What was your "Whoa s**t!" moment?

[gimbal]

I can imagine that, Defender of the Crown must have looked like an animated movie in video game form.

[desiv]

I don't know about "THE" moment, but one I remember in particular was the Newtek DemoReel (#3???) with "The Face" image in Dynamic Hires.
They tell you to get close to the screen.
Then that image showed up on my 1084s monitor, and I was shocked...
I'd seen great looking images, but that one just felt so real looking...
Probably the music and the way they presented it helped.

[twenty90seven]

The animations in Flashback including the muzzle flash

[ESC]

Originally Posted by Styrbjorn

I know that was pretty impressed by Hunter when it released.

[ Show youtube player ]

Oh yeah, this is one of the games I thought was so cool back in the day since it was 3D!

I'll have to revisit it because I don't remember if the game was actually good or not, all I remember was playing it and being impressed by the 3D-world.

[Weasel Fierce]

Shadow of the Beast running in a store window.

[ElectroBlaster]

Initially the first experience of an amiga was a mates A500 screen gems pack, but his mum was VERY paranoid, so the mate would only let me see workbench. The novelty quickly wore off until I found the "Say" program where within seconds I had the machine swearing and being rude! his mum came in and told me to leave and go home lol I never got to see what all the fuss was about.

Then 12months or so later, I had another chance to see an amiga, this time at another friends house. For me the "Whoa s**t!" moment was visiting this mates house, he had just got his A500 and before that had an Amstrad 6128 so the jump for him was huge!

Quite boastfully he showed off and loaded up:

Assassin and Shadow of the Beast,

Then he loads up Octamed v4 that was on a c u amiga coverdisk he just got!

The games blew me away, but octamed is where I really took notice....
My reaction was a huge "Whoa s**t!" this is amazing!

When I eventually had to leave to go home, I left buzzing and it lasted for months. That day left a very long lasting impression on me. The machine was like something that fell to earth from the future or something.

I badly wanted an Amiga from that moment on! I was determined by hook or by crook I would have an a500.

In all honesty, there has been pretty much nothing else that has impacted me like that since.

[Nath]

My first ever Amiga was a second hand A500, with a disk box full of games. First evening with the new machine, pulled out a random game..."Hmm, Shadow of the Beast, lets see what this game is then shall we?"

Boom. Title screen with parallax scrolling, amazing graphics, gorgeous colour palette...and that musical score. Chills.

[Stevo2k]

Still getting many whoa moments following the Amiga demoscene.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by amifan

I was looking back through some old magazines and came across an advertisement for DigiPaint and it took me back to when I saw first used the programme in `87/`88, what comes back to me was just thinking "Whoa s**t! This can`t be happening on my computer?!", it was so unbelievable to me that a home computer could display graphics like this AND you could alter them and make new graphics. It was when I felt the Amiga really was something way beyond what had come before. What software on the Amiga made you think, wow I have never seen this before?

As a teen I used to watch educational stuff about the Quantel Paintbox on TV (one episode was about doing digital photo-montage) and the first time I used my new Digi-view 4.0 software and Digi-Paint 3.0 package together with shared clipboard for raw data from Digi-view capture it was amazing to think just 3 years earlier what I was doing was impossible to do for less than 30,000 bucks.

Yes the Quantel system was higher resolution and colour depth BUT unless you spent another 10,000 bucks on a high end professional colour printer and just took a Polaroid of my Sony CRT screen on top of my A1000 you would be hard pressed to tell the difference anyway

Working out a hacky way to do photoshop style smudge/blend by setting up a 16 colour section of the 32/64 colour palette in Dpaint II (I think this was Dpaint II) so I could do airbrush type effects in my pixel art was very cool. The last image I remember doing with that technique was fluffy clouds....I loaded them into Digi-Paint 3 or Photon Paint 2 etc to use as a background and stuck some image of a Boeing airplane just like was shown on those mid 80s educational programs featuring the Quantel Paintbox system.

There was also something very magical about watching Digi-view render that HAM image from those 3 captures you took in between turning the colour wheel in front of the black and white camera. If you got the lighting 100% even you would get hardly any fringing, so I did all my digitising in a north facing room with thick net curtains lol. Still have some of those RAW format Digi-view images (1 file per disk if they were hi-res interlace captures!!)

