I quite like your list, as it has a loooot of good games that nobody talks about, making it NOT just another list of the same games, but something original
Great list! Felt very personal rather than just the usual top 100. You really seem to be pulled in by a good soundtrack. I would love a video on your top OSTs
Gravity Force!! I remember playing a windows or DOS clone as a kid & have been looking for a name for so long!! Thanks. This is a gamestyle/mechanic that you don't see anymore but would work well today, especially with proper physics.
Imagine having a terrible fire back in the day, mind blowing. There is no way I could stretch to a 1200 now with those prices but I might still try and get myself another A600. Tbh it's my fave Amiga, perfectly sized, no A500 TV modulator stuck out the back, not thise side of Christmas though.
My favorite game never appears in any list. Yet, it gave rise to one of the biggest, most dedicated fan community of the time, who made hundreds of clones over the years. The game I speak of is Emerald Mine!
Rodland - Nice conversion of the arcade game, except... Yup, they left something out. If you complete all the levels of the arcade version, it then tells you how to access a full second set of levels with all new graphics. Actually, you apparently can access the second set of levels right from the start, it just doesn't tell you how to do it until you've beaten the game. All of the home ports of Rodland left out the second set of levels. Not that I was good enough to get that far, but it bugs me to know that they left them out. Vroom - F1 was a separate game that also came out for the Amiga. It used the same engine and was very similar though. First there was Vroom, then there was a data disk for Vroom with new tracks, and then came F1. Funny/sad story: Someone once gave me a magazine with mostly Intel-based content and they had a review of F1 for DOS. In it, they said something like "Domark took a little-known Amiga game called Vroom, ran it through their magic conversion process and produced this superior new game." I wrote them an angry letter pointing out that the DOS game was a port of the original Amiga F1 game. I doubt they ever printed it. Magazines where always shortchanging the Amiga. I also once read a review of the DOS version of Body Blows where they lamented that it only supported one joystick, and then only listed it as being available for DOS. Frontier - I thought this was an impressive tech demo, but a lousy game. Being a huge fan of Elite (on the C64, the Amiga version was really a step down in gameplay), I had high hopes for this game, but didn't like it at all. To get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, you have to accelerate to ridiculous speeds, and then use time acceleration. However when you encounter a pirate, it drops you back to normal time, but with you still traveling at 9 million KPH, which means that other than slightly altering your trajectory, maneuvering is out of the question. Which then does away with one of the aspects that was so much fun in Elite: Dogfights. Combat is reduced to a jousting match where you and the other ship zip past each other while taking potshots at each other. Because of the realistic motion of the planets, 99.99% of players had to use the autopilot, but the autopilot had a bad habit of crashing into planets if you didn't deactivate it the moment you arrived at the planet. Also, why is the autopilot able to instantly drop your speed down to nothing when arriving at a planet, but you can't do that for combat? Then there are the bugs, like the fact that there were star systems that would crash the game if you tried to get info on them. Actually, I think virtually all of my sessions with this game ended with crashes. I did like to just fly around and marvel at the size of the stations though. However when it came to actually playing the game, i just found it frustrating. Turrican 2 - I was never much good at the Turrican games. I usually lasted about 30 seconds between lives. I used to play them with unlimited time and lives turned on. My pirated copy of T2 had a very annoying bug. There was a section in the last level where you have to climb a vertical shaft by jumping on alien heads, but avoid being pulled in by their teeth. There was one head that if it caught you, you would spawn inside the wall and be unable to finish the game. Stunt Car Racer - I loved this game, and I once got to play it against another person with two Amigas hooked up together. I used to have all of the tracks memorized so I knew exactly how fast to go over each jump. Well, except for the Drawbridge track, which I found impossible to drive properly. It was impossible for me to tell if the bridge was up or down, so I would always end up driving off it while it was up in the air, and then I'd crash. Fans have made two mods to this game. There's a "TNT" version which stand for The New Tracks, and then there's a "Turbo" version that is supposed to have a smoother framerate on faster systems. As I recall, the WHDLoad installer supports all the versions and will even let you apply the turbo patch to the TNT version.
Don't buy an Amiga, buy a MiSTer, a good wired controller and a good wired mechanical keyboard. I spent quite a lot of money building my Amiga collection out but honestly should have just stuck with the MiSTer. It's a better experience hands down.
