Shadow of The Beast, what a pile of crud on the Atari ST.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by RichL

Game was shit full stop.

Hard to say that. If you're out to play a fun game, the game completely fails to deliver so yeah from that perspective it is pretty shit.

But SOTB has an ace in the hole that most other games did not. The primary purpose of owning this game was to pull it out and show off what your precious Amiga could do to others and kind of boast with it, especially if the others had a lesser machine.

So no, I can't call the game "shit". It sold machines.

[tolkien]

Originally Posted by coder76

Atari ST didn't have a blitter or support for hardware horizontal scrolling, no sprites, copper, or dualplayfield. Its sound chip was also poor compared to Amiga's sound chip. Go ahead, try to do a better version on the Amiga, without using Amiga's custom chips except for screen setup. That means plotting out all pixels with the 68000 CPU and also scrolling, like on Atari ST.

But you know? Amiga had all that goodies so we can use them. Luckly for us we dont have to try the atari style.

[kremiso]

a game (the original) developed mainy to finally demonstrate the real Amiga power (technically)

i didn't like also the Megadrive and Snes ports (ok, iirc the second was just a prototype?)

i would like to see an indie remake (but still 2d to be clear) at some point

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Hard to say that. If you're out to play a fun game, the game completely fails to deliver so yeah from that perspective it is pretty shit.

But SOTB has an ace in the hole that most other games did not. The primary purpose of owning this game was to pull it out and show off what your precious Amiga could do to others and kind of boast with it, especially if the others had a lesser machine.

So no, I can't call the game "shit". It sold machines.

True.
"Shadow of the Beast" was the A500s "Defender of the Crown"-moment.

Unfortunately the 1200 never had that.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Guess it depends where you lived. STs outsold Amigas massively in the UK in its early days (3 times as many STs here as Amigas in mid-1988 according to issue 1 of ST/Amiga Format), and even though Amigas were selling faster by the time the STe launched there were still more STs in use, so over here the STe was a big deal (though not entirely for the right reasons). Germany was Amiga dominated by then, the US likewise, think it was only really France where the ST was never outsold by the Amiga.

Correct, France is the place where the ST was the king. 500.000 machines sold.
The Amiga was the boss in almost all the european countries.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Germany was Amiga dominated by then, the US likewise, think it was only really France where the ST was never outsold by the Amiga.

Hmm, by mid-1988 I'd say it was a lot of C64 here in Germany still. It surely started to shift over to the Amiga in 1988 and 1989, but I wouldn't say that in 1988 Amiga 'dominated' here.

[Marce]

u guys talking about 1988?
in 1988 the Amiga do not existed was time of the 8 bits computers, c64, spectrum and all the other 8 bits cranks
few crazy ppl have an Amiga in 1988, and fact is that all Amiga games from 1986-1989 were very lame

it was convenient to buy a c64 or a spectrum 128k instead an Amiga in 1988
to play games Id say it was not convenient to buy an Amiga until 1991

[touko]

Originally Posted by Trunchis

SotB ports range from decent to plain bad. Any software tailored to the strengths of one platform, especially one with so much custom hardware as the Amiga, is going to fare quite poorly when ported to other platforms without the same hardware capabilities.

I disagree, i can easily port SOTB to the supergrafx console,and except for musics(amiga version is untouchable here), a way better version than amiga one, and without the amiga hardware .

The PC-Engine CD adds a bit more RAM and instructions via the System Cards

Just more ram and an ADPCM voice with his 64ko of sound ram,only an ehanced bios, so fonctions,not instructions .
But the ram must contain code and datas .

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Correct, France is the place where the ST was the king. 500.000 machines sold.

Why isn't there a resurgence in Atari ST games and general scene then?
I always wonder.

Amiga is so huge again, but I don't see anything similar for the ST. Which I feel a bit sorry about, since I kind of like the ST as well. i just never owned one, and don't feel really compelled to code for it.

u guys talking about 1988?
in 1988 the Amiga do not existed was time of the 8 bits computers, c64, spectrum and all the other 8 bits cranks
few crazy ppl have an Amiga in 1988, and fact is that all Amiga games from 1986-1989 were very lame

I got my A500 in late 1987, and here in Germany the transformation from C64 to Amiga was going on through all of that year. At the end of 1988 all of my friends had their Amigas.

In 1991 the transformation to PCs started here.

And you had plenty of great games from 1986-1989, just not good action games, since coders didn't understand the chipset yet.

Playing Starglider 2, Carrier Command, Warhead, Bard's Tale 1&2, Interceptor, Falcon, Elite (with fluid graphics) and lots and lots of other games was amazing.

