The Worst Amiga Games Thread!

About Dragon's lair. I quite liked it since it had quite good animation for the time. Of course the action was practically non existant which was never the idea anyway. It was supposed to be an interactive movie with a little user input.

they probably wanted to convert it to as many platforms as possible. As far as I know the original was on Laserdisks which(I would guesS) quite limited the possibilities of interaction.

But it doesn't stop with the Amiga and C64 and what other versions exist. It seems they're still active, you can now buy Dragon's lair on DVD (Which would be controlled with the remote you spoke of Akira).

[Tim Janssen]

I think Dragons Lair is some form of entertainment, just like watching the latest demos on PC, but it is not a game. The exact definition of 'game' is also beyond me but it has something to do with using joystick, mouse or keyboard intensively in combination with having a good time. IMHO this is not the case with Dragons Lair.

Akira,
I have a few confessions to make..
I've never bought an original game for my Amiga but...
over the past 6 years for PC I have bought 30+ original games that came with hefty manuals and huge boxes. Since I have moved to a very small appartment in the other side of The Netherlands I have thrown away the boxes. I have kept the manuals, though.
I am convinced that games boxes become real collector-items. Especially now more and more softwarecompanies are putting their games in these pathetic small disc-cases. You know, the ones they also put DVD's in.

By the way: Congratulations with the 4th anniversary of your (and Felix the Cat's) Shmups site. Those shmups-week articles at Classicgaming are hilarious

[CodyJarrett]

Believing that Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were not intended to be games is not any reason to excuse them. They were sold in games shops, next to other games. They were marketed as games. And they cost around £50!

If they are supposed to be more about the graphics, why weren't they marketed as animations? Why did they cost so much? Eric Schwartz and Tobias Richter did animations they were just as good, but they didn't sell them at a high price.

But people kept buying these games. And that is the main problem with films, games, music - people will buy any old shit.

Give me PD games like Scorched Tanks, Trick Or Treat, Gravity Force 2, Tankkk or Knockout any day, rather than these hyped up animations.

[Tim Janssen]

Somehow there is something 'magical' with these Dragons Lair/ Space Ace games. I am not quite sure for what reason.

I was "caught" by this magic back in 1989. In that time I read some Videogame magazines at the local newsagent. I saw many screenshots of blocky 8-bit games. Suddenly I saw a preview screenshot of Dragons Lair for Amiga. That game looked awesome - almost television-like! Being a foolish child I imagined how playable that game would be. I thought I could move Dirk the Daring freely around the screen. In that time I decided to save up my pocket money and buy me Amiga just to play that game.
In 1993 I played for the first time a laser-game on Amiga (Dragons Lair3: Timewarp) and found out it was a turkey. Something of the magic was lost.

Back in the late eighties Dragons Lair & Space Ace showed one thing: how far computers had come in the graphical era. It was enough to wow your uncle and aunt with.

[Amiga1992]

But graphics do NOTHING to gameplay. I stick with Cody here, give me a PD game and I'd have more fun. Ork Attack is a good choice! Dragon's Lair was much better as a demo or something, and even that way, 50 a pop??? Screw it. People who bought it were DUMB. They were just flashed by teh graphics, just teh way people buy games today. "Flashy graphics ? I WANT IT!"

Bought 30 PC games Tim? Are there as many original PC games? Aren't they all FPS/RTS/TPS games?

Anyway, I don't see any magic in parting with 50 UKP to push the joystick in a direction when the computer tells me to.

Thanks for yoru comments about Shmupsweek, I am glad you liked it! Be sure to send some comments so they appear on this friday's mailbag, talk about anything shmuppy you want!

[ps: you know why I always edit my posts? Because this keyboard SUCKS!]

[Tim Janssen]

Hi Akira,
I was some days off last week. I have missed the shmups-mailbag.

The PC games I have bought were mostly cheapos: Fade to Black, Hell, Darkseed 2, Knights Gate, Descent 1 & 2, Eartworm Jim 1, 11th Hour (Most sucking game -EVER!), Mageslayer, Alien Odyssey, Wing Commander 3, MDK, Darklight Conflict, Shockwave Asssault, Pyrotechnica, Guts'n'Garters, Magic Carpet, Chaos Control, Streetfighter 2 Turbo, Battle Arena Toshinden, Dune 1, Quake 1, Ecstatica 2, Star Trek Borg, and a few more.
Only MDK, Fade to Black and Descent are worth the CD they came on.

