When you play the first Lotus game, and remember that it came out only a year after Outrun... it makes you realise there was no excuse for how shit Outrun was.
Been saying that for years. There's a thread about it on the English Amiga Board forums too lol. There are technical reasons why the Lotus engine can't do Outrun (all the cars are the same etc) but yes, it does highlight what the machine "could" do. We are long overdue a better version, but work is being done to rectify this ;)
Unfortunately US Gold couldn’t have given less of a stuff about the end product. They quickly built up a reputation for releasing substandard arcade conversions, and _Outrun_ was just one of those that on the Amiga especially should have been a lot better than what we got.
What I love about videos like this is it makes me remember the games I'd long forgot lol. Games from this list I owned or played regularly: Moonshine Racers, Days of Thunder, Outrun. I'd ague Outrun is the worst, simply because it was such an utter disappointment. And that loading screen? OMG what were they thinking? I recall I'd play it anyway while wishing it was better. Then I'd leave it for months, and eventually find myself thinking "it can't have been THAT bad, can it?" I'd fire it up again, only to be disappointed all over again. A little like how I visit McDonnalds these days.
@@oldstylegaming It sure was. It was probably the biggest computer and gaming influence on my life. I learned a lot about programming on that thing. By 1995, it was getting a little long in the tooth, though, and I was ready for my first 75MHz Windows 3.11 Packard Bell with free Windows 95 upgrade. :D
@@GforceProdComp by 95 the amiga would have been getting a little long in the tooth too when compared to other offerings. Amazing machines both the c64 and Amiga though.
Think I would have been better off with my C64 until 1995 to be honest. in 1991 I got a 386SX. The graphics were much better, but since I only had a beeper speaker on that PC, the sound and music was a huge DOWNGRADE. It was a huge upgrade in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, etc. but for gaming (at least audio wise) is was a huge letdown. Plus PC joysticks at this time were NOT nearly as good as the ones we got on the C64. Even the cheap quickshots were better than most of the "higher end" joysticks for DOS at the time. Gravis did make some good ones though.
Most of the amiga games came from licenses of movies or were port of coinop arcades, so they did exploit the name without caring too much about the quality. Outrun is a classic example. But when authors did focus on the game itself, you had timeless masterpieces like Another World, Shadow of the beast (all three of them), IT Came from the desert (and more or less all the Cinemaware games), Operation Stealth, Monkey Island games... (and the list goes on)
@@giddue Well, see, that's where it all gets a bit tricky, isn't it? Opinions. SoTB was a technical masterpiece but gamplay wise? Shallow and tedious. The sequels did improve things but are hardly classics. The Cinemaware stuff aged very quickly but was fine when released. On the flipside, there were some GREAT conversions; "Rodland", "NewZealand Story", "Super Hang-On", both "R-types", "Rainbow Islands", "Pang!", "Bubble Bobble", "Marble Madness", "Toki", "Pac-Mania" and older ones like "Commando" and "Ghosts 'n' Goblins".
Do you remember the hype for Rise of the Robots in the months and months before it's release? Magazines and programmes about games wouldn't stop going on about how revolutionary it was going to be because it "learns how you fight" and adapts. Things were being compared to it before it was even out. "It looks okay but it's no Rise of the Robots."
Akira is the worst Amiga and Amiga CD32 game I have ever played. And as someone who loves the movie the game is based on, it was a punch in the face. Edit: No 1000 Miglia? That is the most boring Amiga game.
I actually heard on another TH-cam channel that the magazines of the time begged for level-skip codes from the developers of _Akira_ simply because they could not even get past the first level!
@@Revener666 The problem isn't how good or bad the license is, the real problem is that it takes away most of the money that should have gone into development and at the same time limits the designers because they have to somehow include certain aspects and scenes of the franchise. Since there were no big budgets for video games, having to pay for a license was a very huge deal. I tried to stay clear of these games
It's call Fire and Forget because when you fire it up, you want to forget that it exists. I will say that the sequel did fix a lot of the issues with the original, but it was still kind of mediocre
The early Amiga years were lean times: most games were appalling and ST ports clogged up the shops. The top of my personal hate list is Psygnosis' "Barbarian". I bought it when it came out (in 1988, I think) based on the amazing-looking screen shots. Sure enough, the graphics were very good - but they could barely move. Instead of moving smoothly across the screen like they would in any half-decent 8-bit game, the sprites would disappear, appear a little further on, disappear again, appear again - and so on until they got to where they were supposed to go. And then the screen would suddenly lurch horizontally in an attempt at "scrolling"... I was shocked beyond belief. I had never seen animation that bad, even back in the days of the old Vic-20. And for years, the C64 and Spectrum had been running perfectly smooth-running games. I could not understand how my supposedly super-powered Amiga could perform so abysmally. This actually still haunts me to this day. I would love to find out how they managed to make that game so shoddy. Anyway, I brought the game back to the shop and got a refund.
Agreed! And I seem to remember the controls were terrible, too. Another HUGE disappointment for me was the _Who Framed Roger Rabbit?_ game. And _Dark Castle_ with its joystick PLUS mouse control. Yeah, like I have 3 hands... [edit: Actually it might have been keyboard only plus mouse. It's been years.]
Agreed, lean times indeed; I got my Amiga 1000 in November '86, and the only early games that were good were Arctic Fox, Shanghai and Marble Madness. Psygnosis' Barbarian was terrible, apart from the graphics. I'd previously bought their Deep Space, and Brataccas, they were buggy and slow as well. I have a feeling that with their early 16-bit games, they just ported the code from Mac or ST to Amiga, and it was already bad code at that. I doubt the ST versions play any better. The shop wouldn't take Deep Space back, though, so it became one of my more expensive blank disks... The ST-Amiga porting didn't go away quickly, and was still going on with the likes of Outrun. After maybe a few months, I decided to get myself a C64 again as I still had some games for it, to tide me over until better Amiga games came out. Thankfully, Starglider and Carrier Command restored my faith.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Dark Castle, where misstepping off a single step would make the character fall to the ground. That and the terrible rock throw aiming system...
@@leokhorn Dark Castle was a game with a lot of potential but damn, who was the idiot that came up with the control system on that? I remember I even wrote a letter to the publishers complaining about the controls (this was before the internet). Do you know what they sent me? A description of using the controls. Uh, yeah, I know HOW to do it. BUT IT SUCKS DONKEY BALLS!
The crazy thing is (as an ex Amiga owner) these games were often about £25 retail (about £50 in today’s £.) Imagine paying £50 and getting one of these duds!!!
ROTR was hyped up with Hugh amounts spent on advertise. This is the next gen in fighting games, just look at these graphics! And the game play was so poor. I remember that I was trying out different buttons on the keyboard, because surely this can't be it? I'm missing something, right? (no)
captain planet is still one of my favorite amiga games. I played it recently and finally finished it. Something i couldn't do back in the day. I would always mess up the animal rescue parts at the end of each level. I actually think the bad game play added to the puzzly aspect of the game. the jumping especially.
Pretty much EVERY game that Thalamus did on the Aniga was UTTER trash, which is a shame since their C64 stuff was generally good to great (for the most part)
Same here, I think it was boxed in with my Amiga when my folks got it for me and my brother as a shared xmas prezzie... what a stitch up having to SHARE the best xmas present I ever had, even to this day! So captain planet was the first game I ever played on the system and although it was really clunky and frustrating, it holds a wee place in my heart. And yes playing it today is horrible, lol
Me and some of my friends found them both kind of hilarious games to play due their difficult and actually unfair level design that was basically all about trial and error.
It's the same game, just with updated graphics. They didn't even bother to change the story of the game, they just gender swapped the character and still gave her the "12 labours of Hercules" storyline arch. LOL. There's only one word for that: LAZY.
