PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

I remember seeing the PC screenshot of Silent Service 2 in a magazine, and feeling jealous because the PC version didn't have any visible color steps anymore.

Amiga:

In this case that's almost entirely on the developers though for not knowing how to dither properly with the limited palette, as this 1-minute pass shows:



But I totally share your pain. I did lust after those seemingly stepless gradients with MCGA and they were the first thing for me to recreate as I got my first AGA amiga.

[acidbottle]

Indirectly, Civilization 2!

A PC 286 owning friend had played Civ1 a lot on my Amiga and when Civ2 landed it was nowhere to be seen for Amiga. It was arguably the best in the series and am sure Amiga could have done it, trouble is, Amiga was slowly becoming a commercial void by then. Bah!

[TCD]

Same story with Warlords 2...

[Megalomaniac]

So many of my favourite PC games when I did get one were sequels to Amiga games - Civ 2 probably could have been done on a 4Mb A1200 from hard drive (though ideally at least an 030, and a non-CDROM version would miss a few of the game's luxury features) whereas Grand Prix 2 would have needed at least an 040 (probably 060) to even imitate the VGA to any quality, let alone SVGA.

Actually with hindsight, the best thing to do might have been to get a second-hand PC in about late 1994, so probably a 386DX or 486SX, probably about £500. You couldn't've played new games on it, but you'd use that to 'hoover up' the great PC games from the previous 3 years that either weren't on the Amiga or needed more power than you had, then get a brand new PC in late 1995 or early 1996 by which time PCs had truly taken over. That would have taken some courage mind you, to look at new PC games and know they were still beyond you. At least it would have meant largely skipping the Interactive Movie monstrosities.

[phx]

IMHO there was absolutely no reason to get a PC until the mid 90s. Even if there were a few titles which are superiour and without a match on the Amiga, it still doesn't make sense to invest in an expensive PC just for them. On the other hand you can easily find more great titles on the Amiga which didn't exist on the PC at that time.

Myself I was mostly into strategy and simulations, but still I never got a PC because I was also a developer and prefered the much better architecture and operating system of the Amiga.

I got my first PC around 2015 and I can still use it for today's games with i7/3.4GHz, 32GB and GTX970. This wasn't possible in the 90s. You burned a lot of money for a crappy system.

[gimbal]

So... "none" then. Maybe it is time to repeat yet again: the thread topic is to name games which actually did show off the PC at the time. Not to rant about how shit PCs were.

[Marce]

Originally Posted by phx

IMHO there was absolutely no reason to get a PC until the mid 90s. Even if there were a few titles which are superiour and without a match on the Amiga, it still doesn't make sense to invest in an expensive PC just for them. On the other hand you can easily find more great titles on the Amiga which didn't exist on the PC at that time.

Myself I was mostly into strategy and simulations, but still I never got a PC because I was also a developer and prefered the much better architecture and operating system of the Amiga.

I got my first PC around 2015 and I can still use it for today's games with i7/3.4GHz, 32GB and GTX970. This wasn't possible in the 90s. You burned a lot of money for a crappy system.

this is 95% right excepting:

if u are into strategy and simulations then the Amiga is not and never was the ideal computer for you
The amiga is ideal for guys who likes platform games , shooters, arcades, puzzle platform games etc

you got ur 1st PC too late,
but yes, in the mid 90s you burned a lot of money in a crappy system buying a pc, despite lot of superior PC games ,it was better to have an Amiga until 1998 or so

[Marce]

Originally Posted by gimbal

So... "none" then. Maybe it is time to repeat yet again: the thread topic is to name games which actually did show off the PC at the time. Not to rant about how shit PCs were.

well if you want to name games, here is another one

monkey island 2, the amiga version was very lame and incomplete, compared to the PC version

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

So... "none" then. Maybe it is time to repeat yet again: the thread topic is to name games which actually did show off the PC at the time. Not to rant about how shit PCs were.

Check the second post of the thread.

[Megalomaniac]

An Amiga was still better than any PC for flight sims and strategy games (even if money was no object) until every game was in VGA and hard drives became standard (and until the 640k limit had been properly overcome - says it all about how complex PCs were that 'expanded memory' (EMS) and 'extended memory' (XMS) had to be configurated separately)). After that, assuming money was no object, and you were patient with the technical side of PCs, it was starting to gradually change by 1991 (the end of the OP's question)

It's true that the PC got most great flight sims first, and better, after Interceptor or F16 Combat Pilot at the end of the 80s.