[Retro-Nerd]

I can only talk for Germany and what i've seen here back then. The C64 was king till the end of 1988 for sure. The slow transition to Amiga started probably around the same time, and was in mass use probably since 1990 till the end of 1992. And co-existed surely a bit longer besides the SNES/MD/Game Boy Classic. The PC wasn't a serious gaming platform before the end of 1992 here.

[BigD]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

True.
"Shadow of the Beast" was the A500s "Defender of the Crown"-moment.

Unfortunately the 1200 never had that.

Slam Tilt was that for me! Simply gorgeous on the back of the box but it animated and played like an AGA dream too! Pinball Fantasies was a classic but it was eclipsed by Slam Tilt: the king of pinball games!

[BigD]

I'd also say that Guardian was that too! A game that supported a multi-button CD32 pad even on an A1200 and was an actual 3D version of Defender! Awesome!

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by gimbal

So no, I can't call the game "shit". It sold machines.

Actually it is shit. Calling SOTB a game is truly an exaggeration. Actually we are talking about a classic Amiga demo extended with some joystick support.

Simply have a look at all the advertising screenshots: it's all about the attraction title screen. The rest is riddled with 8 bit sprite like enemies with almost no animation at all combined with an abysmal gameplay.

It's more like a "milestone" of pretending that the Amiga can have anything from the early 90s arcade in pixel perfect manner and the birth of the myth of being cursed with "Atari ST shovelware" and all the "lazy coders".

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Why isn't there a resurgence in Atari ST games and general scene then?
I always wonder.

Keep in mind that games is only a small SIG of the whole Atari ST computer user base. The Atari ST was never a gaming computer at all. Just take a look at M68k based Apple Macs: they never got any arcade game ports (except some very simple ones) and in fact they didn't need it.

However, DML does a good job to support the Atari STE (at least) with his recent and ongoing AGT project.

[Megalomaniac]

Even before Beast was released, most of the really technically impressive Amiga games were Amiga exclusives developed with Amiga hardware in mind. People were already talking about the need for an ST version as well as holding back development. Not just US titles like Hybris and Sword of Sodan (now THAT has no gameplay....) either - while browsing an old issue of ACE online I saw a letter from an ST owner who bought Menace after seeing it on the Amiga and was disappointed with their version (seemingly released a few months later, judging by review dates). The Amiga couldn't match some of the dedicated arcade machines with multiple processors, but it could do a lot better than we usually saw with arcade conversions, especially from certain developers who preferred to do it fast rather than well (putting in 50% of the effort still meant 90% of the sales....).

As for the ST, it only sold about 2 million worldwide according to Wikipedia, compared with nearly 5 million for the Amiga, 4 million for the Atari 8-bit family and 3 million for the Amstrad CPC. Plus, a lot of those were mainly used for music, and I suspect that people moved on from it quicker than some of the others. The ST was only seen as cutting-edge for quite a short period of time - once the A500 was in the same price bracket, few chose Atari.

[AnimaInCorpore]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The Amiga couldn't match some of the dedicated arcade machines with multiple processors, but it could do a lot better than we usually saw with arcade conversions, especially from certain developers who preferred to do it fast rather than well (putting in 50% of the effort still meant 90% of the sales....).

Multiple processors... where TF did you get this info from? In fact, even after more than 30 years there's no better Amiga conversion of a _single_ M68k CPU based arcade game like Final Fight (which is still touted as the epitome of a "failure" conversion). IMHO Richard Aplin did a real good job.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by AnimaInCorpore

The Atari ST was never a gaming computer at all.

I beg to differ...

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AnimaInCorpore

Multiple processors... where TF did you get this info from? In fact, even after more than 30 years there's no better Amiga conversion of a _single_ M68k CPU based arcade game like Final Fight (which is still touted as the epitome of a "failure" conversion). IMHO Richard Aplin did a real good job.

From the actual hardware? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_System

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by AnimaInCorpore

Actually it is shit. Calling SOTB a game is truly an exaggeration. Actually we are talking about a classic Amiga demo extended with some joystick support.

I think you are exaggerating a bit now, mate...

While Beast is definitely not a really good game, it's not unplayable. But so were many games back then.

I mean, i remember how many games I started on my C64 and Amiga, and it was barely possible to survive more than 30 seconds, because nothing was ever play tested within European bed room coders and their game publishers.
I remember starting Goldrunner (which was touted as the STs big action game back then by Happy Computer), and i thought it played like shit with the enemies just staying in their position regardless of the scrolling.

So, Beast is unfortunately just as hard as a lot of these other games.

Seeing it through the lense of the time it was released, calling it a non game is unfair, imo, though.

[alexh]

The STe demo of the SOTB title screen just had a new release.

https://twitter.com/keithclarkcouk/s...18630578720768

(P.S. You don't see the flickering on real HW using a CRT. Instead the dither blends to make a different colour/shade and looks good)