I'd actually say that due to a lot of developers overestimating the Amiga's graphical abilities (and audio for that matter) you ended up with that lack of function. Unlike the popular consoles (even the 8-bits like the NES) graphical effects those platforms you could pull off effortlessly were a drain on the CPU if done on the Amiga as it had no managed tilemaps, and some peculiar limits on sprites. While the Amiga was a better / (or in some cases same) CPU type, it couldn't easily do comparable things and leave time for the game logic while maintaining 60fps and also having both music and sound unless you abused the hardware in specific ways (which is why a lot of the top end Amiga games have a very specific look - repeated sprite patterns for backgrounds etc.) I say this as a big fan of the hardware at the time btw, but if you drill down it really doesn't stack up.
Not to mention a vast amount of LAZY direct Atari ST ports. The direct ST port was to the Amiga what the Direct ZX Spectrum port was to the C64 and MSX computers
I can't understand how the magazines at the time gave good scores to Magic Pockets. I paid £20 (or so) for that utter shite game and felt proper let down
it was ok for the time i thought, i liked it. but £20 back then.... like £80 now. Everyne apart from 2 kids at our school ripped off their amaiga games so for me it was the cost of a 3.5 disk -> 75p
Fun list but is Kick Off 96 a 1% game? No, it is crap but it is not the worst football game on the Amiga (there are two worse ones in your list for starters). The problem with Amiga Power is that they loved to be controversial. Kick Off 2 was rated one of the best games on the Amiga by AP until S Campbell joined them then all of a sudden anything Kick Off related got slated because he detested the games so much. They also had a long running feud with Team 17 and (allegedly) marked their games down because of it. Some games that could have made the list - Belial, Surf Ninjas, Gazza's Super Soccer, Street Gang, Crazy Cars 1 & 2, Paperboy 2, Moonwalker.
Vector Soccer comes to my mind. God that was shit. I don't know what they were thinking. I love vector graphics, but it doesn't really work for sports games. I have a Vectrex and even I don't like any of the sports games on it.
I always remember the review for Shaq Fu in Amiga Format. It starts off with a paragraph talking about typical Amiga fighting games, where the best strategy is to trap your opponent in a corner and kick him in the head until he dies. Near the end of the review for Shaq Fu, the reviewer says "In the end, the best strategy I could come up with was to trap the opponent in a corner and kick him in the head until he dies". Easily one of the funniest reviews I've read.
@@scottbreon9448 That's the most logical solution. However, when I finally got hold of my first Amiga which was an A1200 Desktop Dynamite Pack, some bright spark thought it would be a great idea to bundle this monstrosity of a game along with 'Oscar' so I couldn't wipe the disk clean. It didn't make a particular good frisby either. Oscar wasn't particularly a good platform game itself but was at least relatively pretty to look at and was a borderline masterpiece compared to the abomination that was Dennis. The Amiga had so many great games that could have been bundled with these kind of packs instead; I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that it was a film studio licensed game. You'd also think that they'd try to show off the capabilities of the A1200 (games like Super Stardust comes to mind) especially when things were starting to not look too good for Commodore and the Amiga.
yeah we could talk about the worst castlevania port ever made, eswat and all us gold conversion, pit fighter, bangkok knights (and all c64 conversion), the way of the little dragon, roger rabbit and so on. so much failure on the amiga it became a joke and still worth a laugh
Even while none of these (out of which I'm familiar with) are exactly good games, I think there are a lot of games on Amiga that I'd never feel like touching again after the first try - games which in my opinion would be clearly worse than some titles on the video. Of course I also felt like many magazine game reviews at the time gave kind of random scores, and there is room for personal preference when occasionally the only available options might be garbage, junk and rubbish. Fortunately, I can't remember too many bad titles which I found excessively bad, since I've tried to actively forget some of my the worst Amiga gaming experiences. One such title does come into my mind, however, and that is Mouse Trap. Just few months ago I was checking some old floppies, and unsuspectingly came across this abysmal platformer that soon rang warning bells from the long gone past after loading it... Bionic Commando, Yolanda and Out Run I actually played relatively much back in the days, but I'm not sure should I dare to try seem them again haha.
Grat video as always, although you missed International Rugby Challenge, it was the second worst rated game in Amiga Power's history (issue 26, Jun 1993), scoring 2%
Kick Off 96 had an infamous bug and kept crashing after you played one halftime, no matter what team. Since it was impossible to complete a single match it was considered "unplayable" and therefore got it's 1% rating. If I remember right, the fixed the error a couple of weeks later, but the damage was already done, the reputation of the Kick Off-series ruined.
Yolanda was basically just a reskinned version of Hercules on the C64, another diabolical game, although ZZap gave that game a high score for some reason. They didn't even bother to change the actual storyline and tasks for the game, they just updated the graphics and changed the player sprite.
I was working in a local computer shop when Rise of the Robots came out, and as a teenager with my finder on the pulse I was given free rein to order whatever I though would sell. I ordered 25 copies of that turd on every platform. Think we sold 3 total.
Great list mate 👍 if you thought OutRun was bad you should try Turbo OutRun, I got stung for 25quid by looking at the pretty pics on the box! A nominal mention should also go to the absaloute dump that was AfterBurner 😟
Truthfully, any system with that vast of a library of games is bound to have a LOT of shovelware. Even the C64 and ZX Spectrum had an awful lot of shovelware. Although in it's defense, most of the shovelware on the C64 were just really low quality budget games like Bionic Granny, they usually were not full priced games unless you count shit like Auf Weidersehen, Pet.
Great vid.I'm currently making a compilation of amiga games to add to usb drive for my soon to arrive gotek and put some life into my Amiga 1200 which hasn't been used in a long time, its full of all the classics plus ones i have heard of but never played, two of which are on this list, I will be removing them. Akira is one of them, love the film and never played the game and certainly won't be bothering with it now.
@@oldstylegaming yeah I'm from England. I'm sure I must have a full set of adf games but I couldn't be sure. Adf games alone is just over 3.5gb and I have the tosec set but that has numerous versions of the same game. I think I'm covered for what I want but thanks for the offer. It's sometimes difficult to remember everything but these types of videos help for sure. I'm still looking through them all and sure there will be some I have missed.
Worst thing about Fears IMO was the complete lack of enemy AI. Absolutely every mob just walked directly at you firing straight towards you, IIRC.. Even if there were walls between you. Terrible. :( Also in ROTR it annoyed the hell out of me how a chunk of your leg disappears every time you do a low kick. >.< (on multiple formats!) Craziest thing about this whole list is how many of these worst games were bundled with Amigas/CD32, etc. Great way to show off the system! >.
I know... if it was me you would have the best games..think they did the same with my C64 i got the Hollywood Pack that had Miami Vice and Topgun in...wtf...luckily Platoon Rambo and The Great Escape was in there too though
I remember Jonathan Nash's review of Fears in Amiga Power. He captioned one screenshot "the baddies all shuffling along trying to get on a line with you, shooting all the while" then scrambled the same words for the next screenshot and then the next - it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever read!
Agreed. I can tolerate the terrible graphics if the gameplay was actually half decent. There have even been decent efforts on 8-bit systems in recent years, but Fears as a game was a total letdown
Loaded most of these only once .. caption planet my mate Dave got this with the 500+ music is still very nostalgic .. moonshine racer didn’t look to bad .. allo allo I will only play this only once ... Fears was dying for this a completely different game to the demo disk that was out the demo IMO was amazing and run nice .... Outrun nothing .. pinball magic wanted a dreams squeal double dragon and street fighter 2 for me definitely more out there ... Nicely put together and the voice over Paul well done mate ;)
Thanks mate, im getting more confident and i am splicing less and less voice over now as its flowing a bit better...hate the sound of my voice though...its nothing like it sounds in my head lol
I never purchased a legit copy of any Amiga game, so i never felt bad if a game was shit. It just freed up the floppy for a better game. Same with the Atari STe.
