Greetings from Australia. We certainly had the best C64 and Amiga TV ads. I really love the CD32 version of Defender of the Crown. It is playable on the A500 mini too. It’s quite a blast to set up the mini with a keyboard on a large OLED and go through the thousands of games on a usb stick and just pick one at random.
Thanks for this video!. I’m “new” to the Amiga (2012-2013), as I grew up with the Atari ST. These 1200/AGA type videos show me that there were still a few more good years left on these platforms after 1991 or so.
@@jrherita The Amiga 1200 was a model with a pretty reasonable price. But, if you added a hard drive or an accelerator, the price would shoot up-or you’d just be better off going for a higher-end model like the Amiga 4000. Either way, whether it was a Mac, PC, or high-end Amigas, they were all expensive machines
They really dropped the ball with the Amiga. One of the things that isn't really spoken about is that there was no "direction" as to what the Amiga was going to "be". By that I mean Apple and Microsoft/IBM et. al. had found their "markets" bythe mid 90's. When you bough a PC/Mac, you understood what the capabilties were, and more importantly, these companies KNEW their markets, and therefore made sure that their "silicon tools" were going to match the needs and expectations. However, the Amiga always seemed to be having an identity crisis. think of it like this. PC's were the compters that did went to Uni to do STEM courses, Apple Macs went to do all the Arts courses. Meanwhile Commodore spent all it's time at high school playing games that when it came time to graduate and grow up, it never paid attention and therefore ended up just going to work at Macdonald's full-time. And while there is nothing wrong with that, in the end lets be real your future is inevitably going to be working with the next genereation of kids (consoles) with their own lingo and culture, and you are just going to be "that guy" that while has the cool stories at work, you ain't going to be invited to the cool kids party after work, Grandpa. [I do not mean to insult anyone. this is just an analogy that was easy to explain what i wanted to say at 6:30 n the morning waiting for my coffee to kick in]
Great video. I went deep on the Amiga 500 scene when it came out but drifted to PC when Wolfenstein and then Doom were released, so the rest as they say, was history. I unfortunately skipped the whole Amiga AGA generation. Jump to 2020 and COVID, and I started collecting retro hardware. Bought a modified CD32 full of pre installed games while in lockdown. Wow. If only Commodore they were able to get this out a year earlier with sufficient cashflow to make enough of them. Many of the games you mentioned have merit, but Banshee is my regular go to when I pull my CD32 out for a session…
The Amiga 1200 was my very first game system, so naturally I enjoy hearing more about it. The topic of exclusives is an interesting one to focus on, given from what I hear, the computer scene of the day encouraged multi-platforms far more than the consoles did. 2:21 - Love the build up to the joke here. Also, quite rare to see the one other CD32 advert get shown off. I do wonder if these were the only two TV adverts the CD32 had (unsurprising given the console's short official life). 3:23 - As the female fighter on screen demonstrates. This is my first time hearing of this game; usually when Amiga 1200 fighters are mentioned, Fighting Spirit is the one that gets the spotlight. 5:59 - Guardian still holds up graphically; the bright visuals makes the world pop out and the ship has a simple yet charming design. 8:14 - The 8 player gameplay sounds like it'd be amazing to experience. Rather reminds me of Street Racer; funny to see Mario Kart style gameplay but with more realistic cars here. 12:47 - You weren't kidding with the Legend of Zelda comparison. Certainly nice to see such a type of game running on the Amiga. Real surprising that a lot of these exclusives are appearing as Amiga AGA exclusives after the Commodore closure. I would have assumed that would be when more of the games were made multiplatform. 15:13 - You mentioning the objective thing sounds familiar; I believe I had heard of Marvin's Marvellous Adventure before from a video discussing Mario-like games on the Amiga. The objective matter is a cool touch to differentiate itself from a pure aim-for-the-goal platformer. An gosh, I love that box art. 19:20 - My first comparison was actually Nintendo's Mach Rider. Black Viper is one I recall from my research on Amiga CD32 games and gosh, it does look fun. The sense of speed from on-screen is incredible. Again, another rather late exclusive. 24:39 - As someone who grew up with three brothers, multiplayer is always a huge plus. Banshee looks like so much fun; I had hopes it would be included in the Amiga Mini but sadly not. There were rumours of a CD32 mini floating about, so perhaps there is hope then.