B.T.W: Has anyone ever played Cliffhanger on Amiga? Now that is a crap game. -Certainly not up to the usual Psygnosis-standard. I cannot get past the 'falling rocks' level.

[RCK]

there many of the previous PC games that are not garbage for me !

Descent 1 & 2 : really cool (but must time to control the ship)
Eartworm Jim 1 : fun on Snes / Genesis
MDK : hoooo, i love the sniper mode
Magic Carpet : not excellent but not one crap game
Dune 1 : This game is NOT one crap game ! have you read all the books ?
Quake 1 : the first real 3D FPS !, very good atmosphere

[Tim Janssen]

Since the amount of space on my PC harddisc is sparse, I install only games which offer me enough addictivity (IMHO). Maybe it is time to erase the 3450 C64 games I have collected throughout the years. They take up a whopping 300 Mb.

The games you mention are all classics in some way, but I am not 'caught' by them:
Magic Carpet was a revolution back in 1995 but I cannot get far enough in this game.
Same case with Eartworm Jim: I am stuck in the last level which is extremely difficult.
Quake 1 is also a graphical milestone but, as with most FPS-games, once find a cheat I get bored.
I have bought Dune 1 for pc a couple of weeks ago for only Fl 5,- (1,5 Pounds). I have played the Amiga game to death so had high hopes with this version. Apart from the speech and the flying section I prefer the Amiga version. I haven't read the books, though. But this will change in the near future.

[Amiga1992]

Do NOT delete those C64 games! Common, tehy are masterpieces. Do not even consider deleting those diamonds in favour of PC garbage

At least, back them up.

MDK is one of the few PC games I own (Need for Speed 2 and the Reap are the others), and it is enjoyable for a while. The Sniper mode is funny indeed .

And Earthworm Jim really is difficult, but this makes it challenging. Though it can get REALLY frustrating a later levels

but including Dune!! EH? ...suppose the books do help: But Dune II, although spawning modern PSX games like Command & Conquer, had so little in comparison

A few personal ones that I hate (and still remember!);

Emlyn Hughe's Football (sp?) - side scrolling footbal nonsense

and er...all my CD32 games: especially Diggers the first game that came. Ooh but I do have a soft spot for Brutal Sports Football (Vikings & Lizards on an american football pitch, rip heads, tear limbs & score goals. Sweet.)

And although it may cause people to flare up - I was never a fan of sensible soccer....

The bad games are the ones that made you feel like you'd wasted your time loading it up.

Unless you have an old Amiga Power coverdisk (issue37), which contains a deliberately bad PD game...

"ALS" - the "Advanced Lawnmower Simulator": move the mower, cut the grass. That's it.

[Tim Janssen]

Hi BWT,
Dune 1 on Amiga is an okay game. I especially like the two songs that accompany the action throughout. There is one problem with the game though: it is extremely linear. Once you have played Dune 1 you do not want to start it all over again. Following a linear pattern the characters in Dune are willing to work for you or discover new rooms in the Artreides palace.
I bought Dune 1 for PC because I was curious about the quality of it. The game has nice speech and even a great animation in the flying section. Pity the Amiga's sonics are replaced by typical god-awful MIDI songs. I did not bother to play the game on PC because of the linear pattern.

About Diggers: I have never played that game but it looked like a nice little puzzler to me. Pity it did not use the CD32's capabilities. It is more a A500 game.

Akira,
You don't have to worry about my deletion of the C64 games. I have spent too many hours searching and downloading them. I will them burn on CD in the near future

[Mangar]

Speaking of crap games... The biggest hyped up piece of shite I recall back in the day was EPIC. For me that was the biggest letdown I ever had on the amiga. On the PC there are too many to count..

[Tim Janssen]

Yes, Epic was one of those extremely hyped games. Lucky enough I bought the magazine Amiga Format who slagged the game off with a meagre score of 27%. They also ran a special section with letters from readers who were heavily disappointed with the game.
I have never bothered to buy the game let alone to copy the cracked version.

Personally I think the most hyped Amiga game ever is Street Fighter 2. Back in December 1992 CU Amiga kept on hyping it with previews, solutions and so on. My friends went wild but I found the game rather tame. When I come to think of it, many beat'em ups are overhyped on Amiga. Just look at the hype Mortal Kombat and Body Blows got. But then again, I am not a beat'em up fan.