For adventures, losing LucasArts was a big loss (Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max were as good as their Amiga classics, though their later ones weren't) but we still got Steel Sky, Bloodnet, Amazon Queen, Nippon Safes and a few others after late 1992 - though mostly after the PC versions and usually without AGA graphics. For RPGs we didn't get much after Eye of the Beholder II, apart from the Ishar series and the overrated (at the time) Legends of Valour, probably as much because they were more popular in the US than in Europe

It was later for strategy games though. Populous, Megalomania, The Settlers and Ports of Call (to name but a few) were all Amiga (or Amiga and ST) originals, and most great PC strategy games until about 1994 did get Amiga versions, usually available in AGA, although you needed a hard drive and at least an 020 to get the most out of them. The Settlers showed what could be done by an Amiga-designed game within a 1Mb A500 without lacking extras for bigger machines though.

[Weasel Fierce]

The problem is that a lot of PC releases at the time indicated either had some advantages and some drawbacks (usually a bit more color but worse sound) or the advantages were pretty trivial so it doesnt make "the amiga look like shit".

Historyline was 92 and when you compare side by side, the PC version looks a little better, but the Amiga version looks fine.
Space Hulk is 93 and has speech in the PC version, but the Amiga version has better music. Again, both versions play just fine.

The same is true for most games in the time frame ending in 91 as indicated by OP: The differences just arent that major, especially when you are using comparable systems (processors, hard drives).

[ImmortalA1000]

Hmmm for games that don't use polygons, like F1GP and Actua Soccer it always was the case but those polygon games are a bit rubbish in the 70s when it was 'affordable EGA PC' for normal home/family use like an Amiga would be used. In the era of 'affordable 286 VGA Adlib' it's a different story but still not exactly up to 3DO textured 3D standards so I never cared.

For everything else it depends on...

1. Who is doing the developments on Amiga and technically how well was it done (DOS Adlib port job sound usual crap etc)

2. Depends what exact year you are talking.

Here is 2 examples.

Amiga 1000 running Lotus II fullscreen, zero frame drops. PC DOS Lotus III, no Lotus II for PC, requires a machine faster than a 33mhz 486.

Amiga 1200 running Super Stardust requires a PC spec of 120mhz Pentium for keyboard or 133mhz for joystick control if you want the same zero frame drops. In both cases I tried these games in the 1990s on the real hardware I owned, or a friend owned, side by side so it is not wikipedia bullshit, that is how it was based on those 2 games. No PC could do Shadow of the Beast in 1989 either. But it could do all those pathetic point n click games that infected the Amiga/C64 from unwanted yank imports. YUCK.

But of course people talk about Wing Commander, which quite frankly has been coded up by a bunch of losers on the Amiga when in reality it should easily match the 386 PC speed on an A1200

I got a 486 25mhz PC in Sept 92, it ran F1GP about the speed of the Amiga 4000/040 but it cost half as much as A4000/040. I didn't think much of Actua Soccer myself, rather have a perfect port of Megadrive ISS soccer games etc myself but each to their own and again you would need an Amiga 4000/040 to do Actua Soccer type game engine.

[sokolovic]

I dont how it runs on a 386 PC but the AGA port of Wing Commander seems quite good to me although it was released in 1994.
There is an history behind the Amiga port of Wing Commander. I surely won't call the guy that made it "a bunch of losers".
As for Actua Soccer or ISS, who cares of having them on the Amiga when you had SWOS that is vastly better on the system (and actualized officialy until 1996). Even in 1991, best footy games were on the Amiga. You had to wait ISS pro evolution on the PlayStation in 1999 to have a serious contender.

[Megalomaniac]

I'm confident in saying that you couldn't do texture mapped graphics at a playable speed with a useable screen size on an A500. Several games tried it (e.g. Wing Commander / Legends of Valour / Citadel), none succeeded. I don't think you could on an 8Mhz PC either. I can't think of any texture mapped A1200 games with fully 3D movement that are faster than the AGA version of Wing Commander on a stock A1200 either, so I'm not how you can assume it was a bad programming effort, especially considering that Nick Pelling was quite seriously ill during the development time.

[sokolovic]

Wing Commander isn't using textured 3D but rather 2D scaling sprites.