I had a couple of budget titles (but they were gifts from family members) Never purchased a legit copy of anything myself. LMAO. But then again, most of my C64 stuff was cracked games too
gumdeo - Yeah I had it with my Screen Gems pack, talk about feeling short changed! It also had Nightbreed the Interactive Game included as well and that deserves an honourable mention for being utter wank too
I had an Amiga 500 in the US in high school and Lotus turbo esprit made it to my local mom and pop computer shop. I played that game everyday and thought it was the greatest game for a PC or console I had ever seen. It made the consoles look so inferior. Good Memories!
Worst controls ever? A game called Brataccas. I had the ST version but according to Wikipedia all versions had the same problem. Wikipedia says the developers "say their interface 'implies action,' which means that the game tries to sense what you want to do and will proceed to do it for you". Well, it didn't work. Dammit, you weren't able to even stand still! You'd try to stand still and the guy would tap-dance all over the screen! It was impossible to play, which was a shame, since the dystopian environment was rather interesting.
@@oldstylegaming Thank God the sequel made up for it. Fellow TH-camr Zeusdaz reportedly had Richard Aplin contact him about the first _DD_ on the Amiga, saying that the original programmer of the Amiga version got stressed out and quit the project not long before the deadline date.
i think that tight deadlines were to blame for a lot of rushed games mate..Martin Webb who coded the C64 version of Out Run told me that they were ridiculously under pressure to get games out on time and thats why many were substandard (even though i like Out Run on C64)
That's amazing. I've had Amiga since 1986, had them all except A3000 and currently own no less than six Amiga's and I have never heard of ANY of these games except Rise of the Robots, Street Fighter and Out Run, of which I owned them all. Sadly.
Fears being choppy and having 'pixelated' graphics for sure isn't the reason why it wasn't a great game! Indeed Fears was the very first tech demo to prove that first person shooters could be done at all on the Amiga and it bursted the knot that had held back all the other developers who did afterwards. And even despite being the very first, it's really actually good in technical aspect, because very few Amiga games could actually concure with Fears in veiwport size and detailed, varying graphical content while still maintining a playable framerate. Of course it was no good game, because it lacked gameplay wise, had no music and no great sound, and the graphcis seem to be designed by someone who didn't have much knowledge about ambience and atmosphere, but judging Fears by technical aspects is like saying that the haircut was the worst thing about Trump..
Lists like this are always going to be Amiga Power heavy because they're the only magazine that actually gave realistic scores. Unfortunately they also reviewed fewer games than a lot of the others, so there are many terrible games that end up missing from lists like this simply because they never reviewed them, and the reviews that exist in other magazines gave them the usual 70-75% marks despite often not having a shred of playability.
It is possible you're wrong about Amiga Power, maybe. I don't tknow the review scores of said games but AP were on a different scale (which is what caused them to fall out with Team 17), 50% was deemed average where in other rags 70ish% was average. So that lower AP score may technically be a similar rating compared to others.
I like 4th and Inches actually! It's a simple but fun football game...I was very surprised to see that on this list...and where the hell is Top Banana !
I assume you mean games that got magazine to notice it. Over the years I seen some really bad ones. The one you talked about that was really funny is Bionic Commando. It's like they never even seen the Arcade version in Action. The Amiga had to work extra hard to make that horrible game play.
Outrun was still better than Chase Hq in my opinion, at least you got a cassette with the soundtrack on it free😂 I remember buying Vector Soccer and even as a 9 year old I knew it was wank, unplayable!
OMG Steve....please dont stick up for Out Run...you have the real cabinet ...you should hate it more than anyone...the soundtrack came with the Spectrum version too...does that mean that was good too lol. That Vector Soccer was like if a nursery kid drew the sprites lol
old style gaming I heard the Spectrum free soundtrack was in monochrome so no😂 I actually like checking out how bad games actually are, check out a Hunchback clone called Kwasimodo, I have a lot of nostalgia for it but it’s absolutely pony
Hunchback was the first game i ever played on my Vic 20 ..i recently bought all the games i had when i was like 9 way back in 85. Hunchback, Cosmiads(great Galaga clone), Crazy Kong(worst DK clone ever) , Amok Attack (very good bezerk clone) and a cartridge game called Road Race which was hard as nails but me and my mate loved it...we will always have games that mean so much to us
Final fight... I was obsessed with the arcade game, hell I’ve even stole a magazine where there was a poison ( villain character ) coverage on it. They had the arcade graphics ported well, and that is about it!
Final Fight is a weird one for me. I still play the original on MAME occasionally, but I find the vast majority of the home ports haven't aged particularly well TBH. Of course there are versions that never should have existed in the first place, and the Amiga and C64 versions are certainly two of those.
I think the Amiga got off lightly with this list! Whilst most are naff, at least some are playable to some degree, check out more crud from the 80s that move at 5fps with a movement so slow they make Battletoads look good!
Well, that's mostly because he only picked games that were reviewed by titans like Amiga Joker. If you made it that far, your game can't be complete garbage, otherwise they wouldn't waste valuable space in their magazine.
There was a really bad Amiga game called Street Hockey where you literally couldn't tell the difference between when you were trying to play it and just leaving the joystick alone and letting it play on it's own.
Days of Thunder, Nightbreed:The Interactive Game, Shadow of the Beast 2 (great graphics and music but horrendous gameplay), Back to the Future 2, Treasure Island Dizzy, and Total Recall were shit.
C64 games were making great use of the machine by the time the Amiga came around so i would imagine early Amiga games wouldn't be as good as well developed C64 equivalents.
The sad thing about Terminator 2, besides wasting a incredible license, was that it had enjoyable parts - but instead of polishing that, they packed it with rather horrible mini-games, to emulate some scenes in the film. And Rise of the Robots had one interesting thing about it: A soundtrack written (in part?!) by Brian May of Queen. But yeah, that's about it.
@@V3ntilator Gloom was quite better, because Fears had weird perspective and was getting quite tiresome after a while. The problem with Doom-likes on Amiga was that these games required at least 68030 to run at decent speed with bigger window. PCs that were used to play Doom had much more powerful x86 based CPUs Amiga was designed with 2D graphics in mind and was amazing in this departament. Now we can only laugh at this, but at the time when popular A500 model was released many people still had 8bit computers that didn't even had multitasking and proper mouse controlled OS. Too bad Commodore was a corporate clusterfuck and they weren't interested in creating an Amiga that had custom graphics chip with some 3D capabilities. That would be a game changer. At the time were A1200 was released 3D stuff was still kinda in the experimental stage.
I read AP from around 34 or so to the end (in fact, The End). I knew what number one would be. I was still excited to see it. If you have done or will do a breakdown of why it was so bad I'd love to see it.
Almost disappointed I never owned any of the games that made this list. I wouldn't have been surprised to see Night Hunter up there somewhere. At the time, I was gobsmacked by how primitive the game was on a platform like the Amiga. I did later learn that the threadbare look of the game was due to it being a port from C64. Doesn't really explain why the title music was just an 8-second loop from who knows what.
Hard to believe some of these games were developed on an Amiga lol. Excellent job as usual! As far as the question you asked me a few weeks ago, I think the key to increasing your American audience is having more Nintendo content. Nintendo retro is BIG in the U.S.. I'm more a fan of the Mega Drive/ Genesis content but can't deny Nintendo is king 8n the States. Many of the U.S. based retro Nintendo YT channels I sub to get quite a few views. Sorry it took so long to answer back but I needed a social media break lol. Hope that helps mate.. take care!
It's true, and sad. Banjo Guy Ollie made some terrific Amiga covers, but these days it seems to be all Nintendo classics, which is understandable since they get more views. Can't blame him for it. Then it's worse with "8-bit" channels that are strictly console and not even 8-bit most of the time (e.g. 8-bit music theory). On the other hand, there's 8-bit show and tell, the 8-bit guy, and Perifractic, who make terrific videos on the Commodore systems even though they weren't terribly popular where they live.