Everyone praises the Amiga, but the reality is things got tough, a lot of users switched to PCs, and then, as the years passed, the nostalgia kicked in...
We saw it with different eyes back then. The PC became king, and it has remained that since then. Commodore cheaped out with the A1200. But it is a wonderful little machine.
Loved the list with Breathless being my favourite if a little hard to control (when turning it always felt like I was moving in treacle as it was very slow), the other 3D game I liked was Alien Breed 3D II, Spiris Legacy was also an enjoyable game along with Banshee. Unfortunately the CD32 was basically an Amiga 1200 it was to little to late. All they needed was an upgrade to the sound chip, CPU and some sort of 3D chip with its own extra graphics memory and I think it would have lasted a lot longer, it was the lack of some sort of 3D GPU that killed it. I know you could buy an accelerator and addon graphics card but because they weren't standard companies just made games with the base model in mind.
Commodore must have known how popular gaming was on their machines so when updating their chipset its kind of strange that they didnt try to give it decent sprite handling ability to match the megadrive or snes, or even exceed the console abilities
Unfortunately Commodore leadership kept starving investment in the Amiga. The engineers wanted to do a lot of things (i.e. add a DSP to the Amiga 3000, and possibly later 1200/4000 - which would have), but instead leadership spent money on things like the Commodore 65, the Amiga 600 (which changed specs several times, and therefore wasted time in development), etc. It also hurt that Motorola kept the prices of their faster processors way too high vs. Intel, so they couldn’t afford to put a higher clocked 68030 in the 1200 for example, or even offer a 68020 Amiga 500+ a few years earlier for cheap, despite the fact that some 386s were cheap by 1990.
Of the games presented, The Speris Legacy is the only one that captured my interest. It has the familiarity of being Zelda like with the bonus of good Amiga style chip music.
If only they realised it needed the 68030 and some 3D hardware. It could have been so different. Well, probably nothing they could’ve done to hold off the consoles, apart from chasing after the Apple Mac market and picking up more creatives, coders and hobbyists.
All these exclusives or near-exclusives (having a DOS port) meant to compete with the consoles of the time nice and fine as long as you don‘t know the console games they‘re „inspired“ by. I say that as someone who went from C64 to Amiga 500 to Amiga 1200 with no console in the house at that time. Back then even I myself though „yes, that‘s just as good!“ with many of those games, but in hindsight it wasn‘t. There‘s always something missing no jump‘n‘run on the Amiga could compare to Super Mario World, no beat‘em up to Street Fighter 2 (where the Amiga port was bad to play, but the production values were there). Speris Legacy is no comparison to Zelda - A Link to the Past. Amiga‘s finest, like Turrican 2 and 3, would only make mediocre games on SNES and Mega Drive, while not being worse than on Amiga itself. That says a lot. I think most of that comes down to the style of production. I think Amiga games were still made „guerilla style“, where the team is small and production time short. No real oversight about cohesion and taste. Meanwhile console games were already productions with big teams, multiple producers, a director and whatnot.
I was a little bit disappointed when I got an A1200, the AGA library is full of OCS/ECS with barely noticeable enhancements. There were a few gems though. 👍
Given the nosedive that Commodore was taking at the time, we're lucky we got AGA. There was another chipset being worked on, AAA. I don't know if it's true, but the story goes that Commodore somehow lost the designs.
I covered the AAA story in my Amazing Facts video on the A1200, basically they couldn't get it to work properly and were so short on money that they cancelled it rather than throw more cash at it.
