Non-Amiga games that should have been Amiga games

[ImmortalA1000]

Rescue on Fractalus programmed by Loren Carpenter and nobody else thanks.

[gimbal]

Some MSX games. Zanac and Eggerland most notably. The Amiga was really good for puzzle games so it was a shame it never got a port of the excellent Eggerland games. Apparently it was good enough to create Nintendo console versions so it was definitely in the realm of possibilities.

[luncheon]

Silpheed!

[ztronzo]

NBA Jam
BurgerTime

[Muzkat]

I think Lethal Enforcers could have had an Amiga version.

It featured static backgrounds, sprites that were hardly animated, and simple point and shoot gameplay that would have easily been converted to point and click with the mouse. I remember enjoying the arcade back in the day.

[TCD]

Just thought of Shadow of the Comet which would have made a pretty good Amiga game especially on the A1200.

[ztronzo]

Resident Evil
Alone in the Dark

:-)

[Python1]

This thread made me think of a non-Amiga AGA game that should have been an Amiga AGA game: X2 from Team17, successor to Project-X.

If in 1996 the Internet, forums and crowdfunding were already mainstream, maybe the remaining Amiga community could have convinced Martyn Brown to develop and release X2 on the Amiga (CD32?) rather than on the PS1?

Here some people think the Amiga couldn't handle this game.

Personally, I am talking (dreaming) about a 1996 AGA game developed on and for AGA Amigas as Project-X was for ECS/OCS Amigas in 1992. Not about a "simple"/impossible PS1 conversion.

[gimbal]

"in fact, at times it's difficult to identify shots onscreen or to differentiate your own firepower from that of your enemies"

Nice thing to fault a game on I have that with pretty much all decently paced shoot em up games nowadays.

[Megalomaniac]

In terms of the standard A500, pretty much all of those early ST-but-not-Amiga games, some have been done unofficially. Things like Rastan, WEC Le Mans, and Target: Renegade that were big 8-bit games after the 16-bits were taking off, but no doubt Ocean would have done them badly. Maybe a few later C64 games like Turbocharge (which was in development), Slicks, Project: Firestart and Wasteland? A lot of people never got to play those.

Loads of SNES and especially Megadrive games would have been doable too - Micro Machines 2 was a good shout, Jungle Book, EA Hockey, NBA Jam.

For bigger Amigas up to 060 with 32Mb and a hard drive, most non-action games that ran on a low-end Pentium would have been doable, stuff like Civ 2, Settlers 2, Master of Orion, Theme Hospital, the Lucasarts adventures up to Grim Fandango at a push. Mostly unfeasible to play from floppies and far easier to do in AGA only though (otherwise you'd have to point the graphics down). For the standard A1200 maybe LHX Attack Chopper, Wing Commander 2, Indycar Racing of there was a big enough market.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

...NBA Jam.

Would be interesting if that could be done on an AGA machine. No idea if this is the actual source code, but maybe some of it could be used: https://github.com/historicalsource/nba-jam

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Don't know if that would have been feasible though given how little optimisation effort went into the DOS PC port. The main target was consoles for that one, clearly.

I want to note that I won't list games from Apogee or Epic Megagames here. It is simply not realistic to claim that there should have been Amiga ports given that those companies simply never even seemed to have considered to target the platform. They were PC junkies.

Well actually there weren't so PC junkie since Apogee was using Amiga to developpe games and was even planning to release Stargunner on it (it was the targeted platform)


https://web.archive.org/web/20141110...classic_games/

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Python1

Here some people think the Amiga couldn't handle this game.

The answer of pretty much every "what if this game was ported to the Amiga ?" question here is pretty much always the same. "Couldn't handle it", "underpowered", "you can't adapt it to 1 button joystick", "maybe with a 68060" etc...


I remember that back in the days games weren't always ported as 1:1 versions and we're generally fitted to the targeted machine (you can easily spot the machine running one version of many multi platform games of that era).