@@jamiec2023 it's an absolute no-brainer, just go for the pack which includes the case (it's prebuilt) as you need a case and it's cheaper just to buy the entire thing from him. Unless you want to 3D print or buy some specific case (I'd love a C64 or A1200 case with a proper keyboard built in for Amiga/ST/C64/Speccy etc).
I keep hearing about these but am a little clueless. The 'basic' description I hear is that it emulates hardware more accurately but not sure what real difference I would see over a Raspberry Pi. I know with emulation sometimes you get not 100% accurate sound emulation, the C64 mini had that I believe. I know RMC The Cave have a mister system so will give it a go next time I am down there.
@@37Retro FPGAs create an exact copy of the CPU + other chips in a console. That means that it is 100% accurate. In software you're recreating the same logic but the work is being ran on a CPU 10000000x faster and which works very differently. That leads to small differences. Then on top of that modern computers add several frames of lag from your pressing a button to seeing movement on a screen. FPGAs don't. You can actually feel it on the 8/16 bit machines in fast paced games. Although if you have a low-latency PC setup it's usually not a problem. Another thing is that some cores are actually better and more efficient than emulation. The Saturn MiSTer core for example is 99% perfect, the PC emulator isn't and it requires a lot of horse power to actually run. The C64 is a special case as the SID chip is analogue which is impossible to recreated perfectly. Also because they had many revisions of it which differed a lot. There are some exceptional hardware recreations for a real C64 though which is almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing.
I notice the latency playing C64 games, they feel much better on the MiSTer. I prefer emulation from the PS1/N64 for 3D games as you can render them at a higher resolution and use new texture packs etc.
My mate had Midnight Resistance on the Amiga and we played it to death, switching between it and Shadow Warriors all day. But was there ever a reason why the game was so dark/hard to see? Its obvious in this video, too... its like someone's turned the Contrast knob on the TV down to 1.
I can't remember the actual reason but it is "a thing" you are right. There is a version out there that has fixed the colours with brighter ones but look as I did I could not find it.
Personally, I think Commodore's neglect killed the Amiga. When the Amiga came out, DOS games were still using EGA and the Amiga put them to shame. However, while Intel systems continued to get faster, and improve the graphics, the Amiga stayed stagnant. Yes, there were accelerator boards and Commodore made the A3000, but other than that, they didn't put out any major upgrades. The DOS world moved on to VGA graphics and then SVGA, while Amiga was still using 32 colors I knew the Amiga was doomed the day I opened up a magazine and saw an ad for Wing Commander. Up to that point, the Amiga versions of games had always been the most graphically impressive, but there was a game that looked great in DOS, and there wasn't even Amiga version to compare it to. By the time the AGA models came out, Commodore was giving us VGA quality graphics at a time when the other side was enjoying graphics in 16 million colors. Commodore had the edge with the Amiga and they squandered that advantage.
Absolutely, things switched the other way and fast! Earlier on with basic 2D games I remember that PCs had a lot of trouble trying to do smooth scrolling and were usually quite jerky in motion. I remember playing Wing Commander on Amiga (or trying to) it had a frame rate of about 0.6 :P
@@37Retro I had a Supra Turbo 28 accelerator for my Amiga. It used a 68000 chip running at 28Mhz, so it was pretty much 100% compatible with all games, and if it wasn't, there was a physical switch to toggle it off. As long as you had some true Fast RAM in your system, it could make quite a difference in games. One novelty was that you could switch it while the system was on, without causing any problems. I used to load Wing Commander, and the intro would be slow and choppy, then I'd flip the switch and it would suddenly get much faster and smoother. Many people were amazed at the difference it made. Sadly it didn't make that much of a difference with badly ported DOS 3D games like Stellar 7, and Nova 9. Even at the faster speed, they still lagged when large enemies were on the screen. And it didn't make any difference at all in most European games. I don't recall Stunt Car Racer, or Castle Master getting any faster, or smoother..
