What if any Japanese developers got on board with the Amiga?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

AF gave Shadow of the Beast 78% (http://amr.abime.net/issue_160_pages) which to me sounds about right for its actual entertainment value by 1989 standards

I would give it 90% for the intro, 40% for the game.

Technically marvellous games aren't automatically more fun than a technically ordinary but well-designed game though.

True, but 'technical marvelousness' sells games far more than good design.

Hindsight tells us how bad the OutRun port was, but it launched into a world before Lotus

Outrun was like the IBM PC, fans were desperate to get anything with that name on it. And if you had eg. a ZX Spectrum, how could you complain? "It's not as good as the arcade version!", they retorted. Well duh. What they got was pretty amazing considering the machine's limitations.

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Compare that to the Amiga version:-

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Could it have been done better? Sure (apart from the music it's a straight port from the ST), but it's more playable and much closer to the arcade game than the 8 bit ports. Just because it isn't the best the Amiga could possibly do doesn't mean it wasn't worth having - especially if the alternative was nothing at all ("We don't feel that we can do the Amiga justice - so no Outrun for you!).

As to why the home computer ports weren't that great:-

The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s

OutRun was the hottest arcade game around and US Gold had paid £250,000 up-front to secure the home computer rights from Sega (a top-tier license typically sold for a quarter of this amount)...

Although Martin was only 17, he was already a seasoned programmer with more than a dozen games under his belt. The majority of these were original titles for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer which were mainly sold via mail order...

Martin developed Max Torque, a clone of Sega's motorbike racer Hang-On, which they successfully sold to Bubble Bus Software. He then started work on a quick OutRun clone. "I'd already coded the road stuff for Max Torque - bends and so on. It was pretty simple to switch the bike for a car and boom, I had another game!" To avoid any issues his version featured a Porsche-style car rather than a Ferrari.

On the day the Webbs visited US Gold, they brought along a demo of their C64 OutRun clone, having no idea that the firm had just officially licensed the Sega coin-op....

Everything was going well and Martin was weeks ahead of schedule when the finish line suddenly moved. "US Gold requested a handful of tracks initially. Then when I finished in October Geoff asked me to port all of the routes, which was a mammoth task. We had no original design documents, just the arcade game, so we had to master every route and video it using a Super 8 recorder. I played that game a lot."

£250,000 (equivalent to ~£830,000 today) for the rights, and what game assets did Sega give them? Nothing. But if US Gold hadn't taken that deal we probably wouldn't have gotten any home computer versions of Outrun at all (at least not in 1987-88).

But yea, I wish more mags had been willing to give low scores.

Outrun reviews:-

71% ST Amiga Format Jul 1988
66% Datormagazin Dec 1988
61% Amiga Action Apr 1991
5% Amiga Power Oct 1994

Ratings aren't absolute. As games got better the bar moved higher. 71% was probably a fair score in 1988.

[Weasel Fierce]

Nobody I knew talked about "arcade perfect" at the time. Half the time we had never played the arcade version, and if we had we didnt expect it to be the same.

I think the ready availability to play arcade ROMs on home computers has skewed peoples perceptions.

Of course nobody has any reason to play the Amiga ports of Street Fighter 2 or Strider today, but we played both and had plenty fun with them. (and in the latter case we did have the arcade in the local shop)

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

AF gave Shadow of the Beast 78% (http://amr.abime.net/issue_160_pages) which to me sounds about right for its actual entertainment value by 1989 standards (though they did give Strider and Ghouls N Ghosts over 90% around the same time, which was misguided at best). Technically marvellous games aren't automatically more fun than a technically ordinary but well-designed game though. Hindsight tells us how bad the OutRun port was, but it launched into a world before Lotus - aside from Buggy Boy and Super Hang-On, were there really many better racers than OutRun on the Amiga, or ST for that matter? But yea, I wish more mags had been willing to give low scores. The really negative reviews were often the most entertaining to read as well.

OutRun looks nothing like the arcade on ST and Amiga, the pixel art and coding were done by absolute pricks. I will not be discussing that any more, if people who bought an ST or Amiga came from some rubbish before and not cutting edge stuff I always had in my timeline that is not my fault. If OutRun on PC Engine/Megadrive looked that crap the developers would have lost over a $1m doing such rubbish. I have done the research and some artwork and there is zero reason why even the ST version shouldn't be graphically identical to the PC Engine version.

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I am sure it was <70% for the £34.99 copy and the same issue was Deluxe Scrabble for £28, maybe it wasn't AF then, doesn't matter none of these magazines, even TGM or ACE, marked down Amiga games enough compared to the ST versions which they already didn't mark down enough, few reviewers could probably even tell the difference between 16 and 32 colour graphics.