I spent more time on Dpaint/Digi-view/Digi-paint on my Amiga than playing Amiga games lol there is only so many times you can play Marble Madness, Defender of the Crown and Shadow of the Beast 1 in 1987 when you just got your Amiga 1000

Shadow of the Beast 1 is probably the Amiga game that impressed me the most from the moment the title and overground level graphics began with the music playing, a work of art*.

*(a copy of the excellent Rastan Saga arcade game I loved but with Rodney Mathews style Fantasy Art and some amazing music by David Whittaker on your 'home computer')

edit: I actually bought an extra 1mb RAM expansion for my Amiga 1000 which I think was 450 quid in 1988 so I could make the best use of Digi-view etc! 1.5mb was a good amount of memory later for Digi-view 4 + Digi-paint 3 shared graphics data port function and multitasking. When I got an Amiga 2000 I ordered it with 8mb RAM card so I used to grab 250 odd frames of video using Rombo's Vidi-Amiga capture device (mono quality) from my VCR in slow motion and use clips from Buck Rogers or Star Wars etc space battles as animbrushes in Dpaint 3. To be able to do that in 1991 was pretty amazing.

[TCD]

The intro and first level of Turrican II. And 3D Demo by Anarchy. Very good times indeed

[HardyTC]

When my brother fetched Amiga 600, I was 5 years old kid and the only games I saw by this point was on C64 and Pegasus (NES bootleg) speaking of that NES bootleg on that console I've seen Mortal Kombat for the first time (some crap-bootlegs) and then my brother found Mortal Kombat II inside the box with floppies, he turned it on and from the beginning (I mean the intro,music and menus) till fatality it was a huge impressive moment for me.

I also remember that evening my brother beat the game till Shang Tsung level and he couldn't beat him after a few attempts he let me to try and I beat him... my 2nd brother and sister were laughing at him that he couldn't beat Shang Tsung and a little kid did. Unfortunetely I couldn't fight against Kintaro 'cause the copy of game was damaged and it used to kick to GURU screen every time when it came to fight against Kintaro.

[adrdesign]

EXPO '92 demo from Batman group, in a spanish game shop franchise called "Mail Soft". After that, sampling and making music with DSS8+ and Octamed made my life (till today).
[ Show youtube player ]

[OmaOhneBH]

First whoa thing was the Juggler demo, for sure!

[Rob68K]

Power Chords.

[zx80]

Mine was just a picture of Tut Ench Amun on the Amiga 1084s monitor seen in a shopping mall around 1988 when I still owned a C16plus4 (for whatever reason). That was the moment I realized I do need an Amiga 500. One year later I had owned/collected the money to buy one myself and immediately fall in love with it.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by zx80

Mine was just a picture of Tut Ench Amun on the Amiga 1084s monitor seen in a shopping mall around 1988 when I still owned a C16plus4 (for whatever reason).

It's actually on page 2

[zx80]

Thanks, corrected the link in my post above. Maybe you could correct your quote as well

[Signman]

1986 the 1000 (then just Amiga) running Dpaint 1 with color cycling waterfall. From there Defender of the crown, Juggler demo and all the greatness to follow.

[grond]

Originally Posted by HardyTC

I also remember that evening my brother beat the game till Shang Tsung level and he couldn't beat him after a few attempts he let me to try and I beat him... my 2nd brother and sister were laughing at him that he couldn't beat Shang Tsung and a little kid did.

Hahaha, I had a similar glorious childhood moment. This was with the C=64 game "Forbidden Forrest". My brother and his friend were playing this a lot but never got past the ghost level. I usually was only allowed to watch but when they got frustrated, they passed the joystick to me. Ten seconds later I had won the level because I had figured out that you didn't have to shoot at the skeleton but at the spectre floating in the background. They stared in disbelief as the spectre dissolved and then grabbed the joystick from my hands...

[HardyTC]

Originally Posted by grond

Hahaha, I had a similar glorious childhood moment. This was with the C=64 game "Forbidden Forrest". My brother and his friend were playing this a lot but never got past the ghost level. I usually was only allowed to watch but when they got frustrated, they passed the joystick to me. Ten seconds later I had won the level because I had figured out that you didn't have to shoot at the skeleton but at the spectre floating in the background. They stared in disbelief as the spectre dissolved and then grabbed the joystick from my hands...

Hahaha, well, at least I could face the Kintaro... untill the game dropped to GURU after 2-3 seconds, who knows how this legendary challenge would end...