[Mangar]

Street fighter II and all other incarnations of the street fighter series were awful. I think I played Mortal combat on the amiga and liked it. Cannot really remember. Elfmania was a cool one. But with the limitations of the amiga joysticks the beat-em-up games sucked..

[Amiga1992]

'The limitations of the Amiga joystick' is just an excuse for programmers to not do what they were supposed to I kind of agree that nothing great was released on the miggy, fighting games wise (SF style, I'm not counting IK+), however the control problems were bollocks. Mortal Kombat 2 was a great conversion, and managed to cram every damned move into a one button control scheme, proving all others wrong. Mortal Kombat was cool too, but MK2 surpassed it.

Elfmania was cool looking, but the gameplay was arse. Same control method as Body Blows, which was very limited.

Shadow Fighter was quite well done, because it packed a good bunch of moves. And Super Street Fighter 2 was about the best one done. You even had the choice to use a keyboard config with all 6 buttons. Thr ECS version looked like arse but played very well, and the 1200 version was just very good. Overall, I think it was the best fighter for the miggy, maybe along with Shadow Fighter.

SF2 overhyping was atrocious. They wanted to make it sound like if it was a SNES-version beater, but it wasn't. Ok, it looked quite identical, in screenshots, but it played like arse and it had lots of frames of animation removed. Bleh, a pathetic effort which I enjoyed a bit anyway

[Ian]

... I just have to include this as yet unmentioned game, now I don't know why no-one has added this already, maybe it's because your minds have blocked out this hidious game ie: It's to painful for you to remember but it's a prime example of everything an Amiga game should NOT be ...... A direct Atari ST port, for god sake could the fine programmers at Elite (Tounge firmly in cheek) at least upgrade the music and SFX.

In short this game is THE worst game I've EVER played and it's called:

Thun ...... No, no it's too painful to say.

Ian's mind: Come on Ian pull yourself together man

THUNDERCATS

There I've said it, I hope your all satisfied

[DPainter]

Not speaking from experience, the crappiest had to be Quasimodo (or Kwasimodo). Even after all these years I can recall copying a pile of new disks at a friends house when I asked him about one labeled "Quasimodo." He said it was complete crap, so I bypassed it and went to the next disk.

[Bombjacker]

Now that was one hell of a crap football game - almost as crap as Peter Beardsley is ugly (sorry Peter)!

The Amiga version of Bombjack was also cack. How could Elite just port this from the ST. Never forgave them after that! They were such a good Software House in the 8-bit days but went a bit bollocks with the arrival of the 16-bit machines!

Chubby Gristle was also an incredibly poor game. Its only redeeming feature was the hilarious speech! 'You can't park 'ere!'

[Bombjacker]

Now that was a crap game as well. I believe that was another crap ST port.

Although Bionic Commando wasn't a complete load of crap, why did the programmers manage to port the ST's inability to scroll over to the Amiga. Didn't they know the Amiga had decent hardware scrolling capabilities or something! They did the same with LED Storm as well. But at least they managed to show what the Amiga could do musically over the ST and its Spectrum 128 sound chip!

Also thought that Whirligig was a bit crap too - or was that because I didn't have the original and could never work out what I was doing?

[Shatterhand]

There's a shmup for Amiga called Sirius 7, that's DAMN crap
there's other one too.. I think it was called XP8, it came in 5 disks, and had incredible graphics, but the gameplay was
SOOOOO boring, it played like a bad shmup from the early 80s

People said some games here I quite like

Prime Mover is rather good IMO
and Epic is great for me, I really like that game. Ok, it may be too easy, but it's very enjoyable.

Smash T.V. is good too.. the conversion could have been better... but it could have been worse too.

Oh yeah, and everyone slags off Akira. I played it only in emulators, the 1st motorbike sections aren't that bad, just average. Then the next section freezes the emulator, so I have no idea if it's bad or not. Now, saying that motorbike section is too hard isn't fair, it didn't took me that long to beat it

About Beat'em ups on Miggy being crap, that's also unfair. Both MK games, Shadow Fighter, SSF2 and Fighting Spirite are really good, while Body Blows is ok. I just think the designers never got them right, I believe even more modern BEUS could had been ported to the A1200, like Street Fighter Alpha.