The worst arcade conversions ever

[PatmanQC]

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[oscar_ates]

Street fighter conversions for Amiga was always terrible

[Megalomaniac]

The Amiga wasn't exactly blessed with great arcade conversions, I'd struggle to think of more than a handful which aren't technically outperformed by a similar original Amiga game. By the time programmers started to really understand and push the Amiga, we pretty much stopped getting arcade conversions. The sad truth is, when a Sega game got badly converted, it sold more Megadrives.

[DisasterIncarna]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Street fighter conversions for Amiga was always terrible

thankfully not as bad as SF2 on the c64.

[fryguy]

I don't think Final Fight was that bad, but then I never played the arcade either.

[Heywood]

Rolling Thunder was an arcade game I really enjoyed so it was one of the first games I got for my Amiga - the disappointment was immense.

Thank goodness for good arcade conversions like Marble Madness to take away some of the sting.

I didn't realize how many games Tiertex were involved in - hopefully some were actually half decent.

[oscar_ates]

Tiertex and US Gold conversions were always bad.

Somebody made a miracle with mortal kombat 1/2 and it was a good port. They did not even require AGA and 2MB. Only missing thing was background animations but it would be too much for ECS machines

[Galahad/FLT]

It was pretty much a given that whenever US Gold got an arcade licence, the Amiga would not be well served by them, and right up to the end, the Amiga got completely fucked over by them.

I mean, when the announcement was made that US Gold got the licence for Strider, was anyone reading that news excited by the prospect?

Streetfighter 2 was always going to be shit, but I think what surprised Amiga owners, was that it wasn't worse.

Other people look at the Amiga version and say "How could you be happy with that shit?"

And we would say "Go look what we got before, this is an improvement!"

[Megalomaniac]

Most of the really bad ones were US Gold's, which rarely got the gameplay right, and almost never got anywhere near the Amiga's potential for graphics and sound (or, in most cases, the ST's potential) - though some like Ghouls N Ghosts and Forgotten Worlds did look good for the time. Most of Ocean's UK-developed ones were lousy too - Chase HQ and Renegade perhaps the worst of the lot. Unfortunately, everybody won from the rush jobs except the games-buying public - US Gold and Ocean sold just as many copies as if they'd done it properly, programmers probably made more than if they'd spent twice as long designing and coding a brilliant original creation, US Gold especially blanketed the magazines with ads (which may have influenced review scores) and the companies behind the arcade game made more money from the console conversions, and the Megadrive especially was initially marketed on its great arcade conversions, none of which were really beyond the Amiga's potential.

Probe were hit-and-miss - the Mortal Kombats worked out well where OutRun and Tiger Road didn't - different coders and a different publisher, plus it was five years later.

The Sales Curve and Ocean France usually did a good job, Graftgold did a couple of good ones too, it's a shame Marble Madness was pretty much EA's only one.

[mcgeezer]

As most know the early arcade ports to Amiga suffered from being an Atari ST codebase, and even then the ST suffered from those ports being descendants of the 8 bits. I know that Rolling Thunder on the Amiga is basically coded like it's running on a ZX Spectrum. I suspect most of the US Gold stuff suffered from this, Bionic Commando is another one that looks like the dev's knew what they were doing on the C64 but when it came to 16 bits they were shockingly poor.

I mentioned in a thread not so long ago that the Amiga hardware wasn't really exploited up until 1988 with Factor 5 and R-Type, however it was pointed out that there were some earlier exceptions but none were arcade ports.

It's my opinion that even in 1990/91 the 8 bits were still the king platforms over the 16 bits for a lot of studios.

Worst port though... has to be Bomb Jack, simply no excuse why it was so bad on both the ST and Amiga.

[PatmanQC]

I asked this question before but perhaps I didn't hit reply. People have claimed that the version of final fight for the Amiga had music on the first stage but every version I've played it did not.

Can anyone verify?

[oscar_ates]

I would say also CPS machine was quite a 2d power house. It's graphics chip run at 16MHz, can hardware x-flip and rotate any sprite. Most games used 8mb rom for graphics. Amiga graphics is limited by the chipram which is either 1mb for ecs and 2mb for AGA.

[Fiery Phoenix]

That push scrolling on Bionic Commando was awful.