If you don't like Shadow of the Beast 1 then that's because you don't like that sort of genre replicated in arcade quality, it is a 9/10 Rastan Saga style arcade game regardless. It is a brilliant SF/Fantasy Art (in the style of Rodney Mathews) re-working of Rastan Saga arcade game and for that reason it gets 9/10, it is better than the arcade game in every way, including high sample rate very cool music vs craptastic FM sounds of arcade. If the underground levels pushed the OCS chipset as hard as the above ground levels technically it would be a 10/10 game I guess but you need to give the developers room to improve

People who know how to review games would realise that and stop moaning about 'lack of puzzles' and other bullshit excuses I read in Beast 1 reviews. Arcade games are HARD, they are not for everyone. C64 Uridium, Green Beret and Ghosts n Goblins etc are also 9/10 games but they too are hard because they perfectly replicate that 'take no prisoners' zero frame drops/instant controller response level of difficulty true arcade games have. Super Star Wars on the SNES platform levels are incredibly difficult too and really frustrating but that never got marked down. Arcade games are tough, I spent most of my teenage years playing those arcade games, that's just what those coin guzzlers are like, take 'em or leave 'em but marking Beast 1 less than 9/10 just shows it is "not the game for you" AND that they shouldn't be giving an opinion in magazines read by people who worked to pay for the games they bought. It's a bit like saying "no I will save £7 and get Deluxe Scrabble instead with my 3 days wages because the magazine reviewers are experts" WRONG! It is not their place to rate a game they personally are not good enough an arcade gamer to appreciate. It's a bit like saying a 1980s BMW M3 is only an average car because you get too much wind/exhaust noise in the cabin when driving for hours on some curve devoid stretch of high way LOL.


I think Mario on N64 is a piece of shit, nothing wrong with saying that, a magazine getting me to review that game and me telling people who have to buy that game with their own wages would be very wrong though. I know why I don't like Mario N64 so I would never offer to score it for other people. Like I said plenty of jobs for such idiots who think they can rate Beast 1 less than 9/10 and rate Deluxe Scrabble 10-20% higher out there stacking supermarket shelves. THAT was another problem.

The reason reviews weren't harsh is because magazines needed those huge double page full colour adverts for wank sold by Activision/Ocean/US Gold/Domark etc etc. IF reviews had been as harsh as they deserved to be it wouldn't have taken 6-7 years to get proper 'Japanese quality' coding like that of Lotus II, there is no technical reason why it took that long, it was lack of effort and standards from 1985 for game engine development on ST/Amiga. It takes time sure but if your job is making computer games then you make the time like the Japanese did.

I bet the whole acquisition of arcade licenses for UK Publishers was all a bit like teenagers losing their virginity, loads of bullshit chat, 10 seconds of 'action' and then a celebratory smoke. US Gold/Ocean probably put 1000% more effort into getting OutRun/Chase HQ licenses than actually making sure the game looked like something on a PC Engine or FM Towns. There is no technical reason this didn't happen. Greed and lack of respect by publishers forcing talentless coders into unrealistic timescales after spending months chasing the arcade license owner for 'persmission to bust juice' as we like to call it in London

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Outrun reviews:-

71% ST Amiga Format Jul 1988
66% Datormagazin Dec 1988
61% Amiga Action Apr 1991
5% Amiga Power Oct 1994

Ratings aren't absolute. As games got better the bar moved higher. 71% was probably a fair score in 1988.

Amiga Power is the only who got it right. It fails the 'Rescue on Fractalus test'. If I like PC Engine OutRun and I ask for Amiga OutRun for Xmas...when I load it up on Xmas day my exact thoughts would be "F#&K OFF"

There is no technical reason why Lotus quality scaling bitmaps via the OCS hardware couldn't be done much earlier, trial and error and talent. At least Super Hang-on looks something like the arcade. ST Outrun looks f'all like the arcade even in screenshots (which they never show on the back of the box....the box of software which you would never be allowed to return for a full refund).

C64 OutRun coding is NOT the problem, OK it would be nice if the land and the tarmac were a different colour but no the game engine is absolutely fine. The biggest problem with C64 OutRun is half the pixel art is f'ing shit and half is not bad at all considering the VIC-II weird restrictions. The audio is also not bad. C64 OutRun could be refreshed in a matter of days and vastly improved just by hacking in some different pixel art here and there using a sector editor.

Amiga AND ST OutRun needs a complete overhaul, game engine is wank, pixel art looks f'all like the arcade even working within the 16 colour + rasters for road/ground stripes of Atari ST's restrictions.

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If people could return useless wank like ST/Amiga OutRun for a full refund just like if you bought a Big Mac and found a dog turd in the box instead, THEN that little prick who started US Gold who did this all on purpose with OutRun (he shipped 100,000s of copies to shops BEFORE review copies went in the post) would be bankrupt AND THAT IS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO JAPANESE DEVELOPERS ON MD/PC=Engine.

(Rescue on Fractalus test is simple, you visit your friend with an Atari 800 and play said game then you go home and buy it for your C64, Amstrad, Apple II, COCO etc....is it anything like the original to warrant the purchase)

[Megalomaniac]

Minor issue that PC Engine Outrun wasn't released until 1990, the Outrun box did have ST screenshots on (well, one of the gameplay and one of the 'cinematics' -https://www.mobygames.com/game/outrun/cover-art/gameCoverId,95444/), as did Street Fighter 2 (https://hol.abime.net/2137/boxscan) and from what Bruce says it sounds like Sega were as much to blame for at least the C64 version being bad as US Gold were.

