the huge margin of resellers, distributors and publishers in comparison to what a game developer/team would get in the end...

People stopped buying Amigas because they already had hundreds of pirated games and so had become sick of the Amiga. They wanted something new and exciting, which meant a PC because developers were producing new exciting games for the PC, but not for the Amiga because they couldn't sell enough to beat the pirates.

Not so much getting sick of something, but witnessing the development in computer technologies.

Back to your original question:
yes the PC made big steps forward, while C= was standing still...
But not only the PCs: 4th generation consoles were already beating the Amiga in some points ...

Commodore certainly could have made more money from the Amiga for longer if they had done things differently. But to say that Commodore 'killed' the Amiga by their incompetence is reaching.

I strongly disagree, this is totally adequate and a logical conclusion, exactly because they did things not differently ...

If that was true then how come all the other home computer manufacturers suffered a similar fate?

Because they all made the same mistakes:
Atari, Amstrad (Sinclair), Olivetti (Acorn), Tandy ... all tried to go PC. All developed an own line of PCs, put resources and development into it, but still could never really compete with other cheap clones and all of these endeavors tanked in the end.
None of them trusted in their own platform ... most of them did not even think of it as a "platform" or a "system".

Were they all incompetent too?

Yes

Commodore made some mistakes for sure, which are easy to see in hindsight. But many of those mistakes involved doing things that Amiga fans still think they should have done - like producing more high-end stuff, and (attempting to) leapfrog to 'next generation' hardware that made the PC look like shit.

How can a goal they never reached, be considered as something they should not have done?
This statement makes no sense.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

95 is the absolute earliest for that model - but they had a firmware bug that prevented them from burning audio CDs, which was fixed in 96.

Still the price would be around 800 US$ (not NZ$) by end of 96.

Well like I said, I misrembered. The time frame is too late for the purpose I remembered (burning master discs for the CD32 title we produced in 1994). So that price may have been for a CDROM drive, which I would have used to test gold disks on my A1200.

I don't think I would have bought the CD writer later than 1995-6 because we pulled the plug on Amiga development around then, after which I would have had no reason to buy it.

Amiga games on CD were too few and and rare by then to be pirated this way

True.

But still: even towards the end of the 90s a CD-R drive was no standard in a new PC, but something you had to buy as an extra and you would need to copy a lot more games to get some return of investment, if that was ones plan ...

The criminal mind doesn't always work logically.

so there was a good couple of years from 1991 to maybe 97 where CD games were surely less often pirated than disk based games before.
(At least in the first world)

Yes.

But this did not lead to significantly lower prices for CD based games in this period, although piracy was always the first argument brought forward by publishers to justify high prices ..

Games in general didn't so much get cheaper as more sophisticated. Call of Duty Modern Warfare, released in 2009, cost US$250 million to develop (equivalent to US$311 million today). Recommended retail price on launch was US$69.99, but street price was often lower. In the UK Sainsbury's sold the PS3 version for £29.

In the end it was Napster and other piracy (and Steve Jobs) that convinced music labels to sell a song for $1 online instead of charging $9 for a single on CD... and they did not go bankrupt.

MP3 format sucked. But pirates didn't care about the quality loss. They loved it because it saved bandwidth and allowed them to 'share' music online. Scammers loved it too. How many ignorant PC users were duped by the promise of 'free' music?

The music labels may not have gone bankrupt, but...
Sounds silenced by $20m debt

Feb 18 2009

Icon chief executive Steve Dods blamed the collapse on a "soft retail market". He also said "factors such as illegal downloading and piracy have not helped".

Many people now get their music for nothing from the internet, and even legal websites charge a fraction of the cost of a CD in a store.

Music store sales have slumped from more than $50 a person each year in 2000 to $34 a head last year. Total music sales topped $200 million in 2001, but were down to $147 million last year.

Other retailers blamed reduced prices at The Warehouse, which sells CDs for at least $5 less than prices in music chain stores.

Auckland-based Real Groovy music store manager Chris Hart said competition from The Warehouse was "huge", the discount chain selling CDs for about $22 when the full markup price for a music store was about $35.

"The Warehouse, The Warehouse, where everyone gets a scratched second-hand CD re-sold as new bargain!"

I don't know why we are discussing this. In 1994 downloading CD size games from the internet was not cost-effective.

The pirate Amiga 'warez' network worked well in New Zealand because the 'importers' didn't care how much it cost. It was worth it to 'stick it to the Man' and increase their 'street cred'. It was a vicious cycle. Shops daren't risk stocking many games because by the time they came in (3 months after release in Europe) pirate copies would be everywhere. Then you couldn't buy the game you wanted in a shop, so you had to either order it from overseas (and wait 3 months hoping it didn't get lost in the post) or get it through the warez network.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

So far so true ... and this goes even further:
without piracy - or lets better say the easy availability of games, many would not have bought an Amiga in the first place.

Yes, this is certainly true. But it was a double-edged sword that needed careful handling.

Well ... we would buy new games as a group of around 10 people. And yes it was illegal, but in the days of cassette decks, mixed tapes, VRCs and so on we did not feel the guilt.

You could have done it legally without any hint of guilt (and more fun) by doing what we did - have 'gaming parties' where people took turns playing each game, and selling/swapping/loaning games you no longer wanted.

But even if only 1 in 10 of you bought each game, that was still much more than the average. Most Amiga fans collected a huge library of pirate games totaling 500 disks or more. Out of that they might only play 10 games regularly, which would have cost about the same as those 500 disks. The difference is that disk manufacturers got the money, not game developers.

I guess an other problem was the huge margin of resellers, distributors and publishers in comparison to what a game developer/team would get in the end...

