Worst Problems With Amiga Games

[CodyJarrett]

Amiga games aren't perfect - one of the big problems is the lack of support for controls other than the basic joystick.

If a Spectrum/C64 could allow configurable keyboard controls, why can't the Amiga?

(Actually, I remember that Codetapper listed his pet hates with Amiga games in another thread)

[Tim Janssen]

Yes, I agree. But when my joystick was broken I found Silkworm the most user-friendly game I have ever played. They let you choose keyboard control and it played far better than joystick.

Another annoying habit, especially with games that come on more than 2 discs, is the disc-fiddling (especially when you have only one discdrive). Psygnosis' Defender-clone Anarchy is the worst: because the game supports only a single drive one has to change discs six times before the intro is loaded.
On the other hand, Psygnosis' Hired Guns let you anticipate by telling which disc it probably needs next. Excellent attempt which I haven't seen since.

[Amiga1992]

C64 games didnt let you chose anything else, in most cases (though I remember there was this strange key combination that allowed you to emulate a joystick in most games... what was it? it involved teh ctrl., 1 and 2 keys... I discovered it in a desperate try to play a game when my joysticks broke down ).

I did a thread about this thing, where codetapper vented spleen a-plenty I'll reiterate, the worst problem I had were cracktros. They used to fuck up compatibility with my A600.

Then again, if I bought originals, I wouldnt have had this problem, so shame on me. (but originals were nowhere to be seen in this shitty country )

The worst problem was the ugly black empty area below the screen. I used to switch to NTSC in boot menu just to stretch the image to fit the whole screen but it kept speeding up the game all the time because of frame rate differences between pal and ntsc modes or there were some other reasons that I don't know.

@puzzle

Because of that problem I thought abut getting extra ram or a hard drive for my 500+ but I'm glad I didn't do that until I got my 1200

Especially in syndicate everything went slow motion after you launch the gauss gun several times. But it was fun to see people screaming and burning all around the place in slow motion :laugh

[TikTok]

Especially in syndicate everything went slow motion after you launch the gauss gun several times. But it was fun to see people screaming and burning all around the place in slow

That wasn't slow-down, it was cinematic effect! Just like in that PC game Max Payne or whatever it's called .

[Shatterhand]

haha, I remember that thing with the Gauss gun, it was nice playing with the cheat mode on just to have lots of them..


There are lots of games that support keyboard for amiga, not only Silkworm. Micro Machines, Flashback, Street Fighter 2, The Lost Vikings, and many more. I always used the keyboard to play when I had the option.

[Muzkat]

If there was something that I hated about Amiga games, it was the vulnerability of the disks. I don't mean that they broke easily when you dropped them, or anything like that (they were quite tough in such situations), I mean how disks were prone to get errors in due time.

You would have a fav game, which you played devoutly every day. Then one day, you would load it up, and be greeted with a "Read/Write Error- use Disk Doctor to correct." Or a guru that wouldn't fix itself after a reboot. Or a disk loop, where you would hear the Amiga's loading noise grind to a halt, and go nowhere.

I think in my Amiga manual, it actually says that, because the Amiga 500 uses disks (ie: doesn't work off a harddrive), that disks are prone to "wear and tear" after time, and that's why, argues the manual, you should make backup copies of all your important disks.

Most of my "important disks" were games, BTW

[P-J]

I tell you something tho. Living in the age of retrogaming (since we've got a gaming past now), hindsight is everything.

I wish I'd made backups of all my originals, played only from the backup, and left the originals in the box with the manuals. Then a lucky collector would have something more.

Unfortunately, in those days, I didn't think to backup that often.

[CodyJarrett]

Luckily there are projects nowadays to preserve original disks, namely WHDLoad and CAPS, both working in different ways.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Also, the floppy disk problem is not neccesarily an Amiga issue. Floppies are inherently vulnerable to R/W errors - moreso on the PC, I have found, than on the Amiga. The only area where I have seen the Amiga beating up on floppies worse than other platforms would be in disk-based copy protection, which often yielded brutal track-stepping techniques. Of course, the damage this caused was significantly more critical to the heads of the drive than the disk itself.

[TikTok]

Some games would also do strange things when you had to swap disks; forcing you to take the disk out whilst the drive light was still on or with the drive clicking madly away.

I don't know how much (if any) damage this would cause, since the heads aren't actually reading the disk, but it sure doesn't sound nice :eek.