The full top 100 list was... Hired Guns Hunter Turrican Eye of the Beholder 2 Stunt Car Racer Wizkid Turrican 2 Exile Frontier Elite 2 Midnight Resistance Top Gear 2 Leander Theatre of Death Skidmarks Simon the Sorcerer Escape from Colditz Knights of the Sky Jetstrike Rainbow islands F1 / Vroom Apidya Liberation Disposable Hero Sim City It came from the desert Pang Fury of the Furries Lotus 3 GoldenAxe Gravity force 2 Robocop 2 Battle Squadron Another World Gunship 2000 Qwak North and South Saint Dragon SWIV Rodland Chaos Engine Gloom Moonstone Cjs Elephant Antics Switchblade 2 Menace Myth Rubicon Flood Spindizzy Worlds Quick and Silva R Type Shadow of the Beast IK+ Full Contact Shufflepuck Cafe New Zeland Story Super Space invaders Lotus 2 Lemming Cytron Prince of Persia Walker Virus Kid Gloves Assasin First Samurai Star Wars Mortal Kombat Miami Chase Ninja Warriors parasol stars R Type 2 No Second Prize Shadow Dancer Super hang on Simulcra Flashback Gauntlet 2 Twintris Buggy boy Chuck Rock 2 Hard drivin Superfrog Body Blows Galactic Lotus 1 Robocop Crazy Sue Silkworm Wolfchild Risky Woods Rampage Toki Dizzy Fantasy World James pond 1 and 2 Dynamite Dux Jimmy Whites Stardust Cabal Super Cars 2 Sword of Sodan
I quite like your list, as it has a loooot of good games that nobody talks about, making it NOT just another list of the same games, but something original
Great list! Felt very personal rather than just the usual top 100. You really seem to be pulled in by a good soundtrack. I would love a video on your top OSTs
So glad to see Hired Guns get some attention. I played that game for months. For those who want to blitz through it, remember applegate
Gravity Force!! I remember playing a windows or DOS clone as a kid & have been looking for a name for so long!! Thanks.
This is a gamestyle/mechanic that you don't see anymore but would work well today, especially with proper physics.
Disposable Hero was a stunner back then, even better - it sounded and played great. I miss those days of coverdiscs and journos we could trust.
I have a TF in my A1200 and Elite II: Frontier runs really fast with it. Like you I spent way too many hours playing that game :)
Imagine having a terrible fire back in the day, mind blowing. There is no way I could stretch to a 1200 now with those prices but I might still try and get myself another A600. Tbh it's my fave Amiga, perfectly sized, no A500 TV modulator stuck out the back, not thise side of Christmas though.
I NEVER thought I'd see footage of WizKid ever. Played this many times as a kid and always wondered what the hell was going on 😂
Yes a great list but if you like two player battles there was a pd game called Extreme Violence, hours of fun and laughs
Stellar list my friend.
Good stuff.
My favorite game never appears in any list. Yet, it gave rise to one of the biggest, most dedicated fan community of the time, who made hundreds of clones over the years. The game I speak of is Emerald Mine!
Love The Amiga my fav machine
Rodland - Nice conversion of the arcade game, except... Yup, they left something out. If you complete all the levels of the arcade version, it then tells you how to access a full second set of levels with all new graphics. Actually, you apparently can access the second set of levels right from the start, it just doesn't tell you how to do it until you've beaten the game. All of the home ports of Rodland left out the second set of levels. Not that I was good enough to get that far, but it bugs me to know that they left them out.
Vroom - F1 was a separate game that also came out for the Amiga. It used the same engine and was very similar though. First there was Vroom, then there was a data disk for Vroom with new tracks, and then came F1. Funny/sad story: Someone once gave me a magazine with mostly Intel-based content and they had a review of F1 for DOS. In it, they said something like "Domark took a little-known Amiga game called Vroom, ran it through their magic conversion process and produced this superior new game." I wrote them an angry letter pointing out that the DOS game was a port of the original Amiga F1 game. I doubt they ever printed it. Magazines where always shortchanging the Amiga. I also once read a review of the DOS version of Body Blows where they lamented that it only supported one joystick, and then only listed it as being available for DOS.
