PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The DOS version of Syndicate is an example for me. Primarily because it was exactly the same as the Amiga version, except for the in mission game resolution, which was basically 4x higher.

It didn't make the Amiga version bad because it was as far as I can tell, bug for bug identical, it was just easier to see what you were doing.

The HiRes version was planned for the AGA Amiga but was never published.

WeaselFierce, that's right. And even Amiga magazines were blaming games for being too much demanding. Amiga Power slashed Star Trek 25th for being 8 disks and HD mandatory. What did they expects ? By 1994, every Amiga games should have been HD mandatory...

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The HiRes version was planned for the AGA Amiga but was never published.

WeaselFierce, that's right. And even Amiga magazines were blaming games for being too much demanding. Amiga Power slashed Star Trek 25th for being 8 disks and HD mandatory. What did they expects ? By 1994, every Amiga games should have been HD mandatory...

Absolutely yeah.

[Megalomaniac]

Pretty much all the games-only mags were guilty of being a bit myopic about what 'an Amiga' was. 060 processors went up to 75Mhz (5 times as fast as a stock A1200) and could handle up to 32Mb of memory, which is used smartly could offset some processing shortfall against a low-end Pentium. The AGA graphics hardware would have been a limiting factor (being roughly equal to VGA, not SVGA), but you could have done credible versions of just about all PC games up to about 95 or 96 on real top-end Amiga hardware, even before you consider PowerPC processors or special graphics cards.

Stuff from 1991 would have been a doddle on an A1200 with a hard drive and fast RAM -there's plenty in LemonAmiga that was designed around machines beyond a basic A1200 that proves what was possible visually, though little of it has the playability to match. Still, if more people had upgraded we could have played (just counting stuff by ex-Amiga companies) Civilization II, Command & Conquer, Syndicate Wars, Grand Prix 2, maybe Tomb Raider at a push...

Another issue as to why we didn't get some of those games is economic rather than technical - most of the first PC-but-not-Amiga games were American, and even by 1990 PCs were dominating Amigas for US sales. A game bought in the US probably saw them keep a much higher percentage of the sale price than one sold in Europe through an international distributor - meaning that 10,000 PC sales earned them a lot more than 10,000 Amiga sales would.

[rare_j]

Sim City for Dos was a lot better than the Amiga version. We had it on a family member's PC in the holidays, they went back to uni and took the PC with them, so I got the Amiga version to continue playing. But after playing the Dos version I just couldn't get into it. With the extra resolution and colours there was no competition.

It's worth mentioning that on the same PC was Duke Nukem (not 3d) which was laughably poor compared to Amiga stuff.

[Nightshft]

For me pc games really took over with

1994 System Shock
1995 Descent
1996 Tomb Raider
1998 Incoming
1998 Half-Life (I remember installing CS as a mod for HL)

But that was much later than 1991. And (at least for the later games) you needed to buy 3d cards, which were quite expensive. And - jeezus - every 12 months your 3d card would be old and new cards would be 3 times as fast...

[Megalomaniac]

The sheer cost of PCs, and the need to upgrade so often, always put me off them too Nightshift. If you spent £700 on an A500 in 1987, £100 on a half-meg RAM upgrade in 1989 and £100 on a second drive in 1991 (and even that was inessential if you mostly played action games, though with hindsight probably worth what amounted to the cost of 3 or 4 games), you still got good new games for seven years. Even if you also spent £600 on an A1200 and hard drive in 1992 it was still a much cheaper way to go. You'd have to spend the same on a PC at least 2-3 times in 7 years to keep up with PC games (and I think it's much the same today).

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Sim City for Dos was a lot better than the Amiga version. We had it on a family member's PC in the holidays, they went back to uni and took the PC with them, so I got the Amiga version to continue playing. But after playing the Dos version I just couldn't get into it. With the extra resolution and colours there was no competition.

It's worth mentioning that on the same PC was Duke Nukem (not 3d) which was laughably poor compared to Amiga stuff.

It must be noted that Maxis was one of the few publishers that did made enhanced version for fasters Amiga. Their games were Always published with an HD installable HiRes version for buffed up Amigas. Probably because the Amiga was much more a video workstation in the US than a basic game machine like it was in Europe.
Generally US made games on the Amiga were all HD friendly and would greatly benefits of enhanced hardware.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Marce

who cares about what year
I put lollypop as example because the Amiga version is very lame compared to the original PC game done 1 year before
and there is a recent thread about lollypop who remind me it

there are some members wasting so time in this buggy port instead to relax and play the PC original version which is 10 x better, I do not understand them

Because the OP SPECIFIED games between 1985-1991

Is that clear enough for you now?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Pretty much all the games-only mags were guilty of being a bit myopic about what 'an Amiga' was. 060 processors went up to 75Mhz (5 times as fast as a stock A1200) and could handle up to 32Mb of memory, which is used smartly could offset some processing shortfall against a low-end Pentium.

Yes, though the difference is far, far greater than the clock speed alone might lead you to believe. Depending on what you're doing, the '060 can be >15 times faster than the '020, and depending on the accelerator, can handle up to 256MB of RAM. For integer operations, the '060 can peat a Pentium CPU at the same clock speed. Some of the later games that were ported from the PC and were Pentium-class games (e.g. Descent: Freespace and Earth 2140) were playable on an '060.

[Photon]

Don't agree with shit, Amiga had talented artists the PC lacked.

I "played" Myst (written in some ported scripting language so you had to Click Left Arrow instead of pressing left arrow...) and like the rendered pictures (not rendered on PC IIRC).

Comanche ran decently in low res.

So did Quake after I got a Pentium in ... 1997?