Other ones that come to mind for me (on the Amiga) are:

Afterburner
Fighting Soccer
OutRun
Street Fighter

They are 1/10 bad for me.

I actually quite enjoted Double Dragon and Final Fight conversions back in the day - not saying they are great conversions, but were playable enough

[jotd]

Even early Z80 boards had graphic capabilities that outran Amiga (because Amiga isn't a console, more a general purpose computer).

- Pacman boards: 6 sprites, but with separate color palette (amiga has 8 sprites but sprite pairs share the same palette, which for instance prevents a sprite to be used for pacman as 4 different palettes are taken by the ghosts)
- Galaga/Xevious: 2 8x8 tile layers with X/Y flip & 256 possible colors + sprites... 8x8 tiles means that you cannot use the blitter to draw them as blitter width is 16 pix min.

So no blitter and those games couldn't cope with huge bosses and all, but when there were a lot of small objects on screen, fixed score OSD layer with underlying scrolling starfield or scenery, ... they were kings.

And the blitter is often overrated. It's slow and clunky to use. You have to wait that the previous operation has completed before changing any blitter register, and to perform a different blit you often needed to set 4 or more registers, and during this time, only the CPU is working. So a lot of small blits is the worst case scenario. You're reducing the number of blits by using interleaved bitplanes but that's one more constraint to have because now you cannot use partial planar blits to save bandwidth or perform shade tricks or whatever.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by PatmanQC

I asked this question before but perhaps I didn't hit reply. People have claimed that the version of final fight for the Amiga had music on the first stage but every version I've played it did not.

Can anyone verify?

It doesn't have music on the stages.
But Richard Aplin mentioned in interview that he left "space" for that in the engine, but there was some misunderstanding, or something like that, within the team, and nobody sent him a music track, so it never got in the final game.

OnTopic:
I think Rolling Thunder have to be one of the worst conversion ever on the Amiga.
Final Fight was impressive with technical side of things, but the gameplay was so off, that I never got into it.
Street Fighter 2, as Galahad said, could have been so much worse.

To be fair to the coders and Amiga, we got some great ports:
Mortal Kombat 1 and especially 2
Golden Axe
Pang
Toki
Silkworm
Ghost and Goblins
(all above working with A500)
etc...

Soon, we should get great port of 1942.

[PatmanQC]

Originally Posted by Fiery Phoenix

That push scrolling on Bionic Commando was awful.

Other ones that come to mind for me (on the Amiga) are:

Afterburner
Fighting Soccer
OutRun
Street Fighter

They are 1/10 bad for me.

I actually quite enjoted Double Dragon and Final Fight conversions back in the day - not saying they are great conversions, but were playable enough

I think I mentioned this in the video but I Liked double Dragon growing up for the Amiga But there is something off About the sprites and I couldn't quite place my finger on it.

One viewer said that the main characters look like blowup dolls from the 70s which now I can kind of see.

[dirkies]

adding to the hall of shame: 1943

[jotd]

Double Dragon 2 has graphics so much closer to the arcade than DD1. Another Mr Aplin conversion in solo. Hats off.

[Megalomaniac]

Just about every bad arcade conversion on the Amiga has a similar equivalent Amiga original (or ST game in many cases) which is technically more impressive, though usually a later release. Compare 1943 to Hybris (or ST Wings of Death), or Outrun to even Outrun Europa (let alone the first 2 Lotuses, on Amiga or ST), or Strider to Lionheart or (Amiga or ST) Leander, or SFII to Elfmania or Fightin' Spirit (can't think of a good one-on-one beat 'em up the ST beyond IK+, which is hardly the same thing technically or gameplay-wise), and you can see that, while all coming from arcade boards which were more powerful than the Amiga, those conversions were a long way below what could be done - and that blaming ST ports is only half the story.

Rolling Thunder was a very early release, but the arcade board should have been a doddle to convert, and they even missed out a major gameplay feature (the different enemy colours weren't just for show, different coloured enemies behaved differently) - the fact that Kixx never reissued the 16-bit versions, when they reissued almost any old drivel, is the best recommendation I can find....

[eXeler0]

As a big Shinobi (Arcade) fan I was expecting much more from the Amiga version. The sluggishness of all movement and the palette that looks like a mix between Atari ST and Spectrum ZX were extremely disappointing to me.
OutRun also stands out as a big disappointment considering the success of the Arcade and the hype.