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Has Amiga stood the test of time?

One of the most controversial debates in gaming is whether the Amiga had high quality games comparable or better to the SNES/GEN/TG16/NG/CDi/WIN with amazing titles, or whether like half or more of its library are equal to some flash games we saw in the 2000's or very poor games that just aren't either fun to play or have bad gameplay.

I'm curious where people on Gaf, place the Amiga in 2019, I'm only talking about the Library.

I myself only have 197 games, the Amiga has a LOT of games. Just like other gaming devices of its time.

So whats your opinion? I'm talking about everything Amiga, from the computers, to the CDTV and the CD32.

IMG_0539.jpg
 

Birdo

Banned
Only really as nostalgia for those of us who had them. I don't think other people would see the appeal, since Amiga games didn't have an "Identity", like Sega or Nintendo.
 

CJY

Banned
My favourite console of all time. Planning to get back into it shortly when I take delivery of a Vampire card. I've been emulating it with FS-UAE on Mac and it runs extremely well.

Thing is, Amiga never truly died. It's technically still an active platform.

From a gaming point of view... There are enough quality games on this single platform to last most people a lifetime and it's my "desert-island" console, no doubt about it.

Edit: So strange, this video just popped up in my YouTube recommendations:
 
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There were a lot of really cool games but I guess many of the best games weren't exclusive. Like, The Secret of Monkey Island, Lemmings, Simon the Sorcerer, Syndicate or Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis were all on PC (and Mac probably?)

They all have aged tremendously well.

Were Pinball Dreams, Cannon Fodder or Moonstone Amiga exclusives? 🤔
 
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The amiga was in a league of its own ...i remember owning one and then looking across at a high specced pc at the time from my dads work and the Amiga creamed it on most game

The Last ninja / Robocop 3 / FInal Fight/Street fighter 2 /Battlechess there was nothing like it without spending thousands of dollars and even then you had to deal with horrible DOS or Dos frontends
it wasnt until the like of the SNES/MEGADRIVE started coming out with decent ports and even then the Amiga usually had better sound and graphics

I miss my Amiga :(
 
It was ahead of its time, that's for sure. Many games had the best version on the Amiga, and of all home computers it had the best sound and graphics. The PC as a gaming platform didn't catch on until dedicated audio cards and VGA became common.

 
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Z..

Member
It has about 10~15 or so exclusives which range from great to absolutely timeless classics, but otherwise it's mostly better off ignored since there's more often than not better versions of it's best games elsewhere. For enthusiasts, though, there's plenty of decent and fun games on it you really can't or shouldn't be playing anywhere else...
 

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
I mean, I have no interest in playing it. I was kinda interested in seeing what it was about back when I was into emulation (so like.... ~2000 or so), but all I ended up playing were ports of arcade games, and at that point.... why bother?

Obviously, I suspect it's different for someone who was part of "the scene." Feels like an extremely "you had to be there" platform.
 

theclaw135

Banned
From the perspective of people like myself, systems like Amiga (or Neo Geo, etc) had seemingly failed with next to no retail presence at the time of their original release.
 

pr0cs

Member
It's eclipsed now but I can't imagine how much cooler tech would have evolved if commodore wasn't run by fucking suits and Amiga os would have grown organically like dos did.
Amiga is why I decided to go into software dev so many years ago (25). They're a distant memory now but my most fond programming and gaming memories are with the Amiga
 

tassletine

Member
I don't think it stood the test of time when it was alive!

My memory was of a very few great games and A LOT of Atari ST ports.

Constantly waiting to see if the developers had written some new code or just ported over some ST code to run at half the speed and then crash.

If you were lucky you got a new soundtrack but most of the time you were left with a rubbish game, that annoyingly played much better on the cheaper machine.
I spent most of my time on Deluxe Paint.
 
Amiga was a cool gaming computer with good library in the best age for gaming. Why was that age the best? Because it had 4 viable home consoles, rich arcade scene, multiple computer formats with great games and multiple handhelds, as well as NES holding until about '93.

It had, however, no where near the massive and incredible libraries of Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES, and was therefore mostly forgotten.
 

Fuz

Banned
It was ahead of its time, that's for sure. Many games had the best version on the Amiga, and of all home computers it had the best sound and graphics. The PC as a gaming platform didn't catch on until dedicated audio cards and VGA became common.


What a nice documentary. Lots of stuff I didn't knew.
(Also lots of feels)

EDIT: The whole channel seem pretty damn good. Subbed.
 
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Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
I love(d) my A1200 but am not paying shitty eBay prices to get a replacement 1200.

Either yellowed / weathered going for £200+ or white(ish) £350+ for something 20+ years old and 'sold as seen' no way.
 

M0G

Member
It was an incredible platform and easily holds it own in terms of exclusives or games originally created for the platform. It sat nicely inbetween owning a console and owning a PC and for a while was preferable to owning a PC for gaming tbh.