All other games on PC looked like shit.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by CFou!

EOB 1 & EOB 2 AGA exist :
Eye Of The Beholder AGA
Eye Of The Beholder 2 AGA

bu not around 1991...

Any news of the Lands of Lore conversion which is announced on the readme files of these) splendid conversions ?

I'm joking (barely, please do it !) but this is one of the game that make me think that it was beginning to be difficult for the Amiga. One of my friend especially bought an HD for this game, waiting for its release which never came although an Amiga version was announcied everywhere, by Westwood themselves, and even commercials mentioning it were made.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Photon

So did Quake after I got a Pentium in ... 1997?

That was the year Quake II was released. Also Blood and Fallout and Postal and Curse of Monkey Island and Dungeon Keeper. It was a good year for PC gaming in my book.

[Nobby_UK]

So my question to you is, which PC games do you remember that made the Amiga look like shit?
For the purposes of this discussion we will limit the period to games released between 1985 and 1991

None, especially in that time frame.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

For this evaluation I don't care about what the Amiga 'could' do, but what it did do. Any discussion about theoretical abilities of either platform is off-topic.

Now that I can work with, clear boundaries

Unfortunately with an upper limit of 1991, there aren't really any games that I can think of myself. The Amiga kicked enough ass that my PC-owning friends and classmates were banging on my door to come play games they liked with better sound. The loading times didn't matter (didn't have a harddrive...). In fact they found it user friendly that you could just boot the games directly from floppy instead of having to go through a setup procedure.

edit: well... maybe some racing games. Stunts is from 1990, I'll play the PC version over any other version any day.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Sim City for Dos was a lot better than the Amiga version. We had it on a family member's PC in the holidays, they went back to uni and took the PC with them, so I got the Amiga version to continue playing. But after playing the Dos version I just couldn't get into it. With the extra resolution and colours there was no competition.

Interesting. I wonder which PC DOS version that was.

SimCity was originally developed on the C64 starting in 1985, but the first release versions in 1989 ran in 320x200 with 16 colors on the Amiga and 512×342 with 2 colors on the Mac. Later that year it was ported to the PC in EGA 320x200 and 640x350 both with 16 colors.

Various revisions followed. In 1991 V1.2 for the Amiga upgraded the graphics to 64 colors (EHB). This was much more colorful than the PC, but with lower resolution than EGA. The Amiga version also put stats on a separate screen that could be dragged up and down over the main screen.

So which is better, higher resolution or more colors? I tried both and couldn't decide. The colors in EGA are a bit garish, but the higher detail sort of makes up for it. I actually prefer the less colorful build selection buttons to the Amiga ones, which are a bit too fancy for my tastes. OTOH the monochrome buttons on the original Amiga version were a bit spartan. 32 colors probably would have been plenty enough, along with the Amiga's much nicer palette of 4096 colors vs 64.

It's worth mentioning that on the same PC was Duke Nukem (not 3d) which was laughably poor compared to Amiga stuff.

Indeed. Making an EGA game in mid 1991 when most PCs at that time had VGA seems silly. But PC gamers lapped it up, so apparently it didn't bother them.

[gimbal]

In the case of Sim City higher resolution I guess, it's not exactly a game made to be beautiful. It more looks "cool" than anything else.

I'm not actually so sure that most PCs had VGA mid 1991. Most NEW PCs surely yes, but the ones that were already parked inside people's homes...

[Megalomaniac]

Judging by https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/1991/, most PC games at that time had EGA AND VGA support - about half still offered CGA, as did about a quarter from 1992. Not all games have the tech-specs entered, but the ones that do show the pattern. Of course the screenshots on the box were all VGA, and reviewers barely considered what it looked like on a PC more than (at the most) 18 months old, but that was the real experience of PC ownership back then - your £1000 machine needed a big extra spend on it within 2 years or you'd miss out on new games. Meanwhile a 1987 A500 needed only a memory upgrade to play plenty of good 1994 games, and a C64 from 1982 still got a few good games in 1992. I'm repeating myself a bit, but I'm glad I avoided getting onto that treadmill for as long as I could, even if many PC games did look (and often play) better than Amiga ones by 1992 at the latest.

Apogee were a small scale shareware developer originally, so maybe their games were EGA only as they didn't have a VGA PC to develop them on? It looks like the later physical compilation of the three episodes of Duke Nukem 1 did add VGA though.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Unfortunately with an upper limit of 1991, there aren't really any games that I can think of myself. The Amiga kicked enough ass that my PC-owning friends and classmates were banging on my door to come play games they liked with better sound. The loading times didn't matter (didn't have a harddrive...). In fact they found it user friendly that you could just boot the games directly from floppy instead of having to go through a setup procedure.

Most of my friends were into really nerdy games. RPGs, adventures, simulation, strategy etc. The loading times on PC were a big factor that made the PC quite interesting for them even in 1991. It really depended if you were into graphics or into lots of data displayed in neat tables

[sokolovic]

As I said before, Maxis games were perfectly converted on the Amiga, with a low end version for basic Amiga users and an high end for people with buffed up machines.
Too bad the only game they didn't bothered to give a choice between a low system version and an high end one was probably their best. A low res 64 colors EHB version of Sim City 2000 would have been infinitively better than the rushed Q&D port we had. (And an HiRes 64 colors version for AGA users would have been largely enough). Funny enough, there is a thread on usenet where Maxis ask Amiga users about the SC2000 conversion and many response was give us the full HiRes 256 colors version...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys...HmRKLdLs?pli=1

[Galahad/FLT]

Sim City on CDTV looked alright as I recall and that version also works on A500 1 meg chip ram.machines