In truth US Gold, the home conversion developers AND Sega all benefitted from bad arcade conversions - US Gold got 90% of the sales for 50% of the work, Tiertex et al got 2-3 times the sales that their quality of work actually merited, and Sega got something which artificially made their consoles look better than the rival computers. The same applies to Ocean to an extent, though their conversions were a mixed bag. Capcom probably made more money from people putting 20ps into their coin-ops and from selling their own console versions than from US Gold's licensed computer versions as well, so they had little incentive to ensure that the conversions were good.

And to turn the Shadow of the Beast vs Deluxe Scrabble argument around, should you complain about a Scrabble game getting a good review if you're not good at the board game itself? I doubt anybody who planned to buy Shadow of the Beast but was put off by this apparent low AF review score (which doesn't seem to be primarily due to the difficulty) will have bought a Scrabble game instead...

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

5% Amiga Power Oct 1994

wow, that's a score, but sadly in 1994
here in Italy, never seen something less than 7 out of 10, or 70%, or 700
for the fresh releases, in vgmagazines

in general i mean
so after the initial physiological learning phase, i have always tried to try out games before purchase (so yes, also trying cracks)

but yes, as ImmortalA1000 said, some very overrated reviews cry out for vengeance

[saimon69]

I STILL would love someone to port the reverse engineer of the STE version by Fedepede04: would be a redemption

[Photon]

As a coder I'm not impressed by late 80s/early 90s programming efforts in Japanese games on Japanese consoles (or arcades) - when it comes to performance.

The Amiga community is quite harsh on games that don't use the Amiga hardware fully, and we celebrate instead the relatively few games that were great technically and graphically (and gave us that arcade quality feeling).

The consoles were limited in hardware and cheap and many looked past the many failings: only platformers, shooters, and fighting games and nothing else.

Japanese coders have been mostly absent from the computer games industry for decades. In the 80s/90s, I think the case was that they were learning programming, or there was a big mismatch between programming education and programming jobs, and programmers didn't have the same enthusiasm for coding.

To this day though, not a lot of games are developed by Japanese programmers, and the vast majority of games that are, are still tied in with some consoley hardware product, with a complete disregard for supporting any other platform. This last thing I think is the Japanese way of their companies owning their employees' lives.

Not exploring game ideas, and ransoming games software to the purchase of a limited hardware product though, earned them a following that sort of had to be loyal, even when the games were just more of the same. By contrast, the US and especially Europe pursued new game ideas and awesome gamer moments. But the limited consoles, limited game ideas, and limited software releases were a success, well, mostly only for one company. Who was the second biggest player in Japanese games in the 1990s? If you can think of one or two, it will be a short list, and the game ideas will be limited. Any vitality to the games scene on each console would come from elsewhere. The games coming from Japan would be the same-old in a new dress.

This loyal following happily ignore poor performance, and happily accept things Amiga owners never would, such as the paginated freeze-scrolling of platformers on SNES, stiff animations, extreme tile re-use, always cartoony graphics, etc etc.

What the Japanese games companies excelled at was testing. They realized this early, and the hand-eye-coordination from the 1970s they mistakenly assumed everyone wanted 20 years later... was perfected. It is a good feeling to pick up a comfy controller and romp around with reliable reactions.

So I like to play console games, but I'm extremely selective and stop playing as soon as a game stops interesting me, because I realize the game idea immediately and it will be that limited for the rest of the game.

If the game idea is not a standard one, or there are gamer moments bigger than a whoa, this boss is 2x2 sprites instead of 1x1, there is something to explore. If not, there is no reward for playing.

As rewards go, there is also something to be said about production quality. The Amiga dominated not only consoles but PC and arcades in the quality of expression of graphics of sound. There's just something special about a game where an artist has been involved. It builds a mood that makes the game unique.

I contrast this with the absolutely horrible beeps and Casio-sounding cheap MIDI loops, only to be replaced by cheap-sounding .mp3s made by recording Casio keyboards, of pretty much every single game made in Japan until 2014.

I'm sure that Japanese coders also adore the strength of Elite, Exile, Corporation, flight sims, building games, or the fun of the likes of IK+ or Lemmings that their boss would never let them code. Maybe also games they could have never coded.

This is all an observation of Japanese culture and not their people. Something in that culture forces their people to specialize and stick to it, which will not afford intellectual development, which in turn is required for geniuses to be at work, creating novel experiences.

In Japan, the current best-selling game on any platform is Splatoon 3 (a cartoony shooter) for Nintendo Switch, and the current best-selling Japanese games platform is Nintendo Switch. It's not certain that there is a will/drive/possibility for Japanese coders to make games independent of an employment contract. And once that is signed, they are in the hands of the opposite of geniuses, who have no desire to make great games.

[saimon69]

There is a discrete amount of hentai games on steam made by indies, although those does not seem amongst the highly creative ones, then once in a while some little gems come out