I remember a news article in Amiga Format about the developer for Terminator 2 having his computer stolen like a month before the due release date. Wonder if what got released was the result of cobbling something quick and dirty together in time for release
I never noticed this before, but you're right. A lot of these games have an empty, hollow feel to them that's oddly disconcerting. Like they're made by people who've heard of videogames... But don't know what they are
You have noooo idea … It wasn't "people" behind most of the games in those days. Amd the computers themselves were bait made to mislead and subject to incompetence.
To be honest, a lot of those did not look that bad to me (I guess I would've liked the first two and some of the games inbetween). I even owned the PC adaptation for Terminator 2, I guess I still have the disks in my shelf. However, watching a video one does not know how responsive the controls are or - to keep it simple - if the gameplay "feels right". Choppy framerates like with Graeme Souness Vector Soccer are a big turn off for me. Old games really don't need 30 fps but that... wow. That is something else. Thank you for the video! I've been recently watching a lot of videos about Amiga and C64 games and TH-cam kindly recommended your video to me.
The reason Moonshine Racers was so crap was because they blew all their money on the intro cinematic. Probably the best on the system ever! Such a contrast from the rest of the game.
Ninja Rabbits and International Ninja Rabbits were really bad games. They had very stiff and slow gameplay. However the background sprite art was really good and the International Ninja Rabbits title screen song was awesome. Also I really liked Captain Planet for the most part. Rescuing the animals was tedious though.
The music in those Ninja Rabbbits games (especially the first one done by the criminally underrated Sean Connolly) was top notch as well, the gameplay however....
It was amusing how so many of the public domain games for the Amiga were so much better than a lot of the full price releases. But one of my hated games was Impossimole.
Right. Nevertheless, I was a diehard Mk Fan and still enjoyed the shit out of it, never had problems with just one button, probably because I never had a SNES
old style gaming Yeah I love the Amiga and it played a huge role in my early gaming. But after the pc engine and the 16 bit I rarely played it again. But switchblade 2 and Celtic legends always got a replay.
@@oldstylegaming It was an unofficial conversion of the Atari 2600 game, The Empire Strikes Back. Good game on the Atari for what it was, but the controls on that unofficial Amiga port were awful
The problem with cp was that it was really hard. The first stage is the easiest but all the rest are really hard. Ice stage is near impossible to save the dolphins and Linka/wind, along with heart is so long. The music was so amazing, I was lucky my TV speakers were were mute so I used an amp + speakers. I think it's been '95/96 since I last played but the music, like most classical games I can still recall. The second stage, ice was so great.
I mean, come on, that intro for OutRun should have been ample warning of the horrors held within. Also, I'm an American and not intimately familiar with the Amiga, but I played this weird shareware game with an isometric perspective where you were controlling a disembodied penis. Kind of a surprise that didn't make the list.
When you play the first Lotus game, and remember that it came out only a year after Outrun... it makes you realise there was no excuse for how shit Outrun was.
I was going to mention that in the video tbh as Lotus showed exactly what could be done...and should have been done with outrun
Been saying that for years. There's a thread about it on the English Amiga Board forums too lol. There are technical reasons why the Lotus engine can't do Outrun (all the cars are the same etc) but yes, it does highlight what the machine "could" do. We are long overdue a better version, but work is being done to rectify this ;)
Unfortunately US Gold couldn’t have given less of a stuff about the end product. They quickly built up a reputation for releasing substandard arcade conversions, and _Outrun_ was just one of those that on the Amiga especially should have been a lot better than what we got.
"Extra time" is all I hear in my head when someone mentions Lotus.
Me and my mates use to serial link 2 Amiga together for 4 player LETC 3 and Stunt Car Racer sessions! God bless Geoff Crammond!
What I love about videos like this is it makes me remember the games I'd long forgot lol. Games from this list I owned or played regularly:
Moonshine Racers,
Days of Thunder,
Outrun.
I'd ague Outrun is the worst, simply because it was such an utter disappointment. And that loading screen? OMG what were they thinking? I recall I'd play it anyway while wishing it was better. Then I'd leave it for months, and eventually find myself thinking "it can't have been THAT bad, can it?" I'd fire it up again, only to be disappointed all over again. A little like how I visit McDonnalds these days.
Haha
Amiga had amazing graphics for its time. I always dreamed about getting one, but I was stuck with my C64 until 1995.
C64 was great also though...
@@oldstylegaming It sure was. It was probably the biggest computer and gaming influence on my life. I learned a lot about programming on that thing. By 1995, it was getting a little long in the tooth, though, and I was ready for my first 75MHz Windows 3.11 Packard Bell with free Windows 95 upgrade. :D
@@GforceProdComp by 95 the amiga would have been getting a little long in the tooth too when compared to other offerings. Amazing machines both the c64 and Amiga though.
The C64 was a great computer, but not 1995 great. What platform did you move onto?
Think I would have been better off with my C64 until 1995 to be honest. in 1991 I got a 386SX. The graphics were much better, but since I only had a beeper speaker on that PC, the sound and music was a huge DOWNGRADE.
It was a huge upgrade in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to stuff like word processing, spreadsheets, etc. but for gaming (at least audio wise) is was a huge letdown. Plus PC joysticks at this time were NOT nearly as good as the ones we got on the C64. Even the cheap quickshots were better than most of the "higher end" joysticks for DOS at the time. Gravis did make some good ones though.
let's face this... the %70 of amiga's games has the same problem... good graphics and music but unplayables!
And that's why we loved it 😂
70% is perhaps overstating things a tad.
Most of the amiga games came from licenses of movies or were port of coinop arcades, so they did exploit the name without caring too much about the quality. Outrun is a classic example. But when authors did focus on the game itself, you had timeless masterpieces like Another World, Shadow of the beast (all three of them), IT Came from the desert (and more or less all the Cinemaware games), Operation Stealth, Monkey Island games... (and the list goes on)
@@giddue I agree! another example of stunning graphics but shitty playability is Robocop 2 to say one...
@@giddue Well, see, that's where it all gets a bit tricky, isn't it? Opinions. SoTB was a technical masterpiece but gamplay wise? Shallow and tedious. The sequels did improve things but are hardly classics. The Cinemaware stuff aged very quickly but was fine when released. On the flipside, there were some GREAT conversions; "Rodland", "NewZealand Story", "Super Hang-On", both "R-types", "Rainbow Islands", "Pang!", "Bubble Bobble", "Marble Madness", "Toki", "Pac-Mania" and older ones like "Commando" and "Ghosts 'n' Goblins".
Do you remember the hype for Rise of the Robots in the months and months before it's release? Magazines and programmes about games wouldn't stop going on about how revolutionary it was going to be because it "learns how you fight" and adapts. Things were being compared to it before it was even out. "It looks okay but it's no Rise of the Robots."
The German gaming magazine 'Amiga Joker' gave Rise of the Robots 90%. This is no joke ! Luckily there were other magazines back then
Akira is the worst Amiga and Amiga CD32 game I have ever played. And as someone who loves the movie the game is based on, it was a punch in the face.
Edit: No 1000 Miglia? That is the most boring Amiga game.
hahaha that game is mega boring ...but i dont think its as bad as Moonshine Racer or OutRun
I actually heard on another TH-cam channel that the magazines of the time begged for level-skip codes from the developers of _Akira_ simply because they could not even get past the first level!
I remember some of the movie licenses being utter shite.
The Running Man, Red Heat And Ghost Busters 2 come to mind.
In all fairness, those were utter shite on EVERY PLATFORM. LOL
Good movie licenses are still rare today on any platform.
@@Revener666 The problem isn't how good or bad the license is, the real problem is that it takes away most of the money that should have gone into development and at the same time limits the designers because they have to somehow include certain aspects and scenes of the franchise. Since there were no big budgets for video games, having to pay for a license was a very huge deal. I tried to stay clear of these games
Ocean in particular produced most of the license crap games
Kick Off 96 getting a 1% on Amiga Power? Dang! This must be the lowest non 0% score I have ever seen.