I think they were on to something. The world needs more fighting games with bare chested women in them. Even if the game was bad, I'd still give it a go lol
1 correction: Black Viper is not AGA exclusive, it's also works on OCS/ECS Amiga. If memory serves me correctly there's no visual enhancements for the AGA version, it looks the same on Amiga 500 but runs a little smoother on the A1200. EDIT: An exclusive I would choose is Genetic Species Other decent AGA exclusives: T-Zero, Roadkill, Overkill.
I still have my A1200 and lately I'm using it a lot, just as my good old rev 3 A500 with chicken lips keyboard (yay!). But oh my, it's obvious why the Amiga failed in the end. Apart from terrible marketing, while the A1000/500 were groundbreaking, the A1200 was only meh when it came out. Too little too late imho. The exclusives weren't really special I think either, often even only lazy A500 ports with few additional colors. Yet from architecture perspective this machine amazes me still to this day.
Capital Punishment was style and shock marketing over substance! You needed to cover Fightin' Spirit CD32 for the apex of Amiga beat em ups on AGA 'miggies!
Basically this lst of games just shows why Commodore failed. If you take off the Amiga Fan boy nostalgia glasses, most these games on the list were just bad, especially when compared to the console and PC games they tried to replicate - or if you want to use a more friendly phrase "took inspiration from". And as a disclaimer: I played ALL of these games myself then. I wanted the Amiga so bad to succeed and these games to be good. But looking at them 30 years after, it is just obvious most of them weren't.
Indead, the AGA-Machines had much more power, and youre exampeles only shows, that those wasn´t used ! I can´t even see improvements...in nothing at all ! Maybe some color-enhencments 🙃
Ah, and one comment on Capital Punishment. As no games were released anymore by 1996 all the magazines were crazy about anything on the Amiga. This game is so bad, so broken by concept it is almost reaching Rise of the Robots levels. Completely style over substance. And the style is just embaressingly bad, which is shown in the domina character... Who was this supposed to appeal to? 15 year old boys I guess...
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Thanks for the kind words about our little game Black Viper. It's really wonderful to see that someone still appreciates it. 🙂
It's a really awesome game, you should be very proud!
@@TheLairdsLair thank you!
The disappointments of AGA are really evident here - no chunky graphics mode for 3D, no upgrade to the Paula sound chip.
Too little, too late.
Greetings from Australia. We certainly had the best C64 and Amiga TV ads.
I really love the CD32 version of Defender of the Crown. It is playable on the A500 mini too.
It’s quite a blast to set up the mini with a keyboard on a large OLED and go through the thousands of games on a usb stick and just pick one at random.
Thanks for this video!. I’m “new” to the Amiga (2012-2013), as I grew up with the Atari ST. These 1200/AGA type videos show me that there were still a few more good years left on these platforms after 1991 or so.
Don't ever stop . Your videos are great. Hi from New Zealand
Banshee is the bomb. absolutly awesome game. Nice video Laird as always.
By the time the 1200 and the very nice AGA was a thing, I already had a PC with VGA, more CPU speed and a Sound Blaster, tbh.
Same here, though in late 1992/early 1993, a fully spec’d out PC was still a lot more expensive than an Amiga 1200.
@@jrherita The Amiga 1200 was a model with a pretty reasonable price. But, if you added a hard drive or an accelerator, the price would shoot up-or you’d just be better off going for a higher-end model like the Amiga 4000. Either way, whether it was a Mac, PC, or high-end Amigas, they were all expensive machines
They really dropped the ball with the Amiga. One of the things that isn't really spoken about is that there was no "direction" as to what the Amiga was going to "be". By that I mean Apple and Microsoft/IBM et. al. had found their "markets" bythe mid 90's. When you bough a PC/Mac, you understood what the capabilties were, and more importantly, these companies KNEW their markets, and therefore made sure that their "silicon tools" were going to match the needs and expectations.
However, the Amiga always seemed to be having an identity crisis. think of it like this. PC's were the compters that did went to Uni to do STEM courses, Apple Macs went to do all the Arts courses. Meanwhile Commodore spent all it's time at high school playing games that when it came time to graduate and grow up, it never paid attention and therefore ended up just going to work at Macdonald's full-time.