Frontier - I thought this was an impressive tech demo, but a lousy game. Being a huge fan of Elite (on the C64, the Amiga version was really a step down in gameplay), I had high hopes for this game, but didn't like it at all. To get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, you have to accelerate to ridiculous speeds, and then use time acceleration. However when you encounter a pirate, it drops you back to normal time, but with you still traveling at 9 million KPH, which means that other than slightly altering your trajectory, maneuvering is out of the question. Which then does away with one of the aspects that was so much fun in Elite: Dogfights. Combat is reduced to a jousting match where you and the other ship zip past each other while taking potshots at each other. Because of the realistic motion of the planets, 99.99% of players had to use the autopilot, but the autopilot had a bad habit of crashing into planets if you didn't deactivate it the moment you arrived at the planet. Also, why is the autopilot able to instantly drop your speed down to nothing when arriving at a planet, but you can't do that for combat? Then there are the bugs, like the fact that there were star systems that would crash the game if you tried to get info on them. Actually, I think virtually all of my sessions with this game ended with crashes. I did like to just fly around and marvel at the size of the stations though. However when it came to actually playing the game, i just found it frustrating.
Turrican 2 - I was never much good at the Turrican games. I usually lasted about 30 seconds between lives. I used to play them with unlimited time and lives turned on. My pirated copy of T2 had a very annoying bug. There was a section in the last level where you have to climb a vertical shaft by jumping on alien heads, but avoid being pulled in by their teeth. There was one head that if it caught you, you would spawn inside the wall and be unable to finish the game.
Stunt Car Racer - I loved this game, and I once got to play it against another person with two Amigas hooked up together. I used to have all of the tracks memorized so I knew exactly how fast to go over each jump. Well, except for the Drawbridge track, which I found impossible to drive properly. It was impossible for me to tell if the bridge was up or down, so I would always end up driving off it while it was up in the air, and then I'd crash. Fans have made two mods to this game. There's a "TNT" version which stand for The New Tracks, and then there's a "Turbo" version that is supposed to have a smoother framerate on faster systems. As I recall, the WHDLoad installer supports all the versions and will even let you apply the turbo patch to the TNT version.
I was going for a first but TH-cam has only just alerted me bloody thing 😂
Don't buy an Amiga, buy a MiSTer, a good wired controller and a good wired mechanical keyboard. I spent quite a lot of money building my Amiga collection out but honestly should have just stuck with the MiSTer. It's a better experience hands down.
I’m looking to get the mister pi on the next run.. Seems a very affordable way to go for a fpga setup
@@jamiec2023 it's an absolute no-brainer, just go for the pack which includes the case (it's prebuilt) as you need a case and it's cheaper just to buy the entire thing from him. Unless you want to 3D print or buy some specific case (I'd love a C64 or A1200 case with a proper keyboard built in for Amiga/ST/C64/Speccy etc).
I keep hearing about these but am a little clueless. The 'basic' description I hear is that it emulates hardware more accurately but not sure what real difference I would see over a Raspberry Pi. I know with emulation sometimes you get not 100% accurate sound emulation, the C64 mini had that I believe. I know RMC The Cave have a mister system so will give it a go next time I am down there.
@@37Retro FPGAs create an exact copy of the CPU + other chips in a console. That means that it is 100% accurate. In software you're recreating the same logic but the work is being ran on a CPU 10000000x faster and which works very differently. That leads to small differences. Then on top of that modern computers add several frames of lag from your pressing a button to seeing movement on a screen. FPGAs don't. You can actually feel it on the 8/16 bit machines in fast paced games. Although if you have a low-latency PC setup it's usually not a problem.
Another thing is that some cores are actually better and more efficient than emulation. The Saturn MiSTer core for example is 99% perfect, the PC emulator isn't and it requires a lot of horse power to actually run.
The C64 is a special case as the SID chip is analogue which is impossible to recreated perfectly. Also because they had many revisions of it which differed a lot. There are some exceptional hardware recreations for a real C64 though which is almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing.
I notice the latency playing C64 games, they feel much better on the MiSTer. I prefer emulation from the PS1/N64 for 3D games as you can render them at a higher resolution and use new texture packs etc.
We had a demo of moonstone. If you left the mouse in, the second player would fly away.
Excellent list. Now if you excuse me I need to download some files for my A500 mini 😅
My mate had Midnight Resistance on the Amiga and we played it to death, switching between it and Shadow Warriors all day. But was there ever a reason why the game was so dark/hard to see? Its obvious in this video, too... its like someone's turned the Contrast knob on the TV down to 1.