That magazine was well known for its exaggerations in scores
It's call Fire and Forget because when you fire it up, you want to forget that it exists. I will say that the sequel did fix a lot of the issues with the original, but it was still kind of mediocre
The early Amiga years were lean times: most games were appalling and ST ports clogged up the shops. The top of my personal hate list is Psygnosis' "Barbarian". I bought it when it came out (in 1988, I think) based on the amazing-looking screen shots. Sure enough, the graphics were very good - but they could barely move. Instead of moving smoothly across the screen like they would in any half-decent 8-bit game, the sprites would disappear, appear a little further on, disappear again, appear again - and so on until they got to where they were supposed to go. And then the screen would suddenly lurch horizontally in an attempt at "scrolling"...
I was shocked beyond belief. I had never seen animation that bad, even back in the days of the old Vic-20. And for years, the C64 and Spectrum had been running perfectly smooth-running games. I could not understand how my supposedly super-powered Amiga could perform so abysmally. This actually still haunts me to this day. I would love to find out how they managed to make that game so shoddy.
Anyway, I brought the game back to the shop and got a refund.
Agreed! And I seem to remember the controls were terrible, too. Another HUGE disappointment for me was the _Who Framed Roger Rabbit?_ game. And _Dark Castle_ with its joystick PLUS mouse control. Yeah, like I have 3 hands... [edit: Actually it might have been keyboard only plus mouse. It's been years.]
Agreed, lean times indeed; I got my Amiga 1000 in November '86, and the only early games that were good were Arctic Fox, Shanghai and Marble Madness. Psygnosis' Barbarian was terrible, apart from the graphics. I'd previously bought their Deep Space, and Brataccas, they were buggy and slow as well. I have a feeling that with their early 16-bit games, they just ported the code from Mac or ST to Amiga, and it was already bad code at that. I doubt the ST versions play any better. The shop wouldn't take Deep Space back, though, so it became one of my more expensive blank disks... The ST-Amiga porting didn't go away quickly, and was still going on with the likes of Outrun.
After maybe a few months, I decided to get myself a C64 again as I still had some games for it, to tide me over until better Amiga games came out. Thankfully, Starglider and Carrier Command restored my faith.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Dark Castle, where misstepping off a single step would make the character fall to the ground. That and the terrible rock throw aiming system...
@@leokhorn Dark Castle was a game with a lot of potential but damn, who was the idiot that came up with the control system on that? I remember I even wrote a letter to the publishers complaining about the controls (this was before the internet). Do you know what they sent me? A description of using the controls. Uh, yeah, I know HOW to do it. BUT IT SUCKS DONKEY BALLS!
@@JustWasted3HoursHere They just want you to be silenced forever. They blacklisted you automatically.
The crazy thing is (as an ex Amiga owner) these games were often about £25 retail (about £50 in today’s £.) Imagine paying £50 and getting one of these duds!!!
I know especially rise of the robots
ROTR was hyped up with Hugh amounts spent on advertise. This is the next gen in fighting games, just look at these graphics! And the game play was so poor. I remember that I was trying out different buttons on the keyboard, because surely this can't be it? I'm missing something, right? (no)
Most ppl got copied cracked games as they couldn't afford the games.
IIRC Rise of the Robots came packaged with a t-shirt and was £35.
captain planet is still one of my favorite amiga games. I played it recently and finally finished it. Something i couldn't do back in the day. I would always mess up the animal rescue parts at the end of each level. I actually think the bad game play added to the puzzly aspect of the game. the jumping especially.
Rise of the robots came on about 12 floppy disks too.
It was a joke swapping them all the time.
But you are right the artwork on the box sold it.
I half expected Tiertex' entire collection to be listed here!
...and Probe.
@@jessragan6714 Probe made some cracking games on the Megadrive and some good ones on the Amiga, so I don;t think they deserve to be on any bad list.
Pretty much EVERY game that Thalamus did on the Aniga was UTTER trash, which is a shame since their C64 stuff was generally good to great (for the most part)
I loved Captain Planet game when I was a child. Is not that bad! I remember tones of worse games :P
yeah i played it as a kid too but then when i revisited it was nothing like i remembered lol
Same here, I think it was boxed in with my Amiga when my folks got it for me and my brother as a shared xmas prezzie... what a stitch up having to SHARE the best xmas present I ever had, even to this day! So captain planet was the first game I ever played on the system and although it was really clunky and frustrating, it holds a wee place in my heart. And yes playing it today is horrible, lol
It was frustratingly dog egg, that’s why it was included in the Amiga carton classics box set. All of those games were goose.
not enough Tiertex there... Rolling Thunder, Dynasty Wars, Strider 2... they all could be there :D
Oh yeah Rolling Thunder was Dire and it only scored 50% so could have/should have been on
@@oldstylegaming HUMAN KILLING MACHINE! (by tiertex, of course)
I love the original arcade version of Rolling Thunder. Sucks that the microcomputer versions were horrid.
Only passable Tiertex conversion on the Amiga is Bonanzs Bros. But I'm not a huge fan of the original arcade either
Did you know they never completed the amiga version of dennis? On the last level there is a jump you can't make and is impossible.....
I literally played like 5 mins of the game tops ..its really bad I think
I like how the 'dangerous streets' characters are fighting in a jungle 😂
Yolanda looks identical to Hercules on C64.
Me and some of my friends found them both kind of hilarious games to play due their difficult and actually unfair level design that was basically all about trial and error.
Well, it was made by the same coder
It's the same game, just with updated graphics. They didn't even bother to change the story of the game, they just gender swapped the character and still gave her the "12 labours of Hercules" storyline arch. LOL. There's only one word for that: LAZY.
Outrun....that creepy loading screen music sample lol
Great work! Good vídeo. I love watching bad games.
Due to the Amiga's great graphics capabilities, far too many games went for FORM over FUNCTION. Good list.
I'd actually say that due to a lot of developers overestimating the Amiga's graphical abilities (and audio for that matter) you ended up with that lack of function. Unlike the popular consoles (even the 8-bits like the NES) graphical effects those platforms you could pull off effortlessly were a drain on the CPU if done on the Amiga as it had no managed tilemaps, and some peculiar limits on sprites. While the Amiga was a better / (or in some cases same) CPU type, it couldn't easily do comparable things and leave time for the game logic while maintaining 60fps and also having both music and sound unless you abused the hardware in specific ways (which is why a lot of the top end Amiga games have a very specific look - repeated sprite patterns for backgrounds etc.) I say this as a big fan of the hardware at the time btw, but if you drill down it really doesn't stack up.
style over substance
Not to mention a vast amount of LAZY direct Atari ST ports.
The direct ST port was to the Amiga what the Direct ZX Spectrum port was to the C64 and MSX computers
I can't understand how the magazines at the time gave good scores to Magic Pockets. I paid £20 (or so) for that utter shite game and felt proper let down
Barring the soundtrack, which was good for the first five minutes, the game was utter shite, even as a 11 year old.
it was ok for the time i thought, i liked it. but £20 back then.... like £80 now. Everyne apart from 2 kids at our school ripped off their amaiga games so for me it was the cost of a 3.5 disk -> 75p
magic pockets was ace!
Couldn't agree with you more. It's a disgrace.
I hated Magic Pockets.
The Amiga version of 4th and Inches was a huge letdown, especially considering that the C64 version was pretty decent
c64 version was one of the best football sims on the system....
Fun list but is Kick Off 96 a 1% game? No, it is crap but it is not the worst football game on the Amiga (there are two worse ones in your list for starters).
The problem with Amiga Power is that they loved to be controversial. Kick Off 2 was rated one of the best games on the Amiga by AP until S Campbell joined them then all of a sudden anything Kick Off related got slated because he detested the games so much. They also had a long running feud with Team 17 and (allegedly) marked their games down because of it.
Some games that could have made the list - Belial, Surf Ninjas, Gazza's Super Soccer, Street Gang, Crazy Cars 1 & 2, Paperboy 2, Moonwalker.