I don't know when this tolerance to slightly adapting software to the hardware vanished ? Maybe we are now too used to have indistinguishable ports on every home system. I think that the GameCub/PS2/Xbox generation was the last to have clearly diferent kind of GFX signature.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The answer of pretty much every "what if this game was ported to the Amiga ?" question here is pretty much always the same. "Couldn't handle it", "underpowered", "you can't adapt it to 1 button joystick", "maybe with a 68060" etc...


I remember that back in the days games weren't always ported as 1:1 versions and we're generally fitted to the targeted machine (you can easily spot the machine running one version of many multi platform games of that era).


I don't know when this tolerance to slightly adapting software to the hardware vanished ? Maybe we are now too used to have indistinguishable ports on every home system. I think that the GameCub/PS2/Xbox generation was the last to have clearly diferent kind of GFX signature.

I suppose the issue is that, back in the day, we were happy with an approximate conversion of our mate's PC or Megadrive game, because an A500 was all we had. Publishers were willing to do adapted versions, if they'd still sell. In some cases they'd add new features that did suit the target system as well (eg Desert Strike, which has no 'definitive' version as a result.

Nowadays it's different. We can play the exact thing on another system, through emulation or (usually fairly affordable) real hardware. Hobbyist developers are expected to convert the game exactly, and find new tricks to work around perceived hardware limitations. Any new gameplay features or adaptations are perceived as meddling with the original masterpiece.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I don't know when this tolerance to slightly adapting software to the hardware vanished ? Maybe we are now too used to have indistinguishable ports on every home system. I think that the GameCub/PS2/Xbox generation was the last to have clearly diferent kind of GFX signature.

I don't think that people wouldn't 'tolarate' a port that has been changed (Devil's Temple is a great example), but I think people are less willing to create one because it seems maybe pointless. Back in the day you most likely only had one system, so a port of something from a 'better' system was the only way to play that game. Companies would create those ports as long as they made money. Today I don't think anyone creating games for the Amiga or any other 'retro' system does it for that reason. So you'd have to find another motivation and creating something that is 'indistinguishable' certainly does so more than creating something 'almost as good'

[BigD]

This reads like a ClickBoom! wish list poll from a late 90s CU Amiga poll!

Doom
C&C
Theme Hospital
Settlers 2
X-Wing/Tie Fighter
Duke Nukem 3D
Earthworm Jim 1/2
F1GP 2
EF2000
Z - Bitmap Brothers
Wing Commander 2
Strike Commander
Magic Carpet

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Well actually there weren't so PC junkie since Apogee was using Amiga to developpe games and was even planning to release Stargunner on it (it was the targeted platform)


https://web.archive.org/web/20141110...classic_games/

I know, I brought that one up myself in a sister thread. Blew my mind. Makes me want to add Duke Nukem 2 and Bio Menace to the list

[sokolovic]

Ahaha. So it was you. I wasn't sure (and can't remember the thread). It blew my mind also.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Anubis

Sim and Max Hit the Road

Day of the Tentacle

My friend went mad over these two games, he showed them to me running on his 4mb 386DX PC and I just looked completely underwhelmed and instantly thought nothing a CD equipped 4mb Amiga 1200 would break a sweat doing if it was coded directly for it, not some high level interpreter of the tool Lucas did it with on PC. There was a lot of graphic tearing in the animations, this was nothing state of the art IMO.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

I think that the GameCub/PS2/Xbox generation was the last to have clearly diferent kind of GFX signature.

The graphics on the Wii were decidedly PS2 quality, so I never bothered with it as the controllers are severely innaccurate for anything other than party games, but PS3 and 360 however are a very similar quality when handled by talented developers.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a complex 68000 based arcade game conversion that was done properly. The framerate on Operation Wolf for Amiga is a joke for a start. Amiga rarely got what it deserved, I suppose Mortal Kombat 1 + 2 are OK but tough to think of games done properly with the same sort of effort console developers put into games.

Today it's easy to find the original console/arcade graphics ripped for you so that really only leaves raw chipset + CPU balanced coding talent and making best use of quad DACs of OCS/AGA etc.