Having been a developer and retailer I can say that there wasn't much profit in it for anyone when all the costs were taken into account. You had to move a huge quantity to get the price down, and the market just wasn't there for all but the top sellers.

they all made the same mistakes:
Atari, Amstrad (Sinclair), Olivetti (Acorn), Tandy ... all tried to go PC. All developed an own line of PCs, put resources and development into it, but still could never really compete with other cheap clones and all of these endeavors tanked in the end.
None of them trusted in their own platform ... most of them did not even think of it as a "platform" or a "system".

PCs are the Borg - you will be assimilated!

It's a conundrum - make PC clones and have no trouble selling them because that's what everyone wants, or promote your non-IBM compatible platform as an alternative - and crash and burn because nobody wants it. As far as the business goes it doesn't matter what platform you go for - only how many units you can sell. PCs were easy to design and the production techniques were the same, so why not make them while the demand was there?

The market was shifting. The 90's saw a cultural change from having fun to being capitalist. 'Home computer' now meant 'Office computer'. Kids with no money who played games were now wage-earning adults who wrote reports and tracked finances. They needed a PC, not a gaming console. If the PC could play games as well that was a bonus (the games couldn't be kids games though. Hyper-realistic death matches were the order of the day - designed to release pent up stress by acting out violent urges).

The magazine covers below are from 'Family Computing'. Starting in 1983 it featured type-ins for the Apple, Atari, Commodore 64 and VIC-20, PC, TI, Timex, and TRS-80. By 1988 it had morphed into 'Family & Home Office Computing'. In 1990 the transition was complete. It was now just "Home Office Computing" and the feature article was "Where is the MONEY? 7 ways to raise cash for your business". If those last two covers make you cringe, join the club. But that's what most people looking to buy a computer were thinking.

Producing a true home computer in the 90's was walking a tightrope between PCs and game consoles. How could you be a bit of both without compromising on either? It wasn't possible, but one system came close. The Amiga was born to play games, and could do serious stuff too. But the business world demanded 100% IBM compatibility, leaving no room to maneuver on that side. It's only hope was to beef up the gaming side to match consoles, while keeping the quaint non-standard multitasking OS for utility and backward compatibility. It almost managed it. If AGA had come out 1 or 2 years earlier, with more emphasis on games...

How can a goal they never reached, be considered as something they should not have done?

Because they tried (and inevitably failed).

Chasing the high-end was simply the wrong thing to do, but almost everybody with a voice was egging it on. What's worse is the management had an 'optimistic' view of how capable the Amiga was, as a result of the people who knew (or should have known) the reality hyping it up.

But Amiga fans love pushing their illogical arguments that formed back in the 90's when everybody was blinkered. "The C64 lasted 12 years even though it was pirated to hell!" they say. Then in the next breath, "Commodore killed the Amiga by not advancing its technology in 7 years!".

In 1985 Commodore was gutted. But they managed to birth the Amiga and make it a top seller, returning to profitability by 1987 and keeping the revenue up and profit positive until 1993. But they wasted what little R&D budget they had with expensive failures like the A3000, CDTV and AAA chipset, and efforts to make the Amiga more PC compatible. If only they had embraced the Amiga's gaming heart and put more effort into enhancing that side, they might have lasted a lot longer. But who was telling them to do that? Nobody of importance. The fans didn't, the engineers didn't, the sales people didn't - until it was too late.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore certainly could have made more money from the Amiga for longer if they had done things differently. But to say that Commodore 'killed' the Amiga by their incompetence is reaching. If that was true then how come all the other home computer manufacturers suffered a similar fate? Were they all incompetent too? Commodore made some mistakes for sure, which are easy to see in hindsight. But many of those mistakes involved doing things that Amiga fans still think they should have done - like producing more high-end stuff, and (attempting to) leapfrog to 'next generation' hardware that made the PC look like shit.

Fair enough. I still think that if CBM had any strategy how to go forward from the original Amiga 1000 design instead of just butchering it to the very end it might have been a different story. Also marketing the Amiga 500 as a pure games machine might in the long run made it difficult to sell higher end machines. Going both ways (creating 'serious' models like the A2000, A3000 and A4000 as well as 'gamer' ones like the A600 or CD32) in my opinion was the main reason why CBM ran out of money (plus a certain CEO...). I'd go as far as to say that piracy was one of the reasons why CBM went on for as long as they did.

In the long run it certainly wouldn't matter. The PC was unstoppable at a certain point as it was the computer people associated with office products and surfing the internet. If you had one at home anyway you might as well play games on it. But for a brief period (that you pointed out at the start of the thread) the Amiga was way ahead of pretty much anything else (and especially anything else that normal people could afford) and somehow it's a shame that it never got a proper follow up. Just my two cents

[oscar_ates]

Hi Bruce, which Amiga games did you develop? I heard Gloom is from NZ I also read last games released for Amiga like Gloom, Genetic Species etc. did not sell well. Probably because of low number of upgraded AGA owners

[Korban]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

The lack of those flight sims certainly wasn't down to capability - after all the SNES had the rather excellent Pilot Wings and a few other flight sims. My guess was more to do with expected markets.

Pilot Wings had an additional dsp in the cart, plus used mode 7, so it'd be a fair argument to suggest that capability was part of the equation.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Korban

Pilot Wings had an additional dsp in the cart, plus used mode 7, so it'd be a fair argument to suggest that capability was part of the equation.

Nope. Pure Mode7, rotating and scaling 2D objects. That's why everything seems flat.

Frontier was cancelled because it needed an extra chip to works on the SNES making the game too expensive. Not everyone had the financial capacities of Nintendo