Ill add them to the next list :-)....kickoff 96 is terrible though but maybe not a 1%.... maybe it should have scored 2% lol
Vector Soccer comes to my mind. God that was shit. I don't know what they were thinking. I love vector graphics, but it doesn't really work for sports games. I have a Vectrex and even I don't like any of the sports games on it.
I always remember the review for Shaq Fu in Amiga Format. It starts off with a paragraph talking about typical Amiga fighting games, where the best strategy is to trap your opponent in a corner and kick him in the head until he dies. Near the end of the review for Shaq Fu, the reviewer says "In the end, the best strategy I could come up with was to trap the opponent in a corner and kick him in the head until he dies". Easily one of the funniest reviews I've read.
I still to this day dont know what the hell you had to do on level 1 of Dennis.
Level 1: erase the disk level 2: replace contents of disk with better game.
@@scottbreon9448 That's the most logical solution. However, when I finally got hold of my first Amiga which was an A1200 Desktop Dynamite Pack, some bright spark thought it would be a great idea to bundle this monstrosity of a game along with 'Oscar' so I couldn't wipe the disk clean. It didn't make a particular good frisby either. Oscar wasn't particularly a good platform game itself but was at least relatively pretty to look at and was a borderline masterpiece compared to the abomination that was Dennis.
The Amiga had so many great games that could have been bundled with these kind of packs instead; I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that it was a film studio licensed game. You'd also think that they'd try to show off the capabilities of the A1200 (games like Super Stardust comes to mind) especially when things were starting to not look too good for Commodore and the Amiga.
I am a HUGE Amiga fan but to be fair, This list could be 4 hours long becuse there is SOOO many bad Amigagames out there! :)
luckily there were also great games too :-)
yeah we could talk about the worst castlevania port ever made, eswat and all us gold conversion, pit fighter, bangkok knights (and all c64 conversion), the way of the little dragon, roger rabbit and so on. so much failure on the amiga it became a joke and still worth a laugh
Hell, you can fill the first hour with direct/lazy Atari ST ports alone. LOL
Even while none of these (out of which I'm familiar with) are exactly good games, I think there are a lot of games on Amiga that I'd never feel like touching again after the first try - games which in my opinion would be clearly worse than some titles on the video. Of course I also felt like many magazine game reviews at the time gave kind of random scores, and there is room for personal preference when occasionally the only available options might be garbage, junk and rubbish.
Fortunately, I can't remember too many bad titles which I found excessively bad, since I've tried to actively forget some of my the worst Amiga gaming experiences. One such title does come into my mind, however, and that is Mouse Trap. Just few months ago I was checking some old floppies, and unsuspectingly came across this abysmal platformer that soon rang warning bells from the long gone past after loading it...
Bionic Commando, Yolanda and Out Run I actually played relatively much back in the days, but I'm not sure should I dare to try seem them again haha.
Grat video as always, although you missed International Rugby Challenge, it was the second worst rated game in Amiga Power's history (issue 26, Jun 1993), scoring 2%
Kick Off 96 had an infamous bug and kept crashing after you played one halftime, no matter what team. Since it was impossible to complete a single match it was considered "unplayable" and therefore got it's 1% rating. If I remember right, the fixed the error a couple of weeks later, but the damage was already done, the reputation of the Kick Off-series ruined.
Didn't know Allo Allo was made into a game, the Amiga was good for exclusives like that, i remember the game based on the Viz comic
yeah i live near where Viz was created ...ah the 80's was a great time to be a kid in Sunderland :-)
Lol brilliant vid mate, loved the witty commentary 😂
Thanks mate :-)
Yolanda was basically just a reskinned version of Hercules on the C64, another diabolical game, although ZZap gave that game a high score for some reason. They didn't even bother to change the actual storyline and tasks for the game, they just updated the graphics and changed the player sprite.
I was working in a local computer shop when Rise of the Robots came out, and as a teenager with my finder on the pulse I was given free rein to order whatever I though would sell. I ordered 25 copies of that turd on every platform. Think we sold 3 total.
I hope they kicked you out for your stupidity 😂
Great list mate 👍 if you thought OutRun was bad you should try Turbo OutRun, I got stung for 25quid by looking at the pretty pics on the box! A nominal mention should also go to the absaloute dump that was AfterBurner 😟
Outrun Europa was the best Outrun game on the system. But nothing beats the Lotus series
@@theyamo7219 Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 3 played over serial link so you could have 4 players was incredible mate 👏
Title: The Worst Commodore Amiga Games Ever Made!
Me: Some of these actually look better than some of the modern games on Steam.
'Tiger Road' conversion by Probe was an insult to all the living things.
So were almost every Amiga game done by Probe to be honest, except for maybe Overlord/Supremacy
Shocked at how much high profile shovelware there was for the system.....
Truthfully, any system with that vast of a library of games is bound to have a LOT of shovelware. Even the C64 and ZX Spectrum had an awful lot of shovelware. Although in it's defense, most of the shovelware on the C64 were just really low quality budget games like Bionic Granny, they usually were not full priced games unless you count shit like Auf Weidersehen, Pet.
Rise of the Robots - Hold joystick up and to the right, press fire and win !
Great vid.I'm currently making a compilation of amiga games to add to usb drive for my soon to arrive gotek and put some life into my Amiga 1200 which hasn't been used in a long time, its full of all the classics plus ones i have heard of but never played, two of which are on this list, I will be removing them. Akira is one of them, love the film and never played the game and certainly won't be bothering with it now.
where are you from?
@@oldstylegaming 🏴
???? just if you are in UK i can send you the full romset (maybe one of the most complete ive ever seen as ive been collecting for years)
@@oldstylegaming yeah I'm from England. I'm sure I must have a full set of adf games but I couldn't be sure. Adf games alone is just over 3.5gb and I have the tosec set but that has numerous versions of the same game. I think I'm covered for what I want but thanks for the offer. It's sometimes difficult to remember everything but these types of videos help for sure. I'm still looking through them all and sure there will be some I have missed.
i have 10gb of adf's...let me know if you ever want them mate
Worst thing about Fears IMO was the complete lack of enemy AI. Absolutely every mob just walked directly at you firing straight towards you, IIRC.. Even if there were walls between you. Terrible. :(
Also in ROTR it annoyed the hell out of me how a chunk of your leg disappears every time you do a low kick. >.< (on multiple formats!)
Craziest thing about this whole list is how many of these worst games were bundled with Amigas/CD32, etc. Great way to show off the system! >.
I know... if it was me you would have the best games..think they did the same with my C64 i got the Hollywood Pack that had Miami Vice and Topgun in...wtf...luckily Platoon Rambo and The Great Escape was in there too though
I remember Jonathan Nash's review of Fears in Amiga Power. He captioned one screenshot "the baddies all shuffling along trying to get on a line with you, shooting all the while" then scrambled the same words for the next screenshot and then the next - it was one of the most hilarious things I've ever read!
Agreed. I can tolerate the terrible graphics if the gameplay was actually half decent. There have even been decent efforts on 8-bit systems in recent years, but Fears as a game was a total letdown
Loaded most of these only once .. caption planet my mate Dave got this with the 500+ music is still very nostalgic .. moonshine racer didn’t look to bad .. allo allo I will only play this only once ...
Fears was dying for this a completely different game to the demo disk that was out the demo IMO was amazing and run nice .... Outrun nothing .. pinball magic wanted a dreams squeal
double dragon and street fighter 2 for me definitely more out there ...
Nicely put together and the voice over Paul well done mate ;)
Thanks mate, im getting more confident and i am splicing less and less voice over now as its flowing a bit better...hate the sound of my voice though...its nothing like it sounds in my head lol
old style gaming sounds fine to me ... plus you won YT back .. keep doing what your doing Paul it will get bigger and better ;)
Kind words mate ...i just want to keep retro gaming cos i love it :-)
Screen shots will always get ya, I remember looking at the back of one game in disbelief that such a crap game could be imagined to be so good
Mads Mikkelsen at 1:40
*I know y'all here for this: @**6:04**"*
You're welcome.