(Fun fact the ships, even on PC were designed on an Amiga)

[rare_j]

When I first saw Wolf 3D running, 1992 or shortly after, that made the Amiga look poor. But then that is outside the time frame of the original question.
Before then my view was that the Amiga was vastly superior or at least broadly competitive, aside from the odd exception down to design choices or poor porting rather than capability.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jizmo

In this case that's almost entirely on the developers though for not knowing how to dither properly with the limited palette, as this 1-minute pass shows:

It's worse than that. The Amiga version only has 16 colors!

I loaded the jpg image into Art Dept Pro on the Amiga, scaled it down to the original 320x180, reduced colors to 32 and added 15% ordered dithering. Here's the result (scaled up x 2 for viewing on modern hires screens).

Still not as good as the 256 color PC image of course, but would have looked a lot better in a magazine review! It could have so much better with a little extra work, but I guess we are lucky to have this title on the Amiga at all.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Marce

well if you want to name games, here is another one

monkey island 2, the amiga version was very lame and incomplete, compared to the PC version

Monkey Island 2

...was originally released as a floppy disk-based title for IBM PCs as well as for MS-DOS and Mac OS in December 1991. Gilbert later remarked that LucasArts' choice of the release medium for the game, which was distributed on six floppy disks, led him to excise five planned scenes from Monkey Island 2 to ensure that it was compliant with the allotted size limitations. By the month of its initial release, the sequel's launch for the Amiga was delayed to early 1992, and U.S. Gold, LucasArts' product distributor in Europe, had assumed the position of the game's publisher in the relevant territories. The Amiga version was ultimately released in Summer 1992; the development house in charge of the conversion divided Monkey Island 2 into four sequential playable sections that were distributed across eleven floppy disks to adapt the game to the platform's memory constraints

So the Amiga version came on 11 disks because 'the Amiga' didn't have enough memory. But the Mac version needed 2MB, and the PC version needed 640k and a hard drive. So the real reason for those 11 disks was to make it work on a stock A500 with no hard drive or Fast RAM. Good news for those Amiga owners who refused to upgrade and just sat on their hands!

Being on 11 disks had upsides and downsides. On the downside, it meant a lot of disk swapping and long loading times for those who didn't have a hard drive. On the upside it made pirating the game more painful. Or was that a downside too?

Amiga Power called it the most eagerly awaited game of 1992. According to Ron Gilbert, Monkey Island 2 and its predecessor "sold well, but Sierra Online and King's Quest were still kicking our ass completely!" A writer for Next Generation noted that the games were "relatively minor hit[s]" in the United States, but became blockbusters on the PC and the Amiga throughout Europe. Conversely, Edge reported that both games "sold very poorly on release". Designer Tim Schafer said that Monkey Island 2 sold about 25,000 copies... Following the underperformance of Monkey Island 2, Schafer recalled that the management came and told them that Monkey was a failure and that they should make something else. He speculated that the Monkey Island series' reputation grew as a result of software piracy.

For sure the PC version looked better, but was the Amiga version really 'shit' in comparison? Reviewers and owners didn't seem to think so. Perhaps it's 'lameness' had some other cause.

Monkey Island 2 received consistently high reviews for all versions, 95% from Amiga Computing for the Amiga version, 96% from Computer and Video Games for the PC version. When Kixx XL rereleased Monkey Island 2 as a budget game, the reviews remained high getting 91% from CU Amiga.

This game barely squeaks into the time frame of interest, and I don't think it qualifies anyway because the Amiga version received rave reviews and was highly sought after (and still is today).

[TCD]

Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4 were games that made it very obvious that installing games on HD was more than an option. 'Luckily' that 'problem' was gone soon. Just not releasing games on the Amiga was the way more profitable choice.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Wing Commander isn't using textured 3D but rather 2D scaling sprites.

(Fun fact the ships, even on PC were designed on an Amiga)

Interesting, apologies if everyone except me was aware of this. I'd stand by my suggestion that actual full-screen texture-mapped 3D probably couldn't be done at a playable speed on the 68000 though.

Monkey Island 2 is the second-highest rated game at LemonAmiga, so marce is clearly in a minority in thinking its a bad port. Helps that we've all got (Amiga or emulated) hard drives nowadays, so swapping the 11 disks is either a slightly sadistic choice or a faded memory (speaking as someone who played it from floppies back then, with one drive, and got pretty far in it). It was better on the PC, even if your Amiga had a hard drive, but not vastly so. Ideally it would have also got an AGA update later, which realistically ought to be hard drive only but have all the music, but that's life.