PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

[Photon]

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.

I think that limit can be extended by quite a few years through all the fake-3D polygon games in lower res than Amiga and with grey-brown muck for textures

Everyone played those with extremely slow framerates, too. And then they paid twice again to play the same ugly games faster

There are probably a handful of exceptions, and they deserve praise, but then it's also the question of quantity. If so few were able to beat an older platform, was the PC actually any good for gaming until ... IDK, Win98?

That's when you could realistically double-click an icon to play a (fullscreen) game on PC. Even then, some compatibility issues (some of which where impossible to resolve as you couldn't have multiple GPUs/sound cards) always hindered playing. I remember so many semi-working text menus and manual editing of config.sys...

[Marce]

Originally Posted by TCD

Most of my friends were into really nerdy games. RPGs, adventures, simulation, strategy etc. )

correct
those types of games are nerdy/weirdos games
intelligent and sane ppl play platform games, arcadish games , shooters and so on
is that what the Amiga has better to offer

[rare_j]

Hey Bruce, thanks for taking a look at SimCity. Yep, you got the right Dos version, and the higher resolution makes all the difference. Interesting about the colours, there aren't more colours on the Dos version then (I had mis-remembered), they're just (IMO) better colours. I still think the Dos version looks great.

Shame they didn't use the full available resolution for the Amiga version.

[Fiery Phoenix]

Originally Posted by stevelord

Why shudder on the Amiga? The Amiga version is in full 4096 colour HAM mode while the PC version is 256 colour VGA. Both look good IME (I play Links: The Challenge of Golf on Amiga and PC). Unless you're thinking of Links 386, maybe?

Maybe it was 386 - but man Links on the Amiga is sloooooooow. Was it that slow on the PC?

[Megalomaniac]

Links was hopelessly slow on an A500 (despite needing a hard drive), but on a faster Amiga it was probably fine. Not sure if it was quicker on an x Mhz PC or an x Mhz Amiga though - my guess would be on a PC because HAM was slow by nature (though Dynamic Debugger attempted to use it for an action game, unsuccessfully)

DOS based PCs were always less friendly than Amigas, especially with different graphics and sound cards - my first PC came with Windows 95 but most games were still DOS-based until 1997 (the first Grand Theft Auto was about the last, in late 1997) and that was where most issues were, though I think there was only one DOS game that I couldn't get to work. But, then there was DirectX, which had its teething problems. And then, there was Freeserve internet, which messed up most non-brand-new Windows installations it saw, including mine. I don't have fond memories of my early PC years. I have no regrets about putting off getting one for as long as possible,

[Konrad]

1991 it wasn't so obvious by the looks, PC games mostly didn't make the Amiga "look like shit". But still many were already better looking, like Eye Of The Beholder 2, adventures like Monkey Island 2, Space Quest 4, ...). And even games which were graphically similar had more fluent gameplay in many games. Not limited to, but especially visible in flight sims (better graphics on PC and fluent which also made the Amiga look bad). All games were HD installable. Amiga sounded better in almost every field, but PC got slowly better.
So for me, the coming success of the PC over Amiga started to take shape in 1991.
Chances were already slim for the Amiga.

Originally Posted by Photon

If so few were able to beat an older platform, was the PC actually any good for gaming until ... IDK, Win98?

Windows 98 was obviously released 1998. So, yes, definitely: The PC was a very good gaming machine LATEST 1993. And in my opinion by then already the best home computer for gaming.

Besides the shared game library where PC was mostly better:
1992 you had "Alone In The Dark" or "Comanche", which were impressive back then.
1993 obviously Doom, X-Wing, Privateer, Strike Commander, Sam N Max. Full speech in many games
1994 Wing Commander 3 with it's cool movie cut scenes, Ultima 8 Pagan, Tie Fighter
... The list goes on. Games just got better and better on PC.