Yolanda should never have been made...but then again...neither should the game that it was based on. LOL. God, I hated Hercules so much
Yolanda was pure Evil.
@@wiederganger1959 It was the Amiga version of "I Wanna Be The Guy" LOL
I never purchased a legit copy of any Amiga game, so i never felt bad if a game was shit. It just freed up the floppy for a better game. Same with the Atari STe.
hahahahah man after me own heart .... although until i discovered xcopy i did buy a few
Apart from the games I got with my Amiga plus SOTB and Falcon....ditto!
Yeah never bought a Amiga game when i had one in the 90s, copying games was just the thing to do back then
I had a couple of budget titles (but they were gifts from family members) Never purchased a legit copy of anything myself. LMAO. But then again, most of my C64 stuff was cracked games too
Street Fighter 1 was 10 times worse for IBM/PC. Shittier graphics + shittier controls.
Yes! Days of Thunder made it!!
hahaha it had to be in cos its a total pile of sh*t hahahaha
True that! Some of these games would embarrass an 8-bit computer! Keep up the good work mate
Days of Thunder is amazingly awful, and to make it worse it was a pack-in game with some Amigas.
imagine if this was the first game that you loaded up on your Amiga lol
gumdeo - Yeah I had it with my Screen Gems pack, talk about feeling short changed! It also had Nightbreed the Interactive Game included as well and that deserves an honourable mention for being utter wank too
I had an Amiga 500 in the US in high school and Lotus turbo esprit made it to my local mom and pop computer shop. I played that game everyday and thought it was the greatest game for a PC or console I had ever seen. It made the consoles look so inferior. Good Memories!
yep - consoles were piss
Never really got into consoles at all until the PS1 era. Not a fan of MOST retro consoles either. Although, I do like the Vectrex.
Artura. But have to say , I had good fun with moonshine racers 😀
Worst controls ever? A game called Brataccas. I had the ST version but according to Wikipedia all versions had the same problem. Wikipedia says the developers "say their interface 'implies action,' which means that the game tries to sense what you want to do and will proceed to do it for you". Well, it didn't work. Dammit, you weren't able to even stand still! You'd try to stand still and the guy would tap-dance all over the screen! It was impossible to play, which was a shame, since the dystopian environment was rather interesting.
Double Dragon Amiga, consider yourself VERY lucky not to be on the list......
DD may make the next list .. That game was terrible
@@oldstylegaming Thank God the sequel made up for it.
Fellow TH-camr Zeusdaz reportedly had Richard Aplin contact him about the first _DD_ on the Amiga, saying that the original programmer of the Amiga version got stressed out and quit the project not long before the deadline date.
i think that tight deadlines were to blame for a lot of rushed games mate..Martin Webb who coded the C64 version of Out Run told me that they were ridiculously under pressure to get games out on time and thats why many were substandard (even though i like Out Run on C64)
That's amazing. I've had Amiga since 1986, had them all except A3000 and currently own no less than six Amiga's and I have never heard of ANY of these games except Rise of the Robots, Street Fighter and Out Run, of which I owned them all. Sadly.
Fears being choppy and having 'pixelated' graphics for sure isn't the reason why it wasn't a great game! Indeed Fears was the very first tech demo to prove that first person shooters could be done at all on the Amiga and it bursted the knot that had held back all the other developers who did afterwards. And even despite being the very first, it's really actually good in technical aspect, because very few Amiga games could actually concure with Fears in veiwport size and detailed, varying graphical content while still maintining a playable framerate.
Of course it was no good game, because it lacked gameplay wise, had no music and no great sound, and the graphcis seem to be designed by someone who didn't have much knowledge about ambience and atmosphere, but judging Fears by technical aspects is like saying that the haircut was the worst thing about Trump..
Fears was made by a talented demogroup IIRC, so technically advanced but with gameplay design bolted on as an afterthought.
Lists like this are always going to be Amiga Power heavy because they're the only magazine that actually gave realistic scores. Unfortunately they also reviewed fewer games than a lot of the others, so there are many terrible games that end up missing from lists like this simply because they never reviewed them, and the reviews that exist in other magazines gave them the usual 70-75% marks despite often not having a shred of playability.
It is possible you're wrong about Amiga Power, maybe. I don't tknow the review scores of said games but AP were on a different scale (which is what caused them to fall out with Team 17), 50% was deemed average where in other rags 70ish% was average. So that lower AP score may technically be a similar rating compared to others.
Did Dino Dini have anything to do with Kick Off 96?
I'm not sure....doesn't mention it on his gameography
After Kick Off 2 he made Goal!
I like 4th and Inches actually! It's a simple but fun football game...I was very surprised to see that on this list...and where the hell is Top Banana !
I really enjoyed playing Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Especially Level 2 on the motorcycle.😎
I assume you mean games that got magazine to notice it. Over the years I seen some really bad ones. The one you talked about that was really funny is Bionic Commando. It's like they never even seen the Arcade version in Action. The Amiga had to work extra hard to make that horrible game play.
Oddly I remember all those years ago reading the review on fire and forget.. and it was entitled; FIRE AND FORGOTTEN 😅
Ah man, seeing Dangerous Streets reminds me how much it was used in Commodore advertising back in the day. Embarrassing stuff.
Outrun was still better than Chase Hq in my opinion, at least you got a cassette with the soundtrack on it free😂
I remember buying Vector Soccer and even as a 9 year old I knew it was wank, unplayable!
OMG Steve....please dont stick up for Out Run...you have the real cabinet ...you should hate it more than anyone...the soundtrack came with the Spectrum version too...does that mean that was good too lol. That Vector Soccer was like if a nursery kid drew the sprites lol
old style gaming I heard the Spectrum free soundtrack was in monochrome so no😂
I actually like checking out how bad games actually are, check out a Hunchback clone called Kwasimodo, I have a lot of nostalgia for it but it’s absolutely pony
Hunchback was the first game i ever played on my Vic 20 ..i recently bought all the games i had when i was like 9 way back in 85. Hunchback, Cosmiads(great Galaga clone), Crazy Kong(worst DK clone ever) , Amok Attack (very good bezerk clone) and a cartridge game called Road Race which was hard as nails but me and my mate loved it...we will always have games that mean so much to us
Chase HQ on the Amiga was still far better than that crap port we got on the C64.
Don't feel too bad abut knowing someone that worked on Huckleberry Hound. One of my good friends worked on Night Creatures for the Turbografx. :D
Plollpoll lol l lol pool of p pp pp ll pp llll pp llllllllll lol ll pp llp ok p
Final fight...
I was obsessed with the arcade game, hell I’ve even stole a magazine where there was a poison ( villain character ) coverage on it.
They had the arcade graphics ported well, and that is about it!
Final Fight is a weird one for me. I still play the original on MAME occasionally, but I find the vast majority of the home ports haven't aged particularly well TBH. Of course there are versions that never should have existed in the first place, and the Amiga and C64 versions are certainly two of those.
I think the Amiga got off lightly with this list! Whilst most are naff, at least some are playable to some degree, check out more crud from the 80s that move at 5fps with a movement so slow they make Battletoads look good!
Well, that's mostly because he only picked games that were reviewed by titans like Amiga Joker. If you made it that far, your game can't be complete garbage, otherwise they wouldn't waste valuable space in their magazine.
Captain Planet haunts me to this day. I could never get past the wind level.
There was a really bad Amiga game called Street Hockey where you literally couldn't tell the difference between when you were trying to play it and just leaving the joystick alone and letting it play on it's own.
That Steiger Looks and sounds like an AMOS game. Also Quite surprised Robocop didnt make this list
Days of Thunder, Nightbreed:The Interactive Game, Shadow of the Beast 2 (great graphics and music but horrendous gameplay), Back to the Future 2, Treasure Island Dizzy, and Total Recall were shit.
Many of the games to Amiga/C64 really got new life when you play with a controller with "jump button"
That's true ...the 1 button control made a lot of great looking games difficult to control
Bionic Commando was great on the Commodore 64.