And while there is nothing wrong with that, in the end lets be real your future is inevitably going to be working with the next genereation of kids (consoles) with their own lingo and culture, and you are just going to be "that guy" that while has the cool stories at work, you ain't going to be invited to the cool kids party after work, Grandpa.
[I do not mean to insult anyone. this is just an analogy that was easy to explain what i wanted to say at 6:30 n the morning waiting for my coffee to kick in]
In 93 pentium ruled supreme
Another amazing AGA version exclusive is Brian The Lion.
Brian the Lion is not AGA exclusive, an ECS / OCS version exists :)
Her victory "pose" showed her prior experience was that of a lover, not a fighter.
Worms directors cut is somewhat an excusive... And amazing
Yeah I love it, but didn't really feel it qualified.
But wasn't it also on PC iirc?
Great video. I went deep on the Amiga 500 scene when it came out but drifted to PC when Wolfenstein and then Doom were released, so the rest as they say, was history. I unfortunately skipped the whole Amiga AGA generation. Jump to 2020 and COVID, and I started collecting retro hardware. Bought a modified CD32 full of pre installed games while in lockdown. Wow. If only Commodore they were able to get this out a year earlier with sufficient cashflow to make enough of them. Many of the games you mentioned have merit, but Banshee is my regular go to when I pull my CD32 out for a session…
Banshee is a definite must have for a list like this. Never seen Arcade Snooker before, big miss given how much fun I've had with Arcade pool.
The Amiga 1200 was my very first game system, so naturally I enjoy hearing more about it. The topic of exclusives is an interesting one to focus on, given from what I hear, the computer scene of the day encouraged multi-platforms far more than the consoles did.
2:21 - Love the build up to the joke here. Also, quite rare to see the one other CD32 advert get shown off. I do wonder if these were the only two TV adverts the CD32 had (unsurprising given the console's short official life).
3:23 - As the female fighter on screen demonstrates. This is my first time hearing of this game; usually when Amiga 1200 fighters are mentioned, Fighting Spirit is the one that gets the spotlight.
5:59 - Guardian still holds up graphically; the bright visuals makes the world pop out and the ship has a simple yet charming design.
8:14 - The 8 player gameplay sounds like it'd be amazing to experience. Rather reminds me of Street Racer; funny to see Mario Kart style gameplay but with more realistic cars here.
12:47 - You weren't kidding with the Legend of Zelda comparison. Certainly nice to see such a type of game running on the Amiga. Real surprising that a lot of these exclusives are appearing as Amiga AGA exclusives after the Commodore closure. I would have assumed that would be when more of the games were made multiplatform.
15:13 - You mentioning the objective thing sounds familiar; I believe I had heard of Marvin's Marvellous Adventure before from a video discussing Mario-like games on the Amiga. The objective matter is a cool touch to differentiate itself from a pure aim-for-the-goal platformer. An gosh, I love that box art.
19:20 - My first comparison was actually Nintendo's Mach Rider. Black Viper is one I recall from my research on Amiga CD32 games and gosh, it does look fun. The sense of speed from on-screen is incredible. Again, another rather late exclusive.
24:39 - As someone who grew up with three brothers, multiplayer is always a huge plus. Banshee looks like so much fun; I had hopes it would be included in the Amiga Mini but sadly not. There were rumours of a CD32 mini floating about, so perhaps there is hope then.
It's disappointing that Commodore was leaking money badly at this time, but it's nice to see that its era is still being praised today.
Everyone praises the Amiga, but the reality is things got tough, a lot of users switched to PCs, and then, as the years passed, the nostalgia kicked in...
We saw it with different eyes back then. The PC became king, and it has remained that since then. Commodore cheaped out with the A1200. But it is a wonderful little machine.