[Megalomaniac]

Most of those are good games Konrad (I spent most of a summer playing through TIE Fighter Collectors CD once I finally got a PC), but only within a narrow range of styles, and you still had to spend £1000 on a charmless box with obscure DOS commands, unpredictable compatibility and unintelligible error messages, and then replace it every 2 years. Enough later Amiga games were made to prove that most of those games would have been possible on an A1200 with fastram and a hard drive (except for the cutscenes and maybe speech).

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by rare_j

Hey Bruce, thanks for taking a look at SimCity...

Shame they didn't use the full available resolution for the Amiga version.

To use high resolution on the A500 they would have to drop the number of colors to 8 for performance, and vertical resolution would have to stay at 200 to avoid interlace flicker. I think they made the right choice.

We should also remember that SimCity was released on the Amiga first, so the 'die was already cast' on that version, while ports to other systems were ripe for optimization. Most other platforms were really not up to it though, and suffered horribly in comparison to the original Amiga version. What surprises me is that they even bothered to produce versions for lesser platforms. Even the ZX Spectrum got a port!

[ Show youtube player ]

[Rotareneg]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Ultima 8 Pagan, Tie Fighter
... The list goes on. Games just got better and better on PC.

Wait... did you actually use Ultima 8 as an example of games being better on a system as opposed to the inverse?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

To use high resolution on the A500 they would have to drop the number of colors to 8 for performance, and vertical resolution would have to stay at 200 to avoid interlace flicker. I think they made the right choice.

My english is probably not very good but I wrote multiple times here that Maxis games were the few to have a choice of resolution. Sim City is the only one in the Sim serie on the Amiga that doesn't had an HiRes interlaced mode. Even A Train have one.
Soo why would they have to drop colors to 8 for performance ? They could have made the same choice they have made for every others games they published (except for SimCity 2000 sadly).

[Aardvark]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

My english is probably not very good but I wrote multiple times here that Maxis games were the few to have a choice of resolution. Sim City is the only one in the Sim serie on the Amiga that doesn't had an HiRes interlaced mode. Even A Train have one.
Soo why would they have to drop colors to 8 for performance ? They could have made the same choice they have made for every others games they published (except for SimCity 2000 sadly).

The hires-interlace mode of SimAnt (1992) requires 1mb chip and 1mb fast ram, and the readme recommends at least 16mhz cpu. Probably same for Sim Earth and Sim Life. Wouldn't been reasonable requirement for 1989 game.

[jizmo]

I was never a PC guy converting straight to mac from Amiga, but I admit having a wow moments with PC already in 1989, and it was to do with the quality of some of the peripherals PC computers had.

Specifically, we were playing through Space Quest 3 on my friend's father's top of the line work computer and its snappy hard disk drive and sheer quality of the (then gigantic) VGA display with superb sharpness and colors popping left me with awe. Getting the Space Quest 3 later on for my floppy based Amiga with a 14-inch Philips monitor felt at max one third of the experience we had on PC.

Granted, I perhaps could've had the similar quality on Amiga if I had thousands of euros to splash on similar gear

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Aardvark

The hires-interlace mode of SimAnt (1992) requires 1mb chip and 1mb fast ram, and the readme recommends at least 16mhz cpu. Probably same for Sim Earth and Sim Life. Wouldn't been reasonable requirement for 1989 game.

These recquirements are optionnal, not mandatory. These games still can be played in low res because Maxis gave the choice.
Plus we're talking about the EHB version of Sim City which was released in 1991. An EHB low res mode and a 16 colors interlaced HiRes one would have been possible.
That said the EHB low res version is perfectly good for me. I wish they had put the same mode for SimCity 2000 alongside the too demanding 256 colors HiRes one (Doesn't are the SNES and PSX version also low res ?)

[Konrad]

Originally Posted by Rotareneg

Wait... did you actually use Ultima 8 as an example of games being better on a system as opposed to the inverse?

Hehe . I know that this game is regarded mostly bad from Ultima fans .
But neither me, nor my brother played other Ultima games. So from our point of view:
An RPG with solid graphics, sound and fluent gameplay.
Did we have anything similar on the Amiga ? No. The only similar game I can remember is "Tower Of Souls" one year later, which was a huge disappointment for me.