Having said that I think the Commodore 64 had a lot better versions of games over the Amiga.
C64 bionic commando was/is really good..great music too
@@oldstylegaming Yes. Music by the great Tim Follin 🙂👍🏻
Just not that shit American version. LOL
C64 games were making great use of the machine by the time the Amiga came around so i would imagine early Amiga games wouldn't be as good as well developed C64 equivalents.
The sad thing about Terminator 2, besides wasting a incredible license, was that it had enjoyable parts - but instead of polishing that, they packed it with rather horrible mini-games, to emulate some scenes in the film.
And Rise of the Robots had one interesting thing about it: A soundtrack written (in part?!) by Brian May of Queen. But yeah, that's about it.
Fears wasn't that bad. It was quite an achievement for Amiga that had problems with displaying 3D graphics with textures.
Many played Fears for that reason. Same for Gloom.
@@V3ntilator Gloom was quite better, because Fears had weird perspective and was getting quite tiresome after a while. The problem with Doom-likes on Amiga was that these games required at least 68030 to run at decent speed with bigger window. PCs that were used to play Doom had much more powerful x86 based CPUs Amiga was designed with 2D graphics in mind and was amazing in this departament. Now we can only laugh at this, but at the time when popular A500 model was released many people still had 8bit computers that didn't even had multitasking and proper mouse controlled OS. Too bad Commodore was a corporate clusterfuck and they weren't interested in creating an Amiga that had custom graphics chip with some 3D capabilities. That would be a game changer. At the time were A1200 was released 3D stuff was still kinda in the experimental stage.
Luckily I only had Fire and Forget, I so desperately wanted Rise of the Robots, it just looked awesome. I missed that bullet as a kid!
The fact Outrun is on here says alot about how sloppy ports can be.
I read AP from around 34 or so to the end (in fact, The End). I knew what number one would be. I was still excited to see it. If you have done or will do a breakdown of why it was so bad I'd love to see it.
That's a good idea... Maybe I'll do some gameplay and reviews of the top 5 In this list ;-)
Almost disappointed I never owned any of the games that made this list. I wouldn't have been surprised to see Night Hunter up there somewhere. At the time, I was gobsmacked by how primitive the game was on a platform like the Amiga. I did later learn that the threadbare look of the game was due to it being a port from C64. Doesn't really explain why the title music was just an 8-second loop from who knows what.
Hard to believe some of these games were developed on an Amiga lol. Excellent job as usual!
As far as the question you asked me a few weeks ago, I think the key to increasing your American audience is having more Nintendo content. Nintendo retro is BIG in the U.S.. I'm more a fan of the Mega Drive/ Genesis content but can't deny Nintendo is king 8n the States. Many of the U.S. based retro Nintendo YT channels I sub to get quite a few views. Sorry it took so long to answer back but I needed a social media break lol.
Hope that helps mate.. take care!
Ok I'll start to do more Nintendo ...I've actually just bought a boxed system :-)
It's true, and sad. Banjo Guy Ollie made some terrific Amiga covers, but these days it seems to be all Nintendo classics, which is understandable since they get more views. Can't blame him for it. Then it's worse with "8-bit" channels that are strictly console and not even 8-bit most of the time (e.g. 8-bit music theory).
On the other hand, there's 8-bit show and tell, the 8-bit guy, and Perifractic, who make terrific videos on the Commodore systems even though they weren't terribly popular where they live.
@@Mnnvint BastichB also has a pretty underrated channel as well
I remember a news article in Amiga Format about the developer for Terminator 2 having his computer stolen like a month before the due release date. Wonder if what got released was the result of cobbling something quick and dirty together in time for release
another one, "Top Bananna" the worst platform game ever
Top Banana is the single worst game ever made, for any platform, in any universe. But would you believe... one magazine gave it 80%!
@@alienbreedersamigaretrocom5188 LOL! do you remember which magazine?
Theres something inherently creepy about these games... might be the weird sound from the title screens...
I never noticed this before, but you're right. A lot of these games have an empty, hollow feel to them that's oddly disconcerting. Like they're made by people who've heard of videogames... But don't know what they are
You have noooo idea …
It wasn't "people" behind most of the games in those days. Amd the computers themselves were bait made to mislead and subject to incompetence.
To be honest, a lot of those did not look that bad to me (I guess I would've liked the first two and some of the games inbetween). I even owned the PC adaptation for Terminator 2, I guess I still have the disks in my shelf. However, watching a video one does not know how responsive the controls are or - to keep it simple - if the gameplay "feels right". Choppy framerates like with Graeme Souness Vector Soccer are a big turn off for me. Old games really don't need 30 fps but that... wow. That is something else.
Thank you for the video! I've been recently watching a lot of videos about Amiga and C64 games and TH-cam kindly recommended your video to me.
Thanks mate Amiga and C64 are the bulk of my content
The reason Moonshine Racers was so crap was because they blew all their money on the intro cinematic. Probably the best on the system ever! Such a contrast from the rest of the game.
Ninja Rabbits and International Ninja Rabbits were really bad games. They had very stiff and slow gameplay. However the background sprite art was really good and the International Ninja Rabbits title screen song was awesome.
Also I really liked Captain Planet for the most part. Rescuing the animals was tedious though.
The music in those Ninja Rabbbits games (especially the first one done by the criminally underrated Sean Connolly) was top notch as well, the gameplay however....
It was amusing how so many of the public domain games for the Amiga were so much better than a lot of the full price releases.
But one of my hated games was Impossimole.
The Captain Planet "music" and sound effects just triggered a truly awful flashback...
Amigas biggest problem is imo the inability to upgrade from a one button controller.
True and it really hit hard the fighting games. I mean MK is a great looking game but was totally let down by the controls I think
Right. Nevertheless, I was a diehard Mk Fan and still enjoyed the shit out of it, never had problems with just one button, probably because I never had a SNES
@@waltergilman3998 I went back to it recently and it's a nightmare when you've played it with multiple buttons
@@oldstylegaming I can imagine, haha
old style gaming Yeah I love the Amiga and it played a huge role in my early gaming. But after the pc engine and the 16 bit I rarely played it again. But switchblade 2 and Celtic legends always got a replay.
I'm surprised that Ganymed never made the list. What a mess that is
I'll check that game out :-)
@@oldstylegaming It was an unofficial conversion of the Atari 2600 game, The Empire Strikes Back. Good game on the Atari for what it was, but the controls on that unofficial Amiga port were awful
I have a warm, fuzzy feeling about the fact that I've never owned a single one of these. 😂
Fire and Forget - the name sounds right though.
The problem with cp was that it was really hard. The first stage is the easiest but all the rest are really hard. Ice stage is near impossible to save the dolphins and Linka/wind, along with heart is so long. The music was so amazing, I was lucky my TV speakers were were mute so I used an amp + speakers. I think it's been '95/96 since I last played but the music, like most classical games I can still recall. The second stage, ice was so great.
I mean, come on, that intro for OutRun should have been ample warning of the horrors held within. Also, I'm an American and not intimately familiar with the Amiga, but I played this weird shareware game with an isometric perspective where you were controlling a disembodied penis. Kind of a surprise that didn't make the list.
Great video! Say what you want but most of these games have much more charisma, originality and fun than half of the current "modern" games. :]
So what went wrong with Kickoff 96? A little backstory would have been nice.
Pinball mania looks alright I have to say
Looks can be deceiving. Looks are alright yes, but the controls are unresponsive at times, sometimes your flippers "stick" for no reason
Non of them are as bad as Uridium on the Atari ST.
I feel it is my sacred duty to play everything on this list at some point!
not all at once though
old style gaming definitely not, I need to hang on to a fraction of sanity at least!
I think I have, pretty much...
@@peterlawson777 How much trauma counselling did you need after?
Amazingly Awful Games A great deal...I still get anxious around floppy discs to this very day.....!