Loved the list with Breathless being my favourite if a little hard to control (when turning it always felt like I was moving in treacle as it was very slow), the other 3D game I liked was Alien Breed 3D II, Spiris Legacy was also an enjoyable game along with Banshee. Unfortunately the CD32 was basically an Amiga 1200 it was to little to late. All they needed was an upgrade to the sound chip, CPU and some sort of 3D chip with its own extra graphics memory and I think it would have lasted a lot longer, it was the lack of some sort of 3D GPU that killed it.
I know you could buy an accelerator and addon graphics card but because they weren't standard companies just made games with the base model in mind.
Commodore must have known how popular gaming was on their machines so when updating their chipset its kind of strange that they didnt try to give it decent sprite handling ability to match the megadrive or snes, or even exceed the console abilities
Unfortunately Commodore leadership kept starving investment in the Amiga. The engineers wanted to do a lot of things (i.e. add a DSP to the Amiga 3000, and possibly later 1200/4000 - which would have), but instead leadership spent money on things like the Commodore 65, the Amiga 600 (which changed specs several times, and therefore wasted time in development), etc. It also hurt that Motorola kept the prices of their faster processors way too high vs. Intel, so they couldn’t afford to put a higher clocked 68030 in the 1200 for example, or even offer a 68020 Amiga 500+ a few years earlier for cheap, despite the fact that some 386s were cheap by 1990.
Snooker on a PC was always a fun experience.
Very cool list. 9/10 of these games are new to me, giving me plenty to check out.
Banshee is my all time favorite, some funny animations in there
Of the games presented, The Speris Legacy is the only one that captured my interest. It has the familiarity of being Zelda like with the bonus of good Amiga style chip music.
Enjoyed the video! There were a few I wasn't familiar with. I would add "Roadkill" and "Watchtower" to the list; two AGA favorites of mine.
I had Roadkill in there originally but took it out because I felt there were too many driving games.
If only they realised it needed the 68030 and some 3D hardware. It could have been so different. Well, probably nothing they could’ve done to hold off the consoles, apart from chasing after the Apple Mac market and picking up more creatives, coders and hobbyists.
What about Roadkill! Along with Banshee and the AGA versions of the Pinball games and Alien Breed were the best games released on the system.
I originally had Roadkill in the list, but took it out because I felt there were too many driving games.
Roadkill is a real masterpiece
Jetstrike was the best game i had on the 1200
Guardian could have been so much better. So much potencial.
All these exclusives or near-exclusives (having a DOS port) meant to compete with the consoles of the time nice and fine as long as you don‘t know the console games they‘re „inspired“ by. I say that as someone who went from C64 to Amiga 500 to Amiga 1200 with no console in the house at that time. Back then even I myself though „yes, that‘s just as good!“ with many of those games, but in hindsight it wasn‘t. There‘s always something missing no jump‘n‘run on the Amiga could compare to Super Mario World, no beat‘em up to Street Fighter 2 (where the Amiga port was bad to play, but the production values were there). Speris Legacy is no comparison to Zelda - A Link to the Past. Amiga‘s finest, like Turrican 2 and 3, would only make mediocre games on SNES and Mega Drive, while not being worse than on Amiga itself. That says a lot. I think most of that comes down to the style of production. I think Amiga games were still made „guerilla style“, where the team is small and production time short. No real oversight about cohesion and taste. Meanwhile console games were already productions with big teams, multiple producers, a director and whatnot.
I was a little bit disappointed when I got an A1200, the AGA library is full of OCS/ECS with barely noticeable enhancements. There were a few gems though. 👍
Given the nosedive that Commodore was taking at the time, we're lucky we got AGA. There was another chipset being worked on, AAA. I don't know if it's true, but the story goes that Commodore somehow lost the designs.
I covered the AAA story in my Amazing Facts video on the A1200, basically they couldn't get it to work properly and were so short on money that they cancelled it rather than throw more cash at it.
I think they were on to something. The world needs more fighting games with bare chested women in them. Even if the game was bad, I'd still give it a go lol
Same here, I'd give it a "go go" as well....
You forgot the great Super Stardust, Pinball Fantasies and P. Illusions, The Chaos Engine for showcasing the AGA
None of those are AGA exclusives.