@Megalomaniac:
To be honest we didn't have any compatibility issues. With proper installed MSDOS with boot options to choose memory we didn't have any problems .
Yes, PC hardware was expensive, but we didn't have to replace every two years, that's exxagerated. The PC had a big, IMO great games library to choose from starting 1992. The Amiga did not.

Emotions are not the topic here. I loved my A4000 (used it still when my brother had a Pentium 133), but I really wanted to have similar games on the Amiga. I hoped for long, but it didn't happen. Another example: 1993 I had "Microcosm" for CD32. My brother had "Rebel Assault". From today's point of view both not great games. But back then I thought "Rebel Assault" was fantastic (Graphics, Sound, Atmosphere, Story, Starwars!) and "Microcosm" mediocre at best.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Enough later Amiga games were made to prove that most of those games would have been possible on an A1200 with fastram and a hard drive

Doesn't help what COULD have been possible. To most buyers it mattered was was really available.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Konrad

Doesn't help what COULD have been possible. To most buyers it mattered was was really available.

This. From 1992 on more and more games wouldn't be available on the Amiga.

[sokolovic]

There was some expectations before Commodore demise thought. Many so called big games were anouncied on the Amiga yet never released : Lost Eden, Megarace, Scavanger IV, Frontier FE, Lands of Lore, Pitfall, Jungle Book, TFX, Epic 2, Magic Carpet (yes I know works havent ever stzrted for this one but still it was anouncied by every Amiga games magazine)....
It was Commodore demise that ruined the Amiga game market. Had the CD32 continues to sell like it was before april 94 (and the 1200 also was a string seller), surely these games and others one would have been available on it. Waiting for them wasn't totally irrealistic before the bankrupcy of C.

[Tigerskunk]

The stupid thing here is, in hindsight, that all the PC had were those 256 colors, its HD that was there and had to be be installed up and a bit of a faster CPU. Which the Amiga mostly didn't need in the first years, because of its blitter unit.

But that was enough for games to simply look better in screenshots in magazines back then.

With HD installs, you could push much more assets into your game, and with 256 colors these looked a lot better.

I am still convinced, that the A1200 could have beaten the PCs at that easily. They just released it two years too late.

Some screenshots of the games that wooed me unto the PC at the time (late 1991, when my friends started to switch over from the Amiga to the PC):

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:


PC:



As for the rest, that was basically it. i don't want to even compare too much, since after 1991 if the Amiga even got a version of a game, it looked bad or mediocre compared to those.

But most important games after that like Wizardry, Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld and Ultima 7 just stayed on PC, and you could just jealously look over to the PC aisle in the store.

And again, the A1200 could have easily do these games in the same quality as well. Which I am sure of, since I spent some time working with it now for my new game.
Commodore just released this too late.

[modrobert]

I can't remember any PC games during that time period (1985 - 1991) which put the Amiga to shame.

As an arcade gamer I got a SNES (with a wildcard copier) as complement to get quality action based games, the thought of using PC for gaming came later.

[Megalomaniac]

Is 'every two years' really an exaggeration? A 2Mb 286 PC cost £1000 in early 1991. Some 1992 games such as Comanche and Ultima 7 required a 386, Strike Commander in early 1993 recommended a 486. Those three were impressive games, albeit a bigger jump in graphics than gameplay, but things like Rebel Assault (and Microcosm) never had any appeal to me - minimal gameplay alternating (after long loading times) with tacky cutscenes (usually acted by people who weren't good enough to get regular film or TV work)

[rabidgerry]

This is an interesting thread and reading everyone's thoughts on the subject.

I don't know enough to contribute, but I will say this.....the link to the 50 best DOS games of the 80's has a game called Death Track in the list. That looks like a great game that I wished had been ported to the Amiga. Kinda like 4d Sports Driving meets Chase HQ and possibly some other game I can't remember mixed together! Would like to try it someday.