Hell if I had money to burn I'd spend stupid money adding all the crazy enthusiast upgrades to my A1200 tower but it would only ever be a nostalgia kick. Hats off to all the things the Amiga community still achieve with the platform though, it's far from dead.
 

Dunki

Member
Of Course.

It has Persian Gulf Inferno after all



But seriously I loved my Amiga there wre soo many great games. And I have far more memories than I had with a Sega or Nintendo console.
 

Devenport

Member
Amiga has many great games that have stood the test of time.

Google "Amiga" + "Party Games".

And it wasn't until 2014 when PT took the title as the most most nail-biting game from X-Copy:



Remember getting to the end of the last sector in the final pass and you'd get a fail buzzer. Good times.

My god...so much memories...
 

nkarafo

Member
SNES had only the Mario advantage and not much more than that. Mega Drive was a joke.
Yeah, no, i'm gonna disagree with that.

You want jokes? How about the 1 button joystick standard? Now that's a joke. I mean, even in 1985 it was a joke since the ancient Famicom/NES was already using a 2 buttons standard. This crippled a ton of games and arcade ports for the Amiga. Have fun pressing "Up" to jump or (god forbid) playing those awful Street Fighter 2 and Mortal kombat ports.

And how about the 800KB disks? Sure that was a fine amount in late 80's. But after that you had 16bit console games with more complexity, better graphics and more animation frames. All these assets would quickly raise requirements and you had 2, 3 or even 4MB carts for the consoles. Again, that crippled a lot of Amiga games in early/mid 90's. Even though the main hardware was comparable to a Mega Drive, these things didn't help the Amiga competing with it (or the SNES) and that's why it fade away while the 16bit consoles held on even during the early days of the 5th gen consoles.
 
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Darak

Member
It was a great machine, but weird. It managed to be ahead of its time and outdated at the same time, as the general purpose computer was moving away from custom hardware and towards abstraction over interchangeable parts. It was also killed by Commodore's lack of vision, as they never had any idea about what the thing actually was. A games console? A general purpose computer? An art tool? It was decent for all those things, but not ideal. For example, the diskette was a bad medium for games, and the interlaced low-hz graphic modes were terrible for productivity.

If it's about the games, the 80's computers all had very interesting game libraries (including the PC). They are worth checking because the feeling is very different compared to anything else. The concept of not being able to play a game at all without reading the manual first, for example, is completely lost (you may say this is not a positive trait, but there are places where you can only go if you free yourself from such constraints).
 

Fuz

Banned
Yeah, no, i'm gonna disagree with that.

You want jokes? How about the 1 button joystick standard? Now that's a joke. I mean, even in 1985 it was a joke since the ancient Famicom/NES was already using a 2 buttons standard. This crippled a ton of games and arcade ports for the Amiga. Have fun pressing "Up" to jump or (god forbid) playing those awful Street Fighter 2 and Mortal kombat ports.

And how about the 800KB disks? Sure that was a fine amount in late 80's. But after that you had 16bit console games with more complexity, better graphics and more animation frames. All these assets would quickly raise requirements and you had 2, 3 or even 4MB carts for the consoles. Again, that crippled a lot of Amiga games in early/mid 90's. Even though the main hardware was comparable to a Mega Drive, these things didn't help the Amiga competing with it (or the SNES) and that's why it fade away while the 16bit consoles held on even during the early days of the 5th gen consoles.
And all of this didn't matter at all at the time.
 

M0G

Member
And all of this didn't matter at all at the time.

Yeah the audience was perfectly happy at the time just like the Spectrum and C64 communities didn't just die after the Amiga and Atari arrived. Different platforms with different strengths and weaknesses. With the storage issue it really wasn't uncommon to see Amigas with several drives daisychained together for multi-disc games.
 
There are so many memorable games on the Amiga...

SWIV
Syndicate
Flood
Putty
Prince of Persia
Another World
Flashback
Jurassic Park
Lethal Weapon
Sleepwalker
Thunderhawk AH-73M
Rick Dangerous 1 and 2
Project-X
Alien Breed
Superfrog
Assassin
Switchblade
Wiz 'n' Liz
Cannon Fodder
Sensible Soccer
Worms
Lionheart
No Second Prize
Amberstar
Dungeon Master
B.A.T. 1 and 2
Zombi (yes, that Ubisoft game)
The Bard's Tale
Beneath a Steel Sky
Ruff 'n' Tumble
Uridium 2
Turrican 1 and 2
X-Out
Z-Out
The Chaos Engine
Gods
Stunt Car Racer
Starglider 1 and 2 (without them no Star Fox)
Elite
James Pond 1 and 2
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 1 and 2
Super Cars 1 and 2
Tennis Cup 1 and 2
Great Courts 1 and 2
Last Ninja 2 and Ninja Remix
Shadow of the Beast
Agony
Walker
Lemmings 1 and 2
Theme Park
Sim City
Pinball Dreams
Desert Strike (arguably on par, if not better than the original Mega Drive game)
MicroProse Formula One Grand Prix
Goal!
Kick Off 1 and 2
Dune II
Alfred Chicken
Titus the Fox
The Blues Brothers
...