@@TheLairdsLair Super Stardust is certainly AGA only.
Nope, it was also on PC - www.mobygames.com/game/6761/super-stardust/
@@TheLairdsLair OK, it was ported later, didn't know that.
With AGA only I meant it wasn't released for OCS-ECS Miggies.
1 correction: Black Viper is not AGA exclusive, it's also works on OCS/ECS Amiga. If memory serves me correctly there's no visual enhancements for the AGA version, it looks the same on Amiga 500 but runs a little smoother on the A1200.
EDIT: An exclusive I would choose is Genetic Species
Other decent AGA exclusives: T-Zero, Roadkill, Overkill.
I had Roadkill but took it out because I felt there were too many driving games.
I still have my A1200 and lately I'm using it a lot, just as my good old rev 3 A500 with chicken lips keyboard (yay!). But oh my, it's obvious why the Amiga failed in the end. Apart from terrible marketing, while the A1000/500 were groundbreaking, the A1200 was only meh when it came out. Too little too late imho. The exclusives weren't really special I think either, often even only lazy A500 ports with few additional colors.
Yet from architecture perspective this machine amazes me still to this day.
"Starfox" wishes it could match "Guardian's" FPS.
There's not much happening on the screen.
Black Viper had an ECS version. I never owned an AGA Amiga and I've played it.
Well, it's still Amiga exclusive so that's good enough.
@@TheLairdsLair Fair enough!
Good to see XTreme Racing, I worked on that, only a small part doing some graphics. Why did arcade snooker have a purple :D
Great work!
Awesome thanks 👍
Even when I had an A1200, everything was still being released without AGA. It was kinda sad. So much missed potential.
The AGA launch coincided with Commodore's demise, so few AGA games came out, the developers didn't want to invest over a dead brand.
Capital Punishment was style and shock marketing over substance! You needed to cover Fightin' Spirit CD32 for the apex of Amiga beat em ups on AGA 'miggies!
Fightin' Sprit is a fighting game not a beat 'em up, that's a different genre.
@@TheLairdsLairIt's a 3 round 1vs1 like Capital Punishment but with multi-button support.
What is the helicopter sim shown during the credits? Also great video loved it and will use it as a list to guide my play choices.
Basically this lst of games just shows why Commodore failed. If you take off the Amiga Fan boy nostalgia glasses, most these games on the list were just bad, especially when compared to the console and PC games they tried to replicate - or if you want to use a more friendly phrase "took inspiration from". And as a disclaimer: I played ALL of these games myself then. I wanted the Amiga so bad to succeed and these games to be good. But looking at them 30 years after, it is just obvious most of them weren't.
I think you're not using stock 1200 but an upgraded one. Guardian on stock 1200 was not that smooth.
LOL, I'm using emulation!
Most are perfectly identical on the OCS. So i dont see the logic of claiming these are anything special..
None of these games are on OCS, that's the point . . . . .
Indead, the AGA-Machines had much more power, and youre exampeles only shows, that those wasn´t used ! I can´t even see improvements...in nothing at all ! Maybe some color-enhencments 🙃
Sorry but are you on drugs? The regular Amiga could never do Guardian, Breathless or Xtreme Racing with all the 3D effects.
how do people think the amiga was great. Maybe for a year or two it was a little better because of the graphics but they didnt keep up with the times.
could buy a genesis or Nintendo , no one used it for actual work.
@@AlT-vt3gbThe Amiga was for creatives, the consoles were only meant for gaming.
Ah, and one comment on Capital Punishment. As no games were released anymore by 1996 all the magazines were crazy about anything on the Amiga. This game is so bad, so broken by concept it is almost reaching Rise of the Robots levels. Completely style over substance. And the style is just embaressingly bad, which is shown in the domina character... Who was this supposed to appeal to? 15 year old boys I guess...
All this "exclusives" are from the same years, because no one care about porting this very outdated games to other platforms.
Snes was more impressive then Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 have boring games.