I can't remember the actual reason but it is "a thing" you are right. There is a version out there that has fixed the colours with brighter ones but look as I did I could not find it.
Personally, I think Commodore's neglect killed the Amiga. When the Amiga came out, DOS games were still using EGA and the Amiga put them to shame. However, while Intel systems continued to get faster, and improve the graphics, the Amiga stayed stagnant. Yes, there were accelerator boards and Commodore made the A3000, but other than that, they didn't put out any major upgrades. The DOS world moved on to VGA graphics and then SVGA, while Amiga was still using 32 colors
I knew the Amiga was doomed the day I opened up a magazine and saw an ad for Wing Commander. Up to that point, the Amiga versions of games had always been the most graphically impressive, but there was a game that looked great in DOS, and there wasn't even Amiga version to compare it to. By the time the AGA models came out, Commodore was giving us VGA quality graphics at a time when the other side was enjoying graphics in 16 million colors.
Commodore had the edge with the Amiga and they squandered that advantage.
Absolutely, things switched the other way and fast! Earlier on with basic 2D games I remember that PCs had a lot of trouble trying to do smooth scrolling and were usually quite jerky in motion. I remember playing Wing Commander on Amiga (or trying to) it had a frame rate of about 0.6 :P
@@37Retro I had a Supra Turbo 28 accelerator for my Amiga. It used a 68000 chip running at 28Mhz, so it was pretty much 100% compatible with all games, and if it wasn't, there was a physical switch to toggle it off. As long as you had some true Fast RAM in your system, it could make quite a difference in games.
One novelty was that you could switch it while the system was on, without causing any problems. I used to load Wing Commander, and the intro would be slow and choppy, then I'd flip the switch and it would suddenly get much faster and smoother. Many people were amazed at the difference it made.
Sadly it didn't make that much of a difference with badly ported DOS 3D games like Stellar 7, and Nova 9. Even at the faster speed, they still lagged when large enemies were on the screen. And it didn't make any difference at all in most European games. I don't recall Stunt Car Racer, or Castle Master getting any faster, or smoother..
I had this pack as well;
I thought SWIV came on one disc?
Hunter was an army Gta before gta
Do have list of the games?
The full top 100 list was...
Hired Guns
Hunter
Turrican
Eye of the Beholder 2
Stunt Car Racer
Wizkid
Turrican 2
Exile
Frontier Elite 2
Midnight Resistance
Top Gear 2
Leander
Theatre of Death
Skidmarks
Simon the Sorcerer
Escape from Colditz
Knights of the Sky
Jetstrike
Rainbow islands
F1 / Vroom
Apidya
Liberation
Disposable Hero
Sim City
It came from the desert
Pang
Fury of the Furries
Lotus 3
GoldenAxe
Gravity force 2
Robocop 2
Battle Squadron
Another World
Gunship 2000
Qwak
North and South
Saint Dragon
SWIV
Rodland
Chaos Engine
Gloom
Moonstone
Cjs Elephant Antics
Switchblade 2
Menace
Myth
Rubicon
Flood
Spindizzy Worlds
Quick and Silva
R Type
Shadow of the Beast
IK+
Full Contact
Shufflepuck Cafe
New Zeland Story
Super Space invaders
Lotus 2
Lemming
Cytron
Prince of Persia
Walker
Virus
Kid Gloves
Assasin
First Samurai
Star Wars
Mortal Kombat
Miami Chase
Ninja Warriors
parasol stars
R Type 2
No Second Prize
Shadow Dancer
Super hang on
Simulcra
Flashback
Gauntlet 2
Twintris
Buggy boy
Chuck Rock 2
Hard drivin
Superfrog
Body Blows Galactic
Lotus 1
Robocop
Crazy Sue
Silkworm
Wolfchild
Risky Woods
Rampage
Toki
Dizzy Fantasy World
James pond 1 and 2
Dynamite Dux
Jimmy Whites
Stardust
Cabal
Super Cars 2
Sword of Sodan
Frame rates seem very high…
You're talking shit about loading Apidya music files into Octamed because they weren't compatible with that tracker.
Wow aren't you a delight. Did you try it?