...and on, and on...

Sure there was a lot of rubbish released on the Amiga, but with it's distinct aesthetic and incredible sound it was home to some of the finest games released on such a system.

 
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petran79

Banned
Ask any 80s-90s teen during the late 80s-early 90s, especially in Europe. It was way cooler to own an Amiga 500 or AtariST than a Mega Drive. In Germany Amiga 500 outsold the Mega Drive too.
I was one of the lucky kids who got the chance to watch and play games both on Amiga 500 and the flagship Amiga 2000,despite never owning one, though AtariST, C64, Atari 400/800 and countless other monochrome computer brands were also popular.
Unfortunately with the arrival of SNES in Europe, Commodore was in decline and with 386 CPUs developers began to shift to IBM clones, as PCs were used to be called that way.
But Amiga brought games for older audiences (teens and up) to the foreground, with more realistic graphics and better narration. Defender of the Crown was the Crysis of its era or rather even more important.
I consider the video game Elvira Mistress of the Dark as the best horror game of the 80s with graphics and the Amiga version had the best music.
Because consoles were in a dire state when it came to violence and sex censorship, Amiga was regarded as the best way to play video games.

You have also to consider that the arcade scene in Germany and other countries was almost non-existent. Only adults were allowed to enter. As a result Amiga arcade ports were the best alternative for teens to play those games.

I think it still holds well and it's games influenced today's western gaming scene too
 
I don't think that the influence of the Amiga can be underestimated. For instance, if it wasn't for Psygnosis' success on the Amiga, there wouldn't have been a Wipeout on the PlayStation. Not even mentioning Lemmings' success of DMA which would turn into Rockstar...one of the most succesful studios of today.

Without Turrican there wouldn't have been a Star Wars: Rogue Squardron either. And why some of the best NES and Super NES soundtracks sounded so good, was because of prominent Amiga composers like Allister Brimble and Tim Follin.

See for example:


 
Amiga had a 10-year headstart compared to what PCs offered back in 1985, but it died as soon as PCs leapfrogged it with fast out-of-order, superscalar CPUs (Pentium Pro/II) and 3D accelerators (3Dfx Voodoo).

The origins of RTX ON:

 

OldBoyGamer

Banned
The Amiga was and still is one of my favourite games playing devices.

Being a full computer meant I learned some early I.T. Skills on it as well as of course gaming. When I moved from the Speccy to the C64 to Amiga and then to consoles I struggled to come to terms with the fact consoles had no keyboard no mouse and no hard drive and no accessible OS..

I remember when I walked into my local games shop in Barking (London). It doubled as a comic book shop but I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the guy that owned it. He knew me well as I was a regular customer.

I walked in asking about the brand new Atari ST as I wanted to buy one. He said to me ‘why would you want an ST?’

He pulled me over to the brand new demo Amiga on the shelf and showed me Sword of Sodan. The leap from Speccy and C64 was just mind blowing and I’ll never forget watching the huge main character getting spiked through his body by a spike in the ground. I literally cried out ‘wow’ and the guys laughed and said ‘yeh, wow’.

A week later I went back and bought my first Amiga 500.

The years that followed were some of the best I’ve experienced as someone whose life had been determined by video games and the the industry that surrounds them.

The one thing I always say about the Amiga is that there were two things that made it stand out. One was the high resolution of the graphics that still look sharp enough to play today. And secondly was the sheer breadth and depth of the game genres on the system. You literally could not find a genre of game that didn’t have a top game in that genre on the Amiga.

It was a very special machine and I still have a lot of joy playing the games on emulator.
 

T8SC

Member
The Amiga was an amazing machine with some of the best game music ever to grace a computer system.

A few of the games I enjoyed:

Turrican 1, 2 & 3.
Lemmings 1 & Tribes
Shadow Of The Beast 1, 2 & 3.
Apidya
R-Type
Cannon Fodder
Speedball 2
Hero Quest
Lotus Turbo Challenge 2
Pinball Dreams & Fantasies
Zool
ZeeWolf
Desert Strike
Stuntcar Racer
F19 Stealth Fighter
F15 Strike Eagle II
Wings Of Fury
Sensible World Of Soccer
Rainbow Islands
The New Zealand Story
Another World
SWIV


Also, because it is the greatest video game soundtrack ever, it needs posted here:



Chris Huelsbeck, this soundtrack was epic!

Also, Psygnosis was such a great developer throughout the 90's.
 

Collz69

Member
My Amiga days were and still are my greatest gaming experience, something that’s hard to explain to people that were never part of the scene. I only ever bought 2 games for mine, like everyone else I copied all my games. The Amiga has a ton of great games that have more than stood the test of time, but for every great game the library contains four times as many shitty ones, something that’s often overlooked but I didn’t care then and I still don’t, you play the great games you love and forget the rest. Great times, really miss them.
 
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